Chapter Five: Underground
When the last one falls
When it’s all said and done
It gets hard, but it won’t take away
My love
~3 Doors Down
“Have you lost your fucking MIND?” Logan’s fist connected with the glass jaw of his blonde partner with a lot less force than he wanted it to.
The boy sprawled back into the dirty wall of the alley, crying out in pain as Logan’s restrained second punch landed to his midsection. Two more well-placed blows later, Paul Cassidy was huddled on the ground.
“I’m sorry, Kinney. I didn’t think.”
“That’s fuckin’ obvious, you fuckin’ dolt!”
Logan took several deep breaths, his claws biting at the underside of his skin. He gave the boy another few minutes to gather his strength. Hauling him to his feet, Logan glanced back, hearing the reporter looking for them.
“Come on, before that nosy bitch catches up to us.”
Shoving the boy ahead of him, he rushed them both from the alley to the waiting pickup truck parked nearby. They’d been sent to make sure the riot went as planned, which it had. Until people starting dying.
That had been part of the plan they’d kept Logan out of. He’d only received orders to incite the riot with a few well-chosen comments and watch the fur fly. The kid had been told to draw a weapon and cap a couple of the mutants on the other side of the protest.
One of them couldn’t have been any older than Bobby.
Hopping into the truck, Logan fastened his seat belt, not bothering to remind the kid to strap in. He gripped the gearshift and pounded on the clutch. The truck shot out of the side street, nearly flipping with the force Logan used to propel it down the street.
He wanted to jump in, to save those kids. But his orders were clear. Only do what he was told, no interfering. He’d let them die to save his cover.
He hated himself a little more every day.
At first, he’d had a goal. Working his way into the underground syndicate that was the Friends of Humanity. The Professor had chosen this chapter deliberately. They were “ghosts” who knew nothing, save what they were ordered.
They had no conception of what any of the X-Men looked like. That made them the perfect chapter to penetrate. Their contact with other branches was limited, meaning the possibility of anyone identifying Logan as one of the enemy was slim to none.
Didn’t mean that it had been a cakewalk to get into the chapter. Logan had done nothing but wait for close to a month. Once he’d been recruited, they put his muscle and military training to good use.
If anyone knew anything about the chapter, they knew it was Logan Kinney that got the tough jobs done. Most of the riots in Canon County had been started by him. All that escalated into real violence, could be traced back to him.
He was the worst enemy of anyone against the Friends.
I fuckin’ hate my life, he thought bitterly as he sped the pickup toward the hideout of the Friends.
Every day he awoke he had a moment, just the space between two heartbeats, where he thought he’d never accepted this gig. He’d turned back to ‘Ro that night and taken her into his arms.
Harsh reality would smack into him, then, and he’d spend the rest of the day wishing he’d been smart enough to tell Chuck to go fuck himself.
Thinking about her was dangerous. The more he thought about her, remembered her, the closer he would get to going apeshit, destroying the base, and running all the way back to Westchester, to her.
He’d been close to that point a time or two. So close he could taste the blood of these mutant-hating fuckers. But then, something would happen. A report would come in that mentioned her, one of the assholes he worked with would mention how they’d “treat” her when she was captured…
And he would remember why he’d agreed to do this in the first place.
Being away hurt with physical force, but he continued to tell himself it was for the best. Maybe she would move on, live a full and happy life without him. He’d burned their last remaining bridge by walking away from her. She was free now.
He would be content to know she was safe and happy. There wasn’t any other choice.
Pulling the truck down a gravel path that served as a street for the hideout, Logan let the kid beside him whimper with pain. He knew Paul wouldn’t tell any of the leaders what had happened. Worse than being on the wrong side of the Friends was being on the wrong side of Logan on a personal level.
Having to prove it again wouldn’t be unwelcome.
He halted the truck, cutting the engine and flinging the door open. Stomping his heavy work boots in the loose gravel, he ground his teeth, moving toward the main building of their little home away from home.
“What the fuck was that, Kinney?” Howard Rankin, the cell leader, was already mid-rant when Logan entered the building.
“Ask him,” he growled in response, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.
“I said covert. Did you hear me say covert?” Rankin turned to his other lackeys. “I heard me say covert because I was standing there when I said it.”
Logan clenched his fist in frustration. “Ask the fuckin’ kid if he heard you.”
Taking two strides to cross the map and paper-filled room, Logan grabbed Rankin by the shirt, hauling the much taller man down to his eyelevel. “No one said we’d be leaving bodies behind.”
Rankin paled slightly, though he attempted to look foreboding and in control. Logan almost smirked at the man’s gall. “I don’t have to clear everything with you, Kinney.”
“I can’t do my job if I don’t have all of the information, idiot,” releasing him so hard, the other man fell backward a few steps.
