Claimed (12 page)

Alexander:

We were woken up when there was a loud knocking at the door. “Alexander,” Andrei’s childish voice warbled. “Mama says it’s time for dinner.”

At my side, Ellie stirred and rubbed her eyes. “Hungry?” I asked her.

Her stomach growled and she blushed. “Evidently,” she said, burrowing her face under a pillow, “I seem to keep doing that around you.”

I laughed. “Come on,
cherie
, let’s go get some food.”

Downstairs, everyone had gathered around the large dining table. Mrs. Olusola bustled in carrying a big plate of steaming white rice and Ellie rose automatically to help her.

I shook my head. While I would have liked to believe that Ellie was being kind and helpful, I suspected otherwise. My intuition warned me that this was her training coming to the fore. In Nigeria, old patterns, ones of submission and obedience and fear were threatening to take over. “Sit down,” I told her. “I’ll help.”

She gave me a wide-eyed look, before nodding and taking her seat. I saw her introduce herself to Katrina, who was the only person there she hadn’t yet met, before launching into an animated conversation with Sasha.

Good.
For the moment, she was fine, but I knew I’d have to be protective of her. Her past experiences made her vulnerable in this place, in much the same way as I couldn’t go to that barn in Provence without being washed up in the past.

You weren’t raped in that barn,
I rebuked myself. No matter how distressing I found the memory of that day when my aunt had caught me in the barn tying up Angela, it couldn’t even come close to matching up to the trauma Ellie had endured in Nigeria.

Jean-Luc rose to follow me into the kitchen. “Good trip?” he asked me in French.

“Good enough,” I told him, responding in the same language. We’d been speaking in English in the dining room, out of respect for Pavel and Katrina, who didn’t speak any French. But in the kitchen, switching to my native tongue was a caution against being overheard by Grace Olusola and her helper, a gangly teenaged girl chopping vegetables in the corner.

“How’s she holding up?” Jean-Luc had many years of practice reading my mood. Right now, it must have been obvious that thoughts of Ellie were uppermost in my mind.

“Who knows?” I asked rhetorically. I shot Grace Olusola a cautious look, but she was busy stirring something on the stove, her entire attention on the bubbling contents. “I gave her the knife and that seemed to help.” She’d buckled it at her hip as she’d dressed for dinner. The action had been so automatic that she probably hadn’t even realized she’d done it.

“We’ll need her functional,” he said. “We are spread dangerously thin here. Ideally, I’d like a team of two to three to patrol the grounds in addition to the security cameras, but with only five of us that are competent with a weapon, we can’t risk it.”

“Anton said he’d bring a half-dozen guards with him,” I reminded Jean-Luc.

“Even so,” he said. “Sasha and the child are deadweight, as are the servants. I feel like a sitting duck. If Ellie is right and we have a leak among us, we are in trouble.”

“You think she’s right?”

“I don’t discount the idea quite as readily as you do,” he replied. “Trust is good. Staying alive is better.”

No,
I wanted to say.
This wasn’t an either-or choice.
I’d trusted Ellie in Hanoi when I handed her a gun loaded with sufficient bullets to kill Dylan and me both. And I’d stayed alive. Both things were possible.

But I also knew myself well enough to know that I was sometimes capable of being too sentimental. Who was I going to suspect? George, who had been pulling information for me almost from the very start? He’d been a child genius until one day, he’d seen a picture in the dark corners of the internet that had truly shaken him. He’d never told me what it was, though I could make my own guesses. All I knew was that he’d sought an ally who could
act
on the information he was so good at finding.

Should I have been wary of Katrina? Her history was so similar to Ellie’s. She too had been taken and held captive for many years. She didn’t talk much about her experiences, but her emotions ran deep and my cause was deeply personal to her.

Maybe the leak originated in Pavel. He had no deep trauma that had caused him to sign up to my cause. He just had a quiet and unshakable sense of right and wrong and when he saw an injustice, he couldn’t stand by and allow it. Or was I mistaken?

I shook my head. I knew in my head that Jean-Luc and Ellie’s words were not to be dismissed out of hand. But my heart was stubborn.
My heart would always chose to believe.

***

We went back to the dining room. I carried a large dish filled with some kind of fragrant stew. Mrs. Olusola was right behind me, with a platter of greens in her hands. Jean-Luc had bottles of beer in his hand, which he grinned and passed out to everyone at the table.

“Wait, we are allowed to drink?” Katrina looked surprised at this unexpected concession.

“It’s almost Christmas,” Jean-Luc replied benevolently. “You can each have one beer.”

Pavel laughed. “Ah, the generosity,” he said dryly. He looked at the steaming hot dish that I’d set on the table. “What’s this?”

“It’s a goat stew,” Ellie replied. Her voice was strained.

Pavel looked at the dish. “Are you sure?” he asked dubiously.

“I ate it every single week for two years,” she replied. I could hear the brittle note in her voice. My bright star was close to her edge. I had been a thoughtless fool and I hadn’t realized that Mrs. Olusola’s presence would cause her so much tension.

This whole thing was a mistake. I should have sent her to Anton’s for safety; I should have never given in to my own selfishness and kept her with me.

Both Sasha and Katrina looked concerned. They’d both heard the stress that she was trying her valiant best to hide. “I’m rather familiar with Mrs. Olusola’s cooking,” Ellie continued. She got up. She hadn’t eaten a single thing; her bottle of beer sat unopened in front of her. “Will you excuse me please? I’m not really hungry.”

Fuck.
This was Berlin all over again. Yet again, my good intentions had let me disastrously astray. Ellie was more important to me than life itself. And it seemed that I was failing her in the same way as I’d failed Pamela.

