Chapter 32: Ruger

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ruger

T here’s not a fucking soul in this world capable of real, pure love. That’s the first lesson my mother taught me. I never remember her holding me. My first memory of getting anywhere near her arms was when I reached out for a hug at three years old, accidentally knocking over a half-finished bottle of whatever beer she was drinking back then. She smacked me across the face so hard, Doc had to take me for stitches.

Men have always felt safer than women. Easier to be around. Less unpredictable. Less emotional.

Zayna has me completely fucked up. I’m the unpredictable one in this situation. My emotions are bouncing off the walls. Walls. Walls surrounding my heart that are over ten feet high. I tried being married. I tried convincing myself that the highs and lows of chasing after Darlene while she fucked around and got her ass sent to prison and lied about a million fucking times was me doing the right thing.

I have no regrets over killing her. No doubts she would have smacked away a hug from Eden over half a bottle of piss-flavored beer. No doubt she would have created a monster with the same fucked up blend of neglect and hysteria that created me. I know what I am completely. I understand it.

What hurts is seeing Zayna’s face and coming to the realization that she thinks the same thing as everyone else. It doesn’t matter if I kill just for her, just to prove my love and devotion. She will always see me with blood on my hands. Thick red blood.

Zayna knocks on the bedroom door. I don’t want to let her in. I want to strip her clothes off and chain her up until she gives me her ex-boyfriend’s life. My urges wrestle against the commitment to her that I already made. I have to kill one more of the men who hurt her. Then what? She made herself clear.

No killing her ex-boyfriend.

I don’t want to face it. Or her.

“Ruger, let me in.”

“No.”

She keeps pounding on the door. I got my food already. No point in going out there. I have my bed and Zeus. I don’t need Zayna. She can sleep on the couch for all I fucking care. Or Zeus’s bed if she needs to curl up. I don’t give a shit about her.

Zeus gets up and runs toward the door, barking like he wants to have a conversation with Zayna. Is there a single person in this fucking house aside from Eden with any loyalty to me? Zayna keeps knocking.

“I can stand here all night.”

“Go ahead,” I call out to her. “I don’t care.”

“RUGER!” she yells. “UGH!”

I hear her feet falling against the wooden planks as she walks away. Good. She ought to get used to sleeping alone. I certainly will. I close my eyes and whistle for Zeus to come back to bed with me. Reluctantly, he obeys, but he shows me his big pink asshole before sitting at the foot of the bed away from me.

Message received. With my eyes closed, I just picture Zayna. Her hair. Her smell. What life will be like without her. A single tear pierces the corner of my eye. The only one I will ever allow myself to shed for her or any woman. I have definitely learned my lesson this time. If I keep choosing the wrong fucking women, maybe the best thing to do is stop choosing.

Priests do it all the time.

I reach down for Zeus’s back. He whines bitterly as I stroke his fur. Whatever, asshole. Your ass is stuck with me for the long haul… My fingers sink into my semi-loyal dog’s fur and then I hear a loud cracking sound and a thud.

What the fuck?

I sit straight up in bed. There’s a large split through the bedroom door and the head of my good wood splitting ax stuck in the door. Zayna grunts loudly and before I can yell her name she swings again and splits the middle of the door with another big cut.

“ZAYNA!”

“I’m coming to bed,” she says through her grunting as she struggles to pry the ax from the door. “I don’t need your help.”

This woman is out of her fucking mind. Before she splits the door completely in half, I run up to stop her and thrust what remains of the door open. Zayna stands back, allowing space for Zeus to race through the open door and act like they’ve been separated for years.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She keeps wielding the ax and glaring at me.

“What does it look like? I’m breaking the door down.”

She has no right to look this sexy dripping in sweat. I never put Zayna to the task of splitting wood and clearly, it took her plenty of effort to get through that door. Worst part is she’s just glaring at me, holding that goddamn ax like she’s ready to chop my ass down. Like I’m the one who did something to hurt her.

“Why are you doing that?”

I sound angry. Like Doc scolding me for stealing from the Flying J.

“Because you won’t let me in, Ruger!” She yells at me, heaving the ax to impale the wall next to the door frame. We both flinch, surprised by the strength behind her fury.

“So I won’t let you kill my ex-boyfriend. Big fucking deal. I told you that I loved you and you just stormed off. How is anything going to work between us if you don’t talk to me?”

Everything about Zayna pisses me off right now. Her lips. Her hair. The color of her skin. It’s impressive the way she swung that ax to get through the door, but it also means I’m fighting a beast far more stubborn than I imagined. Any other woman would have curled up on the couch weeping. Not Zayna. Not the teacher. I wonder if I did this to her by making her kill with me. By fucking her in my bed every night. Did I turn her into an ax wielding mad woman?

“Put the weapon down.”

