MadetoBeBroken (6 page)

She wanted to ease the yearning and touch herself, but if
Alexi disapproved, he might pull that glorious cock from her mouth, and right
now it was more vital that she felt it filling her, bumping hard against the
back of her throat. She wrapped one hand around his good thigh and lifted the
other to his balls and felt them, full and hard, in her grasp. This seemed to
drive him even wilder and he bucked his hips hard, driving his cock deep into
her throat.

She gagged, swallowed a salty droplet and ran a hard tongue
along the underside. He moaned in a gratifying way, his hands tightening in her
hair. The sensation along her scalp was electrifying and she thought of him as
she’d briefly imagined him before, yanking her hair back while taking her
roughly from behind.

“Good little slut,” he panted. “Don’t stop.”

Something in his voice brought her up short. Her lips tightened
and she cast her eyes upward to meet his, taking care that he was watching his
cock disappearing into her mouth over and over. When he saw her glance up, a
yearning for his approval in her eyes, he gave a mighty groan, pulling her head
so close she could have swallowed him, root and balls both, and held her there
while his seed spurted down her throat.

She breathed in the dark scent of his pubic hair, part soap,
part his own leather and fresh tobacco scent, trying not to choke as she
swallowed. Then, for reasons she could not explain even to herself, she sat
back on her heels and opened her mouth wide for his inspection.

“Every drop,” he husked. “Good girl. You know how to satisfy
a man with your mouth. Tell me, are you satisfied?”

“Yes.”

He grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled hard, snapping
her head back. “You lie to me again. We had a bargain.”

“I
¼
I’m wet,” she
said, more weakly than she wanted to.

“That’s better.” He spread the robe on the soft grass and
gestured for her to lie back. “Open the legs.”

This time he knelt before her, his hands stroking her calves
and thighs worshipfully. “So beautiful, this sight,” he murmured against her
skin. “I dreamed of a sweet pussy like this, tight and pink. Your pussy.”

She felt the soft pressure of his lips high on her inner
thigh, where the skin was silkiest and most sensitive. Moisture wept from her
cleft as he kissed her again and again on her mound, her belly and in the
indentations just inside her hips. He took one of her lower lips between his
teeth, nibbling lightly then sucking, but her clit pulsed, untouched and
aching. She writhed beneath his head, tilting up her hips desperately.

“So impatient,
krahsniy
. I could make you come just
like this.”

It was true. He flicked his tongue against her weeping slit,
not touching her throbbing bud, and her legs began to shake. He pushed her
thighs farther apart so that she could not clench and stimulate herself,
licking, sucking and kissing every millimeter of velvety flesh except the one
that had grown hard and sensitive. Her juices leaked, soaking the robe beneath
her.

A new sensation made her gasp—a waft of warm air on her very
center. Her clit trembled each time he blew on it, setting her to writhing,
weak moans escaping her lips. The ache was unbearable. If he would only keep
doing that, rhythmically and without letup, she could finally come. She felt
his fingers dip into her sex and she strained to meet them, but he had other
plans. A gentle but insistent push between the globes of her ass startled her.
The slick finger probed relentlessly. She relaxed against the pressure,
focusing on the puffs of air stimulating her nub and not the invasion of the
finger—now two fingers—pumping in and out of her tight rosebud, igniting nerves
she never knew she had.

Just as she felt the wave begin to crest, something hard and
wet rammed inside her opening. Her hand drifted toward her crotch but he
stopped it, mashing her fingers in his, fucking her pussy with his tongue and
her asshole with his fingers. Her body shook, her back arched, everything in
her vision melted into darkness until she was just a bundle of nerves and need,
panting and moaning like an animal. Finally he pressed the flat of his tongue
hard against her throbbing clit and ground the wet organ against it, shattering
her into a thousand pieces that seemed to shoot from her body and burst into
the forest like Roman candles.

She didn’t know how long she had lain there panting,
blinking the darkness away, but Alexi swam into her vision, unsmiling but with
a soft look in his glittering eyes. He was hard again.

He landed a kiss on each knee as she struggled to her
elbows.

“Are you going to fuck me, Alexi?”

He let out a short, barking laugh. “Is that your question?”

She had forgotten about the questions.

“No.”

