Well, here is part five. Sorry it's taken so long when I said it wouldn't. Got a bit carried away with helping out a friend on some of her stuff. Well, I hope this is okay. I know I said it was gonna be a fight scene and it kinda is, but it's not really what I wanted it to turn out like. It is really more of a scuffle but a whole, fully blown fight just wasn't fitting with the story so I had to alter it a bit. Hope it's not too bad.
Thankies for your reviews! Glad to have you're comments and criticisms! I need them to help me get better (which I hope is what I'm doing…)
Okay, this chapter has been written and re-written about seven times over. It's still not entirely how I would like it but I might go back and re-do it later. Hope it doesn't suck too bad!
Happy Reading!
Gem
xxx
The Job (part 5).
Riddick stood in a lightening fast, fluid motion that made his powerful muscles ripple beneath the thin layer of gleaming skin, pulling taut with frustration, anger and a barely maintainable control that stopped him from lashing out and striking her. Instead he swiped at the table that stood as the only division keeping them apart, sending it effortlessly crashing into the cell wall. The thunder clap of noise that his movements elicited echoed around the small chamber and before the clatter had finished reverberating around them, Riddick's vast hand had struck out, encircling her slender neck almost entirely. He could snap that beautiful little neck in two if he desired, or just a slight application of pressure and her windpipe would be blocked. But he didn't. He simply stood there fighting the Beast that clamoured to get out, to be released, to run rampant like he hadn't allowed it to in years.
Riddick drew his lips back in a soundless snarl due to the immense effort it was taking to keep the creature within him under restraint and he glanced up to take in Jack's reaction to his release of such aggression. He was curious as to what she would do now that her endless goading had born fruit.
No fear. Not a single ounce of trepidation in the least clouded her effervescent watch as she study him, retaining her previous fury and using it to match his own directly, like two black, thunderous clouds thrashing against each other. A storm was definitely approaching!
It seemed an eternity before either of them moved, as if their limbs had suddenly become stone, weighing too much for them to shift even a centimetre. In the end it was Jack who broke the motionlessness first, raising her smaller, though no less deadly, hands to wrap about his offending forearm, digging what remained of her bitten down nails into the warm, soft, supple skin as hard as she could, leaving small, crimson crescent moons when she moved her fingers to get a more firm grip on her assailant. She grinned broadly at his flinty expression, her eyes narrowing in fake mirth as she droved her fingertips harder into him, like semi-circular knives.
"So…" she purred, her quicksilver eyes flickering briefly from his face to locate where their shivs had fallen. Then she turned them back onto him, their depths icy and willing for a brawl. "How are we gonna do this, Riddick? Hmmm?" she cocked an eyebrow at him before continuing. "Only one of us is supposed to leave this cell alive, you know?" still he remained stoic and Jack allowed herself a thin smile as she released her iron grip on his arm and instead traced lazy, seductive circles over the skin she had pierced. Her languid glance shimmered up from her hands' activities to his face, smirking in triumph when Riddick's ebony brows knit together a little further. She ran her tongue over her lower lip, glazing it slightly before speaking again, her voice low, barely more than a whisper. "You gonna kill me, Riddick?" her smile hovered on her glistening lips and her eyelids fluttered closed in an extended blink that made her seem bashful, her dark lashes brushing against her cheeks. "You gonna go for the sweet-spot?"
Riddick grit his teeth at her words. She was toying with him, laughter clearly dancing in her eyes when she reopened them and fixed the flashing diamonds back onto him. He loosed a snarl, tightening his firm grip about her throat and her eyes winked closed giving him the impression, at first, that it was due to lack of oxygen. However, as he looked closer, the faint, almost none existent movements of her lips could be seen, as if she muttered out a fervent prayer to heaven above.
"Just another job, just another job…" she mumbled under her breath, over and over again as if repeating it would make the statement more true. He laughed deep in his throat at her. Never before had he met someone who could so suddenly go from one emotion to the other. From cocky and arrogant to nervy and tense as a tightly wound coil. He shook his head as he continued to chuckle and Jack's stabbing fingernails returned to their vicious assault on his forearm.