“NO!” she yells. It takes all my military training and experience not to flinch. I’m not in the best position, but Zayna is still a small woman. Easy enough to overpower. The ax blade is more unpredictable and I keep my ax sharp since it gets cold as fuck around here and I chop food for the fire whenever I can to stockpile for the winter.

Her hair is all wild and tangled around her head. Unbelievably sexy.

“Put the ax down, Zayna,” I say to her more sternly. She can tell from the look I’m giving her that I mean business, but Zayna barely bothers to hide her defiance.

“I agreed to your original terms,” she says. “You can’t go back on them now. You can’t just… You can’t!”

The explosion of vulnerability from her shocks me, but it’s not enough to cure me completely of what I want. There’s no cure for what I am. The fucked up events that created Ruger Blackwood from the blackness.

“I want to be different, Zayna.”

“Then BE different.”

“I can’t,” I say to her, trying not to snarl at her. But I sound angry because the pain she plucked up is deeper than Zayna can imagine. She doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up knowing your mother prefers beer, cigarettes and dick to taking care of you. The first woman’s hands I reached out to for love smacked me away.

“I can’t believe you can share your love.”

“I can’t,” Zayna says, her voice trembling with anger. “I don’t love my ex-boyfriend. Do you realize how crazy you sound?”

Bold words from a woman who chopped down my bedroom door with an ax.

“You loved him once. Means you could fall in love again.”

“I don’t hold onto the past.”

“Don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Zayna says, her hands finding a suspiciously more comfortable looking position on the ax handle. “What past am I holding onto?”

“Put the ax down, Zayna.”

“No.”

“Zayna…”

I lunge for the ax handle when she won’t listen this time. She tries to swing at me sideways, like she’s trying to chop my body in half. I dodge her swing and the ax lodges in the cabin wall. The force throws Zayna back a little and she’s surprised by her own strength. I grab the ax out of the wall and she shrieks as I throw it aside — over ten feet away.

Before Zayna can get a hold of herself, I grab her by the waist and drag her into the bedroom. She screams as I lift her off the ground with one arm wrapped around her waist. The fighting only gets worse from there. First she tries dropping her weight, like she isn’t light enough for me to throw over my shoulder.

“PUT ME DOWN!” she shrieks, trying to pry herself away from my grasp. I haul her through the door she damn near chopped down. Zayna digs her nails into my forearm and follows up by biting down on me like I’m a Klondike bar in the middle of summer. I wince and grunt as I body slam her on the bed just to get her teeth off me.

“FUCK!” I yell as blood spurts from my forearm. “You bit me!”

“I’ll do it again too!” Zayna says, getting up on her knees on the bed, lunging at me like a pit bull on the run from Michael Vick. She jumps at me, but finds a wall of muscle that forces her back onto the bed. I grab her and try to hold her down. One knee on the bed and then the other as I wrestle Zayna’s forearms away from my face.

“STOP SCRATCHING ME!”

She knees me in the thigh. But I know she was aiming for something else. We’re going to wake Eden up messing around like this. I grunt and pin Zayna’s hands above her head. She screeches like a banshee and I do the only thing I can think of to shut her up. I kiss her. I expect her next move, but I let it happen. I have control here. Hands pinned above her head. Zayna’s soft, curvy body beneath my weight. She’s out of breath too.

I’m bigger than her, stronger than her, and I know all her weaknesses the same way she knows mine. Except I’m in control here. Not her. She lashes out with another kick to my thigh and I kiss her harder. Fury surges through her when her kicks don’t work and I don’t stop kissing her. She bites down on my lower lip hard. The heat and pain flow through me immediately, but Zayna doesn’t achieve her mission.

I let the blood flow into her mouth and I don’t stop. Her lips are so soft. So much better than any other lips I’ve kissed. Just having her like this gets my dick hard, even if she wants to chop me in half. She grunts miserably when her bite doesn’t work to stop me.

“Get off me,” she grunts.

“No.”

“I hate you.”

“I believe that,” I whisper, adjusting my hips and then moving Zayna’s head so I can kiss her neck. This only infuriates her more. She can feel my dick getting hard, which makes her panic more.

“I HATE YOU.”

“Good,” I whisper. “You can tell me that when you take my dick tonight.”

“RUGER. Get off me.”

It’s not that I feel high on my power. It’s that this is the only power I have over her. This stupid, useless physical strength. She’s the one who has my heart pinched between two of her fingers. She’s the one who can crush the life out of me with a word. With her absence.

“I need him dead,” I whisper. “I need you to be only mine.”

She looks at me with dead panic on her face. “That can’t be the only way to prove it to you.”

“Why do you even care about him?”

My dick stiffens with uncontrollable and downright absurd rage. I should be stronger than this. Better than this. But I’m not. I’m a jealous fucking psycho with blood on his hands and the worst part is that I just crave even more.

