“It’s not safe—”
I was already down the hall. I’d claim I didn’t hear him if he tried to give me shit for it later, but there was no way I wasn’t going after the stranded soldiers. I heard him swear behind me, heard a shout from somewhere down the hall, followed by three telltale cracks.
My radio crackled to panicked life—it was the men trapped down the hall. “They’re up here! They’re in the south stairwell—” The radio crackled some more, punctuated by loud pops I heard both through the radio and outside of it. The explosive had left the floor and most of the walls intact, but it had lit odd portions of the walls on fire—it took me a moment to realize it was the wooden doors to the apartments. The acrid smell of burning paint stung my nose.
“Fuck,” I muttered, creeping through the smoke. My finger weighed heavy on the trigger. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Crack. There was a scream, and I stepped through the smoke to find my guys sheltering in a doorway, one of them now clutching a bleeding arm.
“I’ll cover you,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry. “Get to the elevator.”
Suddenly Ash was there—he’d followed me into the smoke-shrouded firefight. There was a shout in Ukrainian, and Ash pushed me into a doorway with him, the recess just barely deep enough to shield us. Reflected flames danced along the edges of his ballistic glasses, a trickle of sweat ran down from under his helmet and slid down the strong, graceful lines of his neck. He was tense, alert, but also completely in control, his tension contained by an immense sense of calm. Being near to him in this linoleum hell was like pressing your palm to a sun-warmed boulder or digging your fingers into the sand: inherently soothing, grounding, a reminder of what real power feels like.
That was Ash in battle. The inevitability of stone, the strength of storms and waves.
He glanced at me and bumped my shoulder with his. “We’re getting out of here, Embry.”
I scowled at the end of the hallway through the smoke. “Those Carpathian fuckers won’t.”
I didn’t give a shit why the separatists wanted their own country right now; I didn’t give a shit about anything except that they’d tried to kill men I cared about, they tried to kill me, and fuck them. Fuck them for picking this jagged, piney piece of crap country to live in, for choosing this ugly-ass Soviet-era bullshit for me to die in, fuck them all.
“Hey,” Ash said, and I realized I was still scowling. “Getting out of here is the first priority, okay? Living is more important than killing.”
On cue came a crack crack crack crack from through the smoke.
I dropped to a knee as Ash stayed standing, both of us squeezing our triggers to fire bursts of bullets at the enemy. My three guys across the hall took the chance to run back, and then Ash yanked at my shoulder as he started walking backwards. “Come on, Lieutenant.”
I shook him off, staying on my knee and firing. I could almost tell where they were shooting from, almost, and if I just got a little closer…
“Embry,” Ash said. “Get the fuck on your feet.”
I ignored him and moved forward to the next doorway. I was going to nail those motherfuckers, I knew it, and all the rage and certainty fused together in my blood, pounding through my body. I hated them, I hated this building, I hated the smoke and peeling paint, I hated the cold sweat on my neck as bullets buried themselves in the wall around me.
They let loose another volley, short bursts of fire, and I finally pinpointed the corner they were shooting from. I kept my body low, but I moved into the center of the hallway and let loose onto them, shuffling backwards but still exposed because fuck it all, I was going to put them down like dogs—
A sledgehammer hit my shoulder.
I staggered back, the breath knocked out of me, looking down in a daze to see where the sledgehammer had come from, but it wasn’t a sledgehammer at all. In fact I couldn’t see much of anything in the smoking darkness—except for a growing wet stain on the shoulder of my combat jacket, right outside of where my body armor ended.
And then another sledgehammer tore through my calf. I felt the fire and tear of it, the hot blood running into my sock. I’d just washed that fucking sock.
“Shit,” I said calmly, and then laughed. My voice sounded so funny, so mildly surprised, like I couldn’t find the keys to my Audi R8 or my favorite watch or something. Still laughing, I raised my gun and kept shooting back, shooting and shooting for what felt like several hilarious hours, but was probably only a few seconds.
