Wounded (13 page)

I heard the whole thing. I heard a male voice give an order, Rania’s voice reply calmly, and then his again, angry. I heard a
smack
, fist on flesh. Heard her cry out. Then the jingling of a belt and an order. Gagging. Vomiting.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened.
 

I swear to god I will kill the motherfucker. I will cut his goddamn throat and cut off his cock and shove it into his slit fucking neck.
 

I have to breathe deeply to calm the rage. My temper, a problem for me my whole life, is coming back with hurricane force. I’ve learned to control it, keep it contained, not lash out like I used to. I nearly didn’t graduate high school because I spent so much time suspended for fighting. I nearly got expelled when a kid ended up in the hospital after a fight with me. Of course, he fucking started it. Jumped me in the parking lot after football practice. Beat my ass, too. Knocked me down, knocked a tooth loose, and broke my nose. He didn’t expect me to get up, but I did, and I got mine. He spent a week in the hospital with a lot of broken shit.
 

Now this Abdul asshole is hitting Rania, and I can’t see straight. Can’t think straight. I shouldn’t be reacting like this. She seems to be under the impression this Abdul character is some high-up general in the Iraqi army. I don’t care. I’ll still fucking kill him if he touches her again.

She ran after our kiss. After
she
kissed
me
. I didn’t see that one coming. She was there next to me, lush and beautiful and hurting and needing comfort. Needing protection. No woman should ever be hit. No woman should ever be forced to do what she did. Something primal inside me reacted to her proximity and her pain. My lips touched hers before I knew what I was doing, and then I was lost in the soft sweetness of her lips.
 

Goddamn, but I’m screwed. She tasted like mint toothpaste. Felt like heaven. It was just a kiss, but it got me so hard I thought I was going to explode without even being touched. And then she pulled away, crying. I don’t get why she was crying. She didn’t seem to know how to kiss. She didn’t respond, just let our lips touch, her whole body tensed and frozen. And then she was crying.

I think it was her first kiss. Seems impossible, but it feels true.

Then she kissed me, leaned in and took my lips with hers, and I think I did come in my pants a little. I’m still achingly hard. Painfully hard. She’s gone now, running away from me, from our kiss. She’s as confused as I am, if I’m any judge of her facial expressions.

I’m so hard, it hurts still. I need relief. I’d take care of it myself, but then I’d have no way to clean up. I slowly and painfully shift down to a lying position and focus on thinking of something else, anything else but Rania. I call up a memory of combat, but that only leads to remembering Rania’s face above me when she first rescued me.
 

I owe her my life, and I refuse to let her be beaten.
 

My combat knife, the only part of my gear aside from my clothes that seemed to make it here with me, is lying in the corner near my feet. It takes several agonizing minutes to retrieve it. I have to keep stopping to catch my breath and let the bolts of pain lessen. It hurts so bad I could puke, but I grit my teeth and bull through it. I hide the knife under my blankets, near to hand. Next time I hear something like that happening, I’ll stop it. I don’t care how bad it fucking hurts. I don’t care if I rip open my wounds and re-break my ribs. I won’t let it happen again.

This animal fury inside me at the thought of Rania being hurt baffles me, confuses me. I don’t know where it comes from, but I can’t explain it away or ignore it. It’s not just my temper, or my upbringing. My dad drilled into me all my life that women are to be protected. Never, ever struck.
Ever
. Women are to be cherished and taken care of. Dad held doors for Mom. He treated her like a queen. He was a difficult man, angry and disturbed and broken from his war experiences, but it never translated into violence against me or Mom.
 

My drive to protect Rania is something else. Something deeper, harder, fiercer. I don’t dare look too closely at what it is, because that’s impossible. Unworkable.
 

I’m exhausted from the pain now. I close my eyes and try not to picture Rania’s face, try not to remember her lips. It doesn’t work, though, and I pass out to an image of her bright brown eyes like melted chocolate, her red lips and her soft skin.

She kissed me.
 

Goddamn it.
 

I just need to heal enough to walk so I can sneak out of here and get back to the base. I can’t deal with this. With her. With her lips on mine like a slice of sweet, hypnotic heaven, her breasts crushed against my chest, soft yet firm, her nipples pebbling. The smell of her arousal wafting up to my nose.
 

My cock is throbbing, rock-hard.

