Seize me From Darkness (Pierced Hearts Book 4) (34 page)

Was he trying to decide if I could shoot? “I can pull this trigger fine. I didn’t say sit, I said
turn
.”

His monotone delivery continued. “If you shoot me and kill me how will you get off this island?
The sat phone is locked away. You going to wait for Glass and shoot him too? Let me talk then you can think about these orders again? Maybe I’ll cooperate?”

His logic was impeccable. Bastard. He was setting a trap here
, but what was it?

“Talk. Two minutes.”

He shifted his feet, rested his forearms on his thighs. “I remember,
meisie
, how much you like what I do to you.” His eyes narrowed. “Last chance to give me the rifle without fuss. I’ll only punish you a little.”

My grip crunched in enough to strangle the rifle
, if it were alive. “One minute forty.” Pity I had no watch.

“
Suit yourself. I wanted to tell you who I met on the beach just now. An old fisherman, drunk, lost. He ended up here by accident. Was a nice guy with a boy of his own. His son has a baby coming too.”

He went on with more detail
about his talk with the fisherman. Now and then, as he spoke, he would study the rifle in my hands then look away, then stare at it again. It made me think he respected what a bullet could do. But then he stopped looking and I agonized that it wasn’t loaded at all. Damn him. He’d been in combat and been fired on many times. Were there bullets in this thing or did he scorn the threat of me with a loaded gun?

I frowned.
And why was he saying this? Was his new friend sneaking up on me? The tension of wondering if there was someone there, about to jump me, became a compulsion. I did a quick scan behind me then whipped my head back around to check Pieter. He hadn’t moved. Thank god. My heart stuttered back to life and he smiled at me.

“So?”

“So he told me his life story. I told him some of mine. He’d found a bit of paper on the beach, from your resume. It had your picture on it and I was worried he might have read your name. He said he could only read a little English. Then he went on to tell me he saw what I did to you last night.”

That...I recalled
, all the pain, all the climaxes Pieter had forced from me. In his strange way, he cherished me, yet here I was ready to shoot him. Why? Was what I was doing right? If it wasn’t... An unwelcome tear rolled down my face.

Fuck
it.
I was right. I must be.

Except I sort of, kind of, loved some of him. How was that possible?

The rifle seemed heavier every second. Where was this heading? “And? Sixty seconds left.”

Only I was the o
ne dreading the end of my countdown...and I had no clue why. Just something about how he regarded me. As if being held down and hurt a million times while he fucked me into nirvana wasn’t going to have psychological impact. Be strong.

“Not giving me the gun?”

“Fuck off.”

“
I don’t think so. He gave me this big speech about being good in this lifetime, which I agreed with. He’s right about what is morally correct. I agreed that what I’m doing to you is wrong.”

Stunned,
I rearranged my fingers on the rifle. Was he saying he was going to let me go? Did I dare ask him that? My vocal cords wouldn’t function for all of half a minute. If I never said it, I’d never hear him say no.

“Are you
...are you saying you’re going to free me?”

He nodded, looking sadly at the ground between my feet.

This couldn’t be.

“I’m saying that af
ter I pushed him out to sea, I climbed aboard, and I strangled him, and then I dumped his body overboard.”

Blankness filled my head as everything seemed to jerk into stillness, then I kicked over into
horror. He’d killed a man. Just now. A complete innocent. Was this a lie? I stared into his eyes, concerned if I looked away for a second, he would pounce.

“You’re lying.”

“The day my brother died, I ran through the crowd of demonstrators to Aden, my fellow officer, planning to, I don’t know, just stop him. My brother was curled in a puddle of blood at his feet, dead, brains spread out in a splatter. I pulled my pistol and shot Aden’s face off.

“I lost a brother, a country, a wife, and for a lo
ng while, my respect for myself, but I’ve come to terms with who I am. Killing is what I do.”

Stated so blatantly. I blinked, my thoughts running about like freaked-out mice.
Truth then.

He’d killed a
stranger. A fucking stranger.

A
dark purpose emanated from him, and his feet moved under him, ready.

His large hands rested on his knees. The damage those could do...if he managed to seize me.

Caged and concealed behind the swayed locks of hair, his eyes lurked. The crack and rustling thump of a palm leaf falling to the sand behind him distracted him not at all. I was his only target.

I was playing
a dangerous game with a dangerous man.

“Why?”
I croaked. “Why today?” Black specks danced across my vision. My lips numbed. The gun seemed lost in my thick fingers.

“Because I want you.” He rose to his feet, heavy muscles sliding on arms and thighs, ominous as a dread instrument of war about to attack. “Because I will kill to keep you. I will kill a man on the bloody
whisper
of a suspicion to keep you. That –” He nodded at the rifle. “– an empty gun, will not stop me from taking you back.” He took one step.

