Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own DA
A/N: Being the stickler for realism that I am, I preformed a little experiment to write this part and actually had my brother tie me up and set my reading glasses across the room!! Boy I tell yah, give it a try, it is NOT easy to get them on without using your hands! So, Logan does it the same way I did...uh, excluding having someone standing across the room laughing, my bro seemed to find the whole thing hilarious :-)
Oh yeah...sorry for the wait, I hit major big time writer's block!!
Wild is the Wind
Logan awoke to the taste of blood in his mouth. Choking, he spit the hot, sour liquid out onto the floor rolled painfully onto his stomach. Feeling sick, he rested his burning forehead against the cool cement floor.
After a few, long moments he opened his eyes to survey his blurry surroundings. His eye sight wasn't horrible, and he could make out the basic shape of the barren room. The walls were bare and made of gray cement. There was one window where a dirty stream of sunlight splashed into the dismal room.
Sighing, he turned his attention inward. He knew that he was hurt, but he wasn't positive how badly. There was a dull ache at the back of his head and blood was running from either his nose or the side of his mouth onto his lips. Feeling groggy and exhausted he gingerly laid his head against the floor, only too aware that it was resting in pool of blood.
He was relieved to find that the pool wasn't large, which meant he wasn't bleeding profusely. The still warm, thick liquid clung to his hair like molasses when he lifted his head again. He arched his back, allowing him to turn and see his hands and feet. He discovered that he'd been hand-cuffed and his feet were bound together by white plastic zip ties.
Where the hell am I?
Unable to remember how he had ended up in such a situation, he found himself wondering if he was better off not knowing.
Anxiety beginning to rise quickly in his chest, he cast his gaze around the room. A glint across the room caught his eye. Figuring that the only thing it could possibly be was his lost glasses, he wiggled worm style across the floor. The going was slow and it took him a good fifteen exhausting minutes to navigate his way to the reflective object.
Releasing a sigh of relief when he finally reached it, he was then faced with the problem of getting them on without any hands. Grunting with irritation, he attempted to tip them with his mouth so that the lenses faced the ground. Stretching, he managed to grab them with his teeth. Carefully, slowly, he twisted his head to lever them into a standing position.
"Shit," he cussed savagely to himself when he managed to get them standing only to have them fall over. Becoming frustrated, he shifted his weight, rolling into a different position. This time, he easily was able to grip them between his teeth. Grunting slightly, he set them back on the floor. Finally getting them to balance, he lowered his head and attempted to hook them behind his ears.
He listened intently to the sound of his own breathing as he tilted his head.
"Oh...there...okay..." he muttered to himself, lifting his head to flip the glasses onto his nose. His attempt failed, only resulting in them clattering back to the floor.
Groaning with the failure, he wiggled into a new position to try again. Now having perfected the act of balancing his glasses on the lenses, it took him only moments to get them standing again. This time, however, he lowered his head until his chin touched his chest to hook them onto his ears. When he lifted his head, his glasses were balancing on the end of his nose.
"Okay...alright, got them there...now I just have to push them on." He looked around the room and, seeing nothing that could help him, he wiggled over to a corner. Breathing heavy now from the effort of moving across the room on his belly, he pushed his face into the corner, the frame of his glasses catching as the two walls came together and coming up the bridge of his nose.
The triumph was small, but significant. Logan rolled off his stomach, propping himself up in the corner to get a better view of the room now that he could see. Matters only became more bleak when his gaze came to rest on the dark, almost black trail of blood he'd left behind him.
"Oh God...this isn't good," he groaned, then -- thinking of Max -- amended his statement. "At least she'll be safe for once."
***
Max stormed into the Kalispell airport. The facility hummed with the voices of less than twenty people, one of which belonging to a woman with short black hair who sat behind the desk filing her nails. She looked up in time to meet Max's heated glare moments before she and the sheepish Zack arrived at the desk.
"I need to get to Seattle," Max announced in a voice that broached no argument.
"Our next flight to Seattle doesn't leave until tomorrow morning," the woman informed her. Max leaned across the counter.
"Apparently you don't understand," she hissed. "I need to get to Seattle, now!"
The other woman looked at Max for a moment, then shifted her gaze to Zack who had his eyes cast down onto the floor.
