Stepbrother UnSEALed (28 page)

He's not looking at her as he pulls up to the curb, more distance than he really needs from the door. His eyes are glued to mine in the mirror.

For a second, we share our hurt.

I finally understand why he's doing this. And I wonder if he's beginning to understand Chris and me, our love shining through the dense, twisted wreckage of all our baggage.

I won't blame you, dad,
I think, trying to send him the message without wasting any words.
Go ahead. Walk me in.

I start to fiddle with my seat belt. The sound annoys Evie, who starts thumping her overdone fingernails on the car's interior, tapping loud and hard in time to the rain.

“Cut it out,” dad growls. “This is stressful enough.”

“Oh?” I see her face turn and she smirks. “Poor baby. I'll fix you a drink or two as soon as we get home. We're doing what we should've done months ago, and she isn't even kicking and screaming. It's a miracle, really.”

I don't have the energy to be mad at this bitch anymore. I just want to get this over with, so I tear off my seat belt and pop the door, heading out into the rain. Dad turns off the car and runs after me, yelling.

“Honey – wait!” he runs up and takes me by the hand. “I can't let you do this alone.”

I stop, feeling the hot tears come as dad hugs me close. The wet splash I feel on my forehead isn't just the rain. There's a drop of something hotter, just like my tears, and I completely lose it when I look up and see him crying too.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Evie's sharp voice rings out behind us, slamming the car door ass he gets out. “Move! You're both making this harder than you need to. The girl's way past hugs and kisses, Bruce. She needs drugs, doctors, shock therapy.”

Okay, now I'm pissed. I look up, beaming all my hatred at her, but it's nothing compared to dad's.

“Evie...shut the fuck up.” He's storming, and I recognize the same rough thunder in his tone I've heard in Chris' a dozen times before.

“Oh, so now you finally channel the tough guy.” She pauses and laughs, an irritating sound that makes me want to slap her across the face. “Where the hell were you while your family was falling apart, Bruce? Where are you now? You're a few steps away from getting her the help she needs to get off her sick, cancerous crush on my idiot son, and you're standing here blubbering like a baby.”

Dad slowly releases me. The rain picks up, like something out of a bad movie, and Evie makes a face. She just won't let up.

“Ten seconds. That's all I'm giving you before I check her in myself. I'm not going to stand here all day watching this ridiculous heartbreak in the rain.” She reaches up and brushes her hand through her hair, wrinkling her face in disgust.

She's way too done up for dropping me off with shrinks. It's almost like she's...celebrating or something. Which, I guess, isn't completely out of the question. She's taller than both of us on her heels.

They look like they're ready to flatten us any second, walk over our bones, solidifying her triumph. I can't believe she doesn't see it.

She's still blaming Chris for screwing our family? The only one doing the sabotage here is standing right in front of me, counting down on her fingers, a vicious smirk plastered on her face.

“Okay, ten!” she yells, tapping at the clock on her phone. “Come on, Cordelia, it's time for mama to do the job daddy won't.”

She starts toward me and I step back. There's no fucking way I'm going to take her hand. I'll push her down into the gutter and watch her roll around in the cool, wet drainage before I do that.

She's fast, determined, and I'm really screwed up. Before she can grab me, dad throws his arm around my shoulder and spins me around. We're walking, quick stepping back to the car. He pops the passenger door and shoves me inside.

I blink, not understanding what the hell just happened. Dad pops his door and slides into the driver's seat. He's about to shift the car in gear before Evie runs up, raking her long, green fingernails on his window until he puts it down.

“Asshole! Have you lost your fucking mind? What the hell is
wrong
with you? Both of you!”

“Check yourself in, Evie. You're going to need a reset before I send in the divorce paperwork next week.”

My heart stops, and for the first time since I saw Chris in the media, I crack a smile.