Maybe less, because Ash was there shouting at me, clearly upset, clearly panicked, and it bothered me to see Ash panicked. I liked it better when he was calm. Why couldn’t he see how funny it was about the sock? About my voice?
I tried to tell him, but when I spoke, the words came out in jagged tremors and the only words that came out were blood and sock and Audi. He bit his lip and swept his gaze from my bleeding shoulder to the spot where blood had begun to drop from my leg to the floor. “Little prince,” he said, his voice breaking. “What have you done?”
Bullets tore into the linoleum next to us, and I saw the moment he became stone again, the minute he became an Army captain and not the man who once begged me not to disappear. He hooked my arm around his neck and—as an afterthought—lifted his assault rifle with his other hand and shot into the smoke as we retreated backwards, almost all of my weight on his sturdy shoulder. The giddiness had faded and the pain had come, stealing my breath and my thoughts, like a hook in my stomach that kept my ribs from expanding all the way.
“North stairwell,” Ash said as we got close to the elevators. “There’s no way you can climb down that shaft right now.”
He saw the look on my face and added, “I’ll be right there with you. But you need to go first.”
The pain robbed me of my will to argue. I let him ease me to the floor and then I did as I was asked and crawled to the stairwell, a one-armed, one-legged crawl that left a smear of blood behind me. Ash kept shooting, dodged fire, tossed a grenade or two down the hall, shouted things into the radio to the men downstairs—he was a one-man battle in and of himself, single-handedly bearing the brunt of the enemy’s malice and saving the rest of us at the same time.
I made it into the stairwell, pulling out my handgun with a shaking hand in case it was occupied. It wasn’t. A moment later, Ash joined me, kicking the door shut behind him and pulling out his flashlight. My whole body was shaking now, violent shivers, pain racing along every nerve’s pathway with vicious, electric sizzles, and there were moments where life seemed to fade in and out: static, then Ash with his flashlight, then black static once more.
“Little prince,” he said. His voice was so far away and so close at the same time. “Stay here. Stay with me.”
I tried. I really did. But despite the adrenaline surging through me, I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t keep the static from crowding at the edges of my vision. I remember grabbing at Ash’s jacket and telling him to leave me behind and to save himself. I remember him dropping a quick kiss onto my helmet. “You’re not Patroclus yet,” he said. “You’re not dying here.”
I’m still not sure what all happened next. I was carried, I know that much, and there were more gunshots, more moments where panic and adrenaline plunged me into the kind of prey-alertness that had my heart hammering and the blood spilling out of me faster and faster. There was a moment when I remember sitting on the ground as Ash pulled a rucksack off a dead Carpathian soldier and rifled through the contents. Another moment when I heard him cursing after trying to hail help on the radio multiple times with no response.
And then the moment when I finally came to completely, gradually swimming up through a hazy layer of strange dreams to see Ash’s boots pacing in front of me and a pile of rucksacks and our body armor next to me. Night had come, and in the forest, it had come with a vengeance, sweeping darkness like a layer of paint under the canopy of trees. It had also brought a thin breeze that wiped at my s
kin with cool fingers. I shivered.
The boots stopped. “It’s too dangerous to light a fire,” Ash said, “but I can give you my jacket. We might be here a while; I can’t get anyone over the radio for an evac and we got separated from everyone else. I took off your armor to work on your shoulder—and mine to make it easier to move you around—but we should probably put it back on soon. How are you feeling?”
“I…” I felt fuzzy but not terrible. A little weak, maybe, and my mouth tasted like metal, but I wasn’t dead or dying or writhing in agony. So definitely a welcome surprise.
The boots resumed their pacing, and I noticed Ash’s hands now, balling and flexing restlessly by his thighs as he paced. “The Carpathians carry morphine in their first aid packs. You were moaning as I taped you up, so I gave you some. It’ll be our little secret.”
Morphine. That explained the fuzziness, the way the pain felt like it was shouting at me from a distant room. I struggled to sit up, fuzziness quickly turning to dizziness and the pain’s shouts getting closer. But I managed, propping myself against a tree and taking several, slow breaths as Ash continued to stalk around our makeshift camp like a caged tiger.