"I suppose it would be possible to get a small passenger plane to take you," she finally replied.
"Well, Kim," Max said, looking down at the dark haired woman's name tag, "you'd better find out real quick."
Kim narrowed her crystal blue eyes at Max, not hiding her apparent irritation.
"I'll get right on that, Ma'am," she smiled in an overly sweet fashion and picked up the receiver to a phone sitting on the other side of the desk. As she dialed, she sent Zack a charming grin, ignoring the highly on-edge Max. "Hey, John," she said into the phone. "This is Kim, I don't suppose you'd be willing to make a run to Seattle tonight?"
Max began to pace nervously, imagining Logan in every kind of pain she could fathom. She didn't put even the most obscure forms of torture past Lydecker. If she was positive of one thing, it was that Logan's death would be drawn out and painful. There would be no mercy shot to the head for him. He would drown in his own blood before Lydecker would allow him that.
"Yeah, I know," Kim said into the phone. "I tried to tell them that...apparently it's some kind of emergency....yeah....I know....well, maybe..."
The sound of the woman's voice was drowned out by the roar of Max's own heartbeat. She was shaking violently, but not due to low levels of serration. She rarely lost control, but as she stood thinking about him, she felt the tattered thread of it she held so tightly begin to slowly slip away.
She became remotely aware of Zack standing beside her as the heat radiating from his body permeated her cool flesh. The conflicting urges to go toward and away from the heat struggled within her for long moments before she turned her gaze to him.
"Why did you do it, Zack?" she asked, her voice breaking with emotion. "Why did you lie to me?"
His eyes broke quickly with hers.
"I didn't want you to be with him," he replied, his voice betrayed the fragile state of his emotions. "It's no fucking fair, Max. We've known each other our entire lives and you care less about me than that little shit-head. I did it for you."
"For me?" she settled her hands resolutely on her hips. "Zack...you're my brother. Blood is thicker than water, and even this I might one day come to forgive you for, but damn it! How could you not warn Logan?"
He didn't reply, but forked his fingers through his disheveled hair.
"Do you love him?" he finally asked.
"What?" Max asked, not believing what she was hearing.
"Damn it...don't fuck with me, Max," he turned to look at her. "No more of this coy shit, now tell me, do you love him?"
The question seared her.
"What the hell kind of question is that?" she demanded, deciding her best bet would be to become the aggressor. Zack, however, was well versed on her ways of avoiding the issue.
"Yes or no."
Heatedly, she called him every awful name that came to mind. When she'd finally exhausted her vocabulary bank of swear words and disgusting objects she took a deep breath, only to find him still waiting for her answer.
The question warranted serious thought. Even though inside Max already knew the answer, admitting it out loud was a very different thing. Love was a strong word, did it qualify for how she felt about Logan?
"I don't think..." she hesitated as she was about to say no, her blatant fear for his life overcoming her anger once again.
Zack leaned close, his eyes level with hers.
"I need to know, Max," he demanded. "Do you love him?"
She swallowed deeply, her eyes stinging from holding back an onslaught of emotion.
"I think...I think I do," she finally managed to choke out.
"Excuse me." Kim interrupted their discussion. "I've got you a pilot and a plane coming in from Logan, should be here in about an hour."
"Logan?" Max asked, thrown off guard.
"Yeah, Logan International Airport in Billings," Kim replied, as if everyone in the world knew that the airport in Billings was named Logan. Had she been in a better mood, Max would have found the irony of the situation amusing.
"Who do we pay?" Zack asked, his shoulders squared and his expression stony.
"Pay the pilot," she answered, leaning over the counter a little to give him a good view of her endowments. "He's doin' the two of you a big favor you know...comin' in all the way from Billings at this time of night."
"We're touched...really," Max broke in, taking Zack by the arm. If he was going to move on from her, pretty little dark haired Kim wasn't the place to start. Somehow, Max had always imagined someone like her to be the kind of woman Logan would end up with. Petite, but only in stature, with classically beautiful features. She certainly never dared to imagine him with someone like her.
"You know, Max," Zack pulled his arm out of her grasp. "I don't being treated like a criminal just because I don't like your little boyfriend."
"He's not my boyfriend," Max insisted for the millionth time in her life. "And this is not about you not liking him. You've gone way past that, Zack."
