Surviving Raine 01 (30 page)

I swirled in the water and brought the fucker up close to me as he struggled to get out of my grasp.  I grabbed one of the loops on his jeans and brought his torso up close to mine and then brought my knee up quickly, crushing his balls up into his body.  He yelled and started thrashing around in the water.  With a quick jerk of my neck, I nailed his nose with my forehead, and blood started gushing into the water.  I shoved him back underneath the waves and started swimming to Raine again.

The hands gripping my arm became more desperate, clawing at my skin for a minute before the movements slowed and then stopped.  I shook the bastard by his hair once and then let him go.  He didn’t resurface but slowly sank into the waves.  I resisted the urge to drag him back to shore, resuscitate him, and then beat his ass more thoroughly.

It took several more minutes, but eventually I reached out and felt the skin of Raine’s arm.  She immediately wrapped both arms around my neck and held on as tight as she could.

“Loosen up a little, baby,” I said.  I grabbed her waist under the water and held her against me for a moment before moving her to my back.  “Hold on tight, but let me breathe, okay?”

“Yes.”  Raine’s hot breath in my ear should have been both comforting and soothing, but my mind was still too focused, too eager to kill.  I couldn’t think about much of anything but getting back to the last motherfucker who had dared to threaten what was mine and finishing him off.

We were a ways out but not a distance I hadn’t swum before, and nowhere near too far even though my right leg was getting a little tired and achy.  Raine’s arms around my neck were almost cutting off my air, but I kept trudging on until my feet were finally in the sand and then out of the water.  I reached up and grabbed her forearms and pulled them gently from around my neck, having a little bit of difficulty with that because she didn’t seem to want to let go.  I took that as a good sign – she must not be badly hurt.  I pulled her around in front of me and took her face between my hands.  I scanned her up and down.  Aside from her busted lip, I didn’t see any blood or signs of further injury.  I glanced out over the water and saw the boat barely still visible on the horizon.  I turned back to Raine.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, my words clipped and strained.  My muscles were still desperate to latch on to something and squeeze the life out of it.

“I don’t think so,” she responded through deep breaths.

I let go of her without another word and stomped across the sand to where Buzz-cut was still lying in the sand, trying to both hop and drag himself away simultaneously.  It wasn’t working well with one leg, and he had only managed to move himself about two hundred yards down the beach – like he could go somewhere and fucking hide from me.  I didn’t even have to run to catch up with him.

When I reached him, I grabbed his injured leg, pulling and twisting it as he screamed.  He flipped over onto his back, and the look of terror in his eyes reminded me of how Raine had looked as Ponytail had held her.  It was the same look on her face when Buzz-cut had shoved Dreadlocks to make him grope her.  I felt my chest tighten, and I increased my grip on his ankle until I could feel the outline of the bone against my thumb.  Keeping up the pressure, I jerked it hard to the left, listening to the snap of the bone before his howls drowned out all the sound around us.

He still had a bloodied knife in his hand, and he tried to get near enough with it to cut my skin.  He didn’t even come close, but I got tired of dodging, so I kicked his hand, breaking two fingers and causing the knife to fly off into the water.  He turned his head, his eyes searching for the lost weapon.

“You want it back?” I snarled at him and then laughed.  “You want to fucking cut me, you fucking son-of-a-bitch?  You want to cut me?  Let’s go get your little toy, shall we?”

I dragged him to the water and shoved his face into the wet sand.  He struggled under my grip until I pulled him up by his ears just long enough to take a breath before I shoved him back down under the shallow waves.  I found myself wishing he had a ponytail, too, so I could yank him around by it, but I made do with what was there.

Images of Buzz-cut pushing Dreadlocks kept infiltrating my brain as I started slamming his head into the wet sand repeatedly.  His face was a bloody mess of shallow cuts and scrapes.  I caught a glimpse of the knife just a few feet away, hauled him up, and dragged him over to it before throwing him headfirst towards the weapon.

“Come on, you pussy!” I screamed.  “Pick up the fucking knife!  Pick it up, and I’ll fucking gut you with it, you worthless piece of shit!”

He was moaning and bawling and wouldn’t even go towards the slim blade.  He put his broken hand up over his bleeding face and begged me not to kill him.

