MIA
“JESUS CHRIST, quit staring”How could I not stare. We were in the confines of a private plane. We were going to some unknown place that the asshole of a man failed to inform me about.I went to him for help but this was not the kind of help I wanted. I wanted a fake id, new documents, something that wouldn’t easily make Bryant find me.“I will if you tell me where we are going”, I said with equal disdain.He hated me. I hated him. I could tell by the instantaneous taps of his big as fuck boots, he would rather have been anywhere but here. Trapped with me.“You’ll know when we get there”He replied so distantly checking his gun for the hundredth time. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was planning on how he’d get me to shut up with one bullet.“How long is there?”He snorted placing his gun down on the coffee table and taking another shot of whiskey.“I’m not the one flying the plane, am I?”His replies were as instant as they were lethal. He made no attempt to hide the fact that me being in his life exhausted and angered him.“Andro-“My silly attempt of trying to calm the ceasefire between us evaporated the minute his dark eyes gazed at me as if peeling all my skin with a sharp scalpel.“Flames. Andro doesn’t exist anymore”Of course. How could he exist when the boy I knew had added almost fifty pounds of sheer muscle and brawn. Add in the grumpiness, the danger to him, the tattoos peaking through his shirt and he was like a hot Hades.Sexy, devilishly handsome and a major asshole in all the world of assholes and trust me I had met my fair share of assholes.Calming myself and trying to find my voice underneath his sharp stare, I tried to reason with the tank of a man,“Okay...Andro... Flames. I’m sorry about everything. The bombing at your place of work, you having to accompany me-““Sorry won’t bring Elise back”, he threw a jab. Jabs that hurt more than any of Bryant’s beatings.He blamed me for my sister’s death? Well, I sure as hell wished it was me that died that night because my life had never been easier since.I should have gotten used to his indifference by now but every insult he threw my way was like a sharp blow to my gut.I still wondered to this day what Elise saw in him. Sure he was handsome, most especially now but even back then he looked like the type mothers warned their daughters to stay away from. He’d always been a magnet for danger.The same danger he brought to my family when he decided to elope with my sister all in the name of love.“You always an asshole?” I dared.“Women like me this way”, he mumbled and I rolled my eyes.What sort of women liked him that way. The desperate kind?“Women that beg me to fuck them for eternity”Bold and provoking, his voice returned the question that lingered in my head. No hint of mischief in his voice, I met his gaze and the idea of a woman begging him to fuck her for all eternity sounded disgustingly pitiful to me.I mean sure with a body as big and ripped like his, the sex would definitely be good. I could imagine how easy it would be to fit in those big, possessive-“My eyes are up here, sweetheart”God. Was I actually imagining…“I have that effect on women’, he said cockily.“Keep dreaming, I’d never ever fall for a man who has an ego bigger than the country’s zip code, uses crude words to compensate for the fact that he has a small dick and absolu-“My words got cut off when his phone rang sharply saving me from the intense stare contest that went on for five seconds.“Snakes. Yes, she is”,Andro stood up walking to me with that intense stare that scared and challenged me at the same time.“Looks fine to me. Why do you think she’ll say yes if it’s me? For fuck’s sake, Jason’s a fucking pussy who doesn’t know shit. Alright but if she dies, I tried. Come the fuck on you think I specialize in that shit like you do? Gimme a grenade any day rather than that shit. Copy. Anything turns up on the asshole you call me stat. Jason there? Put him on”A two seconds pause and Andro’s vibrational voice sounded.“I’ll castrate you when I get back, you fucking asshole”He hung up, eyes gazing at me.“What?”He’d threatened to castrate a man and here I was trying to act defiant in front of him. Trying to hide behind a cover until I found the nearest tub and sobbed all my woes in it.“Take off your shirt”My throat dried and fear crept up my throat.He wasn’t Bryant and yet…my heart thumped so loudly he could have heard it. Memories of everything that happened to me for the last pathetic years of my life flogged my gut.I couldn’t…“Mia”He knelt before me but the sight became even blurrier.“Can’t…can’t can’t breathe”“H-Hey look at me. Breathe. One. Two. Three. In”, his palm landed on my cheek and it was a cooling ointment saving me from my own flames of hell.I held his palm against my cheek and I breathed in.“Hold it”, he commanded.My lungs up taking in as much air as they could, I waited for his voice because that’s the only thing I could cling on.“Out. Feel better?”I nodded peering into those spirals of dark that seemed genuine. He looked genuine kneeling there, his palm on my cheek, his cologne so strong and so relaxing it calmed my frayed nerves.“I’m sorry I don’t know what-““No one sees panic attacks coming. You are lucky I was here”I didn’t know whether he was being genuine or straight forwardly sarcastic but I took it as a sign that we were establishing some common ground.