Ash followed me, bearing down until his full length was buried inside. “Fuck, it’s hot inside your ass,” he hissed, almost sounding angry about how good it made him feel. He ground his hips into me, pulling out a few inches and rocking back and forth to tease that spot inside me.
“Oh God,” I mumbled. My hips thrust against the bag—it was a reflex, I couldn’t stop it if I wanted, and there was more cruel laughter behind me.
“You gonna come like a teenager humping a pillow?” His hand slid under my throat, curving me back towards him so he could talk into my ear as he slowly pistoned his cock in and out of me. “Huh?”
I shivered violently, devilish heat scissoring through my groin. My balls were drawing up, my thighs so tense they almost hurt more than the gunshot wound in my calf, and the morphine put everything on the near edge of surreal. For a moment, the man behind me with his cold laugh and humiliating taunts really was a twisted storybook prince. For a moment, this really was what happened all those years ago on that day he’d stood over me with his boot on my wrist—after defeating me at the drill, he flipped me over to finish that defeat in the most complete and total way possible.
He kept his hand on my throat, but his head dropped as he gave himself over to the feeling of fucking me, his strokes going deep and mean, hard enough to jar my shoulder every single time, hard enough to loosen the dressing on my wound. “Fuck,” he said to himself. “This is what I needed. Goddammit, hold still—” my hips were thrusting against the bag again, my climax only the barest breath away “—hold the fuck still like I want you to.”
That’s all it took, that stark confirmation that he was indeed using me, that right now to him I was just a tight hole that couldn’t fight back, and I came, rubbing against the bag, a horny teenager just like he’d said, and not a man with multiple confirmed kills and a garage full of sports cars. It was Colchester inside me, Colchester gripping my throat, Colchester showing me the side of him filled with limitless cruelty and selfish, animal strength. Colchester, Ash, my captain, staking my body with his cock like a conqueror, like a king.
And my climax went on and on and on, thick lines of ejaculate spattering the bag, and Ash kept my body curved towards him so he could watch it all from over my shoulder, as if I was putting on a show for him. And once I’d emptied myself, he pressed me back over the bag and let loose, as if my orgasm both angered and aroused him beyond measure. Almost all his weight was draped over me, I could feel the muscles in his thighs and abdomen and chest all working in concert to drive those powerful hips into me, all working to bury that cock deep and hard and fast. It was all I could do to breathe, all I could do to keep ragged, guttural groans from spilling out of my throat; it was his massive frame folded over mine and also that massive cock, unrelenting and greedy and unsatisfied, determined to wring everything it wanted from me before it finished.
Ash seemed lost to himself too, his jabs and cutting remarks from earlier now gone, just irregular grunts and the inexorable invasion of his dick as he speared me over and over again.
And then, without warning, his teeth sank into my shoulder and he exploded in a flurry of sadistic thrusts that left me with tears searing my eyelids. I could feel the scorch of his semen as he pumped himself into me, the hot spurts of him, and I could also feel the fresh blood trickling warm down my chest from the gunshot, and through my tears, a strange giddiness arrived. Colchester—Ash—had just fucked me to within an inch of my life, just spilled himself inside me at the same moment blood spilled out of me, like he was a vampire or a fairy queen or a wolf. I’d waited four years for this, and it had been more deadly and brutal and beautiful than I ever could have hoped.
We laid there for a moment, Ash still draped over me, and then—impossibly—he began moving inside me again. Still fucking hard.
“I hope you didn’t think it was that easy,” he murmured in my ear. He shifted his weight and tilted my body up, and I could feel the thin smears of blood from my leaking wound across my stomach as he positioned my body. The blood didn’t bother me and it certainly didn’t seem to bother him, not with the way he held his fingers up to the moonlight to look at it.
More shifting and moving and then my rapidly swelling cock encountered a warm palm full of Vaseline. His fingers closed around me and my eyes fluttered closed of their own accord and he suspended me between two realities—the reality of his thick cock stroking me from the inside and the reality of his slick fist, tighter and meaner than I liked to handle myself, but somehow even more perfect for that exact reason.
“I’m going to—” I broke off, it already happening, Ash’s dark laugh echoing in my ears as he kept jerking me through my climax. A few minutes later, he came again with a low growl and pulled out after his contractions slowed. I thought that was the end, but when I saw—even more impossibly—that he was still hard, I knew it wasn’t. He rolled me onto my back and eagerly tugged off my boots and pants, and then entered me again.
“You like being fucked like this?” he asked, pressing our chests and stomachs together so that my cock was squeezed between the flat muscles of our bellies. Whenever he peeled himself away, there were smears of blood and precum across the ridges of his perfectly sculpted abdomen.
We both groaned at the sight of the blood. “Yes,” I managed.