“You're making a huge mistake, little man,” she snarls, fear and rage souring her face. “Do it. I fucking dare you to. I'll take you to court and squeeze every penny out of your miserable, selfish accounts. I'll go to your finance bloggers and tell them all about your whore of a daughter, your spineless little tantrums, how bad you are in bed. I swear to god, if you cut me out, Bruce, I'll –“

He floors it. Dad and I are laughing like angry, emotional lunatics as the car rockets away, doing a hard loop around the clinic before heading back to the road.

The last glimpse I ever catch of Evie is the car's tires kicking water in her face, ruining her outfit. She stands there the whole time in full meltdown, soaking wet and stamping her feet, cursing us for ruining her life.

When the sheer adrenaline wears off, we're back in the city, tooling along the streets. We're stopped at a long light when I finally grab his hand and ask.

“Dad? Is that really you? What set you off?”

He smiles softly. “I knew I was going to drop one of my girls off for some serious help the whole way here. Evie made the choice very, very easy. I couldn't have gone through with you, honey, however angry I am about Chris. I'm just sorry it took me this long to see it.”

I nod and swallow, pushing down the bitter lump in my throat so I don't start blubbering all over again.

“You made the right choice, in case you wondered.”

“Damn right I did,” he says, punching the gas hard when the light goes green. “I'll take the woman who's in love with an asshole, my own flesh and blood, any day over the asshole pretending to be in love with me.”

It's going to be a long road home, an enormous journey to fix everything else in my life. But for the first time in forever, there's finally hope, and I realize there's more than one person left on earth who loves me.

D
elia, Delia, Delia!

I'm running toward her on the warm California beach, and I'm going to push her completely into the sand. It's been too long. I need to grab her, savor her, taste her, fuck her.

I want to kiss this woman with my entire body, the full force of my soul, all I can do to stay sane while the fire in my blood hits crescendo.

Our lips are so damned close. I've got my fist in her hair and I jerk her head back as she moans, opening her lips, ready for me to claim everything I've been missing all these.

Her nipples are so fucking hard my dick throbs in my pants. I need to rip our clothes off
now,
throw her in the sand, and dig into her, even if it causes us to sink into the earth.

I'm about to bring my mouth down on hers when we lock eyes. She gazes into my eyes, opening her soft, perfect lips.

Fuck me, Chris. I love you so much.

That's what I'm ready to hear.

Nothing prepares me for the harsh, cold, foreign gibberish that comes out.

My eyes snap open. The door to my cell slides open, and three skinny Korean People's Army soldiers step inside, an overseer in a suit with a flag and a shiny Dear Leader pin fixed to his lapel.

I tense up. My hand twitches from the last week, when the fucks took a hammer to it, threatening to smash every damned bone in my body if I didn't tell them everything I knew about the specs on the stealth chopper wreckage they've got stowed in some hanger.

It's been weeks, maybe months. I lost track of time long ago, shortly after my hell began. The beard growing on my face is the only thing that tells me I've been here for a long fucking time.

“What the hell do you want?” I look up and spit on the floor after I say it, showing my disgust like a good SEAL should. “You come to fry me with those jumper cables like you did with the commander last week? Or are you going to play chiropractor on my joints again?”

The man in the suit gives me an icy stare and starts speaking in that slow, jerky English he always uses. Everything is way underfunded in this hellhole, including whatever they spend on training their interpreters.

“It is a good day for you, Cleveland. We have a deal. Maybe the sun will feel you shine on her face again.”

I clench my jaw, feeling the pain from months ago, when they cracked my goddamned bone. I'm not getting my hopes up. These bastards are awfully crafty at their psy-ops, and chances are this is one more of them, communicated in broken English.

“I don't buy it, Kim.”

It doesn't help that his English sucks. The way he talks about the sun makes me think of Delia, but then everything does these days.

It's her on my mind when they're holding my head under water, making me suck cold, acrid water into my lungs. I remember our kisses when they've got me on the table underneath a blinding, hot lamp, punching me in the face over and over and over.

It's her I feel when they give me the shock treatment, when my heart's racing a thousand miles per hour, ready to explode because the fuckers shoot me up with too much of that truth serum that never works.

She's my sanctuary. My love. My life.