"You are one funny girl, Kid." He snorted and her eyes snapped open again to reveal not Jack but an animal not unlike the one that lay deep within him.
"Really?" she cocked her head to one side, or as much as was possible in his diligent grasp. "I try, I really do!" the final word sprung from her lips in a determined hiss as she kicked the heels of her boots together, hidden shiv-spurs springing forth from them. (A/N: Couldn't resist adding the spurs. You gotta admit that they were kick-ass in CoR!)
Riddick glanced down between them in mild, amused curiosity. A smile twirled at his lips as her leg curled in a flash around his in an attempt to slice his calf muscle open but he dodged deftly, almost without needing to try before he returned his eyes to hers.
"Frisky are we?" he chided and Jack snarled like a wildcat, her leg already in motion as she tried to spur him again, though it was as fruitless as her first assault. "Nice, Jackie. Real polite. Such manners." He snickered and Jack painted a false smile onto her face, barely holding down the fury that would make her blind and get her ass killed.
"Thanks." She replied through gritted teeth as feral as Riddick was himself. Wild. Ferocious. Untameable. "Coming from you that means oh so much!" sarcasm sparkled from her tongue like a lit fuse, like she was spitting tiny razor blades at him, piercing his flesh like her nails were his arm and Riddick clamped his jaw together, the muscles in his temples working as he chewed down, grinding his back molars together in irritation.
And Jack saw it. She saw the tensing and smirked, tutting at him in reprimand for a second time that night. "Riddick, didn't you learn not to reveal your weakness to your opponent?" she teased, tossing his earlier words back at him. Her eyes searched over his face, moving back and forth, up and down like small, luminescent, heat-seeking lasers, though her lasers, deep in her pupils, searched not for heat but for a weakness in him.
In the blink of an eye and with a frustrated roar Riddick shoved her backwards, as far away from him as was possible in the tiny room, releasing her neck from his grasp. Watching as she moved, twisting her agile body like a panther to land in a defensive fighting stance, slipping a second shiv from the back of her belt. He snorted. He should have expected as much from her. She had always been a clever girl and after years in Butcher's Bay she had combined that intelligence with a ruthlessness that made her a deadly little package.
"I'm not gonna fight you, Jack." He replied, his voice thrumming around the stone room and reverberating through the young girl's chest. "No matter how hard you try your little damnedest to provoke me."
"Why not!" she demanded with a cocky snort and a shrug of her thin shoulders. She spun the shiv around in her hand, palming it, searching for the most comfortable handhold. "Cause I'm a woman?" her eyes pulsed up to meet his for a single, electrifying heartbeat before returning to the shiv. "Cause I'm not a man? What? You think I can't hold my own?"
Riddick took a deep, steadying breath, hooking his thumbs through the belt loops of his trousers. "Because I know you can't hold your own." He replied and grinned inwardly at the sour look that passed through her eyes. Her nose wrinkled in contempt and she had not a slightest clue that Riddick was shifting the balance of power from her to him. That he was using her own game against her. That he was enjoying vying for power with her and wanted nothing more than to see her at her most furious…and she was getting there. To boiling point.
"Shut up and fight me!" she roared, her shout resonating about the cell, clenching her fist so tightly around the handle of her shiv that she almost broke the skin of the palm of her hand. "Fight me, you coward!"
Riddick was in motion before the final syllable had finished ringing about them, slipping another of his own shivs from his belt much as Jack had previously. Her eyes widened slightly as she saw the muscles coil beneath his skin and then he was merely a blur of movement. As insubstantial as the air that she clawed desperately into her lungs. But Jack had not spent five years stuck in the bowels of Butcher's Bay and not learned anything about fighting! Her body responded to his sudden rush at her as if on reflex, autopilot, twisting away from his oncoming assault and ducking as she sensed that his arm swinging after her, intent on dragging her back. Air whispered over her head, whisking through her hair and tickling her scalp but she had little time to acknowledge it as Riddick spun and made to snatch a fistful of those tresses. Again Jack was quicker, spinning away from him and rising to stand at her full height as she went, shiv clasped, blade pointing downwards and legs spread for balance.
