thirteen
Liz wasn't sure what first pulled her to consciousness, but as she gained a sense of where she was, the cheek that was pressed to the pillow throbbed with a dull ache. His limbs, the arm and leg thrown over her, felt cage-like and claustrophobic.
Perhaps he was sleeping; perhaps he was a deep sleeper. But what if he wasn't? What if she wriggled free of his embrace only to get a bullet in the brain?
No, through the sluggish, drug-addled mush of her mental process, one thing stood out like a sharp piece of glass: she was alive. He hadn't killed her. She would hand over the money once the bank opened and, if he let her, just walk away.
But walk away to what? A sensation of bleak hopelessness bloomed in her stomach and clawed its way up her chest. She suppressed a sob and felt the tears prick at her eyes. Once the floodgates had eased open, there was no shutting them.
The arm that covered her chest moved. Jack's hand cupped her chin, pulling her head back and he pressed dry lips against the wet, unbruised side of her face. That act - small, casual, the sort of thing a lover would do -broke her. Elizabeth opened her mouth and let out a wretched, choked sob.
"Shh...stop it. Don't cry." His voice was hoarse with sleep, susurrations on her skin.
But there was no stopping it. The words erupted with each spasm in her chest. "I... can't... help it," she sobbed.
"Please. Go back to sleep." Even as he spoke, the leg that lay over hers tightened, drawing her back against him. His arousal, obvious even through the fabric of his jeans, pushed snug against the cleft of her ass. "Please!" he repeated with a little more urgency.
Why should she keep quiet? Why should she spare him her misery? Her life was in ruins: she was going to be alone, broke and very probably stateless. Because whatever Jack said, Liz knew that Harland Jeffries wouldn't let her go so easily. The knowledge that all this misery was primarily of her own making didn't matter. Jack could take his share of the blame - he could have listened to her. He could have at least heard her out.
The thoughts, the self-pity, the emptiness all rollercoastered through her brain and pushed the soft, croaking whimpers from her throat.
His body stiffed against hers, muscles held rigid along with his breath, and for a few moments he didn't move. Then, with a tortured groan, he exhaled. His hips rolled, grinding against her and he covered her mouth with his, kissing her with a strange, driven urgency.
Even as he kissed her, she cried into his mouth, pouring measure after measure of grief into him. It didn't stop him. On the contrary, with each sob, she felt his passion growing. The hand at her jaw slid down, stroking her throat as she cried. The other forced its way between her body and the mattress, encircling her waist, palm pressed against muscles of her belly as they heaved.
It was the pain she was caught up in - all that pain - raw and angry and yet, somehow, hopeless. It seemed to her that he fed on it, growing hungrier and hungrier with each portion. He panted that hunger into her mouth, pressed it into her hips, into her skin with a building ferocity.
When he splayed his hand over the roundness of her breast and she felt the nails of his fingertips dig into her flesh, Liz gasped for a moment, then a torrent of tears overtook the shock. When he moved his mouth to her shoulder, the sharp incisors grazed her skin an inch or two before she felt the pain of his bite. It pushed the self-pity from her mind, the misery, the emptiness, all of it replaced with something clearer and purer. She keened and reached back for him, curling her fingers around the back of his neck.
Liz looked down, through the shimmer of tears, at the angry, half-moons his nails left in her flesh. They looked almost black in the hazy dawn light. The world turned from black and white into bright crimson as he chose another spot and bit into her again. And still she could not make herself let him go. Her breath came in desperate gasps, her nipples burned, her skin became a pebbled landscape of goose flesh and, between her legs, her cunt ached with a intensity like nothing she'd ever felt in her life.
Jack released his grip to worm his hand between them and fumble blindly with the zip of his pants and free himself. Then, pulling her leg back over his, he entered her from behind. Liz arched, crying out at that first, searing penetration. Suddenly every other vestige of pain was gone, emotional, physical, the bites and the bruised flesh, all burned away into the ether with that single act of possession.
There was nothing but the ragged sound of his breathing and the measured violence of his thrusts. The palm at her pubic bone held her still as he fucked her with a driven evenness. Like an act bound to happen, a goal already attained. Only when Liz felt his cock swell inside her did she remember this was sex. And only when her muscles began their familiar, slow, sharp contractions did she realize that she had stopped crying.
The shudder, the brutal pleasure that swept up her body emerged from her throat with a long, stuttered moan. There was an eerie stillness as he stopped moving. Then, with a single wounded noise, he erupted into her.
For a long while, he lay motionless, his arms clasped around her so tight she could barely breathe. A series of raw, involuntary shudders reverberated through his body and echoed in hers. Jack didn't say anything, and neither did she but, after a while, he loosened his hold on her and she felt him run a careful fingertip over the bite mark he'd left on her shoulder. Liz knew very well that, sometime soon, it would start to really hurt, but at the moment, there was nothing but a bruised dull ache. It was much like the rest of her feelings, numbed by the successive shocks of the last twenty-four hours.
Still, as he eased away from her, rolling onto his back on the bed, Liz could not help but wonder about this strange, frightening man. A chameleon. Not like her, an incompetent actress, but someone who really could, based on need, change almost completely. So convincingly that, she suspected, he convinced not only everyone around him, but himself also. Chameleons didn't fake being green, or blue, or whatever colour they changed into. They simply were what they were, in the moment. Jack, she thought, was very much like that.
There was no point in wondering if she'd just seen the *real* Jack. That was like looking into a kaleidoscope and wondering which was the *real* reflection. The only thing real was the quality of it being kaleidoscopic.
It was almost fully light outside. This close to the equator, dawn was as predictable as gravity. It was close to six in the morning. The storm had blown itself out long ago. Liz opened her mouth to say speak, and then closed it. Finally she said, "Before the bank opens, before I give you the money, I want to tell you about it."
Jack didn't say anything. She glanced over at him to make sure he hadn't fallen asleep again. He was lying with one arm casually flung over his chest, but his eyes were open, staring up at the water-stained ceiling.
In a quiet voice, Liz began the long story of where the money had come from, the ways Harland had managed to hide it, and how she'd stolen it from him