See? Shit. She’s under my skin. She’s in my head. What the
fuck
am I supposed to do? I can’t kiss her again. Can’t let it happen. Certainly it can’t go further. I’m not physically capable at the moment anyway, but…it wouldn’t be right. It would be…a mistake. She’s a prostitute. Iraqi. I’ll get out of here at some point, and I’ll never see her again.
 

Plus, she still has to work. Her tricks are putting food in my belly. Water. Bandages. Antibiotic ointment. Without her johns, I’ll starve. If anyone finds out about me, I’m dead and she will be, too, or worse.
 

How could I sleep with her and then lie here and listen to her turn a trick? I couldn’t. I would flip the hell out.

Fuck. Why am I even thinking of sleeping with her? I can’t. I won’t.
 

But god
damn
, is she sexy. Tantalizing. That fine, thick, lustrous blonde hair draping across her face, her wide dark eyes blazing with so much emotion, so much I can’t identify, can’t fathom. Her lithe, lush body pushed close to me.
 

I groan and scrub my face with a sigh. My cock is tangled and bent painfully sideways. I push the blanket down past my hips and adjust myself inside my BDU pants. But then, dammit, touching myself was a mistake. I’ve got a mad case of blue balls going on. Kissing Rania, and then thinking about her…it’s giving me a perpetual hard-on. I grasp my cock in my fist and consider again taking care of it myself.
 

As I’m touching myself, I get the sense of another presence. Rania stands in the doorway, watching me with a strange expression on her face.

“Shit,” I say, tossing the blanket over myself quickly.
 

Embarrassment floods through me. I cast a hesitant glance at Rania, who is still in the doorway, staring at me. I expect her to look upset, or disgusted, or…I don’t know. What I don’t expect to see is her cheeks blushing, her gaze now darting around the room as if trying to forget what she saw but wanting to get another glimpse.

“I am sorry,” I say in my halting, broken, poorly accented Arabic.

She shrugs, not looking at me. I want to explain, but I can’t. Even if she was fluent in English, or I was in Arabic, I couldn’t explain. I just wouldn’t be able to get the words out. She finally shakes head as if banishing the vision and goes into the kitchen. She has a few bags of groceries in her hands, which I hadn’t noticed. I want to get up take them from her, put them away for her, but I can’t.
 

She doesn’t look at me, and when her eyes do slide across the room to mine, I can’t hold her gaze. I wonder if she knows it was she who gave me the hard-on?
 

It’s subsided for now. God help me if she gets too close. It’ll spring back fully erect if she so much as looks at me the wrong way. Or the right way, depending on how you look at it.
 

The worst part is, there will never be release. It can’t happen. I have to be smart. It wouldn’t be just sex, even if it did happen. I can tell. The way she gets under my skin, the way my heart hammers when she looks at me, touches me, the way I want so desperately for her to just sit and talk to me…it would be emotional, if anything happened. I’m smart enough to realize that much; now I just have to be smart enough to keep anything from happening.
 

I have to keep telling myself to think with my brain, not with my cock. Not with my heart.

And then she looks at me, curiosity ripe in her gaze, gaze eyes sliding down my bare chest to my crotch, covered with the blanket, and she blushes and looks hurriedly away, biting her lip.

Fuck. This is going to be difficult.

*
 
*
 
*

We’re both extra cautious for the next few days. She doesn’t sit close enough to touch, and I don’t try. My hands stay on my lap, busy, fidgeting. She starts facing away from me when she has to change or clean up, and I make sure to look away.
 

I’m learning enough Arabic every day now that we are able to have halting conversations. They contain a lot of pantomiming and roundabout explanations of strange words, but they are conversations. We talk about neutral things. Usually words themselves, meanings and contexts and connotations. We don’t know what else to talk about, I think.
 

Her false enthusiasm when working a john is quieter now. I hear her less. She seems to be having a harder and harder time summoning the ability to pretend. The loathing on her face takes longer to vanish.
 

We’ve started exchanging long, awkward glances. Yeah, that stage. Where I’m watching a bird on the roof visible through the window, watching it peck and flutter, and then I feel her eyes on me and I turn to her, and she’s watching me, her expression at once hard and curious and soft and tender and frightened. When our gazes meet, she blushes and looks away, her expression shuttering closed. Then I’ll be watching her, wondering what she’s thinking, trying not to stare at her ass, trying not to wish she would kneel beside me and kiss me again, and then she’ll catch me looking at her. I’ll be the one to shift my glance away, hoping my thoughts aren’t visible on my face.

