Restrain (Siren Book 3) (6 page)

“But it'll get infected—”

“One should be plenty, Mil.” He smiles. “Besides. I've got my priorities set right now. I'll chance it.”

I shrug and pull my hand away. “As you wish.”

I don't dare say it to him, but inwardly, I like that acceptance of death. It makes it feel like we're on the same page. It makes me feel we understand each other.

Chapter
Eleven

Calder

“Umm,” Milla hesitates with an embarrassed sigh. “Do you want to take off your pants? We don't have bandages or anything, so it might be a little awkward having the edges of the stitches brushing against them, for a few days at least. Plus, I can repair the rips while they're off.”

I can't resist teasing her. “Baby, if you wanted to ogle me, all you had to do was ask.”

She snorts, torn between being offended, and being relieved I still have a sense of humor about things. That half-smile puts me at ease, and I reach for my pants, only to realize that the articulate motions to unbutton them are a little beyond my traumatized and slick hands.

“Do I have to do
everything
?” she teases back, and reaches for me. Her long fingers slide beneath my waistband as she works the button, and just the hint of her skin against mine jolts through me, stronger than the adrenaline rush I found in that dark, deadly room.

I rest my chin against the top of her head while she works, undoing the button, and the zipper, and guiding them off my hips gently. She holds them at mid-thigh and kneels, holding the fabric away from my damaged calves while I step out. Even though I
should
be flattered by the depth of care in the gesture, those thoughts are crowded out by others: the way those parted lips would feel wrapped around my cock again, and how it would feel to fist my hands in her hair. Her downcast eyes and focused face, so close to my cock, as though she hardly dares breathe. Mil's a vision, one I never thought to see again.

“Let's get you off your feet again,” she says, tipping her chin up to look at me. The eye contact doesn't exactly help me stay focused, and I sit back down in a daze, only vaguely aware of the relief in my bloodied feet.

Milla sanitizes my wounds and stitches them carefully, not apologizing for the pain she's causing as the dental floss pulls through my skin. She's unusually quiet, but it's probably concentration. I can't watch her while she works; at the first prick, nausea overwhelmed me. So she sits by my side to work, Denise's flashlight in her mouth, aimed at each raw incision.

A particularly deep stab, tugged through roughly, sends a wave of dizziness through me, and I fight to focus on the ceiling. “You're enjoying this, aren't you?”

She pauses, and takes the flashlight out of her mouth. “Just a little. I'm not a delicate little blossom, you know. You could have sent me up, too, and come up behind me. I could have helped you—”

Fucking hell. I should've known Mil wouldn't be willing to wait and worry in the background. “You're
not
a delicate little blossom, but you might need that strength a different day. No point risking two of us when one will do.”

My limbs ache with every tiny, automatic movement, but the pain grounds me. It's pain that Milla and Allen won't have to feel. It's not that I don't think either of them could handle it, just—every mark on them wounds me anyways. I'd rather feel the injury once and get it over and done with, rather than feel it over and over again every time I see Allen's burned face, and Milla's scarred leg.

And, for how peaceful I've felt having Milla by my side again, it's only amplified the guilt over George tenfold. If I was half the leader Milla thinks I am, and Allen expects me to be, it would have been
me
in that ballast tank.

With the drive to act, to lead, comes awareness of my failures. The pain feels like a good penance.

And still, Milla works quietly, focused enough on her task that there's not a breath to spare for a kind word or a gentle touch. I don't know that I'd accept them if she offered them.

Finally, she looks up. “You still hoping to get drunk, Mr. Reckless?”

“You better believe it. You're gonna have to help me with the caps, though.”

“Do I have to do
everything
for you?” she quips in mock exasperation, and when we both chuckle, the tension in the air fades, taking the worst of my thoughts with it.

Chapter
Twelve

Milla

I yell for Allen to help me get Calder to our makeshift bed. His feet are pretty torn up, and if he has to walk on the metal grates, it'll just reopen the scabs. As we settle him with his feet dangling over the edge of the pipe opening, he asks Allen if Allen wants to settle down here for a bit, and drink with us. I stiffen, not liking the idea of being trapped between the two of them with alcohol, even as injured as Calder is.

“No thanks—I've had my chip for ten years.”

An awkward moment passes as Calder wonders whether to say he was only joking, and use the alcohol for something useful. But he stands his ground, and shrugs.

Allen nods, and adds, “But you kids are welcome to. Just—try to keep the noise away from me; I don't want to be around that stuff. ”

Calder nods. “We'll stay out of your hair.”

“I've been thinking—there's that cistern on the other side of the room, and I should be able to dip our clothes into it from the second level. I've been hoping to wash mine. Do you want me to do yours, too?”