“Good, better not to waste.” He pulled the robe over her
shoulders, although the sun had fully risen and was soaking the trees, grass
and the water of the lake with its warmth. “Did you see the birds take flight?”

“Yes.”

“Nature has instinct, just like you and me. Is true that
what happened last night was ‘normal physical reaction’, but also true that
your body responds to me, little red bird. In my hands, you take flight.” He
shrugged. “Nature.”

It was so weirdly close to what she had thought earlier—that
their sexual union was as much a part of the landscape as the trees and
grass—she briefly wondered whether he had some sort of power to see into her
mind. Silly, she thought, shaking the idea away. She was still piecing herself
back together after the shattering power of her orgasm. One thing certainly was
true—her body responded to his.

And she would use this to her advantage.

“I want something to eat,” he said. “So ask.”

Coco took a deep breath of the cleansing air. “How did you
get your scar?”

Gain trust.

“Eggs, bread, fruit, even tomatoes—this place is fully
stocked.” Coco opened and shut one cupboard door after another. “Someone
readied the safe house, and recently.”

“Your operation, no doubt.” Alexi put a pile of white
clothes on the wooden kitchen table. “These were in chest of drawers.”

She held up a sleeveless T-shirt and grimaced. “You can have
any color you like, so long as it’s white,” she quipped. “Tags on everything.
Even the panties are new—Marks and Spencer. I wonder who made the trip up from
London.”

“Go change. I will make us something to eat.”

“A ruthless killer and he cooks too.”

Alexi ignored this. “We learn long time ago to do without—no
gas, no power, no running water in my village. But we have fields with rabbits
and birds, and potatoes are hard to die, even after grenades. With fire, I can
cook a nice rat on the hood from Russian military vehicle.”

She shuddered. “Rat?”

“Innocent girl. Yes, rat and more. Is nature as well, the
need to eat, to get drunk, to fuck. Only two kinds of medical care were left
after the Russians bombed our hospital—maternity and grave injury.”

“The potatoes made the vodka, I guess.”

“No, no. Is more important for food. For alcohol, they drink
antifreeze.”

She emerged from the bathroom in a tiny T-shirt and panties,
her eyes wide. “Like, from a car radiator?”

“We took raiding parties into nearby villages to find more
soldiers. Every month, two months, to replace the bodies. I told my men if they
brought in a man with blue lips, I would kill them both.” There was something
feral about the grin he wore. “Now you see why I do not drink much.”

“Don’t think I’m gonna forget for a second what I’m here
for, despite our bargain.”

“Sure,” he said, turning his back to her. “Is only
business.”

The smell of eggs and sausage filled the room as he busied
himself at the stove. Coco reheated the tea, marveling at the bizarre
situation. It seemed so cozy and domestic—mind-blowing sex in a lush valley,
hot tea and pleasant conversation about drinking poison and eating rats while
your average scarred rebel warlord whips up some lunch. Would he make a run for
it today, force her to fly back to Washington with her tail between her legs
and beg for backup? Or worse, would he kill her in her sleep? He had tried to kill
her already. And then there was the closet full of torture implements,
restraints, clamps and whips. She would not have to use them if he kept his
part of the bargain.
If…

She could see the fresh bandage through the thin white
cotton of his trousers. The wound no longer seeped and Alexi was not slowed by
his injury. He was still strong and still remorseless. It would not take much
for him to overpower her and make use of the arsenal in the armoire himself.
Hell, he even had her gun. She had only the hope that she had gained his trust
and the sex would be enough to keep him from reaching for it.

“I said before you ask wrong question,” he announced,
putting plates on the table. “This one is a little bit right.”

“Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

“You are mocking me because I do not understand American
joke. Know this—I am a difficult man to kill.”

“Not if I had aimed at your head.” She crunched into a slice
of toast.

“But you did not, because I am more valuable alive, no? Was
same for the Russians. What you call me—strongman? Is quite true. In my village
and many more in the coldest, most unforgiving lands in Chechnya, I was
strongest man. My men called me General. We controlled supply lines to other
freedom factions, planted hard vegetables and also
fougasse
—what is the
word in English? Explosive in the ground.”

“Land mines.”

His smile brightened. “Yes! Land mines chipped into the
frozen ground. We lost men to them, but only the stupid ones. The Russians lost
many more.