“You were dead when you first laid eyes on her,” I said softly.  Landon’s voice was back on my tongue.  I took three steps to reach him, grabbed the knife out of the water, and pulled him back onto the dry sand.  I pushed the knife towards his face, making sure he got a good look at it before I opened him up, throat to gut.

He gurgled, and blood began to pour from his mouth.  The fingers of his good hand gripped my wrist, but there was no power behind it.  I punched him in the stomach, feeling the gash open wider and his insides start to pour out.  I punched his face, feeling his nose break underneath my knuckles.  It felt fucking fantastic, so I did it again and again.  Eventually his hands fell to the sides of his head and he stopped struggling.  My fists continued to pound into his face.  Sometimes I felt my fists hit sand, but that didn’t necessarily mean I missed my target.  I alternated left and right, throwing punches to what was left of his face and to his chest, listening to the sound of breaking ribs.

“Bastian!  Bastian,
please
stop!  Stop, Bastian!  He’s dead, Bastian…please stop…”

Eventually I heard her, though I’m not sure how long Raine had been begging me to stop.  Her hands were on my shoulders, trying to pull me from the mutilated corpse underneath me.  I stopped the movement of my aching arms and leaned back on my heels.  Slender fingers wrapped around my bicep and yanked at my arm.  A sharp pain in the back of my leg shot up my thigh from its focal point above my knee and then cascaded all the way down to my ankle.  My leg tried to buckle, but I told it to cut that shit out and stood up straight.

My chest heaved as I tried to take in enough breath to counter the adrenaline surging through my system.  It didn’t work, and I just ended up panting.  I had to make myself stop, or I was going to hyperventilate.  I looked around the beach.  Were there any more of them?  There were four – where’s the fourth body?  Then I remembered – he was left to die in the water.  There were three bodies on the beach, one at my feet and two a little farther away.

Raine’s fingers were tracing up and down my arm.  When I glanced down, I saw her fingers had stopped at the point where the blood covering my arm and hand started.  It was even worse on the other side.  My stomach and chest were splattered with the red fluid.

A hundred images passed through my brain.  How many times had I stood in the center of an arena, bloodied hands held high in victory while I heard the cheers of rich fuckers betting on the deaths of those who played against me?  How many times had the elation of winning rolled over me as the blood of my opponents dripped down my arms?

“Come wash off,” I heard her tiny voice say.  Mindlessly, I let her lead me to the water’s edge, then inside the shallow waves where I could clean the blood from my hands, my arms, my legs, and my stomach.  Fuck, it was pretty much everywhere.  I walked out farther and ducked under the waves for a brief moment.  Raine stayed close to me, which was good.  If she had tried to walk away from me, I just might have lost whatever control I had left.

When I stepped back into the shallow water, Raine took my hands in hers and turned them, palms up, then palms down again.  I watched her fingers trail over my cracked and bloodied knuckles.  It should have hurt, but I felt nothing.  I needed to feel something.

I grabbed onto her hands and then ran my fingers up her arms.  When I reached her shoulders, I pulled her to me, crashing my lips down to hers.  She winced, and I tasted her blood on my tongue, stupidly remembering too late that her lip was split.  I moved to the side of her mouth that wasn’t injured, and one of my hands wrapped around her hair.  My lips moved over her jaw while my other hand dropped down to her waist and wrapped around her back.  The heat from her body covered my wet skin, demanding attention.  It was all I could feel – her heat, her life.  It was mine.  She was mine.  I thought about how she looked at me in the life raft while she held my hand and cried.  Visions of her laughing as I tickled her danced through my head.  I remembered the sensation of joining with her for the very first time and how right it felt.  I knew those men had wanted to take that from me – take
her
from me – and my anger and hatred came rushing back.

“I need you,” I growled and grasped her more tightly around the waist, bringing my immediately hard cock closer to her core.  “Now.”

I practically shoved her down on her back in the sand and only barely stopped myself from tearing the sopping wet clothes from her back.  Instead, I ripped my boxers down her legs and threw them off to the side.  I yanked her shirt over her head before fumbling at the buttons of my pants.  Once they were out of the way, I lay on top of her and hitched her leg up over my hip.  I was buried inside her a second later.

