Hell on Wheels (24 page)

“Grigg, my brother,” he sobbed as he wiped bloody vomit from his lips and laid a filthy, shaking hand on Grigg’s blood-caked hair. “My God, what did they do to you?”

He
didn’t expect a reply. Grigg was too white beneath all that blood, too still, too…
disemboweled,
so
when
Grigg
coughed
weakly, Nate stumbled backward in surprise.

“Jesus God!” he raced around the table, using his blade to slice through the restraints at Grigg’s wrists and ankles. “Hold on, buddy. I’ll get you outta here.”

“Keh meh,” Grigg gurgled, and Nate limped to the head of the table. He cradled Grigg’s wonderful face between his dirty palms and stared into his best friend’s pain-hazed eyes.

“What, buddy? What’r’ya sayin’?”

“Keh meh,” Grigg burbled again, thick blood leaking from one corner of his dry, cracked lips.

Nate
smothered
a
sob
and
had
to
hold
onto
the
table
lest
he
curl
up
in
a
ball
and
die
right
on
the
spot.

They’d cut out Grigg’s tongue.

As
punishment
for
all
the
filthy
names
Nate
had
heard
Grigg
scream
at
them
while
being
tortured, they’d cut out his motherfucking tongue.

Nate
shook
his
head, his salty tears dropping onto Grigg’s twisted face and turning pink in the caked-on blood. “No, buddy. We’re gonna get you outta here. We’re gonna make it.”

Grigg
jerkily
shook
his
head
and
Nate
stopped
trying
to
hold
back, he sobbed uncontrollably while leaning down to press his fevered forehead against Grigg’s too cool one.

They
both
knew
the
score. Tangos one, Grigg zero.

Grigg
would
never
see
the
outside
of
this
filthy
hut. Even if Nate could somehow find the strength in his wounded, sick body to carry Grigg, and even if they could figure out what in the world to do with that big bundle of putrefying bowels, there was no way Grigg would survive the maneuver.

Dear
God
in
heaven.

“Peeh, keh meh.”

“God, Grigg,” Nate was crying so hard he could barely speak. “I c-can’t. I can’t d-do it.”

“Peeh.”

Nate
threw
his
arms
around
Grigg’s neck, wracked by gut-wrenching sobs and wet, sickly coughing. His broken ribs were threatening a revolt, but he couldn’t stop the convulsive sorrow ravishing his control.

He
couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill Grigg. He couldn’t live with himself if—

Grigg
moaned, a sound of unimaginable pain and Nate suddenly knew…

Pulling
back, he sucked in a trembling, tortured breath because Grigg’s eyes…Sweet Jesus, they were dulled by piercing agony, but there was no mistaking the dreadful pleading in them. The pleading for Nate to put him out of his misery.

Nate
allowed
himself
one
tremendous
howl
of
unspeakable
anguish
and
impotent
rage, then he swallowed and wiped the sticky, blood-tinged tears from his face. Looking down on his partner, his best friend, he sniffed and slowly nodded.

Grigg
momentarily
closed
his
swollen, bloodshot eyes. When he opened them again, the desperate pleading was replaced with poignant resignation…and gratitude.

Lord, forgive me
, Nate prayed, and moving around to the end of the table, he cradled Grigg’s lolling head with one shaking hand and braced the hard, deadly tip of his KA-BAR at the base of Grigg’s skull with the other.

“I love you, you sonofabitch,” he whispered, choking on blood and snot and the unspeakable horror of it all.

Grigg
smiled.

In
that
moment, with one last smile gracing Grigg’s mouth, Nate shoved the sharp tip of his steel blade between Grigg’s skull and first vertebra, instantly severing Grigg’s brainstem.

And
it
was
over.

Nate
threw
his
head
back
and
roared.

***

Good heavens!

“Nate!” Ali grabbed Nate’s broad shoulders and shook him, hard. His dark head bounced against the flat pillow. “Nate, for the love of Pete, wake up!”

She’d never in her life heard a more terrible sound than the one tearing up from the back of Nate’s straining throat. Even the screams of her mother that horrible day they’d learned of Grigg’s death didn’t hold a candle to the god-awful noise Nate was making. It was like the furious, helpless call of a dying animal mixed with the roar of an angry dragon swirled together with the convulsive sorrow of a hundred lifetimes.

Then, like someone flipped a switch, the sound ceased.

Thank
goodness
.

“You’re dreaming,” she assured him, sucking in one petrified breath after another. She felt dizzy, but it was not the time to hyperventilate.

His black eyes snapped open and lasered in on her face. For a brief moment, he didn’t seem to recognize her. “You’re just dreaming, Nate,” she said again, trying to reassure him and herself simultaneously.

Cripes.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple slowly bobbing in the column of his tanned throat where his pulse pounded so hard she fancied she could actually hear it. His nostrils flared wide, and for a brief moment she saw such utter despair…such gut-wrenching pain in his eyes. Then he turned away, hiding his misery from her as if it was something he should be ashamed of. Lifting the stupid fishing-lure-printed sheet up to his cheeks, he brusquely scrubbed away the wet evidence of his tears with enough force to take the first layer of skin off his face.

The scouring was useless; she’d already seen the tears. Those heartbreaking tears…

She feared she might see them for the rest of her life, them along with the horrible, dark emotion she’d glimpsed in those first few moments of consciousness.

“You, uh…you wanna talk about it?” she asked when he reemerged from under the sheet.

“No,” he jerked his head once, refusing to look at her.

