Tenants and Tyrants (Book 5 of The Warden series) (6 page)

He nodded and waved her to come at him. She paused a moment to think about her attack. She knew that he had to have something up his sleeve, but she hoped that like all of her other endeavors that she could hold out to the end and get the upper hand at the last second.

She came right at him, with a slashing motion. She expected him to jump back out of her range, but he jumped forward caught her wrist in the movement and she was airborne and landing before she even understood that the fight was over. When her comprehension surfaced with the searing pain in her shoulder, she screamed.

In between pants and yelps, she took note of his foot braced on her elbow. Her arm was stretched out behind her with the sword still in her grasp, because she didn’t have the function in her hand to release it. Her eyes were tearing from the pain, and she could hear herself whimpering for mercy.

Belus pressed a little harder with his foot and she screamed. When he eased the pressure he spoke. “Am I weak?”

“No!” She yelled.

“Do you pity my size?”

“No!”

“Do you think I should pity you for yours?”

“No!”

“Do you promise to never use your size or your sex as an excuse again?”

“Yes, sir.” She ground out trying to sound in control of her emotions, even though all she wanted to do was cry.

He released her, and she pulled her arm back into a more comfortable position. She took a moment to bawl quietly, hoping that he would not begrudge her a moment to recover. She felt hands on her, and she looked back. Duke and guardsman Chuck had rushed over to help her up. The sympathy on their faces was more than from just witnessing the scene. They almost seemed to understand what she had been through. Belus must have trained them as well.

“Leave her!” Belus barked when they tried to get her to her feet. “Go back to your posts.” They didn’t object, but Duke did hesitate. She imagined that asking Duke to leave a damsel in distress was like asking him to shoot himself in the foot. Sure he would do it, if ordered, but it might take a little mental preparation, and he’d regret it.

When they were gone, she used her legs to stand up. A little more difficult, but it got her up. Her arm was still searing with pain, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t dislocated. She did her best to not cry, but the tears just fell from her eyes, whether she instigated them or not.

Belus watched her sit down on the bench, careful not to disturb her arm. “Lift your arm.”

She couldn’t help, but cry then. He was just being cruel. She lifted it, but the pain was too much and she let it down. He moved to her. “You probably have a pinched nerve.” He stopped in front of her and reached for her shoulder.

She grabbed his shirt with her shaking left hand. “Please, don’t.” She was sobbing so ridiculously hard, she was starting to remember what it was like to be a little girl flooded with emotions she didn’t know how to deal with. Though at that age it was usually in regards to a broken toy, now it was in regards to a broken ego. “Please.” She let her hand slip away.

It was pointless. He was already reaching for her arm. He raised the arm which was painful enough, but after it was up, he palpitated the shoulder joint and pressed firmly into it. She screamed as the pain peeked and released. She took in a few gasping breaths as he let the arm drop. “Now raise it.”

“I hate you.” She mumbled so quietly she wasn’t sure he would hear it. She didn’t hate him. He knew she didn’t hate him, but the statement was the only spectrum of their love-hate relationship he was comfortable with hearing from her.

“Raise your arm.” He prompted again. She did and it didn’t hurt. It was sore and would be for a few days she imagined, but whatever had been pinched, was un-pinched. “Better?” She nodded. “Do you still hate me?” She looked up at him to see his smirking smile, that he had only recently started to afford her. She smiled and nodded. “Good girl.” He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand drop away. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. I know a good coffee shop.”

9

The coffee shop was just the cafeteria, and there was no payment since money was a nonissue, but Belus did bring her coffee to the table for her. Not before flirting with the hair-netted attendant behind the counter. She was not very tall, and not very slim, but even with the hair net, Cori could tell she was cute as a button; especially when she blushed at whatever Belus said to her.

Cori eyed Belus as he strutted back to the table with their coffees and a tiny tin pitcher of cold cream that he finagled for her, instead of the powder packets she usually settled for. He set it before her and sat down giving the attendant a wink before turning his attention to her. The smile he gave her was just a leftover of what he had been directing at the attendant, but it made her smile reflexively.

“Here I thought you had your eye on that cute brunette nurse upstairs.” She said.

“No one said I didn’t,” he said changing his smile into smirk. “And it was more than my eyes.”

Cori laughed at that. She had already been shocked once today by Belus’s fighting ability. He had told her once that she was stronger than he was, but she had doubted it. Whether it was true or not, it didn’t matter, since he could apparently kick her ass with death match skills. Now she was being confronted with the image of him as the prison playboy.

Her laughter faded as she thought about how much she would have missed him if he had not survived her gunshot. How many things would she not have known about him? Her eyes watered just thinking about it, but she concentrated on paling her coffee to a palatable bitterness.

She wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but she could hardly stand the childish image of her drinking a soda pop while her mentor drank a coffee. There were apparently many things she would drink just for the privilege socializing with Belus. That thought made her want to cry as well.

When she looked up with the intention of asking about their agenda, she found him staring at her. It was confusion and sympathy, and just a teaspoon of disgust. She looked away and drank her coffee, which was too hot, but she pretended it wasn’t. “What’s next sensei?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re saying it as a joke. I’ll take respect or I’ll take sass, but not some half-ass version of both.”

“Yes, sir.” She mumbled, before torturing her mouth with another drink.

“What were you just thinking about, when you lost your sense of humor?”

“You,” she answered honestly. “My bullet. My gun. My hand.” She shook her head and growled willing away the grief and guilt that were pressuring her to cry. Why did she always have to cry?

