Slay Bells Ring

Chapter Fifteen – Holly

I don’t dream of anything, which is just as well, and when I wake up to a world of dusk, I find Kane is already up. The man is already dressed, and he’s busy eating some of the food I brought. Cereal this time.

Hey, I didn’t know how long I’d want to torture the guy. I came for the long-haul.

I moan as I sit up, and as I do so the blanket around me falls, revealing my bare tits. From where he’s sitting in the kitchen, Kane looks over, and his gaze lingers on me—I’m sure I’m a hot mess right now, nothing too nice to look at.

God. What’s wrong with me? I fucked the man I came here to kill. That has to be some record-setting level of stupidity. I trained to torture and maim this guy, not to have mini-marathon sex with him.

I’m so fucked. I’m fucked no matter how you look at the situation. Assuming I get out of this alive, how am I ever supposed to live with myself, knowing I slept with the man who killed my parents?

But… if it’s the same person who wants me dead now that wanted my parents dead, I should blame this mystery person just as much, if not more than Kane. Kane would never have killed my parents if he wasn’t hired to do it. If that person turns out to be the man who raised me the last thirteen years, I don’t know how I’ll handle it.

I reach for my clothes and throw them on. By the time I’m dressed, Kane brings me a bottle of water and a bowl of my own to eat.

“Eat up,” he says. “Tonight’s going to be a long night.”

He’s right. I don’t say anything as I eat the dry cereal and swallow it down with some sips of water. What I wouldn’t give for an Advil right now, or even a Tylenol; anything to help me ignore the dull throbbing in my feet. I wonder how long they’ll take to fully heal?

Kane must be finished with his cereal, because he sits in the recliner near the fire. “We’ll do the same thing as last night. I’ll sit over there while you lay here and pretend to be asleep. If anyone comes through that door, I won’t let him reach you.”

There are zero reasons I should trust anything he tells me, but as I listen to him, it’s my first instinct. Fucking that man must’ve done a real number on my brain. He got me all jumbled up. Totally his fault, and I hate him even more now for it.

Yeah, I’ll keep telling myself that.

“Look,” Kane says, and the weight behind his voice causes me to look at him, and I hate that I don’t see the coldness in their blue depths anymore. I hate that I see warmth there instead. “If you want to pretend nothing happened, that’s fine. We can do that. I just want us to be on the same page.”

Now he’s… talking about the sex? Honestly, if it was possible to scrub my mind of the memory and pretend it didn’t happen, I could probably live with myself better. But the fact of the matter is you can’t pick and choose which memories to forget. It happened. We fucked. We can move on.

We can move on because it was all different sorts of wrong… but at the same time, it was the best sex I’ve ever had. Hands-down with no close competitors. Kane really is on his own level, even if he does stand on borderline old man territory.

“Well?” Kane asks after a while, when I haven’t said a single word. “Thoughts?”

Instead of telling him I don’t think I can forget about it, I ask him his opinion on it. “What do you think?” If he wants to pretend it didn’t happen, then that’s what we can do—or at least try to. I spent thirteen years of my life hating him. That hatred is still there, simmering under the surface, placated only because of the current circumstances.

I can hate the man and think he’s a beast in the sack, can’t I?

He gives me a smirk, and I hate to report that smirk makes my stomach do something funny. “I was hoping you would decide, but it sounds like you want me to make the decision. I think it would be best if we forget about it.”

Right. He’s right, of course. Can’t argue with him there.

“But I don’t know if I can.” It’s that last, quick admission from him that makes me stare at him, and he must take my look as a question, because he goes on, “I know I wronged you, and you have every right to hate me and want me dead. Hell, I wanted myself dead, too.” He runs a hand along his stubbly jaw. “And I know I have no goddamned right to want anything from you.”

My breath catches for some reason. I don’t know where he’s going with this, but he has my rapt attention. I’m hanging on every word.

His shoulders go up and down as he shrugs once. “But I do. It’s fucking crazy, but I do. If we weren’t waiting on more wannabe hitmen, I’d have you in my bed, committing every single inch of your body to memory. I’d be inside of you every chance I got.”

Heat creeps up my neck and causes a flush to grace my skin. A part of me wants to look away from his intense stare, but I can’t. He has me caught, pinned down, motionless from his words, and certain other parts of my body react in kind.

Like my thighs. It’s a good thing he can’t see them squeezing together right now.

Kane lets out a chuckle and shakes his head as he runs a hand through his brown hair. “I told you it’s crazy. You’re doing things to me, little killer, and I don’t know how or why.”

I’m doing things to him? No, it’s the other way around. He’s the one who’s doing things to me . I didn’t come here to have any sex, just for a spot of murder during this lovely holiday season. Fucking my parents’ killer wasn’t ever on my list of things to do… and yet here we are, both of us not where we thought we would be.

Though there are half a dozen ways the conversation could continue, Kane abruptly changes the subject: “Finish eating. It’ll be dark in less than an hour.”

