The Deception

by Nikki Sloane

  As each one popped free, the tension inside me multiplied. It held my muscles stiff and made it difficult to sit, but I managed somehow, dropping into the leather chair with barely a sound. It unfortunately meant I couldn’t avoid the scene before me any longer.

  He had the legs of a runner. Powerful and toned, the tan from countless summers spent on his yacht fading to pale as it went up his thighs. The classic dress shirt had a longer front and tail than the sides, covering the indecent parts, but I got a flash of his buttocks as he worked to undo the last few buttons.

  The shirt was pulled open, revealing the full bare swath of him from chest to knees, and he left the white shirt to hang on his shoulders. Alice already had both hands on him, obscuring part of his cock, but it was unmistakably and unavoidably there. Hard, and long, and thick, and turning my insides to glass. If I moved, I’d shatter.

  He watched me intently and curiously as I took in the exposed sight of him. He was cold steel, but the room was scorching, and the needle on the thermostat continued to climb as she heaved both of her hands over him, pumping her fists on his angry cock.

  Chess was over, but we were still playing a game, and as I shot him an uninterested look, I made it clear I considered it his move now.

  He didn’t want me to miss a thing, which was why he pushed the side of his open shirt out of the way and set the hand closer to me on his hip, displaying as much of him as possible. The other one drifted into the glossy strands of her blonde hair and urged her head toward him, signaling what he expected.

  She parted her rose-colored lips and complied, her eyes fluttering closed as the head of him slid into her wide mouth.

  I didn’t like the way Macalister and I both sucked in a deep breath at the same moment. It was like I was involved, a part of this, when I was desperate not to be. It made me angry how my gaze kept wanting to slip from his and better watch what was happening at his waist. I absolutely hated the low, dull ache it created in my center when his eyes lidded with desire.

  At least he looked mortal like this. He wasn’t impervious to what she was doing to him.

  Gravel edged into his words like the pleasure he felt was stuck in the base of his throat. “I’ve imagined you on your knees for me a thousand times.”

  Don’t, I whispered to myself, but it was already too late. I saw myself in her place, my knees squeaking against the wood as I rocked on my legs, my mouth steadily sliding over him. A traitorous muscle deep between my thighs tightened, causing a horrifying spark of satisfaction.

  His hips remained perfectly still, but his grip on her hair clenched, twisting the strands to the point of discomfort because her eyes burst open and peered up at him with surprise. And while she looked at him, he looked at me. His wife was nothing more than an instrument. A toy to appease him while he gazed at what he desired but had not yet had.

  Was he aware she did the same thing with his son? Used Vance as a substitute for the husband who wouldn’t even look at her anymore?

  The table between us had a glossy finish, and it was safer to watch the fuzzy reflection in it as Alice bobbed her head and kept up with the demanding tempo her husband required. She had one hand wrapped around the base of him and the other cupping underneath, and saliva dripped over her shiny fingers.

  The lens of the table allowed me to tell myself it wasn’t real. Her head didn’t rock side to side as she inched down and slowly took his cock all the way to the back of her throat. The soft sound of her cough broke the spell and drew my gaze back up.

  The pleasure made his eyes smolder toward me. “I look forward to training you to do this.” Macalister’s tone was seductive. “Just like I did her.”

  Oh, fuck. I could picture it all so clearly in my head. He’d loved teaching me chess and enjoyed the role as my instructor. He’d probably try to make a game out of it. Benchmarks and rewards for improvement on my deep-throating lessons.

  Thick sludge, hot like lava, moved through my veins.

  “No,” I said, both to him and the shameful response thrumming through my body.

  As Alice retreated, her cheeks carved into hollows and her hand clamped down at the edge of her lips. She moved her fist in perfect time with the steady seesaw motion of her mouth, and I saw mostly the whites of her eyes as she stared up at her husband.

  God, the way she looked. Couldn’t he see how badly she longed for him? It was cruel. I’d wanted to see her punished, but this . . . it didn’t satisfy. It only made me feel unease, like it was too much.

