Dominant Predator (10 page)

“If he survives.”

“He will. Merq doesn’t fail.”

There was silence for a moment then Armise said, “What aren’t you telling us?”

But I didn’t hear the President’s answer. I was pulled away from the conversation when a hand rested on my shoulder in a gesture of familiarity. I stepped away from the door and turned to find Neveed, his body nearly pressed against mine, his breath a close, warm brush on my neck. Way too fucking close.

“How does it feel to hear yourself being psychoanalyzed?” he said with a cavalier tone. Almost as if he was amused by the notion.

I shrugged out of his grip. “Doesn’t anybody fucking sleep in this place?” I bit out.

I elbowed the door open. If Armise and the President had been talking about things they didn’t want me to hear then the guilt of it didn’t register on either of their faces. As if it would anyway. They were both too practiced at deceit to give much away in their expressions.

I chose the chair at the head of the table, Armise to my left and the President to my right. Neveed followed me inside, moving to stand behind the President and lean against the wall. Armise was back in a training uniform, having disposed of his jacquerie outfit as soon as we got back to the bunker. His black tattoos snaked from under the sleeves of his T-shirt. The sunburst emblem of the Revolution stood out against the black fabric and I had to wonder if he thought anything of wearing an insignia that identified him as something other than the Singaporean he’d been his entire life, or if this was just another piece of cloth, a meaningless decoration.

“Armise tells me you plan on moving on the rescue in two days,” the President stated.

I sat back and crossed my arms. “There’s no reason to rush unless you give me intel that says otherwise. What are your plans?”

Neveed eyed me then glanced at Armise. Apparently his personal distaste for Armise hadn’t lessened despite him coming through on my rescue.

“We haven’t made that decision yet,” Neveed answered for the President.

“You’re lying,” I noted, sure that he was evading the subject because of Armise’s presence in the room.

“This is not the place for this discussion,” Neveed challenged me.

The President didn’t interject, leaving Neveed and I to re-establish the boundaries between us. Neveed was his second-in-command and up until two days ago had been my handler. He wasn’t anymore, though. As a newly minted General he outranked me, but from the President’s own admission he trusted me more than Neveed.

I had no issues with speaking my mind in front of any of them. It occurred to me that that might have been because, out of all of them, I had the least to hide.

“You won’t talk about it because Armise is here.” I didn’t frame it as a question. There was already too much unsaid between us—all of us—for me to bother with civility or a standard of decorum that didn’t apply to the fucked-up tangle of relationship issues filling the room. At least I’d never slept with the President.

“Yes,” Neveed answered through clenched teeth while staring me down.

Armise gave a low chuckle and got up from his seat. “I’ll leave you to it.”

I grabbed Armise’s wrist, stopping him.

Through the corner of my eye I could see him look down at me, but I didn’t break eye contact with Neveed. “Wait up for me.”

Neveed’s nostrils flared with disgust.

Armise nodded and was gone, the door clicking shut behind him.

“I leave tomorrow,” the President answered when we were alone.

“For the DCR?”

“It’s where I need to be.”

“And I need to be here,” I replied, not bothering to hide my disdain for the idea in my tone.

The President tapped his fingers on the table. “For now.”

“What aren’t you telling us?” I dared to ask, wanting the answer to the question Armise had asked.

The President shook his head. “You know I won’t answer that.”

“I had to ask.” I pushed back from the table in frustration. “Goodnight.”

I was still seething when I opened the door to my quarters.

The sound of running water came from the en suite and the door was open, light spilling into the otherwise dark room. Armise was positioned in front of the mirror, a knife in his left hand that elicited a rough scratching noise as he pulled it down his cheek, the silver and black hairs of his beard falling into the sink. I leaned against the jamb and watched Armise slather one of his balms over his chin, using the strong, exotic mixture to ease the glide of steel over skin.

“He leaves tomorrow,” I offered.

“He told me that earlier.”

“You two have fun catching up?”

Armise eyed me in the mirror. “Jealousy suits Neveed much better than it does you.”

I flinched, but continued on. “What was his answer to you on what he’s hiding from us?”

“That it was my choice to be here,” Armise answered without hesitation.