“To run a city that is also an army, you need very little.
One engineer, one nurse or medical student, one chemist, one farmer, one fixer,
one strongman. We had all this and were very lucky. You do not know, little
bird, that drive to make your civilization again and again from ashes and
shrapnel. Remember you said America was on top from the beginning and you fight
to keep her on top? I fight to rebuild my nation after it is crushed. This we
have been doing for hundreds of years.”

His face was calm and unlined as he spoke, his eyes turned
inward. In their depths, Coco could see the urge to grow from spoiled seedlings
even a rickety, barely functioning semblance of what had come before. Perhaps
it was something like this—a warm cabin, fresh eggs in the cooler, a rugged but
beautiful landscape just outside the window. She could see what it took out of
him, to go from that to cooking rats on stolen jeep hoods and turning young
boys into murder machines.

“To kill me would give the Russians great publicity, but
would bring the wrath of all Chechen region on their heads, which would be bad
publicity. But there were other ways to reach me.” He poured some more tea into
her cup. “Kill the body, you see, and the head will die.”

“They wiped out your army?”

“Oh no. Impossible. They wiped out my family.”

Coco stilled, frozen with shock.

“At night I slept in caves in the mountains, wherever we
moved our headquarters, to keep them safe. But not this night. It was my little
girl’s birthday, the younger.”

“Alexi
¼
” she
breathed.

“You asked and you will hear it,” he said harshly. “They
knocked on the door, if you can believe, as if they were men and not filthy
beasts, and then kicked it in. A jar from my wife’s mother fell from the
mantelpiece and smashed. It sounds silly, I know. She rose without thinking,
and they cut her throat in front of my eyes. Avala loved that jar.

“I flew to protect my girls, but it was too late. They threw
a grenade under the table where my daughters were hiding. I lost everything
that night—my wife, my little girls, my house and this little bit of my face. A
cruel God spared me. He built me again, from ashes and shrapnel, in his own
image.”

Grease congealed on Coco’s tongue. She wanted to retch, or
cry, rip off the faces of men who would do such a thing, but she just sat
there, tasting the cold fat lining the inside of her cheeks.

“You clean. I’m going out.”

* * * * *

The sound of the waterfall faded as Alexi made his way
across the valley. He did not want to be reminded of his ruined house, his dead
family, even of bliss with the beautiful red bird. Bliss was a sort of weakness
too. He rounded the lake and struck off toward a crag whose face was in shadow
from the bright sun directly overhead.

That would be south-southeast, he realized automatically,
accustomed to mapping the landscape wherever he went, the direction of London
and airports. If he walked long enough, a village would rise up on the horizon
eventually, and with it, vehicles, a telephone. He could head to Glasgow and
make contact with the one person he trusted in this benighted country, or
return to London and try to right what had gone horribly wrong. Or he could
just fly back, back to rubble and tainted water and no bread and hundreds of
starving people, grown cunning through desperation, who looked to him as a
savior now that they had lost their first faith.

He had seen the question in the girl’s face, the question he
had asked himself after the grenade ripped him from everything he had ever
loved, everything he had ever been.
Why not work with the Russians?
Better to be well-fed under the Moscow boot than to die in a frozen field with
nothing to take into the afterlife but your independence. But was it? He had
read her dossier—all she did was travel from one embattled hellhole to another,
talking strongmen like him out of reclaiming their manhood, urging them to give
in to a greater power, to bend their necks to the boot. And when she could not
sway them, a bullet sent the message instead.

No, Russia would not forgive her breakaway children for what
they had done—for what
he
had done. His beloved land would be punished
for a hundred hundred years by those brutes, and American would hand them fresh
lashes as the old ones wore out.

He knew this because he had tried another way. If only she
understood that, she would not still be asking the wrong questions.

As he had suspected, there was a deep indentation at the
foot of the crag, shaded by rocks and shrubbery. He pushed aside the thistles
and found a ledge on which to sit, gazing through the flowers that blurred the
land outside. Caves, trenches dug into frozen earth—the war had made him a
feral creature more used to savage hidey-holes than warm beds. He dug out a
cigarette—there were only three left—and lit it. Just as well he was running
out. A truly strong man had no addictions. Addictions were another form of
weakness, and vulnerability easy for an enemy to exploit. He had to be stronger
than ever, not just in his body, his conviction, his intelligence, but, as the
American writer had said, strong at broken places. His leg throbbed but he
would not show it. Unlike the girl’s internal wound, his had scarred over,
sealing the three girls he had loved inside forever. Love was weakness and he
would never feel it again.

