Authors: Bryan Smith
Justice had been done.
She came out of her crouch and eyed Dez. “Take out his gag.”
Dez looked at Echo. “This bitch is hardcore. Damn.”
But Dez did as requested, ripping duct tape from the man’s face and pulling out the sock that had been jammed in his mouth. His screams were louder than ever now, ear-splitting bursts of sound that bounced off the concrete walls and made everyone’s head hurt. Lana shut him up by jamming his bloody severed cock in his mouth the next time it opened. Dez grabbed a nearly depleted roll of duct tape and sealed his mouth shut again, winding it around his head until it was empty.
Then the three women stood back and watched him bleed out.
Dez sighed heavily. “Well, that was fun. But we should start getting our shit together and covering our tracks.”
Lana chuckled. “Not necessary.”
Dez cocked an eyebrow. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“I know someone who can take care of this shit, make it like it never even happened. Uh…do you guys happen to know where my phone is?”
Chapter Fourteen
Sexual Healing
Echo’s nails tore into Casey’s back, drawing blood as he continued to slam into her with a ferocity that exceeded anything in his recent experience. One of her hands came away from his back to grip his throat. She thrust her pelvis at him and cinched her legs tighter around his back. The hard grip on his throat made his breath come out in a wheeze. Echo grinned in a way that made her look borderline insane. Casey thought of the dead bodies in his kitchen, as well as her vehemently stated desire to kill him, and scratched the “borderline” qualifier from this impression.
Something inside Echo had cracked during her year away. Taking human life was something she did with relish and without regret. He didn’t need all the gory details of her adventures to know that. That same off-kilter something had changed her lovemaking as well, though “lovemaking” was too tender a word. It was raw and animal-like, infused with a new violent intensity that was disturbing.
Yes, he was afraid of her, even without a gun in her hand. But his fear of her did nothing to dampen his arousal. If anything, the fear enhanced it immensely. The force of his thrusts rocked the bed hard enough to make the headboard slam repeatedly against the wall, which normally only happened as his tempo increased upon nearing orgasm. But this time the headboard boogie had started right away.
Being inside her felt glorious. Like every moment of euphoria he had ever experienced gathered into one burning center of ecstatic, erotic energy. The sight of her beneath him felt surreal and not just because he had been sure he would never see her in that position again. She was so insanely sexy it almost hurt to look at her. This feeling was so intense he eventually screwed his eyes shut in a desperate effort to stave off orgasm just a little longer.
Echo’s hand came away from his throat. An instant later her fist crashed against his jaw, opening his eyes and snapping his head hard to the side. The unexpected jolt had the effect of abruptly triggering the release he had sought to delay.
She braced her hands on his muscular chest and shoved him away. “Get the fuck off me.”
So much for the afterglow…
Casey fell away from her and rolled onto his back. He breathed heavily and stared up at the ceiling. He put a hand to his forehead and it came away coated in sweat. The scent of sex was heavy in the air, that musky commingling of their perspiration and the smell of her pussy. It was definitely always stronger the better the sex was and this was maybe the best sex he’d ever had, though he wasn’t sure of the wisdom of telling her that. Though intended as a compliment, it was hard to tell how she’d take it given her current state of mind.
In truth, he wasn’t sure how to handle her at all now. She was so much like a different person from the girl he had known. There remained some lingering traces of that girl, but they were mostly submerged beneath a veneer of hardness.
He glanced her way and saw she had turned onto her side and was staring at him. Her expression was stony, empty of even the smallest hint of warmth. She looked like she wanted to strangle him. He recalled the iron grip she’d kept on his throat during the last minutes of their escapade and figured maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth.
She sniffed in a disdainful way. “You’re not as good as I remember.”
He wanted to seem aloof, impervious to any insults she might sling his way, but he flinched at her judgment. “Oh. Sorry.”
Her expression remained blank as she said, “You’re better.”
Now he was just confused. “Um…”
“It’s almost as if you’ve been practicing.” There was a hint of menace in her tone. “I bet you’ve been banging bitches left and right since I left, haven’t you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
He had been with a half-dozen women since Echo stormed out of his life. So he hadn’t exactly been chaste, but it was hardly the untamed degree of promiscuity Echo assumed. Then again, the number might have been at least double that had he not become consumed with liberating Keely from the Order of Wandering Souls.
“How would you put it, Casey?”
He gave a tired shrug. “There have been a few. But only a few.”
“You expect me to believe that?” She lifted her head and propped it on an upraised palm, peering at him more closely in a way that was both curious and accusatory. “You’ve always been such a fucking man-whore.” She sighed. “But whatever. It’s not like I’m still your girlfriend. Just tell me you’ve never been with Ella again.”
Casey made what he saw as a supremely wise decision.
He lied.
“I’ve never been with Ella again. Not since that day.”
Echo studied his face in total silence for several tense moments, clearly searching his features for signs of deception.
Then she smiled and shifted a little closer to him, draping a silken-soft thigh across his legs. She lightly dragged her fingernails down the length of his chest to his groin, where she then wrapped her fingers around his flaccid member. “I’m so glad to hear that, Casey. I think if you’d told me otherwise I’d have to cut this thing off.”
He grimaced as she gave him an unnecessarily hard squeeze.
He let out a breath when she relaxed her grip. “Jesus. You never used to like it rough before. What happened?”
“I’ve changed.”
Casey couldn’t help laughing.
No shit.
Her expression hardened. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t want to laugh at me. It’s a bad idea.”
