J. Redmerski - Reviving Izabel

I give him a what-the-hell-is-that-supposed-to-mean look.

“You might call it brainwashing,” he says.

He waves it off. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was going to give me one chance to prove that my feelings for you were just a fluke and that it would never happen again. Very few ever get second chances in the Order.”

“A fluke?” I sit down on the edge of the coffee table. I look up at him and say, “Sounds to me like Vonnegut wanted you to prove that you aren’t human, that you’re still his obedient soldier who’s incapable of human emotion. What a deranged bastard.”

He nods and crouches down in front of me, interlacing his fingers, his elbows propped on the tops of this thighs.

“Vonnegut ordered me to kill you,” he says gently, holding my gaze. “To prove myself. I told him that I would, that I wanted to, to prove that I was trustworthy, and he let me go. Of course, I had no intentions of killing you. I left that day and went into hiding. Niklas, knowing only the Order his entire life, decided to stay. I thought maybe he just needed some time to figure things out, to decide what was best for him. I kept out of Niklas’ sights as well—if he didn’t know where I was, he couldn’t deceive Vonnegut or feel that he had to choose between us. But then I heard from Fredrik that Niklas had been contracted to kill me and has been looking for me ever since.”

“What a bastard,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief and then backtrack. “You said primarily. Other than me, why did you leave the Order?”

“It was a long time coming,” he says. “When I had to kill my father to save my brother, I knew then it was time for me to leave.” His strong fingers caress my softer ones. “You gave me the final motivation I needed to finally do it.”

I reach out and touch his lightly unshaven face with all of my fingertips. He continues to watch me, his eyes probing mine through the small, confined space between us, thick with passion and understanding. I lean in and kiss his lips.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” I say softly.

He brushes his lips against mine, his touch spreading through my body and down into my toes like a shot of smooth whiskey.

“I wasn’t testing you, Sarai.” He kisses me again.

“Then what were you doing?” I kiss him likewise and wilt when I feel his hands move across both of my thighs.

He lifts me into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, my ass fitted in the palms of his large hands. My fingers crawl up the sides of his stubbly face and touch his lips before my own lips do.

“I was waiting for when the time was right,” he says as his mouth finds my neck.

I wind all ten fingers through his short brown hair, raising my chin as his mouth searches my throat and my jawline. My eyes are shut, the lids heavy with a warm, tingling sensation that I know better than to fight against. He walks with me across the room, though to where I don’t know and I don’t care. I tighten my bare legs around his waist, the cool, smooth surface of his leather belt pressing against my inner thighs. My fingers are fitted around the buttons of his shirt, breaking them apart with ease.

Victor never answers my question, but I don’t care about that, either.

His lips cover mine, the warm wetness of his tongue tangling eagerly with my own. Without breaking the kiss, Victor drops my feet back on the floor to slip my panties off one leg at a time. He raises my arms above me and strips off my shirt, dropping it on the floor. My hands fumble his belt, yanking the prong from the leather hole and sliding the rest of it from the loops in one quick motion. He steps out of his pants and tight, black boxer-briefs. He breathes hot and heavily into my mouth as I’m hoisted back around his waist, and he shoves my back against the wall as if he doesn’t want to wait long enough to blindly find our way to the guest bedroom. I don’t want to wait, either. We’ve waited long enough as it is.

I feel his cock enter me and before he slides me all the way down on it, a shot of pleasure races through my thighs and up my spine, turning my neck to rubber, causing my head to fall back against the sheetrock wall. The backs of my eyes tingle and burn. The warm, wetness between my legs inundated by a hot, shivering thrill.

He thrusts once, deep inside of me and holds himself there, grasping my hips, my back pressed against the cool wall. I open my eyes slowly, still having little control over my lids, and I gaze into his staring back at me with the same voracious intensity. Tiny, uneven breaths waver through my parted lips. My arms are wrapped securely around him, my fingers prodding the tight muscles in his back.

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” I say breathily.