“It was a last minute change of plans, you were already in the field,” the leader replied lamely.
’Ro could teach this fucker a thing or two about leadership, he thought with an inward snarl.
“You could have contacted me.”
“Look, Logan…”
He held a hand up, glancing around menacingly to the others in the room. Most of them had stopped burning files and chattering to watch the scene unfold.
“You still don’t trust me, Rankin? Is that it?”
There was a ringing silence following his question. Doubt about Logan had often surfaced in the last few weeks. He had to work twice as hard as the others to prove his loyalty to the Friends of Humanity. Listening as they praised the works of late, great Stevenson and joining in the cheering. Standing guard duty during the infrequent raids, pushing through more training than the others combined.
He couldn’t blame them. A loner walking in off the street was seldom comfortable in a secretive group’s embrace. They all knew he’d had a past. The fabricated story that a mutant had murdered his late wife was thin, at best. Though he wore a wedding ring as a reminder, his lack of a description of the mutant…or his “wife” had sent up more than a few warning bells.
What he ached to tell them was that his “wife” was really alive and well, fighting against bastards like them. He salivated over the very thought of the day he would be able to repay every slight they dealt to mutants all over. It was one of the reasons he remained among them when everything in his body screamed for him to go home.
“We trust you, Kinney,” Rankin said at last. “We don’t trust your story.”
Logan snarled, the noise barely sounding human. “That’s your problem. I’ve got work to do.”
With that, he slammed back out of the rickety building and stuffed his hands into his pockets. A walk around the compound would calm him down.
Maybe he’d make it an hour without thinking about her.
~@~
Her skin was warm, softer than silk under his rough hands. She writhed and undulated beneath him, the ripple of her flesh silently begging for more. Sultry moans that whispered of sinful pleasure and dark delights fell from her lips, making him press his mouth to hers, capturing the sweet sounds with his tongue.
Then he was inside her, filling her. Sinking into her wet, receptive body, he found peace, love. Her inner muscles fluttered against his hard length, pulling him deeper…always deeper. His arms wound around her back, pressing the ample swells of her breasts against the steady beat of his heart.
Soft blue eyes met the dark of his own, giving him silent permission to ravage her body as he so long desired to. There was no fear, no regret, just the subtle dance of aching flesh and mingled seduction.
Looking down at her chocolate skin, watching as her body enveloped his again and again made him groan, stealing the breath from her lungs with another searing kiss. There was nothing to compare to this slow mating dance.
When they could finally endure no more, they cried out in unison. A soft feminine moan and rough, masculine grunt tangled together on the screaming winds. Shuddering with final release, locked in an embrace not even time can break, he met those soulful eyes again.
I love you.
They never speak, but it is understood as he lay his head upon the sweat of her breast, listening to the familiar heartbeat that matches his own.
Never let go.
Her gentle hand soothed the frown lines of his brow, her kiss bringing a small smile to his lips. He knew what she said without hearing the honey tones of her accented voice. There was no need for spoken words, she spoke volumes with every caress.
Never.
Logan felt his breath sob in his throat before he woke to harsh reality. The thin mattress that he claimed as his every night served no purpose except to keep his back from the dirt on the floor. He was alone, stripped bare of all pretense of standing tall on his own, if only to himself. There was no warmth beside him, no tender kisses to comfort him in the still night. Nothing.
Aroused, heart so heavy he was sure he would be unable to breathe, he blinked his eyes, adjusting his vision to the darkness of the room he shared with two others.
“Need me to get someone to take care of that, Kinney?” a laughing voice said from the bed across from him.
Noting with a sort of grim amusement that he was tenting the blanket with his erection, he threw his pillow at George. “Shut the fuck up.”
George, a skinny, tall excuse for a middle-aged bastard laughed harder, tucking Logan’s pillow under his head. “We aren’t monks, you know. Nothing wrong with slipping into the women’s rooms and slipping one of them a little something.”
“I said, shut up!”
“Both of you shut up,” a grumpy voice said from the other bed. “Just rub one out and be done with it.”
Logan sighed, pulling himself out of the bed with a groan and grabbing his jacket. As the other two argued about the finer points of jerking off, he slipped out of the room, pulling his coat on and jogging toward the southern side of the compound in his bare feet.
The dreams were getting worse. More real, tangible, and damn it, more intimate. It was not a wild, feral fuck against the bedroom door, as had often been the case with Ororo. This was something altogether different.
Union.
He dreamed of it in different ways, but it always ended the same. Some kind of poetic, loving embrace that he yearned for upon waking. Hating himself for giving into sentimentality, he lit a cigarette, having given up cigars alone with his former life.
Would it really be that way with her? Could he have experienced something else with her that touched his very soul? Why, in the name of God, did it haunt him now?