  Enjoyment twisted on his face as our gazes were horribly locked together. The hand on the back of her head pushed with more urgency, and his hips succumbed to a craving to move that he’d held back until now. He thrust forward, stabbing in her mouth, and her cheek bulged as the head of his cock pressed into it.

  It was a raw display of sex and power, and he was utterly in control of everything. Her pace. His pleasure. My emotions.

  My face burned, and my pulse was in overdrive. I tried to control my breathing, but it came and went in ragged bursts. The physical response to the lewd scene playing out before me was that I grew embarrassingly damp between my legs, and it was like he knew. He licked his lips and gazed at me as the hungry Minotaur.

  “I want you,” he growled.

  Three plain words, but they carried an enormous gravity coming from him, especially when there was a woman at his feet, surrendering over again to him with each stroke of her hand and swirl of her tongue.

  Pinpricks of anger stabbed at my skin and injected fire into my bloodstream. “You can’t have me.”

  “I already do, Marist.” His grin was more like a sneer. “I haven’t been inside you or tasted your pretty little cunt yet, but I own you. You’re mine.”

  Alice pulled back off him and jerked to a stop. “What? You haven’t . . .”

  Her stunned eyes searched his when he glanced down, her hair still clenched in his fist.

  “That’s right. You weren’t made aware.” He was condescending. “She made Royce my proxy that night and gave him my time. So, the answer is no. I was denied my two minutes and wasn’t allowed to touch her.”

  Her shocked gaze swung from him to me, and the room went still.

  Her lips were swollen and glossy from what she’d been doing, and they parted like she wanted to say something, but nothing came out. Regret built in her, layer by painful layer, as she realized she’d tried to kill me based off her assumptions.

  And those assumptions had been wrong.

  TEN

  Macalister’s aggressive hand jerked on Alice’s hair, forcing her mouth back around him. She only hesitated for a second. Then he didn’t need to give her as much guidance as he had before. She shifted on the floor, widening her knees a little, and made a moan of approval.

  If anything, she looked fucking thrilled. As if she hadn’t lost him to me after all. Like there was still hope she could get him back.

  Love had made her delusional, but I saw him with clear eyes. The Minotaur didn’t care about the people once they’d been consumed, and he’d used her all up.

  I crossed my legs and ran a hand through my hair, affecting the demeanor of someone who didn’t care that they were sitting ten feet away from a man with his dick halfway down his wife’s throat. I was strong and unbreakable. The Minotaur couldn’t eat Medusa. She was just as much of a monster as he was, if not more.

  “I’m not yours, I’m Royce’s.” I leveled the darkest gaze I possessed at him. “Are you almost finished? I have shit to do.”

  It was the equivalent of entering the endgame, and he was pissed he didn’t get to do it on his terms. “I’m sure.” His blue eyes turned to storms, and electricity crackled in the clouds. “Will you use the vibrator I gave you while you do it? I still have the controls set on my phone.”

  The perfect rhythm Alice had been keeping abruptly fell apart, but he gripped the hair at the top of her head with his other hand, so he could push and pull her
with both. A single bead of sweat rolled down over his defined chest, coursing a jerky path over his flat stomach.

  “And I still remember what you sound like,” his words were clipped, “when I brought you to orgasm with it.”

  The shudder his memory forced on me was strategic. It kept my tongue still long enough for him to squeeze out another comment.

  “Next time I make you come,” he said with a loud exhale, “I’ll be inside you.”

  My mouth fell open. Not so much from what he’d said, but the way his body moved. Vibrations undulated through his arms as he fucked her mouth at breakneck speed, and darkness overwhelmed his expression. His chest was heaving with labored breath, mixed with groans that were soaked in pleasure, and it continued to build.

  Oh, God. He was about to come, and I sat rooted to my chair, not wanting to watch but also dying to know what he looked like when he lost control.