"He knew what he was getting into," Zack pointed out. "It's not like he thought you were some innocent girl from the suburbs when he met you. He knew from the get-go that a relationship with you was a dangerous thing."
Zack's statement took Max's breath away. He'd presented an aspect of things she'd never considered before. Had Logan really known what he was getting himself into with her? Would he want to still have any kind of relationship with her now that he fully realized just how dangerous knowing her could be? Even more important, did she want him -- her very own Prince Charming -- to be swallowed up by the black cloud that followed in her footsteps?
"It doesn't matter," she finally replied. "If he's in trouble, it's because of me and I have to help him."
Zack nodded slowly, and the two sat down dejectedly to wait for the arrival of their flight. Max's mind was consumed with all that occurred in a relatively short time span. She'd left Seattle, walked away from Logan, and traveled hundreds of miles only to find herself sitting in a small town Montana airport waiting for a passenger plane to take her back.
She wondered at first why Zack had insisted on traveling east before running into Canada. Now, things were more clear. He'd been worried Lydecker would get to Logan before they had the chance to make it to the boarder -- the most obvious place to go. So, instead of going strait north Zack had plotted a route that would take them as far away from Seattle as quickly as possible with few hitches along the way. A move of high tactical planning, Max began to doubt his profession that he didn't think Lydecker was close enough to actually present a threat to Logan.
Wearily, she rested her chin against her chest. Her stomach was churning, and for a few nervous moments she thought she was going to throw up on her shoes. However, she managed somehow to recover her composure and replaced the stoic mask she had come to perfect.
To the outside world, Max didn't feel anything. She was oriented toward self-preservation, and damn good at performing under that pretense. She was a woman not to be messed with, the kind that got things done and never allowed anything to get in her way -- a woman made of discipline and stone.
To the outside world, she was impenetrable.
Inside, Max was a child, and a frightened one at that. Only, she didn't fear the normal things most children carry on into their adulthood. She feared being attached, being out of control, letting someone into her heart. Logan represented everything she was afraid of.
Odd to think of the man you love as your worst nightmare...
Love? Had she just thought that word? Logan's easy manner, his gentle but seductive eyes...they made it so much easier for her to tag the word as being not so bad. But, it still contained the negative connotation she had forced on it for so long. Deep down, she wanted to be loved and love in return, but wasn't at all sure she would be able to handle it.
The hour passed by agonizingly slowly, giving Max more time than she cared to have to sort through her feelings. She was startled when Zack nudged her with his elbow.
"Let's go, Max," he said, an almost imperceptible edge to his voice. She looked up to see Kim staring at them, a tall, sandy haired man in front of the desk wearing a green sweatshirt and jeans.
"You two must be my passengers," the man smiled amicably at them as they walked up. "Name's John Rudinski...you ready to leave?" Rudinski had kind, brown eyes and a light unassuming attitude that put Max at ease. She got the feeling he wouldn't ask any questions.
"Been ready for the past hour," Max waved a hand, then turned to Kim. "Got my ninja outside...make sure no one hauls her off for me."
Max wasn't one to leave her motorcycle, but faced with loosing it or Logan, he came out on top. So, the ninja would have to wait.
"I'll send someone out to take it around back," Kim replied, her eyes locked on Zack rather than Max. Rolling her own chocolaty brown eyes, Max hurried the pilot out the door.
"Let's get the two of you loaded up," he muttered mostly to himself as he walked across the lot toward the runway where a small passenger plane with a blue stripe was waiting.
Max vaulted into the small vehicle the moment he opened the door. Zack calmly climbed in beside her. She was eager to go, and very tired of waiting. As Rudinski preformed a quick check and pulled on a pair of headphones with a microphone attached she tapped her right foot. The movement was quick and incessant, and it slowly began to get on Zack's nerves until finally he put one hand down on her leg and held it down.
"Hope you got yourselves seated back there," Rudinski called over the planes engines.
"It's about time..." Max grumbled under her breath, trying not notice Zack's hand which was still on her leg. She didn't mind him touching her or being near her, but the idea of some of the ways he obviously wanted to touch her made her uneasy. She couldn't even bring herself to imagine sleeping with Zack. There mere idea of it was ludicrous.