Riddick looked at her as she stood, knees bent ready for his next move. She was fast, he had to give her that but she was flighty, nervous even. He could see it in the fast twitching glances that she took around them. He smiled thinly and waited. Watching for the slight movements of her body, the way she gripped her shiv, her left foot sliding back scuffling in the dirt slightly. She was going to push off from her right leg then, and that more than likely meant a feint to her right. He smirked again and as Jack pushed off from where she stood, she did indeed fake an attack to her right, traversing and almost side stepping to her left where Riddick's arms waited to encircle her.
The breath left her body in a whoosh, leaving the terrible, almost sickly feeling of being winded in the pit of her stomach as his arms tightened about her.
"Let me fucking go!" she growled, fighting against him thought to no avail. While she was faster than he was; Riddick was a man, a very powerful man at that and no matter how much she trained, that power, that strength was something that Jack could never possess.
Riddick smiled against her ear, his silent laugh whispering by in a soft caress of air. "I'm not a coward." He replied, ignoring her demand for release and her struggle against him. "You know I'm not."
"Whatever…" Jack spat, stilling momentarily. "So…we gonna stand like this all night?"
Riddick shrugged in reply, an action that nudged against Jack's back, pressing them closer together. The cloth of his prison vest rasped against her jacket. "Could do. I got all the time in the world…that is, unless you have something else that you're concocting in that vicious little head of yours."
Jack snorted at Riddick's words and grinned, knowing that he would sense it even if he couldn't see it. "I might have." She replied in a jaunty tone, moving her right foot backwards slightly, the high, cheerfulness in her voice drowning out the sound that the scraping of her rubber sole made against the gritty floor. "You never know with me. I'm a bit of an enigma!" the last word was punctuated by the swift, slicing of her spur against Riddick's shin, catching him off guard and making him curse loudly. However, his arms stayed firmly locked about her and he shoved his body into hers, knocking her forwards and into the cell wall roughly.
Hands tightened about her wrists in front of her and Riddick pulled them up and over her head to secure them in a stringent, one-handed grasp at the nape of her neck, pushing her a little harder in to the rock of the wall, though not enough to cause any permanent damage.
"You like fucking with me, don't you?" he demanded, leaning heavily against her so that she was crushed, unable to move at all.
Jack replied with a strained laughed that was muffled by the way her right cheek was pressed up against the wall and her elbows and arms were forced up either side of her face, penning her in. "Very much!" she struggled to retort and Riddick growled, the vibrations seeping through her back to tingle in her own chest, almost as if she had growled herself.
"But do you realise just who you are fucking with?" he asked in a conversational tone and her breath caught in her throat when she felt the cold steel of his shiv tracing a delicate pattern on her lower back. Slowly, seductively almost, the tip of his shiv inched upwards, taking with it the bottom of her top and jacket revealing the smooth, pale skin of her lower back, seeking the sweet-spot that she had so brazenly mentioned before, asking him if he would go for hers. However, what he saw there made him pause. Made the shiv leave the trail that it had kissed at the bottom of her spine and made the breath still within him. His eyes bored a scalding hole into the back of her head, silently demanding an explanation for what he saw there, sprawled and running from hip to hip, stark against the beautiful smoothness.
She knew he had seen it. The way his breathing had changed told her that much and silently she cursed herself, listening hard for some reaction out of him. Something that would indicate what exactly his next move was likely to be.
"What the fuck is that?"
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Sorry to leave it at another cliff-hanger! It's getting' to be a habit with me. Next chapter is make or break time for Jack and Riddick. I wonder, can anyone guess what it is that's on Jack's back? Hmmm……….
