Page 13 of Striker

My fingers rub the heated skin on my neck, my mind rushing with the lurid images he just planted.

“You have clean clothes in the armoire,” Breaker says. He gestures to the bath filling behind me. “Get cleaned up and change. We’ll bring you something to eat soon.”

As he turns to leave, Breaker pauses, placing his hand on the frame, looking at me over his shoulder. In the bright light, I can see him clearly. His eyes are a pale blue, a stark contrast to the deep warm shade of skin peeking out around his mask. His broad shoulders and chest take up the entire doorway and his head almost reaches the top of the door frame.

He’s fuckinghuge.

A reminder of his strength and the danger he carries under his skin.

“I’m sorry, Little Red,” he whispers, and my skin flushes with a familiar heat. I wish he’d not call me that. My body likes it too much.

“Sorry?” I ask, biting the word out. “For what part? Lying as you fucked me? Killing men I’ve known for years because they were protecting me, scaring the daylights out of me and my family, or kidnapping me?”

His eyes scan me from head to toe, softening as they travel down my legs, then back up my torso and stopping at my face. “I’m not sorry for taking you, but I am sorry you’re caught in the middle.”

He turns to leave and I’m left standing in a cold bathroom in wet underwear, my heart pounding erratically, like a birdtrapped in a metal cage. Trapped, and scared because this fluttering in my chest isn’t exactly fear anymore.

No man has ever looked at me the way he does. The way they do. No man has ever been sorry for hurting me, no matter how much they’ve insisted. Not for raising his voice or scaring me. For being mean.

For being a man.

I’m going to have to be careful. Because this is worse than Rune. Worse because the look in Breaker’s eyes tells me he means it. But like he said, I’m trapped in the middle of what appears to be yet another war, but this time? I refuse to be another causality.

Chapter 5

Striker

Sitting alone in aroom is my worst nightmare. As I watch the girls, I’m reminded of that first day at the school when Fallon left me alone in the cold room.

I had wondered when I heard the lock sliding into place why the doctors and nurses, all the people scurrying about, had made me wake up if they were just going to send me to another dark room. Why put tubes in my arms they said were medicine, stuck me with needles they said would make me strong again, then take me to a warm place with other girls and boys when they had planned all along to give me to a man who locked me up again. Why feed me, I had thought when the first pangs of hunger started, when I was just going to go back to sleep with a hungry belly and tears on my cheeks?

When Father finally opened the door, I remember him staring at my arms with a strange expression on his face. He’d pointed to the marks and asked, “Why did you do that?”

I had looked down at the bloody streaks, the deep gouges from my nails raking over my flesh and said, “So I wouldn’t go to sleep.”

It wasn’t until after Father retrieved me I learned I was at a school and expected to sit for my lessons with who I was told were my brothers. I’d never had a brother, but I liked that I suddenly had fifteen. I’d never been to school either, but somehow knew what it was. A room where boys and girls sat and were given crayons and papers and learned to read and write. Again, I wasn’t sure where this knowledge came from, only that I had it, so it must have been something I learned in those shadowy years before I was brought to the school. Before the darkness.

After Fallon cleaned me up, giving me a cold bath in a metal tub, scrubbing my nails and fingers clean with white bar soap and a coarse brush, he put creams and bandages on my arms and dressed me in gray pants and a dark gray button-down shirt with a pressed collar, then gave me a plate of food.

My new father watched me take every bite, reminding me to eat slowly, using words I didn’t understand now and then. But it didn’t matter. I was so hungry, so glad to be out of that room before I fell back asleep, that I did everything he asked. Then when I had cleared the plate, he said, using the same words as me, “My sons are smart. But we all must learn to communicate. Every day, you will be instructed and every day I expect progress.”

Strange how the mind remembers things. I can’t remember my mother’s face, even to this day, but I can picture sitting in the large open cafeteria, with rusted metal tables and chairs, walls with peeling mossy-green paint. How Fallon had seemed so large and strong. Handsome, with his black hair and pale eyes and the pressed three-piece suit. At five years old, Ididn’t know what a three-piece suit was, nor did I understand that the school was located in a prison until I was much older.

My favorite class was language. Besides my strict education with my brothers in those stark classrooms, and the weapons lessons from Fallon later on, all my education came from the school’s staff and the old black and white movies Cook used to watch in the kitchen. All my memories from younger years are corrupted by my mind now and the things I’ve learned in life. A five-year-old wouldn’t know about a three-piece suit, but now every time I think of back then, or another memory surfaces, my older mind replaces the blank information with everything I know now.

Viper once told me it was the same with him. That he seemed to just know some things without knowing how he knew. He was young like me when he was brought to the school and said he remembered the day I joined in on our language lessons vividly. Mostly though, he told me he remembers so clearly because I looked similar to Reaper, tanned skin and dark hair, so different from him and our other brothers. And that I that had yet to get a name. I was just brother until my skills were discovered.

It wasn’t until I saw Breaker I understood what he meant.

A loud bang brings my attention back to the present. I lean in, focusing on the screen showing Delilah’s room, but all I can see is her back. We placed several cameras high in the crown molding so we can switch angles if need be. Viper wanted one in the bathrooms, but thankfully Reaper argued that there was nothing in there that they could use to harm themselves or us other than the razors we provided for them to shave their legs.

Shifting, I roll the chair closer to the row of monitors and punch the keys on the keyboard to switch cameras. Delilah’s angry scowl comes into view as she stares at the drawer at her feet, undergarments scattered across the floor.

Did she pull it from the armoire on purpose?

The question barely has time to form in my head when she reaches into the armoire and pulls out another. Thick socks spill onto the wood floor and she drops the drawer with a thud next to the other one. She kicks the bundles of socks around like she’s looking for something, then after a minute, grabs several hangers holding her dresses and tosses them to the floor. Then does it again.

“What is she doing?” Breaker asks from behind me.

---