“I don’t,” she says, the honesty on her face giving me a smidgeon of relief. “It’s wrong to kill someone innocent. That’s it…”

That’s the line then? His innocence. It doesn’t feel like enough to me. Not if it means risking her changing her mind and leaving my side to go back to a man who doesn’t have blood on his hands. I can’t risk it. I can’t risk her leaving me. She has to understand that.

I hate her for denying me this one thing. I hate her for the very fact that her denial does nothing to stop my feelings. They surge in waves and crash against the walls I was supposed to put up. Her lips part eagerly for me even as her body thrashes against mine. I like her right where she is and my hands move to strip her clothes off. Zayna stops kissing me and sucks in just enough air that she can yell at me.

“Are you crazy?”

I laugh and keep working her pants off. No point answering the question at all. Zayna kicks my thigh again, but even her toughest kick barely hurts and I just get more excited about getting her naked. She gasps when I get my fingers past her underwear. My dick thumps aggressively against her thigh, raging with desire for this woman. She’s so soft everywhere and it’s downright unfair how good she smells.

My fingers slide between her lower lips and the sexy ass sound coming out of Zayna’s mouth almost makes me cum on the spot. Fuck, she’s wet. For all that fussing and fighting, I expected that I would have to work her up to this. But her juices slip all over my fingers and I struggle against my urges.

Control is the most important thing here. For both of us. I slow down and move my kisses to her neck while my fingers tease Zayna’s lower lips open. I find her soaked clit and keep kissing her neck with firm, even pressure as I tease just around the nub, careful not to give her too much.

“You can’t blame me for wanting to kill any man who ever touched you,” I whisper, sliding my finger in slow, smooth circles around Zayna’s clit. “I can’t imagine a man alive having you and not coming back for seconds.”

Her face tightens like she’s going to argue with me, but I slide two fingers inside her, preventing her from forming a sentence and delivering a firm, physical reminder of my control over her. It’s not just that I’m bigger and stronger. I know her…

Zayna’s pussy clamps hard around my fingers as she swivels her hips in some misguided effort to escape my grasp. No fucking way I’m letting her out of my sight now. I graze my teeth against her neck, sending a thrill of terror straight through her from the threat of extra force. Then I move my fingers inside her. Pushing them in deep. Zayna cries out and more juices spill from her entrance.

I fucking love it. My dick craves more than this too.

For now, I have to enjoy the contours of her cunt as those inner walls grip my fingers. I groan in pleasure as I slide my fingers out and nearly cum again when I bury both fingers inside Zayna and she makes another sexy ass noise.

“You’re so tight, baby…”

She whimpers and moans, finally giving in to my fingers at least by bucking her hips up to meet me. I get my fingers on the rough, textured part of her entrance and move in slow circles, pushing Zayna’s arousal to a fever pitch. Her pussy juices like a summer peach and even slow, steady movements push her all the way to that breaking point.

I can feel her coming towards the edge and I need to bring her there. I kiss her neck again and hold her body against mine while I pump my fingers between her legs.

“Come on, baby,” I whisper. “Cum for me…

My heart pounds nervously. Making her cum won’t change her mind but there’s still some fucked up part of me indulging in wishful thinking. Zayna makes an encouraging whimper and I pump my fingers faster between her legs, tightening the energy between us with a slow, deep kiss that never breaks.

I can’t pull my body away from hers until she cums and I broke her down fighting against me. All she can do is submit to this feeling. Her thighs tighten around me and I thrust my fingers inside her one last time before I feel the convulsive pulses around my hand. She’s so damn hot when she cums.

Zayna rides the wave as I fuck her slowly with my fingers. She’s such a good girl like this. When she’s letting me have my way. I can feel myself getting more gentle along with her. Orgasms calm her the hell down and this is exactly how I need her. She makes one desperate effort at eye contact with me but…

I don’t want to look at her right now. My desire doesn’t have anything to do with my anger and right now… I’m still angry. She senses it too.

“Ruger,” Zayna pleads. She touches my face and the rage surges through me properly. I don’t want her to pretend to love me now. Not while she denies me the one thing that would make me feel better about this. About us. About the future. Because anything can happen in the future.

There’s only one thing there’s no coming back from — death. Not even prison stopped Darlene from screwing around on me. Death stopped her dead in her tracks. Zayna’s fingers scratch my facial hair and I can’t take it anymore. I can’t keep letting her touch me and worm her way into my heart and fool me. But that doesn’t mean I won’t fuck her.

I flip Zayna over onto her stomach. She grunts and pushes her butt against me quickly once she realizes what I’m up to. Touching my dick with her big soft ass has the complete opposite impact of what she intended. I groan with pleasure as she unintentionally grazes the head of my dick through my pants. I’m bulging with so much arousal that I can feel exactly what millimeter of my cock presses up against her through my clothes.

I rip the rest of her underwear away from her ass, prepared to take her from behind with her face pressed into my pillow. She gasps forcefully as my weight presses her hard into the bed. I won’t risk letting her get away before I get mine.

No fucking way.