My bulging eyes met his icy ones. His hands were wrapped around my thighs, and he broke eye contact to plant a lingering kiss close to each of my knees before looking straight at me again.
“Say it.”
“No.” My voice was but a horrified gasp. “No. Please don’t make me.”
A potent bout of nausea crashed through me as my heart hammered in my chest. Blood drained from my face and extremities, and I felt clammy, as if about to pass out.
“You still think that’s why I’m angry?” Einar didn’t relent in his line of questioning, but noting its physical effects on me, he allowed for a benevolent note to lace his otherwise steely timbre.
“How could it not be?” I whispered.
“Because you were so smart about it.” To my utter shock, he gave me a proud smile. “I’m simply too impressed, my darling.”
Unable to form any words, I only let out a choked noise in reaction.
“You don’t fully understand yet, but it’s good that you’re starting to.” Breaking eye contact, he traced my entrance reverently with his tongue, and my head lolled back. “We have become gods together, you and I. Lives of mortals are ours to take as we please.”
His fingers sank into me and parted me for better access to my clit. Einar gave it a brief, perilous kiss, and I shuddered, chills running through me.
“I’m only cross with you because of your secrecy. Because you keep denying yourself and me our right to be who we are together.”
He ran his finger along the rim of my core, teasing me with the promise of penetration without granting it. I moaned.
“There’s not a thing you could do that I wouldn’t forgive. But still, I’m not a man who forgives easily, and I’m not going to forgive you until you beg me with all you have.” He lowered his head until his breath caressed me, and I shivered. “Nowlet me hear how sorry you are.”
And then his lips and teeth were clasped tight around my swollen arousal, and I cried neither with pain nor pleasure, but with nothing short of a complete, unadulterated abandon.
36
CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Ididn’t know whether Einar’s revengeful generosity had anything to do with it or whether it was the feverishly frantic activity of the ensuing weeks that cured my malaise. All I knew was that my self-inflicted anguish had gradually lifted off like a cloud, and though it was never to dissipate fully, it no longer hung over me.
Supplies and all able-bodied persons were transferred to Bonifacio from their respective mountain settlements, Bocca di Verdi newly included in their midst despite the controversy surrounding Bastien’s demise. Einar had been right. Raphael likely suspected that the boy hadn’t died of natural causes. But what use would it have been for him to cry over spilled milk? The only sensible thing for him to do was to accept our partnership offer.
Walls were fortified in any potential weak spots. Trenches were dug up in the scarce grass and earth that covered the hilly cliff upon which the citadel stood, and those were then spiked with sharpened, handmade wood stakes. Each day, most of the men left to work at the crack of dawn and only returned for supper, stifling yawns and resting their chins on their wearyhands, often falling asleep at the table once the communal meal was concluded.
People like me, not fit for the heavy work, also had their hands full. We were tasked with collecting glass bottles and ingredients for explosives anywhere we could find them. We drove for days around partnered settlements and around ghost-like, empty towns and villages, some already crumbling back into nature after months of abandonment. Then, following Einar’s instructions, we settled down to making Molotov cocktails in an erstwhile town hall, toiling for hours at the elegant long tables and collecting the products of our work into plastic crates.
“You’ll only fill the yellow crates with a special kind. For those, you’ll add orange juice concentrate, melted lard, and a bit of polystyrene,” Einar instructed us, strolling between the rows of tables. “Those will be especially nasty,” he said with an equally nasty gleam in his eyes. “Basically, this little mix makes napalm. It will burn and burn until the fuel’s long gone.”
“Do I want to ask how you know all this?” I shook my head incredulously, laying my empty beer bottle and rag aside.
“Och, this is—well, was—his field. Didn’t he tell you?” Russ raised his copper eyebrows at me from a nearby table. “This git has a doctorate inExplosives Engineeringor whatever it was called, ain’t that right mate?” He looked at Einar inquiringly.
Russ had sprained his ankle three days prior, an accident which got him relegated to our factory-like work. No one was pleased about the transition, least of all himself. Stronger than his medium build would suggest, he was sorely missed by the other men. And his thick, inelegant fingers made him particularly unsuited for any precision work with his hands. As such, gossip about Einar was his most significant contribution to our rudimentary assembly line.
“What?’ I turned to Einar as my jaw dropped. “When I asked, you only said youstudied chemistry at uni!”
“Well ... I did, technically.” Einar’s ears turned slightly red.
“But the way you said it, you just shrugged it off. I never would have guessed you had a PhD!”
“Not sure that’s a compliment.” He smiled shyly. “But I suppose I don’t exactly look like the academic type.”
“You look more like someone who gets into bar fights often, not like someone who fiddles with a laboratory set in a lab coat.”
“And yet I do both. Did both.”