With cautious fingers, I lifted my jacket—the sleeve had been unceremoniously cut open, probably for Ash to get to my bullet wound more easily—and I probed the bandage underneath. I could smell antiseptic, see where he’d sponged away the blood as best he could, and admired the neat lines of tape and gauze. My calf was done with the same careful precision.
“You’re not so bad at this,” I said weakly. “You should have been a doctor.”
“If I were a doctor, I wouldn’t have been there to save your life,” he growled, and then raw, real pain edged his voice. “What the fuck were you thinking, Embry?”
“I don’t know.” My fury at the Carpathians was spent. Even the high I normally had after an engagement with hostiles was gone—bled out, dulled by the morphine. “I should have stayed back.”
“Fuck yes, you should have,” Ash snapped. “You almost died today and for what? Separatist assholes in a town nobody knows the name of?”
I peered up at him in the dark. My battle high had spilled out of me, but I recognized all the signs of it in him. He wasn’t stoned with it like some guys were and he wasn’t giddy with it, like I sometimes got. He was vibrating with it, as if he were gripping a live wire with both hands. His eyes flashed in the dark, tension rolled off his body. He was a man who needed to drink or fuck or fight, or all three—the kind of man I was often, but with Ash, it felt different. That kind of hot, desperate agitation was different when it burned through a man as powerful as Ash, that kind of restlessness was perilous when it infected a man who wasn’t used to feeling out of control.
Ash was dangerous right now. Unsafe to be around.
And me? Was I frightened? Uneasy around a man who looked like he wanted to tear me and the whole world apart with his bare hands?
I wasn’t.
More—I felt a heart-stopping kind of awe, a delightful kind of terror, the kind knights in legends have when they realize the woman they met by the river is a great and terrible fairy queen now intent on eating them alive.
I stared at Ash as he stopped his pacing and stood in front of me, asking me something. I struggled out of the morphine haze to focus on the present moment.
“—death wish,” Ash was saying. “Do you want to die? Is that it? Do you hate me so much that you’d make me watch you do it? You’d make me be responsible?”
“You weren’t responsible,” I answered. The morphine and pain made my voice sound weary. Beleaguered.
“Like fuck, I wasn’t responsible,” Ash hissed, my weak voice doing nothing to stay his anger. “You honestly believe that I’d be able to hand your mother a folded flag and just walk away, like I had nothing to do with it? I protect all my men, but you—” His voice broke and he turned away, kicking savagely at a fallen branch. “Fuck you and your death wish, Embry. Fuck you.”
Remembering the first day we met, I tried for a joke and failed. “I’d rather it was the other way around.”
In an instant, he was on me, straddling my thighs, one hand yanking my head back so I had to look up into his face. “Don’t play games with me,” Ash warned in a low voice. “Not tonight. Not after what you did. You don’t even want to know the things I’m thinking about right now.”
I could barely breathe. Pain sang out from my shoulder and hunger sang out from my thickening cock. I was at the mercy of a monster—in the hands of an angry god, as they say—and I’d never felt more alive. It was like kissing his boot, like that first moment I’d been shot at in the trees—the whole world came to life, the forest thrumming and the leaves rustling and my blood and heart all part of this incredible symphony of magic and music that was playing all the time, if only I had the ears to listen. Being with Ash was like my battle high, the fragility of life so apparent, the thrill of surviving it so exhilarating. Surviving him.
“Take it,” I said, my fantasies from all those years ago coming back and making me stir underneath him.
“What?” he asked quietly.
“Take what you’re owed. Take what you deserve for saving my life.”
His lips parted, his eyes hooded, and he pulled my head back even more, exposing my throat. “And what exactly do you owe me?” he asked. “What exactly do I deserve?”
I met his eyes, which were almost black in the dark. “Whatever you want.”
“What I want will have you flat on the ground with tears in your eyes. You think you want to give that to me?”
“No.” I swallowed. “I want you to take it from me.”
He went still.