So what would she ask next, he mused? “Alexi, did you order
the massacre of a train full of civilians?” “Did you stab a French diplomat
outside a theater in Grozny?” “Did children, innocents, your own people, die
because of what you have become?”

Yes, yes, yes.

* * * * *

By the time he opened his eyes again, the cigarette was a
log of ash against the lichen-spongy rocks and long shafts of orange light
slashed across the landscape. He had not dreamed, only vanished from his
thoughts into a dark and silent place, and reappeared in his cave behind a
screen of thistles.

I could live here, sleep here, die here, but I have a
duty to perform.

For the first time since the murder of his family, his
thoughts were in Chechen, not Russian.

Golden light glowed from the windows of the cabin as he
approached it in the deepening twilight. This place of torture and
interrogation looked as humble and welcoming as any crofter’s cottage in any
sleepy Western village.
Is this a place I could live in, sleep and die in,
he asked himself? No, he had a mission and nothing would sway him from it, not
the red bird’s beautiful body or the light that splashed warmth against the
grass.

The white van was still resting crooked on the gravel, but
there was another car next to it, a round-shouldered black vehicle like those
London taxi drivers used. His steps slowed instinctively as he crept up in a
crouch, every other footfall gouging at his injured thigh, and put his hand on
the car’s hood. Still warm. So the visitor, whoever it was, had only just
arrived.

The girl was in the sitting room, a towel wrapped lavishly
around her head like a turban, handing a bottle of beer to a black-haired man
with a severely pockmarked face. Alexi raised his eyebrows in recognition and
sank back into the shadows. Inside, the fireplace roared with a ferocity that
suggested she had poured kerosene on the logs. The girl was smiling and
talking, but her eyes were dull, giving away nothing. She shrugged,
occasionally turning up her hands in a gesture of helplessness as the man
spoke, leaning toward her with intensity. Finally she nodded. The man set down
his empty bottle and rose.

Without the sun to warm him, Alexi felt the chilly bite of
the Scottish evening. He had on only the thin cotton pants and a T-shirt, all
white like a beacon in the darkness. Boris Luganov might be ugly but he wasn’t
blind. The two disappeared into the bedroom, the girl leading him like the
chatelaine of a grand house, and reappeared, then into the kitchen and back out
to the sitting room. Luganov seemed to sniff the air, his eyes darting around
the room suspiciously, but eventually he picked up a spotless black homburg
from a side table. Alexi darted around the side of the house and waited until
the rumble of the car’s engine had ceased to stir the still night air.

She was depositing the beer bottle in the trash, holding it
pinched between two fingers as if it were a dead rat.

“You want to tell me what that was?” he demanded.

She handed him a business card. “Guy from the Russian
embassy. Guess who he was looking for?”

He crumpled the card in his fist. “What did you say to him?”

“Nothing. I said I had no idea who he was talking about,
that I never saw you or met you and I was just a dumb American tourist with a
vacation rental. Hope you like your current ensemble, by the way. I burned all
the men’s clothes in the fireplace when I heard the car. I’ve met him before,
you know. The good thing about having hair as distinctive as mine is that it’s
the only way people remember you.” She pulled off the towel and threw it on the
table.

“Clever girl.”

“Don’t get smug. I didn’t turn you over to him because
you’re still technically in my custody. I’m not going to give those Russian
bastards the glory of taking down the fearsome Alexsandr Maksimov.”

“Is that why you protected me?”

She regarded him for a long time, her expression unreadable.

“I don’t owe you any loyalty, but I don’t expect your
thanks, either. After what you’ve been through
¼
”
She trailed off. “Come with me.”

He allowed her to take his hand—such slender fingers she
had, on a pretty white hand that had squeezed a trigger many times, even once
at him.
Do such rich and horrible contradictions live inside all of us
,
he wondered as he followed her into the bedroom,
or just we who toil in the
shadows, gun oil under our nails and scars where our hearts once were?