Too many questions he would never have answers for. Inhaling deeply from the cigarette, he leaned against a wood post, glancing at the closed gate that protected the community in the darkness before morning. Just a quick swipe of his claws and the lock would fall…he could be at the airport by the time the first flight left. Back in New York before the afternoon, back in her arms before sunset.
Shaking off the impulse got harder every night. It was a pull so strong it nearly took his knees out. He’d never been dependant on a person in his life…that he could remember. Then again, he couldn’t remember ever loving someone as he did her.
“Snap out of it, asshole,” he grumbled to himself, taking another drag from the cigarette.
There were more frequent reports coming from the New York cell every day. The mansion had finally been rebuilt, allowing the students and teachers to return. Logan had already heard there were plan to infiltrate it again.
Word had been sent out to the Professor’s contacts. They would be prepared for an attack this time. It brought him a sense of purpose, knowing he was doing something to protect the family he had left behind. At least with his help, they could save the mansion, save themselves.
It was worth it. He had to believe that if he wanted to make it through this impossible task. There were benefits to his subterfuge.
“We can’t let him know.”
A whispered voice, raised slightly with alarm reached Logan’s sensitive ears. Flicking the rest of his burning smoke into the gravel road, he turned silently, creeping toward the unwelcome sound.
“You can’t believe he’s really a spy.”
“Yes, I can. It doesn’t add up. You didn’t see him today. When I shot those muties, he looked ready to slice me up.”
“He tends to get touchy if things don’t go according to plan.”
“It was more than that, Rankin. I think he’s the one they warned us about.”
Rankin. Cassidy. Fucking bastards.
Logan located the voices in a nearby building. Peeking through a grimy window, he noted the twosome standing close together, holding a set of documents in their hands as though the papers held the key to the universe and they weren’t keen on sharing it.
Through the still of the night, their voices seemed to carry toward him, begging him to listen and know what they were sharing in the dead of night. In the darkness, when all others were tucked snugly into their beds, awaiting their orders for the morning, seldom was done without a tinge of sin. Logan had learned in the last weeks that there was nothing pure that had to be carried out in the night. This had to be no different.
Training his ears on them, Logan held his breath.
“If their plan is supposed to go off without a hitch, we have to keep him in the dark. We’ll send him back to the protests tomorrow.”
“Their plan is flawed. How will they get her to cooperate?”
A long pause, filled with the rustling of paper followed this before Cassidy replied.
“This is that paper the Mutie Doctor put out. Look. Says right here that psionic powers take a lot of mental control. All we have to do is slip her a bit of a sedative and she loses control.”
“Then what? I don’t see why they want he--”
“Drain her blood, use it to infect a few of the other mutants they have at the base. See how long it takes for them to lose control and destroy each other.”
“That doesn’t make any fucking sense!”
“Keep your voice down!”
“How do they know it’ll work? Pah! It’s just an excuse to kill the weather witch because of the shit she started a year ago.”
Snikt!
Logan’s claws extended for the first time in two months, his heart pounding loudly in his ears. He retracted them quickly, ducking from the window in case the duo had heard the grating sound of metal on metal.
“Either way. She dies and that’s justice for what happened to the Stevensons.”
“I’ll give you that.” A sigh. “Where will they take her?”
“The base in El Paso. Plan goes into operation--”
Logan winced as a telephone’s ring cut into the stillness. Grunting, clapping one hand over an ear, he tried to concentrate as the receiver was picked up.
“Rankin.”
The voice on the other end was female and high pitched with panic.
“They’re calling in all cells, putting them on alert. She vanished! The weather mutant vanished from the school!”
Relief nearly taking his knees out, Logan glance around, noting the pick up truck parked less than fifty yards from where he crouched.
“WHAT?! HOW?!”
Logan smirked at Rankin’s shocked exclamation.
“We don’t know. She was there and then she wasn’t. The other mutants are completely freaking out!”
“There goes the Kinney theory, Paul. No way he could have warned her. Wake everyone up, bring Logan here, I want him leading the search from our sector.”
Shaking his head, Logan pushed off from the side of the building, keeping low as he bolted for the truck. Sirens began to wail, lights and sounds erupting from every cabin on the compound as he slid into the front seat of the truck.
Grabbing for the extra set of keys and mobile phone he’d hidden under the seat, he forced the pickup to life, pounding on the pedals even as he dialed for his contact.
On the second ring, he burst through the gate of the compound, leaving this life behind. By the third ring, he was roaring onto the interstate.
“This is Conundrum,” he barked when the line picked up. “I’m blown. Repeat, cover blown. I’m getting the fuck out of Dodge.”
He tossed the mobile out of the window and into the forest, shifting gears with his free hand. It was over. He was going home. He was going to find his weather witch.
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