Yeah, that stage.

Trouble comes later that week. She steps out for something, leaves me with the door closed. I hear footsteps outside, think it’s her, but they pass by, slow next door where she works. A male voice calls out, then again angrily.
 

My gut churns, and my instincts tell me get up, move, hide. I grip my KA-BAR in my right fist and struggle to my feet, gritting my teeth to keep from crying out at the pain biting through my whole body. I can’t breathe. Fire burns in my chest, my lungs, my stomach, broken ribs protesting my movements. A gasping, grating moan scrapes out of my lips as I hobble and hop to the bathroom, the only place to hide in this house. I push myself into a corner of the bathroom. Little cover, little protection, but the best I can do.
 

I hear the door open and footsteps in the house. The creeping of my flesh, the prickling of my skin and the shivers in my spine and rush of adrenaline tells me it isn’t Rania in the house. I can’t be found and reported. For my sake and Rania’s. It’s life and death.

The footsteps, stomping, dragging male boots, move around the tiny room. A smoke-roughened voice calls out, “Sabah? Are you here?”

I hold my breath. My knife is clenched in a white-knuckled fist, cutting edge up. The shivering in my belly tells me this won’t end well.

The steps move closer to the bathroom, and I prepare myself. Hold my breath, hands spread, ready to pounce. Injuries are forgotten. Adrenaline masks the pain of being upright.
 

“Sabah?”
 

My first sight of him is a pair of scuffed military boots, then Iraqi military camo pants. He peers in, sees the empty shower, the toilet. My heart hammers and I want to vomit, but can’t.
 

How can he not see me? Maybe I’ll get out of this without having to kill him.

Nope. He sees me. I lunge, jab my hand in a stiff-fingered jab to his throat, silencing him. My knife flashes out and up into his stomach. Soft flesh parts easily, then bone stops the blade. He staggers back, gasping. I swipe the blade sideways across his throat, loosing a flood of blood down his front. Fuck. I’m making a mess of this. I stab out again, and this time I hit his heart, right between the ribs. Fucking lucky. That’s harder to do than most people might think.

He staggers, stumbles, flops backward to the ground. I can’t leave him bleeding out on the floor. Absurd panic hits me, and I wrench his body into the shower stall so he bleeds out down the drain. There’s not too much blood on the floor; most of it is on him.
 

But what the fuck do I do with the body?

The adrenaline is wearing off, and agony is lancing through me, stealing my breath. Merely staying upright takes every ounce of stubbornness, toughness, and strength I have left. It won’t last long.

“Hunter?” Rania’s voice, worried, confused.

I stumble out of the bathroom, bloody knife held in a red-painted hand. Rania gasps.

“We have a problem,” I say in Arabic. “A man came. Soldier. I kill him.”

Rania curses softly and glances into the shower at the body. “Ahmed.”
 

“What do we do with—” I can’t think of the word for
body
, “…the dead man?”

Collapsing against the wall, Rania runs her fingers through her loose blonde hair, hissing through her teeth. “I do not know.” She fixes me with a confused glare. “What was he doing here?”

I’m guessing at a lot of her meaning. I understand some words, and can infer the rest from context.
 

I shrug. “Looking for you. For Sabah. Went to other door first, then here. He sees me…I am dead. He sees me, bad for you. Bad for me. So…he dies.”

I hate how I sound. I’m not a verbally eloquent man, but I hate knowing my words are bumbled and garbled. She has to think to understand a lot of what I say.
 

 
And that’s all I have. I collapse forward, powerless to stop my fall. I have time to think as I topple,
This is gonna hurt.
It does, like a bitch. I hit the ground on my shoulder and my face. I know better than to try to catch myself on my hands or wrists, with the way my shoulders are. My shrapnel-wounded side takes the brunt of the fall, along with my already-broken ribs. I think they get re-fractured. Lances of agony shoot through me, and I can’t breathe for the pain. Can’t even gasp. I drag a long, stuttering breath in, face in the dirt, nostrils clogged with dirt, eyes stinging with dirt. The knife is still clutched in my fist, and I bear down with all my force, until the handle creaks. I cough, spewing dirt.