Chapter 14: Ruger

Chapter Fourteen

Ruger

S he freezes next to me beneath the comforter like a fucking corpse. I sleep on top of the covers with a cow hide blanket pulled over me. I can hear her breathing all nervous, preventing my ass from getting to sleep. I won’t be able to rest until she does. My eyes close and I start remembering the first plane ride we took when we got deployed to the Middle east.

I was scared out of my fucking mind from the stories I heard. Gideon made it sound like hell and it was worse. I thought I knew heat in Missouri or even in New Orleans, but fucking nothing compared to the desert.

I won’t lie that I hated every fucking second of it. Couldn’t wait to go home. Right now, sleeping next to her with my hands clasped over my chest, I feel an oddly similar unsettled feeling. Zayna trying to hide her tossing and turning in the bed rattles it around like the C-17 Globemaster III we all sat together on, smelling like sweat and fear.

If I give her time, I assume she’ll fall asleep but going on two hours, Zayna keeps lying there as wide awake as I am.

“Do you normally stay up all night?”

She gasps, startled that I spoke, but clearly not startled at all that I’m awake.

“I’m fine,” she responds dismissively, trying to make her voice sound extra sleepy, even if I know her ass is awake. I’m just surprised Eden hasn’t started crying to add on to my sleeplessness. I know all the reasons I can’t sleep. Darlene wasn’t the first person I killed, but her death and burial was certainly the most gruesome.

I can taste that rot on the back of my tongue when I close my eyes. It’ll take a long time and a whole lot of meth before I can push that image out of my head.

“Something happened to you. I can tell.”

She fakes a yawn. “I’m tired.”

I turn onto my side over the covers, giving Zayna the option to roll away from me onto the floor if she chooses, but trapping the rest of her blankets beneath my body. She opens one eye and then shuts it when she sees me staring at her. Crazy ass woman. I know I look good but… I also know most black women have complete negativity when I talk to them.

Maybe I shouldn’t talk. But the other things I want to do would only get her angrier. And I don’t want that. I’m too tired for that and I don’t want to fight.

“Did somebody hurt you?”

She opens her eyes again. I can see her weighing the odds of telling me. She bites her lower lip, then releases it.

“Yes.”

I could have guessed as much. She’s oddly skittish… but she has a strange aura of strength about her. Something that says… “Don’t fuck with me too much or I’ll cut your dick off.”

I keep watching her, even if there’s barely enough light in the room to see a woman with skin that dark. I don’t mind. There’s something about her darkness that just feels… right.

“Do you want me to kill them?” I whisper, trying to make it sound like a joke.

But I’m Ruger Blackwood. I’ve been putting beasts in the ground since I was eight years old and shot my first doe. There’s no part of my tone that sounds humorous once the words come out and I can practically smell the fear dripping off Zayna when I offer.

But then, maybe I have it wrong because she rolls around under those covers and her eyes meet mine. She scrunches her face up. Is he really that crazy? I know he really is that crazy.

“What if I said yes?” she says.

She has this strange hold on me and the more I look at her, the more confused I get about the emotions coursing through me. I want to have more control of myself. My dick. My head. My heart. But when I look at Zayna, I lose control over… just about everything. I would kill for her. If that’s what it took to make her willing…

To make her stay with me.

I don’t even know why I want that. It’s not like I could ever tattoo her with “Property of Bucky” and watch my club name get inked into her ass. I don’t even know if the ink would show up on skin that dark or if I’ll get my ass kicked for asking that type of question. I’m losing track of myself. Losing track of my thoughts. Desperate for a hit of meth, or at least a hit of something.

“I would do it,” I tell her. “But it won’t be easy for you. I’ll need you to help.”

The corners of her lips form a strange out of place smile. Just a quick, unusual smirk and her face returns to normal. I think she enjoys the thought of killing them, but she knows that type of shit isn’t normal. But just for a second, she showed me. I touch her cheek and either out of instinct or fear, she turns to face me, still wrapped beneath the covers. Still out of my reach unless I rip them away from her body.

Zayna gives me a puzzled look as the back of my hand touches her cheek. She has high cheekbones. Soft skin. Her lips are so damn big. They look almost fake. I run my thumb over them. Softer than I expected. I thought they would feel like rubber, but they don’t. They’re just… lips.

My dick wants to make an emergency exit from my sweatpants. My thumb moves slowly over Zayna’s lips. Desire swells in my chest and her eyes remain snapped open and fixed on me, well aware of the danger zone mounting between us. When my thumb moves away from her lips, she takes the opportunity to put some distance between us.

“I’m not a killer. I’ll get us caught.”

It’s my turn to smile and then make a failed effort to hide it. I’ve been killing for too long to get caught — and not just when the Army needed me to do it. I have known my way around guns since I could talk.

“Wouldn’t let that happen,” I whisper, my thumb running over her lips again. Soft. They’re so soft. Any other black woman would have bitten my finger off by now, but she’s letting me touch her. I don’t know if it’s pure fear or… something else. But the opportunity to do something that I know I shouldn’t just makes me want to do it more.

Everyone knows I’m fucked up. That’s my explanation for this. For her. For everything. Do I really need to get involved with another woman so soon after Darlene? With Eden in the back room, ready to wake up and scream her goddamn lungs out at any minute?