“You have no idea…,” he says in return and then devours me with a kiss, so forceful that I almost lose control of my muscles. My thighs constrict around his waist when he drives his cock into me again. I shudder and gasp, the back of my head falling hard against the wall. He holds my body in place with his arms fitted underneath my thighs as he drives his hips toward mine, tiny explosions going off inside my stomach with every thrust.

My back arches, my breasts pushed into his view where he covers one nipple with his mouth. I raise my arms above my head, seeking something above me that I might use to hold onto so that I can ride him, but I find nothing. I drape my arms around his neck to hold my weight up and I grind my hips against his, moving like a wave, gasping and moaning, desperate for every hard inch of him as deeply as I can take it. His fingers dig painfully into my back. His tongue tangles with mine, his moans moving through my body.

I come fast and hard, my legs and the sweet spot between them contracting around him, my muscles quivering. He comes seconds later and holds my naked body firmly in place, my ass seized by his powerful hands, as he empties himself inside of me.

In the moment, I couldn’t care less about the consequences of what just happened. But only in the moment.

With my head lying on his shoulder, Victor carries me down the hall and into the spacious bathroom across from the guest bedroom. He sets me on the counter and stands between my dangling, naked legs.

“Don’t worry about it.” He kisses me on the forehead and then opens the tall glass door to the walk-in shower.

Confused, I ask, “About what?”

The faucet squeaks as he turns on the water, moving both hot and cold into position until he finds the desired temperature. I watch him from the countertop, the way his tall, sculpted body moves, the curves along the muscles carved in a poetic pattern around his hipbones, the way his calf muscles harden when he walks.

He comes back over to me and I slip his dress shirt the rest of the way off, sliding it down over his muscled arms.

“You won’t get pregnant,” he says and urges me to slide off the counter and follow him into the shower. “At least not by me.”

A little taken aback, I leave it at that.

He closes the shower door and begins to wash my hair. I bask in his closeness, the way his hands explore my body with such careful precision and need.

For a long time, I forget that he is an assassin, whose hands have taken many lives without thought or remorse or regret. I forget that I, too, am a killer, whose hands took a life just hours ago.

Seems we were made for each other, like two puzzle pieces that at first don’t appear to fit, but eventually fall into place when looked at in the most unlikely of angles.

Victor

Fredrik’s housekeeper arrives back at the house early in the morning. I’m awake just after dawn, having my coffee on the rock patio in the backyard when she enters the house. She sees me through the sliding glass door when she makes her way into the living room and then joins me outside.

“Would you like breakfast, señor?” she asks in Spanish.

I set the file consisting of my next job face-down on the wrought iron coffee table.

“Gracias, but I won’t be eating,” I tell her and then gesture toward Sarai walking through the living room in search of me. “But she will be.”

“I will be what?” Sarai asks as she steps through the opened glass door. She walks across the rock patio with bare feet, wearing another one of Fredrik’s t-shirts—it bothers me immensely that she’s having to wear his clothes rather than mine, but the only ones I have with me are those on my back—and a pair of loose running shorts. Her long, auburn hair is disheveled having just awoken and crawled out of the bed.

She sits on my lap and I fit my right hand between her thighs.

“Breakfast,” I answer.

Sarai yawns and stretches her arms above her before laying her head against my shoulder. I fit my left hand behind her at the waist to keep her balanced on my lap. The smell of her freshly-washed skin and hair sends my senses into overdrive.

She makes a subtle face, halfway rejecting the idea.

“You should eat,” I urge her.

Raising her head from my shoulder, she looks thoughtful for a moment and then turns her attention to the housekeeper. “Sure, I’d like some breakfast, if you don’t mind,” she says in Spanish.

For a moment, the housekeeper looks surprised that Sarai speaks to her in her native tongue, but she’s over it just as quickly.

The housekeeper nods and heads back into the house.

“I think I’ve put this question off long enough,” she says. “Where do we go from here, Victor? What am I going to do?”

I had been thinking about this very thing since I found out that she was in Los Angeles and after what she had done. I stare off toward the pool, lost in thought, my last desperate attempt to sort out the answers in my head. But they are as broken and unsettled as they ever have been. All except for one.