An undignified sigh leaves me. “
Hell fucking yes
.” Everything itches from all the dirt and grime I caked onto the fabric—it was necessary, since they'd certainly have noticed a change of clothes. But that doesn't mean I have to
like
it. As much as I don't really want to be naked around them, this could be the only opportunity I
have
to feel even halfway clean clothes for a while.

Calder laughs. “Such a girly-girl.”

I punch him in the stomach, lightly. “I'll yank your stitches out.”

He laughs again, and Allen turns his back while I wiggle out of my shirt, sports bra, underwear, and pants.  Calder raises his eyebrow, and glances from his own shirt to me, and I take the hint, and jerk the hem over his head. When we've gotten his boxers shimmied off him, too, I leave the clothes in his arms, and hide behind him. “You can turn around now,” he tells Allen, and passes him the clothes.

Allen carefully avoids looking at me, and hurries to start cleaning them. Only when I'm sure he's out of eyesight do I step forward, making a beeline for where we left the cooler, and the liquor.

“You're sure you wanna do this?” I ask again—I'd intended the liquor to be more for practical purposes than for relaxation.

“Shut up, and pour 'em, lady.” He grins at me, his eyes tracing my naked body as I unscrew the cap, and step close. “Body shots?”

“Fuck off.” I jerk the bottle away from him and down it, coughing at the liquor's bitter taste. He laughs, and pats my rump when I get another shot, fully prepared to repeat the taunt if he oversteps again. “You gonna play nice this time?”

He smiles at me, a charming, lopsided thing that would make my panties melt if I still had them on. “Pretty
please
, Mil?”

I hold the little bottle to his lips and tip it down his throat. “Since you asked so nicely.”

He reaches out to me, tracing the back of his fingers down my side softly, since his palms have a few stitches of their own. “I guess I'll have to think of something else for my freedom celebration, then?”

I shrug. “Wasn't there dancing in your original wish?”

His chuckle echoes in the pipe around us. “I guess. I'd suggest knocking that out now, too, but I don't think my feet are up for it.” He heaves a deep sigh; no doubt the liquor's kicking in faster, on his empty stomach.

“Yeah,” I say as gently as I can, and pat his knee. “You're gonna need to be off your feet for a while. Call me the Babysitter.”

“Well, if that's what you're
into
...”

My smile fades as his eyes take in every nude curve. His cock's hardening. At least the blood's still in his body, even if it doesn't belong
there
. “Don't even think about
that
, idiot. There's no way in
hell
you're—”

He laughs. “But you could do all the work! You do everything, right?”

I elbow him, and hold up another pair of bottles. “No way in
hell
.”

“Awwww.”

*              *              *

Three shots in, each, I dig out the remains of the sandwiches from a few days ago, and make him finish his. It looks like I'm stuck playing nursemaid for a bit, and there's no way in hell I want to clean up his vomit. But our brutal day seems to have wiped away whatever was bothering him. He's back to being difficult and flirtatious.

The more drunk he gets, the more times he makes bad Adam and Eve jokes, until I threaten to go see if our fig leaves are clean yet—
screw
dry. He can catch a cold for all I care. Only then does he stop, leaning back and laughing at his own jokes. When he realizes I'm not laughing with him, he raises an arm and pats his shoulder, a clear invitation for me to lay down with him.

I obey, though I'm careful not to nudge the stitches in his legs. If nothing else, I don't want to have to redo
that
part if he tears them out. Sewing someone up is mildly nauseating work.

“You're really quiet, Mil.”

“Aren't I always?”

“Not like this.” He squeezes my shoulders, and kisses my forehead tenderly.

“It's—it's been that kind of day.” I take a chance on ensuring it's a long time before he gets at all suspicious. “For a few minutes there, it didn't seem like you were gonna come back.”

“For a few minutes there, I thought I wasn't gonna be able to, either.”

To make my sniffles genuine, I mentally relive every funeral I've been to. Mara's, my dad's, Harry's, Robin's, all one after another in an endless slideshow of misery and loss. “It's not just that—I thought, maybe you
had
gotten out, and were pushing ahead. I thought maybe you weren't
gonna
come back for us.”

“Shh, Mil. Don't think about that.” He rolls toward me, wincing as one of his stitched cuts brushes the bottom of the pipe. Some of this alcohol
really
should have gone toward wiping this area off for while his wounds are the most open.

I start to roll onto my back, and away, so I don't have to keep eye contact with him. Even recognizing the intimacy as part of a gambit, it's still hard to accept him seeing me cry. It hasn't gotten easier after all this time.

His arm flattens across me, preventing me from turning away further, and the back of his fingers guide my face back toward him. He gingerly wipes a tear away. “So long as my heart's beating, I'm gonna come back for you. Don't
ever
question that.”

If only he knew who I really am. Which promise would he keep? The one to kill me, or the one to fight at my side?

“You know what scares me, Mil?”

I shake my head, grateful for the change in topic.

