Free MadetoBeBroken by Lyra Byrnes

big rock on your head?”
    “If I’m dead, I cannot fuck you, and you want me to fuck
you. There is tea in Thermos,” he added.
    “I damn sure do not want you to fuck me!” she exploded,
leaping upright. His amused expression did not change. “I want to do my job and
get home. You had me chained up last night. I had no choice.”
    “No choice but to come like steam train at my touch?” He
grinned and poured tea into the Thermos cap, handing it up to her.
    “That was a normal physical reaction to stimulation, nothing
to do with you.”
    “And those men on that night.” His face darkened. “You were
not chained up, you were not in love. Is not because of scar, I believe that.
So again I ask why. Or maybe better I tell you.”
    She sipped her tea, her lips numb. The sun was rising,
showering warmth on her wet hair, the waterfall splashing across the lake. From
the crown of a shaggy-topped tree, a dark mass of birds took flight all at
once, scattering into specks as they rose into the cool air. Alexi stood before
her, gently pulling the robe from her shoulders to drink in the sight of her
firm breasts, pink nipples pebbled in the breeze. She did not stop his hands.
    “Is because you want to be taken by someone you don’t know,
someone you don’t care about. No love, no heartache, nothing to touch you deep
down. This scar,” he put his palm against her torn side, “is just a scratch.
There is bigger one in here.”
    The tip of his finger pressed against her sternum.
    “Let us make a bargain.”
    It was on the tip of her tongue— The United States does
not bargain with terrorists. God knows she had said it enough times before.
But she couldn’t speak. His strange eyes with that ferocious scar filled her
vision. There was a slash of skin in the center of his eyebrow where the hair
had not grown back.
    “You want Alexi inside you, you want answers. I want to rest
in this wild, peaceful country that looks so much like my home, and also want
to take my pleasure with you until your moans silence that waterfall, until you
are aching and shuddering in my arms. No love, no heartache, just a ‘normal
physical reaction’.” He repeated the phrase back to her with a smirk. “One
answer for every time you satisfy me.”
    She tried not to glance at his manhood as it hardened
against his thighs. “You want me to trade sex for secrets.”
    “No. I want you to fulfill your fantasies on a mad warlord
and take to your bosses all you have learned. If your body is open to me—if you
do everything I say—I will not lie to you. That is what you want, little red
bird so full of desire, no? To submit to the demands of a strong man.”
    Amanda’s words floated to the top of her mind, and the
memory of her breath coming fast and warmth spreading through her body as the
madam perceptively noted that, while Coco may be no whore, she wanted
desperately to be treated like one. To be taken by someone you don’t know,
someone you don’t care about. She didn’t care about Alexi, true, but if she
agreed to the bargain, she would know him very well by the time she was on a
plane back to DC.
    Or even a direct flight elsewhere, away from her anonymous
Pentagon City efficiency and her anonymous life, and back to Southeast Asia,
where there was action, color, life, where all her senses could be engaged
again while she did the thing that she did best. Get the bad guy.
    All she had to do was get this bad guy.
    “I told you I’m alone on this mission,” she answered,
pulling the lapels of her robe closed over her breasts. “Nothing you tell me
can be verified until I take it back to the head office, and you’ve destroyed
my phone. Why should I trust you?”
    “I have hurt people, krahsniy , many people. I have
made men and boys, little boys, from villages all over Chechnya into ruthless
killers, and Russian mothers and wives have drowned in tears because of my
actions. This is no secret. But I will not lie to you. One question now,