After (68 page)

“Not out there, either, Nix.”

Nix laughed, the air and the sound tearing up her insides. “Out there? Sure I can.

I've been making peace with my gun and my knife for years. It's easy. It feels good. It's the only thing that feels good.”

“And watching Lauren and Michael feels bad.”

“Yes.”

“And being close to Artel. Him loving you. That feels bad.”

“Yes.”

“How bad?”

Her cold, raw body started to shake, her sweat and tears melting her.

“It's fucking killing me.”

Down in the grass, Kayla wrapped herself around Nix, shaking and sweating and sobbing, and somewhere beyond the cut-up-with-razors agony, Nix had the idea that if Kayla weren't wrapped around her, she would really melt and just soak into the earth, a puddle of dissolved flesh and blood loosed from disintegrated veins.

“Please,” Nix said when she trusted her voice again, when the shaking had stopped. “Leave me alone, now.”

Kayla gazed into Nix's swollen, burning eyes. Then she smiled and nodded. “All right.” Kayla rose and walked off, so graceful even on the uneven earth that she seemed to float above it, paralleling the river.

Poison. They were all poison to her. Gareth. Kayla. Lauren and Michael. Adel and her three husbands and their little Maddy. The peace and beauty of the mecca she'd hardly dared to believe in.

Forget rest. She'd never close her eyes and sleep through a night here, Gareth two floors down waiting for her to come to him, strange luminous women giving themselves to rapists to buy a chance at peace for Andrea and the others.

She'd go. Today. Right now. Over the line. Do the one thing she was fit for. Fight.

The moment she decided to leave, the sagging weight that had been crushing her lifted, warmth came back to her blood, air filled her lungs and she breathed deep as she could, over and over, as if she'd been suffocating ever since she'd boarded that train. The hum and chatter of voices and a dozen conversations quieted, and finally, finally, her own thoughts came together. It felt so good, having her mind back, she felt her mouth widen into a smile, while the gold and russet leaves drifting down like snowflakes and the brown-black trunks and branches blurred against the blue sky.

One thing twinged her belly. Gareth. Maybe she should just go. Skip the painful closeness, the good-bye. Not risk the confusion. He'd try to convince her to wait. To go with him to the base. Just the thought weighed as much as a sandbag.

Nix stopped. Hid. Caught her breath and peered around the trunk of the ash she'd hidden behind.

Two men. The big one with dark hair had the other pinned against a tree, had the smaller man's wrists gripped tight overhead, and ground his groin against the pinned man's ass.

Heart hammering, Nix crouched and slipped her switchblade from her sock where she'd kept it hidden since they'd asked everyone to give up their weapons. Good thing they hadn't searched her room. Good thing they never frisked her.

She'd known it. All Kayla's talk of peace. But you couldn't stop it. Clean, whole buildings and pretty grounds wouldn't save you. Men like that, they'd snatch a girl first chance they got. And if that chance never came, a boy would do.

While the tall, wide man yanked the other's jeans open and bared his narrow ass, Nix silently hinged open her blade. It would be easy, like this, with them both facing that tree. A quick slash of the achilles, then the throat would be easy.

Shit. The big one dropped the other's wrists and spun him around. Facing out like that, his face would give her away.

Days without sleep. Her nerves, her strength were shot. But she'd risk it. Not for the man getting raped. Who cared? What was one, even a dozen of them against all the women they'd tortured. Not for him. Just to feed her own need. Heal her own hate.

She braced herself for the charge, but halted hard before she sprang from her hiding place. The one facing her now, delicate blond, green eyes, laughed. The hot hate swelling her veins ebbed.

“Jesus, you're hard,” the big one's bass sifted past the trees and fallen leaves, and he palmed the blond's crotch through the sagging jeans that were falling down, just held up, now, by that big, fondling hand.

Their mouths locked and that big hand kept rubbing over that crotch, the jeans indifferently shifting up and down. Their kiss ended with a wet noise Nix could hear all the way back in her hiding spot.

“Please, Daniel. Please,” the slender blond pleaded.

“Please, what?” she heard the darker man ask.

“Please. Fuck me.”