  Abruptly, he took one urgent step backward, and as soon as he was out of Alice’s mouth, his hand was there to replace it. He kept hold of the hair on the top of her head so she couldn’t go anywhere, but he issued the order anyway.

  “Stay still.”

  He ran his palm over the swollen length of himself, twisting his grip that was so tight, his cock lost some of its color. It was hypnotic how he jerked in shallow, furious strokes. The tip of him was only an inch from her face, and she must have figured out his intent, because her eyes slammed shut.

  Blood roared loudly in my ears, and my breath cut off as Macalister’s shoulders tensed and he let out a loud, long grunt. As he came, he stared at me with his bottomless eyes and his face twisting with ecstasy.

  She flinched with each streak of liquid that struck her, and he painted ribbons across her face while his body shook and shuddered. At last, his fist slowed and he issued a sigh, releasing his hold of her with a small backward shove. It made some of the semen drip down off her chin and onto her designer sweater.

  It was such a shockingly vulgar and demeaning act, it was breathtaking.

  He was almost done recovering when he spoke to her. “Now,” he said, “tell Marist you’re sorry.”

  I gasped with horror as she turned to look at me with her face covered in his semen and her shame. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  His tone was plain. “That time, I believed you.”

  He bent, grabbed the sides of his pants, and as he pulled them up, he assessed the result of his work across her cheeks and lips. His expression was cold and unfeeling as she peered up at her husband, desperate for him to say something. Anything.

  “Go wash your face,” he ordered. “You look pathetic.”

  There was no audible snap when she broke. She didn’t cry out or even say a thing as she cleaved down the middle. Alice climbed gingerly to her feet, her knees no doubt tender, and looked utterly dead inside as she carried herself from the room, her vacant eyes connecting with nothing. She moved as if she were hollow, and she was.

  The Minotaur had eaten her soul.

  I was at a complete loss for words as he finished doing up his zipper and began to button his shirt.

  My voice was disembodied. I didn’t realize I was speaking until it was out. “You’re . . . you’re so fucked up.”

  His hands ceased moving. There was the subtle, resigned nod of his head. “You told me you love fucked up things, though.” The uneven way he said it was disorienting. “It’s your favorite part of mythology.”

  It was true. I wondered if something was wrong with me because I enjoyed such twisted stories, but I only liked them when they were trapped inside their medium and couldn’t touch me. My life as a tragic, fucked up myth didn’t have any appeal.

  I couldn’t stand to be in this room with him a moment longer, especially when what he’d done to her still lingered freshly in the air. I pushed to my feet and balled my hands into fists. “I hate you.”

  His reaction was shocking. Why did he look so stricken? “I don’t care very much for myself right now either.”

  What?

  He tucked his shirt into his pants and bent to retrieve the sweater he’d cast off. “But I did what needed to be done. Do you hate her?”

  His humiliation of her was so horrible, all my anger flipped on its side and I only felt sorry for her now. “No. Only you.”

  “Good.” He pulled on the sweater, tugging it into place. It was amazing how quickly he composed himself. “I can’t control how you feel about other people’s actions, but I can control my own, so I’ve absorbed the anger you had for her.”

  Meaning he’d purposefully been awful so I would see him as the villain of the story and not her.

  His shoulders rolled back, and his posture straightened so he looked ten feet tall again. “You can believe you hate me, Marist, and that’s fine. But, given enough time, I will change that.”

  “We’re done here,” I hissed.

  “Yes, we are.”

  There was a finality to his statement that would have given me pause if I weren’t so fucking eager to get away from him.

  I had only made it down the hall before I collided with Alice as she stepped out of the guest bathroom. Her face was pale, as she’d scrubbed most of her makeup off, and her eyes were pink, but she wasn’t currently crying.

  My heart hurt for her. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She bristled. “But this is your fault.”

  I froze. “Excuse me?”