All my fears crashed
in.

“Stop
. Stop there. It’s not empty.” My finger tightened. It couldn’t be empty. He was bluffing. I didn’t want to shoot, but he took another step then leaped for me. One, two strides. Panicked, I pulled the trigger while scrambling back, half tripping, unsure where I was aiming, the barrel swinging in little arc.
Click. Nothing.
I yanked the trigger madly.
Nothing. Nothing.

I
stumbled and my heel hit something. Just as I was on the verge of toppling head over heels, he was on me, snarling, one hand on the middle of the rifle and twisting it aside, the other hand had my throat.

“I wanted to see if you’d shoot. Three, four times, you pulled that trigger? You are in so much
fokken
trouble. Did you really think I’d leave it here loaded?”

Still off balance, but with both hands hanging onto the rifle as if it were a life jacket, I gaped at him.

Terror stampeded my mind.

I had to act. Had to do
something.
If I let him have this I was done for, his victim again. If I kept it, he was going to half kill me. Frantic, barely able to think, my fingers stayed locked on.

“Let it go.
Now
.” In the rumbling threat in his words, I could hear the
or else
like the music cue before the beast eats the teenagers in a horror film.

Something, probably that irrational terror, along with having him snarling down at me like that movie beast, made me attempt to swing the rifle around to bear on him.
An empty rifle.

And fuck me, if I didn’t tear it from his hand. It was the left, hurt one, of course. I sat down abruptly
.

He ripped the gun
from my grasp.

I swallowed past the tightness in my throat, my eyes watering purely from the anxiety of facing him down. “I... I’m sorry, Sir.
I didn’t mean to...” But I had.

His eyes narrowed, darkened to what seemed pits-of-hell level.

Doomed, was putting it mildly.

“You spoke.”

The next
sorry
died on my tongue.

He rarely gagged me, but he hauled me to my feet,
marched me over to the box, and held me facedown over it while he connected my wrist cuffs at my back. The leash clicked on, then he wrapped it around and around my face and knotted it somehow. My tongue met the metal links if I swallowed. While still behind me, he twisted my head back until I bent like a bow...
god.
That black stare – so impersonal. I floundered, crazy scared.

“You will learn never to touch another weapon. One lesson only because that’s all I need.
Down.”

He shoved me to the sandy concrete and made me kneel with my face
to the hard surface then he sat. The box creaked under his weight. With my head low, I could only see his feet before me.

“Turn your head to the side
and look at me.”

I did that
, blinking up at him, and his foot descended on my neck. The weight pushed my cheek into the grit.

“Being bad means bad consequences.”

I sobbed once. It was a little wretched, and he would see it, but what did it matter now? All I’d done had come to nothing. I was his again.

I was incandescently angry.
She’d tried to shoot me several times. The trigger pulls had been obvious. Another man might have beaten the crap out of her over what she’d done but that wasn’t going to be me. I’d unleash my anger, yes, but it would have purpose. After weeks of this, I’d thought we were nearly there. I’d thought she wanted to be with me.

That
notion she’d just dragged through the dirt. I figured that meant I could drag her through it too.

Tears
trickled from her eye and over her nose then dripped to the concrete, making wet splotches. I kept my foot where it was while I calmed.

“Crying? You should have thought. You should never have done this. I need to remind you of your place. Down there.” I tapped her neck
with my foot then reached down to run my finger over her cheek and collect some of those precious tears.

My
wet fingertips slipped over one another as I rubbed them together. “These are mine,” I murmured. “Like you are. Understand?”

She nodded, her lips trembling and her eyes communicating misery.

This was hard. Even with my anger, this was hard to do. This couldn’t be a relationship where we were equals in any way, at all. I had to have all the control in my hands, to her mind, her body, her heart, her soul. I couldn’t do that by continuing on the way I had.

I’d thought being on the island would help us become a loving couple. Wrong.

I couldn’t have a woman with so much knowledge wishing to escape whenever I looked away.

I had to come down
on her with brutal precision. There was no question I could dominate her or that she loved it when I did, but now...now I would dom her ass out of existence until she didn’t take a breath without thinking to ask my permission.

I stood then
pulled her up by a grip in her collar and her hair.

“
When I’m done training you, you will beg me for proof of my ownership of your body. It isn’t just my cock that has rights to your body. For every time you pulled that trigger, I will pierce you.”

I
would pierce her irrevocably with my metal. I could taste that. If I didn’t nearly come in my pants doing that, I’d be damn surprised. Growling, I shook her neck.

“
What I did to you before was nothing, girl, and what comes next is only the beginning.”