Logan, however...it was too easy to imagine herself in his bed. In fact, she'd become a master at imagining just such a scenario. In her mind she knew exactly how he would look, what he would say, how he would feel and taste...she had every detail carefully mapped and logged.
Resting her chin in her hand, she looked out the small boxy plane window as it lurched into the sky and roared toward Seattle.
***
Night had fallen, and the room in which Logan had spent his entire day sitting in was shrouded in darkness. A low light from under the door was the only thing that served to illuminate his surroundings. The back of his head continued to throb, but the pain had dipped to bearable levels. Or, maybe he'd just become used to it.
He jumped when he heard voices outside the door. He gazed down toward the crack where light was flowing in and saw two distinct blocks, allowing him to determine that there were either two people on the other side or one person talking to himself with his legs set apart. He placed his bet on the former moments before the door swung open and two men came striding in.
The bright light that flooded in momentarily blinded him, and it took him a moment to recognize one of the voices. When he did, panic rose up in his throat high enough to choke him.
Lydecker.
He silently thanked the heavens that he had him instead of Max, then followed it with a plea for his own safety.
"Finally decided to come around, did you?" Lydecker asked, squatting down so his eyes were level with Logan's. "Didn't think my boys hit you that hard."
"Maybe you should think on checking your prisoners more often," Logan replied, scowling. "I've been up half the damn day."
Lydecker cast a glance around the room, taking note of the dried blood on the floor.
"So it seems," he nodded, then stood up. "Get him out of here."
The other man, who had remained in the shadows rushed toward Logan, grabbing him by his upper arms. As he pulled him up off his seat on the floor, Logan's knees buckled, throwing his weight forward. His feet were still tied together, and hid legs had long ago fallen asleep from sitting in the same position.
The man groaned with the effort of supporting Logan's weight and cast an imploring glance Lydecker's way.
"Drag him if you have to, I don't care," Lydecker shrugged. "Just make sure he can talk."
An expression that lined murderous on the strange man's face, he turned back to Logan and, with a grunt of effort, began to slowly haul him from the room. As they went down the hallway, Logan continually tripped over his own feet and became aware of the plastic zip ties digging into his skin. They obviously didn't want him getting away.
After an agonizing fifteen minutes, Logan was deposited in a chair in a dimly lit room. He took a moment to look around the room, taking note of the low ceiling and bad lighting. It reminded him of a classic interrogation room, only this one was somehow harsher than any he'd ever had grace his eyes. This one stunk of fear and desperation. It was designed to break people, to break their spirit and resolve.
He took a long breath as Lydecker entered the room, a few of his men trailing behind him. The smile that crossed his lips was sickly pleased. He slammed the door behind him and walked up to Logan.
"I'd take these," he said, motioning to Logan's glasses. "But I want you to see me clearly when I kill you."
"Not everyday a man gets to look the devil in the eyes," Logan agreed, earning himself a firm hit from behind with the butt of someone's gun. The impact made his head swim and he thought for a few seconds he would pass out again.
"We know who you are," Lydecker announced. "But we don't give a shit about your piddly little Eyes Only crap. I know you've had contact with her and that you know what she is...that we care about. Now, if you tell me where she is, I might be lenient and just shoot."
"Can't catch a fish without a hook, Lydecker," Logan replied, still blinking to bring the world back into focus. "If I die either way, I'm not giving her up."
"I never said you would die either way," he replied. "Trust me when I say that there are worse things than death in this world."
"I'm sure," Logan agreed, but refused to bend.
"We know she contacted you, Mr. Cale," Lydecker leaned close enough that Logan felt as if his personal space had been violated. "It wasn't very difficult to figure out that she was the legs for Eyes Only, nor figuring out that you were the hacker. We identified both of your voices when she called you...now tell me where she is."
"I can't tell you what I honestly don't know," Logan shrugged. Lydecker's eyes narrowed dangerously and he roughly backhanded Logan. The force behind the swing was enough to nearly knock his chair over, but someone standing behind him caught it and set it upright once again.
"Tell me where she is!" Lydecker demanded, his eyes fiery.
"No," Logan replied in a voice filled with a deadly calm.
The last thing he saw was a swift motion of Lydecker's right hand before something connected with the back of his head, causing blackness to quickly overtake his vision.
~last part coming soon...which is going to be pretty long because I have a lot to cover in it, but I can't force myself to break it up!~