The big one laughed again. “So impatient.” He went on rubbing him, but more slowly now. “I'll fuck you. When I'm ready.” Still fondling, he tugged up the blond's sweater and t-shirt and latched onto his pale pink nipple. Pale, slender fingers swept into dark brown waves, the slight blond clinging hard to the man licking and sucking and stroking. “God, yes,” Daniel huffed, “you're so fucking hot and ready. Do you know how bad I need you, Ty?”

The dark one, Daniel, sank to his knees, and with a tug the jeans fell to Ty's ankles, baring his slender, pale legs and an ambitious erection for so slight a man.

“God fuck, Ty, I'm going to eat you alive.” The entire pink erection vanished between Daniel's open lips and the blond groaned and pulled the other's head hard against his pelvis.

Nix had never seen anything like this. Nothing. The eager, frenzied seeking, both hungry and wanting and urgent. Neither reluctant nor afraid. It did something to her.

Made her soft and warm and wet. Made her stay, hidden and hardly breathing while Daniel went on nursing at that pink cock, while Ty kept sighing, almost whimpering.

“No, no,” Ty pleaded, suddenly pushing the other away. “No. I want to come when you're inside me. Please, Daniel. Fuck me.”

Daniel sprang to his feet saying, “God, yes,” and took Ty in a hard, deep kiss that went on and on. They were both out of breath when he spun his lover to face the tree again, dropped a gob of spit on the ends of his fingers and slid them up between the cheeks of Ty's pale, narrow ass. Hard and urgent as they'd been until now, when Daniel got his jeans open and the cherry crown sank into the shadowy cleft of Ty's ass, he slowed, and eased himself inside with gentle patience that almost undid the painful knot in Nix's gut.

“Alright, baby?” she heard him whisper to Ty.

Ty groaned out a throaty “Yeah, yeah,” and reached back to grip Daniel's ass and pull him harder to him.

“Fuck, you feel so good, Ty.”

Daniel was moving so slowly, to Nix the pair looked almost still. Little by little, though, Daniel's rhythm sped, the thrust of his hips deepened. One big hand dug into Ty's blond hair, the other wrapped around his stiff cock. Ty sighed and whimpered while Daniel bit and sucked his ears, his neck, his shoulders, fucking him, stroking him, panting and grunting his effort, his need. When the big hand slipped out of the blond tangle and went around Ty's narrow chest to tease his pink nipples, the tenor of Ty's cries altered and Nix waited, expectant.

“Come for me, baby. While I fuck you. I want you to,” Daniel panted, teasing and stroking and fucking, his face flushing red and starting to gleam. “God, baby, please,” he huffed, fucking harder, faster. When they came, first Ty, then Daniel, almost at the same time, Ty's sap spatting against the dark tree trunk in startling abundance, trickling down along the fissures in the bark, and they slumped together, panting and sweat-slick, Nix slumped, too, and realized she was panting, catching up on oxygen after holding her breath through their grunting, humping climaxes.

While they kissed and laughed, she crept off, feeling like a traitor. A spy. West of the line, men caught at that would be branded switches and fed to the worst of the brutes—the sadists and the outsiders who didn't have enough credit or cash to get a woman.

Under the guilt, something else churned, warm and thick and heavy. Her own want. Somewhere, under the rage and fear, something in her demanded that pleasure, that joining. Her body urged her to go straight to Gareth, right then. She could have clawed through the solid wood of his door, her need was so fierce. But her brain felt sore and tired and that familiar cold something was coiling in her belly again. Seeing him would just make it worse.

Only vaguely remembering she'd decided to leave, she stayed. Hoping desperately that she wouldn't see anyone who knew her, Nix slipped through the door of her building, crept upstairs and shut herself in her room. She stripped naked and crawled into bed. Images beyond her command, images of the two men in the woods, of Gareth and her merged and divided and merged again as she writhed against her hand and shuddered through her first climax in more than ten years, somewhere between awake and dreaming.

* * * *

When she went to Gareth's room in the morning, soothed from more than ten hours of sleep after days and days of insomnia, feeling warm and tender after a week of feeling bitter and hard, Nix found Nadia there with him. A bad feeling, something new and painful went through her like a saw. Her habitual suspicion, she told herself. Her habit of seeing conspiracy everywhere, after a lifetime of betrayal. But some deep, dim part of her knew that wasn't it.

“Sorry to interrupt. I'll look for you after breakfast,” she told Gareth, and turned to leave.