“Okay,” she blew out a steadying breath and hesitantly wrapped comforting arms around his shoulders—she couldn’t quite make the whole circumference, but she wrapped as much of herself around him as she could. Tucking her head up under his stubbled chin, with her cheek against his broad, heaving chest, she could hear the maddening cadence of his heart racing nearly out of control.

Crapola, hers was doing the same. She’d never been so scared in her life as when she’d been yanked from a deliriously peaceful sleep by the sound of Nate’s terrible screaming.

Double, triple cripes!

It had to be flashbacks from the torture, right?

Or, on second thought, maybe not. He’d been through so much, seen so many awful things she couldn’t possibly comprehend, there was probably no way on earth for her to begin to fathom what hideous demons stalked him while vulnerable and unconscious.

She remained silent for a long time, listening to the second hand on his big, complicated looking wristwatch tick away the seconds, taking the opportunity to catch her breath and letting him do the same.

Finally, when her heart no longer felt like it was going to pull an
Alien
impression and burst through her rib cage, she asked, “Does that, uh, happen to you often?”

She couldn’t imagine.

“Often enough,” he told her, his voice hard, cold, so much different than the night before, when he’d hotly whispered her name into her ear while emptying himself into her body.

“Is it…is it about the torture?”

He pushed up from the bed; the quick movement nearly had her bouncing right off—which was saying something considering the dang mattress was about as soft and cushiony as a cement block. Then, without a backward glance, he swung his long legs over the side, grabbing his bloodstained jeans. “I said I don’t wanna talk about it,” he growled, pulling worn denim up and over his bare butt.

Even while being coldly rebuffed, she couldn’t help but notice just what a fine specimen of masculinity he represented, which probably meant she was a little loco where he was concerned.

Yeah, well, what else was new?

“Okay,” she soothed. “I just…” she shook her head as she pushed into a sitting position. She didn’t even begin to know how to handle this situation, where a man sounded like he was dying in his sleep and was obviously embarrassed at having been witnessed at his most vulnerable, but she’d give it her best shot. Or, in this case, fall back on an old cliché. “If you ever
do
want to talk about it, I just want you to know I’m here.”

He swung around, his handsome face unusually harsh in the unflattering yellow light of the bedside lamps. “I thought you said this was a one-night stand.”

Whoa. What?

“I don’t—” She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I just thought—”

“Well
don’t
,” he hissed. “Don’t think anything.”

“Nate,” she held out a hand to him as she lifted the ridiculous sheet up over her naked breasts. Suddenly
she
was the one feeling unaccountably vulnerable. “Please stop this. You don’t have to tell me what you were dreaming about, but don’t…don’t use this as an excuse to close yourself off from me. Don’t use it as an excuse to push me away. I just want—”

“I’m not usin’ anything as an excuse,” he cut her off with a scornful snort. “I don’t need to. We agreed to one night,” he motioned jerkily out the window toward the faint pink light lining the eastern horizon. The new day looked like it was putting on its lipstick. “It’s morning, now. So…” he made a rolling motion with his big hand, “the dawnin’ of the new day brings this little experiment in lunacy to an end.”

His words cut her to the very marrow of her bones.

Experiment in lunacy?

“But I thought—”

“What?” he turned his head slightly, cupping his broad palm around his ear. In that moment, she wanted to hit him. Again. Only this time she wanted it to really,
really
hurt. To hurt him as badly as he was hurting her.

“Look,” he said, bending to grab his boots when she just sat there, staring at him in mute horror. “It was really great sex, sugar. Probably the best of my life. But we knew what it was going in. Don’t ruin it by tryin’ to turn it into somethin’ else.”

Probably
the best of his life?
Probably?

Now, she didn’t just want to hit him, she wanted to chop his frickin’ head off.

“I think you are the most—” The shrill
riiinnngg, riiinnngg
of his cell phone interrupted the scathing condemnation bubbling up the back of her throat.

He raised a sardonic brow.

Yeah, saved by the bell. Talk about cliché.

She snapped her mouth closed and angrily watched him pull his iPhone from the hip pocket of his jeans. He cut her a grim look before holding the device to his ear. “Ghost,” he barked, giving her his broad back, a back that revealed the garish evidence of her raking nails and the hot ecstasy of the previous night.

A night that was
probably
the best of his life, but one he obviously had no desire to repeat.

She turned away. She wouldn’t listen to the rest. She didn’t need to. Everything she needed to know had been written all over his dastardly handsome face.

It was over.

He’d agreed to one night, and that night had reached its inevitable conclusion.

So that left her with…what?

Nothing, that’s what.

Nothing but the poignant memory of the sweet passion they’d shared. Nothing but the awful knowledge she’d never love a man the way she loved him. Nothing but a heart that’d been burgeoning with hope and was now smashed into a thousand bloody pieces.

She flung the sheets aside and clambered from the bed. Scurrying to the bathroom, she threw on her discarded clothes and refused to give in to the hot tears waiting enthusiastically behind her eyes.

What had she expected?

He was Nathan Weller, Ghost, the Ice Man, Mr. Emotionless—as Ozzie liked to call him. Had she really thought one night with her would suddenly transform him into someone else?

Well, he
had
been transformed, but like Cinderella, his metamorphosis came with a time limit. Not the stroke of midnight like the fairy tale, but the first appearance of the new day.

Only he didn’t leave behind a glass slipper.

Oh, no.

He managed to leave behind her stupid, impulsive, shattered heart.