Maybe I thought I was going to be instantly calmed once I was inside of her, but I wasn’t.  If anything, I felt more desperate and volatile.  They had tried to take her from me.  If I had still been in the jungle…if I hadn’t gotten back to the beach in time…I would have just come back to find her gone.

“Mine,” I growled and slammed my hips against her, feeling my balls smack against her round ass as my cock rammed into her.

What would I have done?  If I had come back and not been able to find her, what could I have done?  I would have seen the footprints and maybe found evidence of where their boat had landed.  I would have known what they were or what they likely were.  She wouldn’t have left voluntarily without me, would she?

“Only I do this to you,” I hissed into her ear.  “Only me!  Do you understand?”

I didn’t wait for an answer; I just increased the speed of my hips as they collided with hers.  Images of what they would have been doing to her now if I hadn’t shown up when I did accosted my brain.  With four of them, they could have easily restrained her, held her down in the sand, and taken their time…if I had been even ten minutes later than I was, I would have seen…

“NO!” I heard myself scream.  One of my arms wrapped around her shoulders while the other one dropped down to put pressure on her lower back, bringing her up and against me harder.  “You’re mine…they can’t…never, ever…I won’t let anyone…”

I felt Raine’s arms coil around my shoulders and her legs wrap around my waist.  Her fingers fanned out over my shoulder blades, and then gripped down on my shoulders.  I didn’t slow down.  Pressure began to build up in my legs, and again I felt a shooting pain behind my thigh but ignored it.  I was concentrating a little higher up and was not to be distracted by something as frivolous as pain.

“Mine,” I muttered as I pounded into her again, my words keeping time with my thrusts.  “You’re mine…mine…mine…no one else...ever…
ever
touches you…”

I was over the edge a second later, thrusting into her forcefully and muffling my screams in the crook of her neck.  I shoved my hips against her a couple more times before collapsing on her body with my lips pressed to her throat.  My hot breath blew out of my mouth in heavy pants, reflecting off her skin and warming my face.

My arms were still underneath her, one on the small of her back and the other between her shoulder blades.  I tightened my muscles to bring her closer to me as images of the four dead bastards and what they might have done to her danced around my masochistic head.  I don’t know how long we were lying like that, but as my mind returned to the present and focused on what was happening around me, I suddenly felt her trembling and realized she was crying.

Holy shit.

She wasn’t just crying, she was literally sobbing silently underneath me.  Her shoulders were shaking, and when I moved off of her, regretting the cool feeling of the evening winds on my dick as I slid out of her, Raine let out a long, heart-clenching wail.  She didn’t let go of my back, and her forehead was up against my shoulder.  I could feel tears moistening my skin.

A thousand thoughts went through my head.  Had I hurt her?  The raw emotions I felt when I had to be inside of her were overwhelming and undeniably strong, and I realized I had been rough with her in my need to make her mine again.  I hadn’t even made her come.  I wasn’t any better than the fucker who had taken her virginity and given her nothing in return.  No…I wasn’t like him.  I was far, far worse.  I had gone and killed four people in front of her and then fucked her to make myself feel better.

Fuck.

There had been no cheering when I killed the last of the bastards.  No one was passing money back and forth with smiles and congratulations.  No one was handing me a wad of cash and clapping their hands on my back.  She had been crying when she pulled me away from Buzz-cut’s body.  She had undoubtedly been terrified when they were holding her and probably even more frightened of me as she watched me murder four people.

Then I fucked her in the sand.

“I’m sorry, Raine…I’m so fucking sorry…”  I tried to wipe tears off her cheeks, but they were coming too fast.  “I didn’t mean to…”

Didn’t mean to what?  Kill them?  Fuck her?  I did mean it.  I wanted it.  I needed all of it.

“You shouldn’t have watched…” I continued to stammer.  “Fuck, baby…I’m so fucking sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry!”

It occurred to me that I was probably the last person she wanted around her at the moment, and she might very well be better off on her own for a while.  I let go of her, feeling her slump back into the sand before I started to stand back up.  Before I could move very far, her hands grabbed my wrists like shackles and she screamed.