She's the reason I'm going to survive this. I'll come home alive and breathing, instead of ground up ash in a tiny metal canister Uncle Sam will get in fifty years, after this sick regime collapses.

Delia, Delia, sweet fucking Delia. Forgive me.

I'm the one getting brutalized, but I can't stop thinking about her. Knowing she's in pain, worrying about me, is a thousand times worse than anything these motherfuckers can do to me.

The Korean smiles – it's the same faceless, plaster smile he always gives me. The same thing I've seen before he tells his goons to take pliers to my toenails, before he has them push me into that rotten pit full of rats and lice, before I spit in his miserable face when he's leering over me, wondering if I'm finally broken and ready to talk.

The man I call Kim paces the small cell while the stone-faced guards look on. He spins around when he's behind me, putting his face next to mine, so fast and sudden any other man would flinch.

I never do. He doesn't scare me, and it pisses him off. Our dealings are about more than about pulling information from an 'imperialist enemy of the state.'

It's become a war of egos, a war between men. He can't stand the fact that I'll never let him dominate.

“A dog until the end,” he snaps, motioning to the guards. “Get him on the plane.”

I wonder what vicious torture 'plane' is code for. I force the bastards to lift me off the bench and drag me outside my cell before I let my own two feet do some of the work.

They've made my life hell. I'm not making anything easy.

Soon, we're out the big steel door, the first time I've been outside since I got here. The wind is crisp, cool, savage like a North Korean winter should be. I don't see any snow, but maybe it's just a thaw.

I wonder if I've already missed Christmas. The thought makes me want to introduce these sick sonsofbitches to my face more than ever. I don't give a shit about repaying them for the torment – not that it wouldn't feel good to.

What really sends me into a blind rage is thinking about all the time they've stolen off my life, all the moments I would've had with Delia.

“Up! Up!” One guard bangs the door to a rickety military transport truck, and two more guards inside jerk me up. They sling me around and throw me on the ground, holding me down, next to the only other person I recognize who survived the chopper crash.

Commander Jones is inside, looking like he's lost fifty pounds. Fuck.

They've been starving me too, but nothing like my C.O. The raging, confident officer I knew on all my missions is gone. Some survival mechanism I don't understand has pulled him under, leaving me staring at this shattered robot, this man who only slurs his speech in faint whispers when they force him to.

I've overheard his interrogations. The walls are surprisingly thin and prone to echo at the prison camp, and the vents carry too.

The only time he makes noise is when he screams. It's usually so precise I can tell exactly what they're doing to him several walls away.

He doesn't even acknowledge me. I pinch my eyes shut and turn my head away, wondering if they're finally done with us. Is this the beginning of the end?

They've already violated the Geneva Convention and all the articles of war several times over. What's one more by taking us out to some rural pit and putting a bullet through our skulls?

Delia comes and goes in my imagination, ghostly and angelic. If I'm about to die, if they're about to make me break all the promises I made about coming back, then I'm going to go into the blackness thinking about her, her, and nothing else.

I don't think about Evie or Bruce or even my fucked up mission. I don't think about the dozens of women I picked up over the years, the ones who begged me for the honor of riding my cock.

I remember that night with Delia in Vegas, right before we came home, the way I jerked her body against mine.

Feral, hungry, insatiable. If there's a god, and he isn't ready to collect on my karma debt, then he'll bring me home.

He'll give me one more taste of her beautiful, perfect fucking lips before I die. He'll let me have her pussy, hard and aggressive. I'll fuck her like I own her, because I do, anchored in everything I want like nothing else, and always will.

I visualize it so damned hard I swear I hear her whimper in my ears.

Chris!
The way she calls my name before she comes, sharp and staccato, is all I want to remember when I'm going to my grave.

Except I'd rather do it on my deathbed when I'm a dried up old fuck, instead of being shoved into a cold mountain pit with a hole in my head.

About twenty minutes later, the truck jerks to a stop, and the soldiers roll us out. The commander and I both topple onto the hard pavement.