***

Ellie:

I’d taken refuge in our bedroom, clinging on to the pillow that we’d slept on. The fabric smelled faintly of Alexander and I held it tightly and stared into space. Part of me was busy yelling at myself for worrying everyone. The other part of me was struggling not to fall apart.

To distract myself, I purposely thought about anything and everything else. Andrei had grown up now. His voice was still childish, but he wasn’t a toddler anymore. At five, he was a smiling young boy who was going to become a very good-looking man. Sasha had once confessed that he was the spitting image of his father. When she had said it, pain had been etched on her face.

Katrina was quiet, but she’d seemed friendly. Yet I could sense from the way that she held herself that she was keeping herself apart. I was good at spotting that - I’d done it too many times in my own life.

I recognized Pavel from Paris, where he had tended to my wounds just a day ago. He had just smiled and nodded at me, but until he’d questioned the contents of the stew, he too had stayed silent.

Unless my intuition was wrong, one of them was leaking information about Alexander’s movements to Lucien. Fear gripped at my heart as I pictured Alexander’s body on the ground, blood pooling out of his wound. I could not let that happen. I would rather die first.

Stay away from all that,
I reminded myself. My thoughts were drifting towards darkness again.

Mrs. Olusola too was the same person she’d always been, kind where kindness was possible, but always wary, as if everything she relied on was precarious and her world could fall apart at a moment’s notice. Her distrust had cause; her husband had run away with the neighbour, taking all the money in the house and leaving her destitute with two young daughters.

There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” I called out.

Alexander entered, carrying a plate in his hand. “Grilled cheese sandwich,” he said. “I made it myself and it might have got a little charred in the process. Nigeria’s not really the place to find good cheese, so this is not the most gourmet of meals.”

My heart contracted in my chest as I gazed up at the expression of concern that he was trying valiantly to hide. “Thank you,” I said softly and he sat down on the bed next to me, leaning against the headboard and lacing his fingers in mine.

“Listen to me, Ellie.” His voice was firm. Not hard, not cruel. Just sure, as if he had complete confidence in what he was going to say. “You are strong. You are a survivor. Are you going to fall apart over some stew?”

I took a bite of the sandwich. “What do you think?” I asked him.

“I think that the girl I met in Saint Denis was someone who had learned to look in the face of her fear and stand tall. I think she was brave precisely because she remembered being afraid.” His voice lowered. “Here, all your memories are of powerlessness. But don’t forget who you’ve become, Ellie. You aren’t the girl who was trapped here anymore.” His eyes were sad. “Dylan took two years from you, love. Don’t let him reach out from the grave and take more.”

He’d cooked in a strange kitchen, making me a grilled cheese sandwich because it was a food untainted by any unpleasant associations.

He’d deposited a million dollars into my bank account, but he’d also arranged for a safe place in San Francisco for me to spend the night. He’d given me a near-priceless gem, but he also stole chips off my plate and leaned against me while I ate.

He made the big gestures, but more than that, he did the small little things that made me feel loved and cherished. “No falling apart over stew,” I promised him. “I’m going to be okay.”

It was the twenty-third of December. I’d been in Nigeria for fewer than twelve hours. Now, for the first time, I believed that I’d survive the next seven days unscathed.

I set my empty plate aside. “Make love to me, Alexander?” I asked him. “I need to feel you against me.”

He noted the way I addressed him. Alexander, not
Sir.
He paid too much attention to detail to miss something like that.

Some days, I needed to feel possessed by him. There were times when I craved his hard dominance
.
Today however, I yearned to be held and I needed to be cherished. My innate resilience had been worn thin by the events of the preceding days and by the overwhelming nature of the memories this place held for me. I needed to be replenished in his arms.

I loved Alexander’s faultless, non-judgmental understanding. He never questioned my desires, he’d never high-handedly declared that he knew what was best for me. Instead, with amazing generosity, he just gave me exactly what I needed.

He turned to me and unbuttoned my shirt slowly, kissing each sliver of skin as it came to view. I tried to return the favour but his hands stopped me. “Shh, Ellie,” he soothed. “This is just for you, love. Let me take care of you.”

My heart skipped a beat at that term of endearment.
Love
.

My shirt was pushed off my shoulders and the rest of my clothes were removed. He positioned me so that I was lying on my stomach. His talented fingers kneaded at the tense muscles of my shoulders.

“I’m going to take this treatment for granted,” I joked. “Will I always get back massages when I’m stressed?”

I heard the chuckle in his voice. “Always,” he assured me. “But I’ve found that chocolate seems to work pretty well too.”

I had to smile at that. “What about you, Alexander?” I asked him. “What do you want when you are stressed? What relaxes you?”

“You,” he replied promptly.

“Oh come on,” I scoffed, my voice muffled by the pillow. “I’m looking for a serious answer.”

His hands worked every muscle, loosening the knots, causing relaxation to flow through me. His fingers brushed against the sides of my breasts as he worked, with just enough heat to get me turned on. “I am serious,” he replied. “Where the others struggled, you triumphed. You represent hope to me, Ellie.” He leaned forward to kiss the back of my neck, pushing my hair out of the way. “Of course,” he chuckled, “that’s not the only thing I see when I look at you. I see this ass that I love to spank…” His palm glided over my butt, “I see this pussy that I want to feast on…” His fingers teased at my folds.

“I’m flattered,” I said dryly.

He chuckled at that. His hands kept massaging. When my muscles had almost liquefied in contentment, his fingers gripped my hip. “Turn around,” he said. I obeyed, and he started massaging my front.

Okay – he wasn’t really massaging my front. At this point, he was just feeling me up, and I loved it. His fingertips raked over my flesh and tweaked at my nipples. His palms kneaded my breasts, just hard enough for me to whimper.

I shifted restlessly. There was an ache in my pussy that had grown steadily more urgent. Now, I was impatient. I needed him.