Come To Me (Owned Book 3) (10 page)

That is, until I heard her.

Lenny.

I heard her scream. The sound ricocheted in my ribcage, bouncing around until I felt sick to my stomach. It sounded like it was coming over some kind of speakers. It was incessant and consistent, never ending, and mind bending. It was like her scream was inside my own head.

They were fucking with me. I knew they were. It was the easiest game in the book. They were trying to rile me up and get me to break form, get me to show my hand early.

Well it worked.

I sprinted down the hallway, not paying mind to corners or open doors. There was only one thought on my mind: Lenny.

I skipped the elevator and ran up the stairs. Her screaming grew louder. It was like a headache I couldn’t shake.

I hadn’t fought much since the war. It was the reason I’d gone into recon instead of becoming a mercenary. I didn’t like to kill. The sounds of the dying weren’t my lullabies.

If I had to kill, though, I would. If I had to use the skills that were forced upon me, I would.

And that night, I did.

The first wave was easy to take out. They didn’t stop to ask if I was in the wrong location. I didn’t stop to question if they wanted to leave first. Unfortunately I lived in a world where we communicated with fists and bullets.

Just like in war, they used the green boys as cannon fodder. It was almost unfair the way it was done. Two boys rushed to where I stood, guns shaking in their hands as they shot bullets at me. I put one in each of their hearts and another in their heads. They fell to the ground without complaint.

I stepped over their bodies and followed the sounds of Lennox’s screams. I climbed the staircase, following the wails like a Siren’s call. The staircase curved and I plastered myself against the wall when I heard footsteps coming.

I threw an elbow, hitting the first guy in the nose. Blood spurted and he yelped. The next guy tripped over the one with the broken nose. They tumbled down the staircase and landed in a heap on the floor, unmoving. A third man came. I shot him in the knee and he screamed in pain, following his forebears as he tumbled to the ground.

Still Lenny screamed, the sound like a screwdriver to my skull. I knew then, as the sound burrowed farther inside me, that I would do anything to get to her. It didn’t matter how many men or women I had to bloody. It didn’t matter the body count. It didn’t matter the blood bath.

The dangerous and perhaps unsound understanding reckoning at my core was that it didn’t matter how many innocents got in my way. My goal was Lennox safe and at home, and nothing else mattered.

When I reached the top, my legs nearly froze. Alice was at the end of the hallway holding Lenny as a shield against her body. Lenny’s eyes were glassed over. She was listless. Blood crusted beneath her eye and stained the clothes she wore. She’d been beaten. She’d been bloodied. My nightmare had come to pass and the brunt of it had fallen on her.

I thought I’d stymied the part of me that had broken upon seeing the sheets. I thought I’d gotten my shit together. Seeing her like that, though, I nearly collapsed. I summoned every ounce of training I had as if it were my own Hail Mary. I had to keep it together. Despite the fact that I felt as if I were coming unglued, a jigsaw puzzle quickly tumbling away, I had to stay pieced.

“Vic…” Lenny looked up, but then her head fell as if too heavy for her body.

“A
re you happy here?”

I didn’t look up from my ministrations. Keeping your shit shiny, even in the goddamn desert, was just something you did. We kept our shoes clean, we kept our things folded, and when we went out and got bloody, we came back and washed it like it was dirt on our clothes, not the life blood of another.

“Are you happy here, soldier?”

I looked up, stopped my rubbing, and paused at her question. It was just me under the tent—the other guys were playing soccer with their down time—so she was definitely talking to me. She had long blonde hair, but it was pulled tight behind her head. With her in her suit, I felt underdressed in my tank and fatigues. Her face was done perfectly, somehow not sweating even in the heat.

I should have recognized her for what she was all those years ago. When Alice asked me if I was happy in the war, I didn’t realize my answer would shape my life forever.

I aimed my SIG at her head.

“Vic,” Alice said, her smile blood red. A brief thought flashed through my head: I wondered if she was wearing lipstick or the blood of her victims.

“Sorry to break up the party,” I replied, keeping my aim.

She shrugged at the dead bodies around us. “Nothing that wasn’t expendable.” She gave a cursory glance to Lennox and I clenched my jaw.

“Drop Lennox and maybe I won’t drop you.”

“Really, Vic, there’s no need for dramatics.”

I shot off a warning bullet above her head. The casing lodged in the cement, causing plaster to fall and hit her in the head. Alice glared, tipping her head so the plaster fell with a thud to the ground.

“Did you know we didn’t even have to drug her?” Alice laughed. “She was already fucked up when we grabbed her. Top notch choice in women, Vic, really.”

I took a deep breath, canceling out all periphery and extraneous noises. Once upon a time, I was a dead shot. This was what my training was for. It wasn’t so people up in their ivory towers could keep blood off their white houses. It was for this, to save the people I loved.

“Don’t worry though,” Alice purred. “We woke her up extra special. Did you hear how much she enjoyed being woken up?” Alice laughed, but the sound was already fading. Nothing save the weight of my own gun mattered at that moment.

“Just a few cuts here and there but it was enough to get her screaming like a stuck pig.” Alice goaded me, but I hid how much the blood on Lenny’s body boiled my own. A day would come when she would know what it felt like to be skewered. I would stick her like the snake she was and roast her over an open fire.

But I couldn’t rush it.

Alice gripped Lenny by the neck, shaking her slightly. “Really pathetic. She might have even called your name. I don’t know, it was hard to tell through all her slurred druggy speech.”