“Let me thank you,” I begged. “Let me make you feel better. Use me. Use me how you need.”
“Oh, that’s what you want, is it?” he breathed. He leaned in, his thighs on my throbbing erection, and I felt his own, an iron bulge pressing into my stomach. It was massive. He’d tear me apart with it. “You won’t let me have you any other time, not with kisses or love letters, but when you’re bleeding and I’m furious, that’s when you’ll open yourself to me? That’s when I get to have this?”
How could I make him understand? That it had to be like this? That I had to be conquered, not wooed? Because it was new to me too; only with Ash did this part of me exist. I could still barely put words to it inside my own head.
But maybe he saw it in my face. Maybe he already knew the answer. He leaned down and bit my neck—not gently but hard, so savagely I cried out. His hand left my hair and began yanking impatiently at the Velcro and zipper fastenings of my uniform coat, efficiently stripping it off of me, taking some care with my shoulder but not enough that I felt gentled. He was still furious, still a monster, still a dark and stormy fairy tale prince, and I the person he’d rescued.
My T-shirt came off just as roughly, and there was no admiration, no petting or caressing, nothing that would distract him from his relentless anger. He moved off me, and one moment I was sitting against a tree, and the next I was forced over a rucksack. Impatient hands tore at my nylon belt, worked my pants down to the tops of my thighs. The air was cool—not chilly, but close—and I felt goose bumps pebble on my back and hips, across the firm flesh of my ass.
Through the morphine and the pain came a slight moment of embarrassed panic—what was I doing? Of all the men I’d slept with, there’d never been a time when I’d been unceremoniously stripped and opened, treated like nothing more than a convenient hole to fuck…
But the thought of it, of being so dehumanized when normally my lovers adored and worshipped me, brought me dangerously close to pumping cum all over this rucksack.
Ash clamped a forearm across my lower back, pinning me in place as his other hand smeared Vaseline from the first aid kit where he needed it. “Is this what you want?” he asked, not a little coldly. A fingertip pressed against my entrance, sliding in to the knuckle, and I bucked backwards. It felt wrong, my body interpreting
the invasion as pain, but I’d done it enough times to rewrite the feeling as pleasure. After a few seconds, he added a second finger, deeper and wider, and something grazed against my prostrate.
“Answer me,” Ash demanded. “Is this what you want?”
“Yes,” I moaned.
“You’re going to let me use you, aren’t you? Fuck you any way I want?”
I moaned again as those clever fingers left me, unconsciously rocking my hips against the rucksack to get some friction against my cock.
“Yeah,” Ash muttered to himself. “Yeah, you are.”
I looked back, unprepared for the sight that met me: Ash without his jacket, his T-shirt clinging to the lean muscle of his shoulders and chest, the biceps in one arm tensing and relaxing as he fucked a fist full of Vaseline through the open fly of his pants. Everything about him conveyed his power over me, his right to take what he wanted—the fact that he was still fully clothed, the slide of that brutal cock in his fist, the forearm still cruelly pinning me in place.
Finally, he had his cock slicked and glistening, and he moved closer, still holding me in place while the wide, blunt crown of his dick began to press against me. It felt huge, unbearably big, a monster, and I squirmed and gasped, instinctively trying to move away from the violation.
“Oh no,” Ash breathed. “You’re not getting away that easily.” He moved his arm underneath me, against my lower abs and hips, to keep me from moving forward any more, and then he continued his intrusion, the thickly swollen head of him pressing past the first ring of muscle and then past the second.
It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. The roughness, the pain from my gunshot wounds, the morphine. The years of wanting and wishing and furtively jacking off to ideas just as fucked up as this. It hurt, it hurt so badly it stole my breath, and yet my own dick felt stretched tight like a drum, wet with precum and throbbing with a needy heat.
Fingernails raked fire down my back and I arched in response, causing Ash to give a cruel laugh behind me. He shoved in another inch, the new angle making it so his tip pressed against that firm, full gland at the front of my inner walls, and I dropped down in morphine-drunk ecstasy, my body completely draped over the rucksack now.
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