“What about Eden?” Zayna says, her eyes locking with mine. It’s hard not to clamp my hand down on her jaw and ask her how the hell she read my mind. I guess I know how it happened. Those eyes saw straight through me the first time Zayna looked at me. It’s the pull that made me want her to come with me.

I should have known that I was just making excuses to myself, to her and to the club about needing help. When the hell have I ever needed anyone? There’s something about Zayna that just… pulls on me.

“I have family. They can look after her for a while.”

“She’s a newborn. She needs…” Zayna stops herself from saying “her mother”, but we can both work out what the end of that sentence would have been. I run my fingers over her lips because that worked to get Zayna quiet the first time.

“I know she needs me but… If we do this, I want you to stay with me. That’s the deal.”

“Stay with you?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want anything with me.”

Her eyes flicker with judgment. With knowledge. With something else that scares the fuck out of me.

“I do.”

“Ruger,” she says. “I won’t hold your beliefs against you but… I’m not going to participate.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“I have standards for myself.”

“I have muscles. I know what I’m doing…”

I sound defensive, but what I’m really doing is holding myself back from the urge that keeps pressing on the back of mind. My dick doesn’t make restraint any easier. My hand drops away from Zayna’s face, but her relief only lasts a second as I keep my eyes on her and slide my hand down inside my pants, looking her dead in the eye.

I can’t touch her. I know I can’t touch her. But I need… something…

Zayna’s arm shoots out aggressively from beneath the covers as she hits my shoulder.

“Ruger. Stop.”

“I can’t.”

She rolls her eyes and hits my shoulder again.

“Stop. You are just… going through a hard time.”

“I want you.”

“No. You don’t.”

She hits me twice and when that doesn’t work, the damn woman twists and pinches my skin. I suck in air and take my hand off my dick before I accidentally choke the life out of it. I’m still hard but… I’m not touching myself. Trying to get Zayna to look at me (and maybe take some pity on me), I touch her cheek.

“Ruger, don’t you dare touch me with your dick hands.”

“I want you.”

“Repeating that won’t change the situation.”

“Will this?”

I grab hold of the blankets and rip them away from Zayna. She screams my name and jerks her hands out trying to get them back. I roll forward a little bit and Zayna rolls away, falling straight out of the bed and onto the floor — exactly as I planned.

“Ruger!” She yelps as her head hits the floor with a thud.

Perfect.

I roll out of Zayna’s side of the bed and land carefully on top of her as she grunts my name again, pinning her to the floor with my weight, cradling her beneath my arms as I brace my body over hers.

She’s so small. So fucking wrong for me to even want to lay my hands on. But I want her. I want her badly enough to do something so stupid. Zayna pushes against my chest, fighting me harder once she gets the stomach-deep realization that I am in total control here. Fighting won’t change her circumstances.

I reach with one arm beneath my body and grab Zayna’s fighting arms. She’s clearly trying not to wake Eden, so she slaps me quietly until I grab her arms and as I pin them over her head, Zayna sinks her teeth into my shoulders. She yelps and drops her hold of my flesh when she feels my dick jump ferociously against her thigh after the bite.

Damn, that was hot.

“Are you finished?” I growl into her ear, fighting the temptation to lick her neck. She smells goddamn delicious and her violent struggling dies down to slow panting as she tries to apply more directed force against my wrist’s grip on her arms. I pull away from Zayna to look at my little biter now that I have her pinned to my bedroom floor.

One look in her terrified eyes and I feel like an animal. I’m so close. I can have her. Even if she fought within an inch of her life, I could still easily dominate and possess her.

“No,” she snarls. “No, I’m not.”

“I’m going to lick your pussy.”

“What?”

“Prove to you I’m a good guy.”

“Ruger…UGH!” she grunts loudly as she wrestles against my grip again. She grits her teeth and tries one more time before I tighten my grip and show her I mean business.

“It’ll be better if you fight,” I tell her. “That way you don’t have to compromise your good girl morals by letting a racist put his tongue inside you.”

Zayna’s gaze narrows with pure rage. I lean forward and kiss her neck. A confused gasp escapes her lips. I’m so close to her soft brown ear lobe. I nibble on it and make her another offer.

“I’m going to eat your pussy, little biter. Ain’t shit you can do about it but lie there…”

“I fucking hate you.”

I laugh. “Okay.”

“I hate all white people,” she says proudly.

“Okay.”

Zayna lets out one last desperate grunt as I slide my hand inside her pants, getting us so much closer to the promise I made. She squirms beneath me as if moving her hips could stop me from getting my hand past those panties. My heart throbs, ready to leap out of my fucking chest from how different she feels down there. Different from everything I know since I was faithful to my last woman and she was just… regular.

Soft, full lower lips greet my fingers and I’m so excited to touch all over them that I don’t realize just how slick Zayna’s pussy feels beneath my hands. I move two fingers forward and she’s so fucking wet that both fingers slide too far and enter her tightness against my will and hers. Zayna lets out a loud moan and her hips move forward on instinct, pressing her body against mine and willing me to go further. I thrust my fingers forward more. Too late to hold back. Too late to stop myself. And her pussy feels so fucking tight that I want to know more. I need to feel her…