  “Hales only want what they can’t have. Once the chase is over and they’ve won, they’re on to the next thing.” Her eyes were as hard as the diamond earring she wore. “If you’d just given Macalister what he wanted, this would have been over months ago.”

  She pushed past me like I was a spoiled child she didn’t want to deal with, and as she strode down the hall, I felt less sorry for her.

  I treated the horrible afternoon in the lounge with Macalister and Alice the same way I treated the initiation. It was something to never be spoken or thought about, because nothing good could come of it. At least my guilt over not telling Royce lessened each day.

  After the Thanksgiving weekend was over, we returned to Cape Hill, and I moved into Royce’s room. Or our room. Thankfully, Macalister continued to make himself scarce, or at least the impending offer for Ascension and the end-of-the-year reports kept him too busy.

  Or perhaps he was avoiding me. Either way, I was glad.

  The week before winter finals, I was in my Porsche, driving to Boston for my first wedding dress fitting with Donna Willow, when my phone rang. My mother’s number flashed on the center console, and I clicked the button on my steering wheel.

  “Are you running late?” I asked. She was supposed to meet me at the salon.

  “No. I’m taking Emily to the emergency room.” Her panicked voice cracked through the car speakers. “Baby isn’t moving.”

  My sister had decided she didn’t want to know the sex of her baby until birth. She wanted it to be a happy surprise, she’d said, so we all used the term of endearment. Her child wasn’t a ‘the,’ they were Baby. I’d hated it at first, but it had grown on me, bringing a smile to my face. But now cold fingers slipped inside my body and squeezed my heart.

  “Which hospital? Port Cove?” My hands trembled as I navigated onto the shoulder of the highway and put on my hazards. I’d turn around if her answer was yes.

  “Mass General.”

  Okay, that was good. I wanted my sister in the best possible hands. “Right. I’ll meet you there.” I checked traffic and was able to pull back onto the road. “How is she doing?”

  “She’s scared, Marist. We all are.”

  I did my best to sound calm and even. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “How can you know that?”

  My bottom lip quivered, but I held it together as I echoed what my fiancé had said to me before. “Because Royce has more money than God, and he’ll make it so.”

  It was a tense, stressful
drive to the hospital, and when I called to tell him what was going on, I was shocked to learn Royce already knew. My mother had called him first, before me. I was her sister and best friend, and he was her—what? Soon to be brother-in-law?

  I took a page out of my mother’s passive aggressive playbook and got several digs in while we were placed in a room and waited for Emily’s doctor to arrive.

  “I understand you’re hurt,” my mother said, “but I was panicking and didn’t know what to do. Emily’s doctor was out of town, and . . .” She sighed. “The Hales have a lot more power to throw around than we do. So, yes. I called Royce first, but I did it because I knew he’d help get my daughter what she needed.”

  Her face softened as she stared at my sister, who looked uncomfortable and frightened as she lay in her hospital bed. They’d strapped a monitor to her belly, and she was fixated on the screen of the machine, even as we had no idea what it meant. Once it had started running, it was like everything else in the room ceased to exist.

  My mother’s hand was cold with fear when she grabbed mine and squeezed. “He’s been so good to Emily.” Her voice dropped low, only for me. “Has he been good to you?”

  She peered at me and, with everything happening, it must have given her focus on what was truly important because she actually saw me. Her thoughtful eyes begged for my honesty.

  “Because if he hasn’t, you leave him. I’m serious, Marist. I know you worry about us, but you shouldn’t. We’ll be fine.” Her grip tightened, like she wanted to put extra emphasis on what she was saying. “I’m sorry if I made you think otherwise, but I want you to know the only thing that’s ever mattered to me is you girls and your happiness.”

  I already knew it was true, but it was good to hear it again and reinforce it. My parents had given my sister and me the best of everything, including their love. The most important thing had been free; I just wished they hadn’t gone underwater to give us everything else.

  But it was done. The only pathway was forward now.

  “Yes, he’s good to me.” I squeezed her back. “I love him. Like, really. Somehow, it worked out.”