“I don’t have them regularly. Sometimes it’s once in a year, other times once a day”Try three times a day after Bryant burnt my skin for his own pleasure.“You don’t have to apologize, Tonelli. We all have our bad moments”“Do you?”He didn’t look like he had bad moments. He was all I’m Donald Trump unfazed by anything or anyone. I wished I had his spirit. That spirit of rebellion and courage, maybe then I would have stopped Bryant all those times he raped me.“I have PTSD. My time in the Marines, Elise’s death…it all acted as a fucking catalyst for my condition”“ooh”What else could I have said? That I thought he deserved it for my sister’s death, for my situation? I wanted so much to hate him and not pity him and yet here I was my heart weeping for his situation.“It’s not a fucking big deal, people have PTSD”“I never said it’s a big deal”Well I thought it was anyway.“Yeah? Then why are you looking at me like I have cancer or something. Take off the shirt, Mia”“ANDRO I-““I’m not going to fuck you in a plane for Christ’s sake. Snakes said something about you refusing him to treat you? Says some shit about your wounds getting infected if they are not checked up on”His crudeness was back but beneath that was a little sincerity that he cared but like every one who tried to help me, I declined his help.“I’m fine just like I told your friend last night”The guy who’d been mildly insistent on taking a closer look at all my injuries. Bryant had ruined my life so much that I couldn’t stand any man’s touch. I was afraid and scared that every man that laid a hand on me would choke me or worse…His touch dissipated from my cheek and it was then that I realized I had allowed him to touch me in the first place. Moving back, his powerful legs hoisting him up, he towered before me.“It wasn’t a request, Mia. You take that shirt off or I rip it off you with my bare teeth”Chills ran down my spine and suddenly I was consciously unbuttoning the pink blouse Berkely had gotten me last night.Andro would hate me even more after he saw me. After he saw all of me.I pushed the soft fabric off my left shoulder then my right and I was shirtless in front of him. The bra was useful enough to cover my breasts but it wouldn’t cover all my scars. I wished it did. I wish it hid my ugliness.Andro didn’t speak a word when he saw me.He took off his jacket covered my shoulders before he said,“You are seeing a doctor once we land”He didn’t as much as look at me or talk to me after that and for some reason it stung like hell.FLAMESNOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY FUCKING MONKEYS.Still when the look alike Clark Kent pulled me aside for a talk, I felt a fucking pang of guilt choke me.Elise wouldn’t have wanted this for her sister. I didn’t particularly feel homey towards Mia but I’d lived long enough to know the difference between wounds and scars. And ten years in the Marines had taught me one fucking thing.Wounds healed but scars didn’t. Scars ran so fucking deep they nearly messed you up. And for her? Shit. Whether she had chosen to be with Bryant or not, he was a fucking inhumane bastard that deserved to be rotting away at some city graveyard.It wasn’t just one scar on her arms or her waist. It was a shit ton of them and I had a gravely loose idea why she had panic attacks.Frankly speaking she was strong, no woman I had fucked would endure the ton of shit she’d been subjected to.“Your friend was right, the wound on her abdomen needed some cleaning otherwise she would have had an infection. Her bruises howev
MIAIF HE WASN’T A COMPLETE asshole, the knots tightening in my stomach would ease up.My nerves in disarray, I panicked. The weather for the most part did nothing but haul harder reminding me that in seconds, my leg would be blown to smithereens.“Don’t move”, Andro nudged and my feet really wanted to move.Add in the cold, the life-threatening predicament I was in and I wanted nothing but to turn the other way and run as fast as my weak legs could manage.But running or moving was going to kill me faster than frost bite hit the man in front of me.Kneeling on the thickly covered ground that was snow, I glanced at his back. Watching the muscles at his back contract and expand like pistons working together to get the job done.“Fuck!” he grunted digging into the snow with his bare hands and I winced at his actions.“L-Leave me”, my voice wobbled.I was a goner anyway the minute I stepped foot outside Bryant Knox’s mansion.“No can do, Tonelli. You die, I lose my money”, Flames’ voice
FLAMES“MOTHERFUCKER, you used up all the fucking water!”“Language man, there are kids here”Fucker didn’t have kids and if he did well that was as catastrophic as leaving an atomic bomb in the hands of Napoleon.“Fuck, the kids. The river is a mile away from here”And the walk to the said river was another fucking problem given the blizzard.“Hey say hi to Uncle Flames”, Jason spoke and the next thing I heard were puny voices coming from the other end of the line. Hi, Uncle Flames. They said in unison and I scrubbed a hand over my face.I hated kids. Tiny evil creatures that were a handful than most of the bullshit people I had met in my life and trust me when you did the work I did, you were bound to cross paths with limp dicks every once in a while.“Cannon’s got kids, two in fact”“Jesus Christ”, I exhaled as I trod through the ankle high snow in frustration.“I know he’s a lucky bastard”Lucky bastard? I would call it stupid and reckless. With what we did having kids was having