He said, “Stay.”

Nadia flashed her wide, warm smile, but her hazel eyes were red and glistening.

“Nadia just showed me this,” Gareth said, and passed over a drawing done in pencil. It looked vaguely familiar. The style of the drawing, frenetic but somehow immediately true. And the man. He was familiar, too.

“Do you recognize him?” Nadia asked, her tear-glossed eyes fixed on Gareth.

“My father.”

Nadia let out a broken little laugh, and tears spilled down her face. “When I saw you the other night, I thought you look so much like him, you had to be... But it seemed so impossible. I didn't even know how to ask. But when I left your room,” she said to Nix, “I heard you call him Gareth. Not Artel. And I knew.”

“Knew what?” Gareth asked.

“Gareth. Do you remember your mother?”

He got up, went to his pack, fished out his treasured artifact, and handed it to Nadia. She looked at the picture, obviously drawn by the same hand as the one she'd shown him.

“Your mother?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

Smiling, tears streaming down her face, she said, “Mine too.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Nadia's broad smile was parenthesized by two gleaming tracks of tears. “Did your father ever tell you that you had a sister?”

Gareth shook his head.

“This must seem so strange to you. A sister you've never heard of. But all my life I've known about you. Wondered where you were. What had happened to you. I can't believe you're standing right here. That I can just reach out and touch you.”

Nadia's slender arm extended as if she would just touch Gareth's arm, as if she wanted to make sure he wasn't just a mirage, but then she pressed her whole body to his and wrapped her arms around him. After a few seconds of startled stillness, he hugged her back, held her as she cried against his chest. Then she was up on her toes, straining to kiss his face, pressing her lips to his cheeks, his lips. When she relented and backed away, Nix was startled. Gareth had that gray look, cold and blank, the way he'd looked to her the day they'd given her to him. She'd forgotten how hard he could be.

“I'm sorry,” Nadia whispered, all her warm light suddenly extinguished. “I should have waited. They'd have done it better. I'm too excited.”

“No,” Gareth said, the effort of forcing himself to speak obvious. “Just, tell me more.”

“I don't know what you know. About our mom. About home.”

Gareth shrugged. “Dad never wanted to talk about that. All he ever told me, really, is that she died when I was born.”

“No. No, she died when I was born. You weren't even two years old.”

He still looked hard and cold and gray. A day earlier, it would have taken a weight off of Nix, that solidifying, that cooling.

Nadia went on, “Riggs, your father—“

“No. You've got the wrong person. Artel. Artel's my dad.”

Nadia plucked Gareth's drawing up from the bed. “This man?”

“Yes.”

“Believe me. I know him. I mean, I never met him, but this picture, there are a hundred of them. All of you together, Riggs on his own, playing his guitar. He must have changed his name.”

“Changed his name. Why would he change his name?”

Nadia's smile came back, small and hesitant. Her voice soft, gentle, she said, “I think he loved you a lot. I think he was scared he'd lose you. So he took you, and left.

And I suppose he changed his name so no one would find you. Take you from him.”

“Who would want to take me from him? If my mother was dead...”

“Do you love him?”

Moment by moment Gareth looked harder, colder, and Nadia seemed softer.

When she asked him that question, she seemed almost afraid of him.

“Yes.” Gareth's voice was sharp and hard. But that little word seemed to crack his rigidity. Rough, hoarse, his gray eyes going red he said, “But our relationship was complicated.”

“Was?”

“He's dead.”

“I'm sorry.” Nadia was quiet then, tears rolling down her cheeks, making her seem suddenly very young. Like a child. Finally she managed a smile and said again,

“I'm sorry. And I don't want to say anything to hurt your memory of him. But you should know. You still have family. Besides me, I mean.” Nix sensed that Nadia kept fighting an impulse to touch Gareth. Her hands fidgeted in front of her. “Your mother and Riggs, Artel, were friends. But the man who raised you wasn't Eva's husband. He wasn't really her lover.”

“Are you saying he wasn't my real father?” Gareth sounded wounded, like the foundation under his feet was rupturing and giving way.

“I'm saying you had three fathers. The man who raised you, and two others. It was a complicated situation. When Eva died giving birth to me, Riggs—Artel—had reason to believe that the others wouldn't let him go on in his role as one of the fathers.