“I believe you.”
Casey put a hand on her bare thigh and gently eased it closer to his midsection. She responded by smiling and snuggling closer against him. “Hmm. Feels like someone’s almost ready to go again.”
They kissed, softly at first, then with greater urgency for a few moments, though it was no match for the intensity of before. Casey smiled as he ran a hand through her luxuriant hair. “I’ve missed this. Being with you.”
Her body language changed when he said that, became stiffer and perceptibly more hostile. “You didn’t ever have to lose it. I was happy with you, Casey. I wanted to be with you forever. Why do you think I so completely lost my shit after I found out you were cheating on me?”
“I wish I could take it back.”
“But you can’t.”
He sighed. “I know. I guess you could still kill me if it’ll make you feel better.”
She groaned and rolled away from him. The mood was broken. There would be no encore performance for now. But he knew it wasn’t a total rejection when she clasped his right hand and twined her fingers in his. Given her aggressive behavior to this point, the emotion in her voice when she spoke next came as a shock. “I don’t want to kill you, Casey. Not anymore. Not after this. But I don’t know if I can ever really love you again, either.”
“So what happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
Her tone made it clear his infidelity remained a raw wound. He knew he had hurt her, but until this moment he hadn’t completely appreciated the depth of that hurt. A year later and she was still feeling it just as intensely. He felt a fresh wave of guilt at this realization. But he also felt considerable relief that his life apparently was no longer in danger, at least not by her hands.
A half hour earlier a very different outcome had seemed likely. That initial pistol-whipping was followed by several more concentrated bursts of brutal violence. She had kicked him across the blood-spattered kitchen floor, keeping the gun trained on him the whole time as a deterrent against fighting back. When she finally tired of kicking the shit out of him, she ordered him to his feet to smack him around with the butt of the gun again. These blows opened gashes in his face that were still leaking blood. The fury she exhibited while knocking him around had caused him to lose all hope she would relent and help him figure out how to help Keely.
But then a funny thing happened.
After knocking him to the floor again, she fell atop him and began to kiss him, pushing her tongue deep into his mouth, which had always been a signal that she was deeply aroused. In the past, this would have caused his arousal to instantly match hers, but this time his body went stiff rather than his cock. This was the instinctive reaction of a battered, untrusting psyche. But a few more moments of pleasurable oral manipulation allowed him to relax and respond in the normal way. Soon their clothes came off and they commenced the first stage of an epic coupling right there on the floor, within arm’s reach of the nearest goon’s corpse. They eventually picked themselves up and shifted the scene to the bedroom.
He still wasn’t sure what to make of this development. Obviously it was an improvement over having the shit beat out of him, but he couldn’t help being troubled by the way it had come about. It was as if the extreme violence had turned her on. Any other conclusion defied logic, defied what his gut told him. Hurting people—even a person she had once loved—was what got her motor running these days.
His gut also told him it might not be wise to question her about it. It was too easy to imagine her becoming overly defensive about it, possibly even violent again. On the other hand, the circumstances meant being delicate about any aspect of what was going on was no longer a good option.
Casey turned onto his side and studied Echo’s face. Her expression was distant now. There was a sense of calm detachment, a peacefulness he found hard to reconcile with the earlier violence. “So…what’s been going on with you, Echo? Where have you been for the last year?”
She turned her head to look at him. “Are you sure you want to know? I’ve done some bad things, Casey.”
Casey grunted. “That part I already gathered. And I
do
want to know. I think it’s important if we’re to have any chance of trusting each other again.”
Echo laughed softly. “Trust each other? That’s funny coming from you.”
He nodded. “I know it is. And I accept that proving myself worthy of your trust again is gonna take a fuck of a lot of work.”
“It might not even be possible.”
“I know that too. But I want to try. So…please…tell me what’s been going on with you. How bad could it really be?”
Echo smirked. “It hasn’t all been bad. I’ve had some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my fucking life out on the road the last year.”
She was silent for a very long moment.
Casey decided to prompt her. “But…?”
She sighed. “You might hate me if you knew the really bad parts. As angry as I’ve been with you, I’m not sure I could take that.”
“What are we talking about here? Robbing banks? Arson? Murder?”
Her reply came in a soft whisper. “That last one.”
“More than once?”
She nodded.
Damn.
“And you’re talking about before the three guys you iced in my kitchen, right?”
“Yeah.”
Casey hesitated before continuing the line of inquiry. He doubted there was anything Echo could tell him that would make him hate her. But not hating her didn’t necessarily mean he might not be repulsed by any of her revelations.
Again, though, this was a case where knowledge was better than being kept in the dark. “Were any of these cases of self-defense? Kill or be killed situations?”
“A few. But mostly not.”
Jesus.
“So…premeditated murder. How many?”
She gave him a look of frustration and let go of his hand. “I don’t know, Casey. I lost count a while ago. There, you happy? Now you know exactly what kind of monster I am. And now you can judge me. Because the truth is, whatever your failings are, they’re nothing compared to the truth about me.”
“I’m not gonna judge you, Echo.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m not lying.”
This was the truth. Though Casey in no way approved of killing people where there was no just cause to do so, his heart wouldn’t allow him to condemn Echo. Despite everything, his feelings for her remained too strong for that.
She smiled. “You know what? I think I believe you. Which means you’re almost as fucked in the head as I am. I meant what I told you earlier, you know. I came here to kill you. And getting away with it would have been so easy thanks to your carelessness. I can’t believe you leave your bedroom windows unlatched.”