Fuck, imagining one of the collars I had strapped around my belt wrapped around his throat made my body ache, my cock perk up.
He’d have to earn that, though. Only good dogs got to wear a collar.
“Who the fuck are you?” He tried to drag himself to his feet as he said it, but his hand flew to the wound at his side and he swayed as he stood, his lashes fluttering shut as shock, injury, and exhaustion finally caught up with him. I caught him before he fell, and wondered if he heard me when I answered his question.
“I’m exactly what you’ve been looking for.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
AUBREY
My vision washazy when I finally came to, and I tensed at the sensation of strong arms carrying me like I weighed nothing. I tried to move to grab my gun, and it took me less than a second to realize I couldn’t because my wrists were bound.
The urge to panic nearly overtook me—I’d been bound before. Helpless. Face down on the cold floors of the facility with Morris in the room, and I…
“Stop squirming before I drop you. I’m shit at stitches, and if you start bleeding out, I’m leaving you.”
The voice was deep, a low rumble that vibrated through my bones, in stark contrast to the lighter sneer of the tone in my memories. The shock of it made me still, though I knew I couldn’t stay that way for long.
Maybe I wasn’t stuck somewhere in my memories, beingtormented by a soldier who thought he could break me, but that didn’t mean I wassafe.
I could feel the bulge of muscles rippling where the man carried me—he had to be a tall motherfucker to do it with so much ease.
And when I opened my eyes and focused, it was worse.
The first thing I noticed was the swing of dog tags at his neck, and I thought I’d been caught by the Order—that they’d found me for what I’d done to Ben. The memory swept through me and made something in my chest ache, but I pushed it aside as my eyes caught on the ragged, mottled scars that ran from one side of his throat to the other. It bisected tattoos and stood starkly against his pale skin. He looked like someone had tried to slit his throat and he’d had a bad patch job putting it back together.
Not Order, then. They had the best doctors guns could abduct.
My gaze traveled up to his face.
It was streaked with paint—black smears and intricate patterns swooping across high cheekbones and full lips. His nose looked like it had been broken, and the paint cut into a scar there too.
Raider.
I was in the arms of a fucking raider.
I started to struggle, and those arms squeezed around me tight enough that my breath punched out in a gasp. My body seemed to recognize all the damage I’d taken during my rampage earlier under the pressure of that hold.
Fuck, whoever was carrying me was strong. Strong enough that he could probably have squeezed the life out ofme while I was trying to get myself oriented. A slight shift of my body told me I didn’t have my gun, and I couldn’t feel my bag. When I glanced over his shoulder, I saw it slung there. Of course. It would have been stupid for him to leave it behind since I’d taken most of the pistol ammo the Order had gathered and made over the last two years when I realized they’d found me out.
My eyes dropped back to the dog tags swinging around his neck.
Stone.
It sounded familiar, like I’d heard the name before, but I couldn’t place it.
“Were you Order?”
It wasn’t actually a useful question, and he snorted in response. When I shifted to get a better look at the tags, his arms tightened around me again.
“Were you?”
Fair point.
For a few minutes, we didn’t say anything else, and I wondered if he was taking me somewhere to kill me. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen his kind before—it was men with paint on their faces just like his that my dad had let into the house.