I dutifully eat, take a quick visit to the restroom, and then it’s time to set our trap. Kane stokes the fire one last time before he sits in the corner of the dark kitchen and waits. I lay on the sofa bed, my head exposed so it’s easy to see who I am, and though my mind should be focused on the possibility of another assassin coming my way, I can’t stop thinking about what Kane said.

He wants more. He wants me again. Why? Am I some sort of weird forbidden fruit to him, or what? Then again, you could ask the same of my strange desire for him. He’s the one man on this entire planet I shouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole, and yet when he was touching me I never felt more alive.

God, this situation is so fucked.

I do my best to push all thoughts of Kane and what we did out of my mind as I lay there in wait. Time crawls by, and for the longest time I hear nothing but the slow crackling of the fire. Even though we got some sleep after all that fucking, I could use some more; it becomes a struggle for me to remain awake.

A part of me hoped, even now, that Kane’s instincts would be wrong, that there was just the one hired assassin. But when I hear the telltale signs of someone picking the lock outside, I realize just how right he was.

Time for assassin number two.

You’d think it’d be easy to pretend to be asleep while knowing someone with a lot more experience is nearby, ready to protect you, but it’s not. I want nothing more than to sit up and meet this assassin head-on, but in doing so I might get a quick bullet to the head. No, whoever it is has to come into the cabin and come towards me so Kane can surprise him from behind.

The door to the cabin swings open slowly, quietly. If I wasn’t awake, the sound would not have woken me. It truly is a miracle Kane was awake that night and overheard the first breaking in.

Whoever it is steps inside. He must see me, because he doesn’t hesitate. I hear his footsteps on the wooden floor, the planks creaking under his weight. I don’t hear Kane move at all—but he does, and that just goes to show that Kane is better at what he does than these guys.

He’s as silent as a mouse, and I hear the sounds of a gun falling to the ground the same moment Kane whispers darkly, “Surprise, motherfucker.”

I hear the grunt of a man after that, and I’m slow to open my eyes and sit up and watch as Kane blocks the flow of blood to this man’s brain for a few seconds, his forearm over the man’s neck. It’s the same position he knocked me out in.

The man, wearing all black, tries to struggle, but that struggling is futile, and it’s only a few seconds before his eyes roll into the back of his head and his entire body becomes limp. When that happens, Kane releases him and lets his body slump to the floor.

“Well, that wasn’t too hard,” Kane remarks. He didn’t even have to pull out my knife to take him on. “These guys—” He kicks the man’s nearest boot. “—are hardly trained at all. Definitely not any, uh, coworkers of mine. It’s like they were hired off Craigslist or something.”

Can’t deny that. They’re pathetic compared to Kane… which makes me realize I’m all the more stupid for thinking I could storm in here and take on Kane.

“Let’s tie the fucker up,” he says. He goes to grab the rope he brought out of the bedroom, and I groan as I get to my feet to help him. Kane lifts the man onto one of the kitchen chairs. “You don’t have to. You could sit—”

“I’m tired of sitting,” I tell him, holding the unconscious man upright while Kane works on fastening him to the chair. If I’m careful with how I stand on my feet, I’m okay. Mostly. Like I said, any kind of pain pill would do me wonders right now.

He does the ankles first, then the wrists get tied behind the man’s back, the rope woven in between his arms and the back of the wooden chair, and then back again a few times. By the time Kane’s done, there is no way this guy could free himself.

After he’s tied up, Kane rummages through the man’s clothes. Some ammunition, a knife, and a smaller gun is all he finds. No phone, no wallet, nothing. Everything he takes from the man he deposits onto the table behind the unconscious assassin.

I get a chill, and Kane hurries to close the door and lock it right back up.

“Now what?” I ask.

“Now we wait for our guest to wake up, and when he does… we’ll have some questions for him. If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll give us the answers we want, otherwise—” Kane pulls out my knife from his pocket, glinting it in the dim light from the fireplace.

I have to say, my knife is way more impressive than the one Kane pulled off the man.

“—it’ll be time to use this baby again,” Kane finishes with a devilish smirk, and I can immediately tell he’s in his element. He knows what he’s doing, and he knows he’s good at it. For just a fleeting second, I see the man who killed my parents and came to find me afterwards, the man who almost killed me, too.

But then I blink and his expression softens when he looks at me. “I can keep watch over him, if you want to try to get any real sleep. It’s up to you. I don’t know how long he’ll be out.”

I wage an inner war with myself, and in the end, I pull a chair from the kitchen and plop down next to our guest. Kane does the same, though he places himself on the man’s other side, leaving a good three feet between us.

It’s probably best if we don’t get too close to each other. After what he said earlier, I don’t know if I can be close to him without wanting to tear his clothes off. If I fuck that man again, I’ll hate myself even more.

Of course, even so, it might just be worth it.

Together, Kane and I wait.