“That still bugging you? I thought you would have gotten over that by now. You gave it a shot, but you missed. Better luck next time, kid.”

He intended it as a joke and she knew he did, but it didn’t stop her from glaring at him for it. “I could have killed you. Doesn’t that scare you, or at least bother you? How can you joke about it?”

Belus rolled his eyes. “Kid, you are too emotional. You criticize me for being a stick in the mud, but you are as tightly wound as a politician on voting night.” He stood up taking his coffee in hand. “Come on.” He nodded for her to come with.

“Can’t I at least finish my coffee?”

“No, bring it with,” he said as he headed to the door.

He led her to the elevator instead of the gym, and they went up one floor to the animal level, which housed the infirmary down its center.

As they entered the four nurses at their hub station, beyond the four chair “waiting room” looked up at her. They abruptly started arguing and debating who would get whose shift. “I’m not injured.” She rebuked them with a high whine in her voice.

They paused and looked to Belus. The arguing started again. “I’m fine too ladies,” he said. Their shoulders slumped and they continued to read magazines or paint their nails. The heavy workload of a prison nurse was the time between animals, and human injury. Without television or internet it was an exercise of the mind just to find something to occupy the time.

One of the nurses, the cute brunette that had been eying Belus the last time he was in, leaned over the counter, showing off her cleavage which was ample. She was not overly tall or slender either, but perhaps that was Belus’s type. Cori could easily draw assumptions about whether Belus was a butt man, or a breast man, but she la-la-la-ed the thoughts away, before she delved into territory that even she wasn’t comfortable with.

“What can I do for you?” the nurse asked.

“A number of things,” Belus said with a smirk that made the nurse giggle.

LA-LA-LA-LA!

“But for now, why don’t you get me my file,” he said seriously. The nurse scooted off to get the file and Cori followed Belus into one of the labs that had a long table in it. He got comfortable just as the nurse came in with his file.

The manila folder was nearly an inch thick, and looked more like a business man’s taxes than a medical file. Belus winked at her, and she left them alone, shutting the door behind her. Belus waved Cori to sit, and she sat cattycorner to him, since he of course took the head of the table.

“Do they know about each other?” Cori whispered thinking that it might not be gossip if she didn’t say it loud enough.

Belus narrowed his eyes at her. “Monogamy isn’t as ideal in this environment as the real world. Done respectfully and without ascendancy it can be a beneficial arrangement and a pleasurable distraction.”

Cori cleared her throat. Her words were sticking before she had even thought of them. “I wasn’t judging, I just wasn’t sure if I should be careful what I said around either of them.”

“Don’t worry about it Cori. I doubt you want to get to know me
that
well.” He raised his brow and she smiled, satisfied that she hadn’t completely insulted his character. “This is my medical file. Take a gander.”

Cori pulled the file over to her and flipped through it. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see. She thought perhaps it would contain a long list of injuries followed by doctors notes of prescriptions and diagnosis, which it did, but a short distance through she started seeing paper drawings that mapping his wounds like one might map the dents on a rental car before borrowing it. She gasps at one photo that very clearly showed an alien creature lodged in his mouth. Cori instinctively covered her mouth when she saw that.

She flipped through further and started reading the highlighted portions of the documents, the specified low survival rates, compromised immune system, lowered brain functions. As she flipped through, Belus pointed at one picture of him that she was certain he could have been a corpse in.

“This one was fun. Danato had to kill me with a voodoo doll, to keep me in stasis while he figured out how to remove a Balan demon that had attached to me.” Cori’s eyes widened and he misinterpreted the meaning behind it. “Don’t worry; we have all sorts of things to protect us from that…now.”

“You were dead, for real.”

“Yeah, for like three days. Your little bullet is not the only time I’ve been close to death, Cori. It certain isn’t going to be the last.”

She leaned back in her chair. This wasn’t making her feel better. Belus was so much braver than her. He had practically told her to let him die for her. “I should have chosen to let myself die.” His brow furrowed. “If I had let myself die then…”

“Then you would be dead. How is that better than me getting shot?”

“I didn’t know if you would survive!” She yelled slamming the file shut. “I only knew that Efrat would try to save you. I didn’t see the end result. I just took the gamble. I risked your life Belus! You should be pissed!”

“And yet I’m not the one yelling,” he said sarcastically.

“I hate myself!” She grit her teeth. “I hate Efrat! I hate him so much, for making me have to make that decision. I should have just shot him!”

“That may have been the easy choice, but not the right one.” He scolded with more volume than he probably wanted to be using, but when she was yelling, it was hard to compete with mere statements.

“Don’t defend me! I was stupid and arrogant!”

“You explained it all to me Cori. I don’t disagree with your decision. Why are you beating yourself up about this?”

“Because I love you, you jerk!” She pulled her feet up on the chair as if they would protect her from his look of annoyance. He didn’t give it to her. “I just…” She needed to backpedal and find the path to that statement so he didn’t assume she was being uselessly sentimental. She brought her feet back to the floor and sat closer to the table to explain herself with some hint of maturity. “I know I made the right choice, but it still hurts. Before all this, I respected you. I considered you part of our twisted little family. I knew I cared about you, but not how much. I hate you so much sometimes, but I love you too. I know you don’t like hearing it, but…”

“I never said that,” he interjected.

“Well, I know it makes you uncomfortable…”

“I never said that either,” he added.

She scrunched her brow not sure what to say to describe the offish way he handled her affections. “Fine, whatever it is then; I just don’t want anyone to hurt you. Least of all me.”