Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 79: War Pigs

"I won't attempt to conceal my level of disappointment in your decision not to join the assault."

Elder Maxson sealed the bunker's hatch with an echoing clank as Kelly took her first budding steps into his private domain. Odd, she had been expecting a moody dungeon ripe with a haze of dark pleasure and pain. But no, not a whiff of sex in sight or smell. Just the typical man-cave punctuated with soldierly mementos and miscellaneous items of comfort and necessity. Very similar to his quarters aboard the Prydwen.

How boring, Elder Boss-Man.

She stood prone with her back presented rudely to him. "I won't attempt to conceal my level of not giving a flying fuck."

There was a minor pause at her back. Then gradual footsteps accompanied the constrained sigh that filtered slowly from him. Kelly, feeling a little exposed in a white camisole and her uniform gathered to her hips where slips of her skin peeked out, felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck prickle in the warning of a predator circling her. Or was it a carnal excitement?

But Elder Maxson simply moved around her. His glower was enough to convey his frustration as he stood to oppose her at the workstation in the centre of his quarters.

Kelly parried the glower with a searing edge. "Is this the part where you cock your leg and piss in the corner?"

Maxson's head tilted in miniscule detail, but nothing else occurred.

Wow, no comeback.

"Knight-Captain Cade's psyche reports were satisfactory, but as you know, I prefer to keep up a personal rapport with any of my brothers and sisters prescribed to our mental welfare system."

The Brotherhood's mental welfare system: Just Cade sitting in a room with a scalpel and a come-hither look.

"Noble of you," she lipped off sardonically.

He ignored her. "Last night was your first off-ship and out of our care. How are you faring?"

How am I faring? Well, aside from getting high this morning, being a salty bitch to the man I love more than anything in this world, even my own evil son, being haunted by my dead husband, confronting the horrors of this war in those poor survivors, having eaten nothing all day, and now having to stand in the same room with a man that sets my panties on fire but who I want to kill, and play house of cards with him while coming down off my chems, oh I'm faring fucking outstandingly!

"I'm good," she said instead.

Elder Maxson employed a single blink at her. "If you don't mind my saying, you don't look 'good', Paladin. You've endured a lot in the week we've been here, and I haven't forgotten your history of chem use and self destruction."

"Oh, Maxson, talk dirty to me some more, I like it."

That riled him a fraction, his beard setting firmly and shoulders squaring at her. She gifted him a foxy smirk. After his little love bite against the wall, she was armed with an arsenal of sooty taunts that he now had no choice but to endure from her. Having that power over him was thrilling.

"Bet you're wishing Danse was still here to keep me under control like the good old days."

She could tell he was struggling to control himself, his chest rising and falling a little more rapidly than before. Hancock's advice was reigning wild and Kelly wondered if he was fighting down a raging boner under that battlecoat.