“Thinking that even when we
do
put this shit to an end, it's not like things can go back to the way they were. I don't even know if I
want
that, half the time. A funeral for George, questions from police, the press, reorganizing things to compensate for everyone we've lost, and everything that's happened... On some level, it seems like this
monster's
already won. Like, even if we survive, he still managed to kill us.”

I keep quiet, afraid anything I say might give me away.

“The one thing I'm clinging to, the
one
thing that pushes me forward, is the idea that we can
gain
something from this, too. Something beautiful and unique enough to make up for everything else.”

My lips start trembling, sensing where he's going.

“You, Allen, even when we
do
move on from this, you're still gonna be my family. I promise you that. I promise you that we're gonna be free together. If I have to kill to make that happen, I swear it.”

That dichotomy again. I sigh heavily.

“You don't have to believe me, you don't have to reciprocate. But I want you to know it, clear to your core.” He takes my hand, and presses it into his bare chest. “My heartbeats have a purpose, and I will
never
forget that.”

He kisses me gently, tenderly, as though
I'm
the one cut up and bedridden, and my heart breaks. The tears become real, and as he kisses
them
away, too, I can't bear to think about what this'll mean in the morning.

*              *              *

The empty bottles pile up in the cooler, only two of them held in reserve for the possibility of future injuries. Calder's skin hums pleasantly against mine, his voice vibrating through me long into the night, as he tells me about his childhood, his family, the favorite restaurants he wants to take me to. My heart aches for him as he discusses his mom's struggles with, and death from bulimia, and the miscarried almost-children who haunted her, whose spirits she could never fully purge from her own.

He tells me about the career he wanted as a kid—Indiana Jones—and his embarrassment when he learned it wasn't a job title, only a character. He pulls my fingers to every scar on his body, from the one that he got when he fell out of a tree onto a wrought-iron fence and punctured a lung, to the one on the side of his neck from when George, as a child, tried shoving him down the stairs, trying to get baby Calder to come downstairs and play with him.

Unsure how to respond, I show him mine. The chicken pox scar on my forehead that my dad always joked looked like a bullseye. It was the one scar the disease gave me, and I only got it because of all the sores, I
refused
to leave that one alone. My mom snapped at me and swore that it would scar. I asked her how long the scar would stay, and she threw out a random number—a hundred fifty years. And when it
did
scar, somehow I believed I would outlive that expanse of time to see my forehead unblemished. Calder laughs with me at my imagined immortality.

The white line along my hairline where I rammed my head onto a car door as a kid.  The one on my hand, from when Harry was teaching me to use a nail gun, and I was too busy flirting with a neighbor boy to look where I had the board braced.

The one at my temple, where a piece of lumber someone else dropped at work nearly cost me the sight in one eye.

The one I got at school, when I was twelve, from a fifteen year old's ring when he punched me. It was the only blow he got in. I don't tell Calder the
real
context of that one. The boy called my mom a whore—a charge I couldn't argue with—and punched back when I slapped him for it. I went into a blackout rage and beat him unconscious, nearly getting myself expelled from school. I still don't quite know all of the behind-the-scenes talks with my mom that persuaded the administrators to let me stay. We weren't talking, at that point. I only knew she was there from a glimpse of her heel-clad feet as she walked away.
No one
wore heels like her. The power, and the aggression, evident in every attention-getting step.

My physical scars were always meaningless. But his smile says the act of sharing them has meaning. And he'll never see the mental ones.

Even the perception that this is mutual breaches a barrier inside me. It's me being honest with him about
some
part of myself, even if it's not the whole thing. I don't know how I'll look him in the eye tomorrow.

But that's a thought for then. And tonight, there's no space in my head for anything but Calder, my man, and Mil, his woman. Not Calder, the cruel industrialist, and Milla, the homicidal socialist terrorist.

Calder catches my eye, in his gaze the promise of the strongest afterglow.

Calder, the man, wants Mil, his woman.

*              *              *

As the day, night,
whatever
, goes on, it's impossible for him to hide his desire, naked like we are. No matter how long I ignore his erection straining upright against his abdomen, it's always there, tucked against my leg, letting me know
exactly
what he wants from me.

In his condition, it's left to me whether to ignore it, or take on all the work. Between the cuts on his hands, and on his shins and feet, there's no way he's dominating me, no way he's overpowering me, no way even
missionary
is on the menu. And that seems to be the main thing keeping his mouth shut about it, though there's a distinct flush to his cheeks when he catches me peeking.

Without the demand or the pressure to please him, the idea becomes a seed planted in my mind, a plant slowly sprouting in the wreckage of my psyche, cracking down my stony resolve to not entangle myself deeper than I have to.

Plainly, I have the power to hurt him, my insecurities aside. That's perfectly obvious. But my influence on him, my control, it goes so much deeper. A thousand threads of pleasure and pain I can play with, a thousand paths we can take.