MIA THE BRAVEST thing I had done? For starters, leaving Bryant knowing very well I put a target on my back when I did.This...what I was doing right now wasn’t close to valiant. I was crying…hard and pathetically and that wasn’t a good look on me because the two hundred pounded man clung to my shoulders threatening to pass out again any moment.My lips quivered; I bit my lower lip toning down the tears constricting my throat and it hurt. The snow didn’t cease but continued to yowl at us till it made sure we knew it didn’t give a shit about a bleeding man and a woman who was too wind and bones to drag said man to the cabin.He was heavy.Insanely heavy for a normal man.For a moment there when he passed out, I thought he’d died and the gun shook in my hands. I hated him and I might have wished for his death at one moment of weakness but I never ever wanted him to die. Whether we both liked it or not, I needed him, he needed me and fate had deemed us inseparable.Him dying meant I was
FLAMESI HAD BEEN shot before. The kind of shot that left my body a few feet from joining the eternal flames of sulfur in hell.This…this was different because I hadn’t seen it coming. The delirium, the haggard breaths, the feel of a woman’s hands all over my body without my permission. And not just any woman but her.Fucking her. The bad shooter. The disobedient minx. The blonde devil. The scarred witch. Honestly, I could have gone on and on about how bad I loathed Mia but the situation stopped me.Just what the fucking hell?!A jut of pain coursed through my veins up the damn place she’d shot at, disorientation bit me in the fucking head and I stifled a hiss, my dick the damn thing…I could feel it painfully poke my briefs and my pants chose the wrong time to be tight.Morning wood, they called it because I refused to believe that my dick responded to the woman beside me.The woman’s whose bare pussy hugged my thigh, the woman whose pebbled nipples poked my chest like hot irking bul
MIA“LIKE THIS?”“NO”Was his gruff reply that was accompanied by an even bigger scowl than the last one which was five seconds ago.Sure, he’d ran to his secret bunker and came with stacks of wood, chunks of wood for lack of better words but he refused to absolutely teach me how to use an axe and I was determined to know how to use it.Leaning against the beams of the cabin, hands crossed on his puffy chest, he tsked every passing minute and I wasn’t backing down from what I was doing.He had left me alone. Alone and unguarded after I had spent the whole night stitching him, cleaning him up, cleaning his blood off my hands and off the floorboards and up until now he was still being an ass.I apologized but why hadn’t he apologized to me?For leaving? Where had he gone in the first place?Hunting?Getting attacked by fucking wolves again?Roaming around the snow with a wound that wasn’t completely healed?I grabbed the wooden handle of the axe again, swinging the damn thing with the
FLAMES“I THINK I ATE SOME BAD MUSHROOMS”It wasn’t mushrooms. Mushrooms either killed you or made you high-if you ate the good ones that is-Nonetheless I found myself smiling like a goofy chum as we both knelt near the toilet bowl.She had a case of ‘eating slightly expired’ canned food and I didn’t need to call Snakes to translate that for me.She wasn’t going to die that’s for fucking sure but at least the wave of nausea would shut her up for a while and I was comfortable with that.My chest hit her back, my hands holding her hair back as she hurled inside the toilet bowl like crazy. If I wasn’t an asshole, I would have been telling her shit like it was going to be okay or rubbing her back like a good little boyfriend telling her to let it all out.But I was an ass, and the ass thing to do for a woman you didn’t like but had boners for, was to fist her hair, fucking enjoying her misery.This right here was the fucking universe telling me Mia Tonelli was weak. If she couldn’t handl
MIA‘IT’S DONE’Ten minutes later after signing the electronic contract sent by one of his buddies from B&A, I was standing in the middle of the cabin’s back yard trying to pick up as much sound as I could.Legs apart, eyes ahead, he’d commanded.Then he had put this rag he called a blindfold over my eyes and let’s just say training had gone downhill.It was in the ass crack of dawn and while I wasn’t a morning person, I wasn’t complaining, I was going to pay him for this very torture because I needed it when everything went south.Because I needed to be ready on the event Bryant ever got hold of me again. I needed it to kill Bryant if he survived the B&A guys.“Focus”, came his voice behind me and I turned.“On what?” I asked.The only thing I could focus on was the cold biting me underneath his oversized clothes. My toes were frozen cold.“Everything. Your surroundings, my voice, the fall of snow lightly touching the ground, touching your shoulders, be perceptive to the trees swayin