Taking another deep breath, I adjusted my aim slightly. I pulled the trigger and the bullet whizzed through the air, hitting Alice in the left arm. She screamed and dropped Lennox to the floor. The look of shock on her face was almost as good as the realization that I’d caused her pain.

I don’t think in all of Alice’s thirty plus years she had ever experienced any kind of real pain. She didn’t have a heart to break, and she was never in any position to feel physical pain. Her pain threshold probably ended at a stubbed toe.

Clutching her now bleeding arm, she shrieked and withered out of sight like a dying plant. She wouldn’t die, unfortunately. I hadn’t had the opening to take that shot without injuring Lenny.

I rushed to Lenny and checked her pulse. It was slow, but she was breathing. She was bloody, covered in cuts, but she didn’t appear to be in any life-threatening danger. She was still wearing the pajamas she’d gone to bed in.

My gaze flicked away from her and to the dark hallway that Alice had disappeared down. I knew I could probably catch her, and Lenny wasn’t in any immediate danger after all. Bodies buoyed us, and if I ran now, Alice could be among them. Just as I was about to stand, Lenny moaned. I froze, hand stuck on top of her.

Not today, but someday I would go down that dark hallway.

I gathered Lenny into my arms, stepping over bodies to make my way out. Only minutes before everything had been so urgent, so immediate. I hadn’t bothered looking at their faces because I hadn’t had the time. Now, I didn’t look at their faces, but for a different reason.

As I walked out, carrying Lenny in my arms, I came face to face with a man. He froze, jaw clenched, shoulders rigid, and stared at me. I stared back. Neither of us made a motion for our weapons. We looked into each other, but I felt no compulsion to kill. From the way the enemy reacted, I’d have said he felt the same way.

We were just two ships passing in the night.

N
o one disturbed me as I carried Lenny through the empty neighborhood. Then again, that was the key word: empty. Alice had fled and everyone else was dead. We made it safely back to my Subaru, but the safety had come at a price. In order to buckle Lenny into her seat, I’d had to add the weight of a few more bodies to my already suffocating soul.

I wish I could say that over the years killing had culled my emotions. That faces and last words no longer mattered to me. That the people I stole away from this world were as important to me as passersby on the street.

That would be a lie.

Looking down at Lenny’s bloody body, I realized I had at least one reason to try and cull those—the lies that had spread between us like weeds.

Truth was, all that had changed inside me was now I was used to it. I’d grown accustomed to the sounds of death the way some grew accustomed to the sound of wind. Didn’t mean it didn’t affect me. Their faces and their last words were forever imprinted on me. Some days I wondered if a kill would break my soul free completely, if there would be one final tremor to break free that which held the nearly deadened thing together.

I quickly shook the image of me buckling Lenny into her seat, my hands still wet with blood. Images like those are pernicious; they’re the kind of images that will quickly break you—like when you have to put a bullet in the temple of a kid, you remember how surprised he looks.

When the mom finds the kid, the sound she makes is unlike any other. The scream marks itself forever on your ears. It’s a unique sound, a wailing, haunted…
surprised
sound.

So yeah, I don’t remember those things.

With Lenny safe and buckled, I zipped out just as the sirens began to sound. I looked in the rearview mirror at her sleeping body, thinking back to the beginning.

Lennox had burrowed herself inside me long before I acknowledged it myself. When she first moved in, I would walk along her hallway, never questioning why. One night I was walking the hallway and I heard a scream and a crash. Instantly my body constricted, my blood blistered. It was the first taste I had of that powerful, possessive ache I would come to know as the side effect of my love for Lenny.

I tried to forget her.

But I couldn’t.

Just the
thought
that something was wrong sent my head into a tailspin. I broke into her room without reason or thought of consequence. She looked so scared, her red hair falling around her pale face. I quickly assessed that nothing was wrong—well nothing externally. Internally, it was obvious. She was haunted by nightmares.

I could relate.

I didn’t even pay attention to how little she wore—well, I didn’t pay
too
much attention. She was dressed in a thin lacy bra, but even though her tits were practically begging to be touched, it was her eyes that had me captivated. They were shadowed, haunted. Deep beneath the cobalt depths lurked a sinister reality.

Sanity would have had me turning away, shutting the door, and locking her out of my life, but there was no sanity between Lennox and me. I had been drawn to her then the same way I was drawn to her now. Even though she was only asleep in the back seat of the car, I felt the urge to keep checking the mirror, as if she would suddenly up and vanish into smoke.

Home wasn’t safe any more, not as long as Alice still breathed, so I skipped through Santa Barbara, drove through Santa Maria, and was in San Luis Obispo just as the sun was rising. Lenny still hadn’t woken.

If I hadn’t realized then by the frequent patrols I made outside her apartment—I was basically one step below stalker—and if I hadn’t realized the night I stayed at her place, watching over her like some hardened sentry, I should have the day I invited Lenny to my “cabin”.

It wasn’t a cabin: it was my safe house. Secluded in the mountains behind San Luis Obispo, I’d never brought anyone there, much less a woman I barely knew. By that point it was obvious to me Lenny was hiding something, but I was so preoccupied trying to feign that nothing was happening between us, I never looked into it. Maybe if I had and I had used company resources
then
instead after all was said and done, it would have turned out differently. Alice never would have discovered Lennox. Dean never would have faced the blunt arm of GEM. And maybe I could have saved Lenny from all of it, even from me.