“Is it still your choice?” I asked, not realising until now that it was a question I needed the answer to.

“What the fuck does that even mean?” Armise stormed, dropping the knife onto the counter. He laid his palms on the counter and hung his head, taking in deep breaths through his nose.

“You don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Armise glared at me. “Neither do you.”

His assertion was true enough, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I decided to change tactics.

“He says I don’t fail. That he trusts me above anyone else. I don’t know if that trust is earned or by default.”

Armise considered my words. “And that matters to you.”

I didn’t think it would. I nodded in reply. “It does.”

Armise grabbed the knife off the counter, flipped it, caught it by the blade and handed it to me. “I haven’t done anything but trim this beard in nearly twenty years. I want it gone.”

I plucked the knife from his hand. “So why now?”

Armise’s silver eyes locked onto mine. “My trust has been earned.”

I inhaled sharply and pushed back the emotion I could feel clamouring inside me for purchase. I approached him slowly. My fingers gripped his chin, tipping his face to the side, the coldness of his skin lighting every nerve in my hand until the sensation was running in waves up my arms and down into my torso as I pressed my body against his. I placed the blade to his neck. Watched the muscle and sinew dip under the pressure of the ancient steel Armise kept maintained with lethal sharpness. It would have been easy to slice through the skin, into the veins and muscles. Quick, fatal, nearly painless. But I didn’t. And Armise knew I wouldn’t.

The last two days had been a lifetime’s worth of change. Of shifting perceptions, and more questions than answers. And I wasn’t going to stop my search for the full truth.

“What’s your core temperature?” I asked, knowing full well that I was delving into the topic I’d avoided for years now.

He swallowed, the motion lifting the knife by a fraction as I dragged it down his skin.

“It fluctuates with my surroundings. Anywhere from eighty-eight degrees to one-hundred-eight.”

I took that information in, tried to reconcile it with what I knew about normal human anatomy. At the lowest end of that spectrum he should have been comatose—at the highest his blood would be close to boiling.

“How much did they modify?” I pressed.

Armise’s lip tipped up. “I don’t know.”

I searched his eyes. “What are you hiding?”

Armise laughed darkly. “What are
you
hiding?”

I didn’t have to hesitate. “Nothing.”

“I wouldn’t make that declaration too quickly.”

“I’m not the President or Neveed. I am a cog in the machine, not a designer.”

Armise arched his neck, exposing his neck further to the blade so I could get to the hair under his chin. When he spoke it was quietly, his mouth barely moving. “You are the piece that when left on the table people are clueless as to why the machine no longer operates as smoothly as it should.”

I stopped with the knife inches from his neck.

He flicked the edge of the blade. “Go ahead, take it all off.”

“Why?”

“Which question? You tend to ask a lot of them.”

I shrugged. “Pick one.”

Armise inhaled. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

“Okay,” I replied, pressing the blade back to his cheek. Making the conscious decision to believe him.

“Tell me about the building where they’re holding your parents,” he said as I smoothed more balm over his skin.

“They’re the former headquarters of the PsychHAgs—psychological health agents.”

“I know of it. Fucked-up programme. They don’t operate anymore?”

“Not officially. And that campus has been vacant for as long as you’ve had this beard. They shut down that facility after my training class. I was the only one to survive.”

Armise’s silver-blue eyes took in my features, pierced me. “This rescue isn’t just about your parents.”

I dragged the knife blade along the line of his jaw. “I know.”

“Any clue what it’s really about?”

I drew the knife away and met his eyes. “If I did, I would feel a lot less powerless.”

It was an admission that shocked me as soon as I had said it. There had been major aspects of my missions that I’d never been briefed on. Moving pieces my superiors analysed and used me to manipulate. But I’d always been aware of what the end game was. Since assassinating the Premiere, I had been set adrift—without a map or a destination—with only a vague call to the Revolution as my guiding principle. The President was giving me revenge as a motivation, trying to steer me into anger. He knew the need to see Ahriman and all the Committee members dead could blind me of the parts he didn’t want or need me to see. Normally, it would have worked.

One simple act by Armise had changed all of that. His defection from Singapore to be at my side had shifted how I viewed everything around me. Maybe that was a part of the unease I couldn’t seem to shake. I’d never let anyone get close enough to me to have that much of an impact on my life.

I scraped away the black and silver hairs, cut down to the skin, exposing scars long hidden beneath the scruff. Slices of white across his angular features. Armise closed his eyes and set his body against mine—one of his hands on the counter, the other gripping my hip. I worked slowly down his cheeks, under the defined line of his jaw and around the curve of his lips. Armise breathed steadily, his chest rising and falling, pressing against mine.

When I’d scratched off the last of the hairs I stepped back and ran the knife under the running water, wiped it dry on my shirt and offered the blade back to him.

Armise gripped the handle of the blade and I let go. He slid it into the sheath.

Armise ran his fingers over his cheek and down his jaw, his thumb coasting over his bottom lip as he appeared to be thinking over what I’d said to him. Finally he spoke. “You’re only powerless if you let them take away your power. And you are stronger than any of them.”

I didn’t buy that at all.

“Even you?” I replied, preoccupied by the unexpected weight of my thoughts.

Without warning, Armise spun on me, barrelling into my chest, lifting me off my feet and slamming me to the floor. I couldn’t stop the fall—his momentum was too great, his ability to anticipate my defensive reactions and leverage my weaknesses too practiced—but I was fast enough to swipe his knife from the sheath on his hip. As we fell I slipped the blade out. When we came to a rest Armise’s body covered mine, pinning me to the floor, and I held his own weapon with white knuckles to his throat—the length of the blade drawing a thin line of blood across his neck.

Armise didn’t even flinch.

“You’ll never be stronger than I am, Merq,” Armise stated, the movement of his throat causing the blade to cut in farther. I eased the steel just a fraction away from his skin. He pressed his neck into the blade—with each centimetre of movement I was forced to either move the knife with him or to deepen the mark where his blood beaded—until his lips were nearly on mine. I relented, letting the steel fall away from his neck, but I spun the handle and gripped it in my fist.

Armise dipped his head down and rubbed his freshly shaven cheek over my lips and along my jaw. The feeling of it was foreign, his scent familiar, the desire now thrumming through me unavoidable.

“But,” he whispered against my skin, “that is why I’m here. We fight together and the world has no choice but to drop to their knees and beg for mercy.”

I arched into him, and inhaled the fading scent of Singaporean balms, of him. I bit at his earlobe and scratched my jaw along his. “Mercy which neither of us is likely to give.”

Armise dragged his lips across my neck and down to my collarbone and nipped at the fabric of my T-shirt. “Put the knife down, Merq,” he urged. His hands tugged at the hem of my shirt. “And take this off.”

I inhaled sharply and wrapped my arm around his shoulders, feeling the muscles shift subtly from my touch. I put the edge of the blade at the base of his neck under his shirt and sliced through the black fabric. “You first.”

Armise rubbed his torso against mine then sat up, straddling my hips. He ripped the remains of his shirt off, his hips rolling with the movement, pressing our thickening lengths together.

I released the knife, sent it skittering across the floor, and in a rush sat up and removed my shirt, then kissed him deeply. Desperately. I had gone much longer periods of time without touching Armise, without him making me come, but I’d never had him in this close proximity for an extended amount of time and not fucked him. I needed. There was no other word for it.

My skin was alight with that fevered, aching desire only he could extinguish—that blissful, deceptive heat of drowning in icy water. My brain registered warmth even as his cold enveloped me, pulling me under. I shivered and burned at the same time, fought for breath and inhaled his scent more deeply. I savoured the insistent, painful press of his cock against mine, still too clothed for the friction to be enough.

Armise pushed at my waistband and gripped my dick in a firm fist. I pumped into his hand. Licked at his lips. Put my hand behind his neck and forced our bodies closer together, his tongue snaking into my mouth. We kissed wildly—with Armise there was no other way. Rushed, grasping onto each other with frantic need. As always the real world fell away and all I could think about was this man and the unrelenting pace he silently commanded of me. He rocked against me, driving his tongue into me deeper, then drawing back and teasing at my lip piercing. His hand worked me rapidly to the edge while the other arm wrapped around my ribs and clutched my back, forcing me to arch into his chest. I could feel his heart thudding, speeding, my own quickening in response.