Oh God, there was no way I could get it up again, no way I could come, but it was going to happen, I could already feel it. Ash bent his head down to nip at my jaw, and I turned my face to look at him with feverish eyes. He was only half-monster now, and there in his face I could see my Achilles again, the man who danced with me, and was it wrong of me that I craved both? The man who danced and the man who bruised me?
And then he stilled, just for a moment, one hand coming up to press against the side of my cheek. “You’re beautiful in the moonlight,” he said quietly.
And he wrapped his arms underneath me and cradled me as he fucked me, his warm, firm lips finding mine and kissing the breath right out of my lungs, and when we came, we came softly and painfully, our fingers digging into each other’s backs and our teeth in each other’s necks.
I’d never been religious or spiritual until that moment. It was the first time I felt like there could be a god, and if there was a god, he or she had created humanity for exactly this reason, for exactly this sticky, breathless, erotic, painful moment.
Ash cleaned me up afterward, redressing the shoulder wound that had opened, giving me a second dose of morphine, using extra gauze and alcohol to clean off the blood and cum that had stained us both. “Of course it had to be bloody,” I murmured, the new morphine already swimming through my veins.
“Hmm?” Ash asked, now checking my calf bandage.
“It’s just…it feels right. That it was this way. With pain and violence.”
Ash was quiet for a moment, packing things away and then helping me back into my T-shirt and jacket. “It didn’t have to be this way,” he said finally. “And it doesn’t have to be this way again.”
“You said that in your letter,” I said. He finished tidying up and then he did something unexpected: he laid down next to me and pulled me against his side, my injured shoulder up and cradled by his arm, my head resting on his chest. It was a little ridiculous—I was a half-inch or an inch taller, so my feet extended way past his—but nevertheless, it felt good. It felt right.
“I said it because I meant it,” Ash told me. “I can be any kind of man you want me to be. As long as I can be your man.”
I sighed. “I don’t want you to change for me.”
“Embry, that’s bullshit—”
“No,” I interrupted, “you aren’t understanding what I’m saying. Not, ‘I don’t want you to change yourself for a relationship,’ but ‘I don’t want you to change at all, especially for me, because I want you the way you are.’ Besides, I don’t think you can change, Ash. I think you could try for a while. I think you could hide it if you had to. But I think there’d always be an itchy, dark corner
of you screaming in the shadows to be loosed. It would eat you up from the inside.”
For a long while, we laid there, listening to the breeze in the leaves, the chatter of the night animals. Ash’s hand ran idly along my arm, and despite the roughest sex I’d ever had, despite the bullet wounds and being effectively stranded in the middle of a war zone, I felt a sweet kind of peace. It was Ash, I realized. Ash made me feel that way. Protected and cherished, even though I was already extremely good at protecting and cherishing myself. But it was different when it came from someone else, I supposed, all the social wiring of the human brain designed to reward the feeling of another human’s attention.
It didn’t just feel like wiring though. It felt like incandescent magic, a secret alchemy, all created by the sweep of his fingers across the tattered sleeve of my coat and the steady beat of his heart under my ear. How funny that he warned me I would end up flat on the ground with tears in my eyes, and here I was, flat on the ground with stupid, happy warmth pricking at my eyelids, except my body was flush against his warm one and my tears were leaking onto his jacketed chest instead of into the dirt.
“I don’t know why I’m this way,” Ash said after several long moments. “And I go from accepting the things I want to hating how I need them. But if you don’t mind how I am, Patroclus, I’ll endeavor not to worry about it. So long as you don’t disappear again.”
“I’m done running from you,” I said honestly. “I tried and it didn’t matter—you haunted me everywhere I went.”
“And you haunted me,” he murmured, rolling over to press his lips against mine once more. “My little prince.”
And so the next act in our tragedy began.
16
Embry
after
The helicopter touches down with a jolt, but Greer doesn’t wake. I don’t blame her—between the abduction and the rescue, the last four days have been hell for her—hell for all of us, really—but her most of all. I remember her face in the window as Melwas touched her. And I remember her tears and bound hands grabbing for me as I stood by her bed afterward.
I’d felt that once before myself, that disoriented rush of gratitude and fear and love and self-destruction. How could I refuse her when I’d demanded the same of Ash after I’d nearly died?
How could I refuse her when it meant refusing both the past and present versions of myself?
The Camp David helipad swarms as the rotors slow, and I expect Luc or some other agent waiting at the door. I don’t know why, because I should have known it would be Ash there, deep circles under his eyes and black stubble that’s moved past stubble and is now a thick, delicious scruff. He ducks his head to step in, and his face as he sees Greer slices right through me with every feeling I have—jealousy and love and pride. And anger, anger most of all. Not the oldest anger I own, but old enough. The war anger.
That slicing look on Ash’s face is because of Melwas. That single tear slipping down Greer’s cheek as she opens her eyes and realizes she’s safely home and her Sir is there to lift her into his strong arms—that tear lays at Melwas’s feet too. And it’s bullshit that a tear and look could have just as much weight as a bullet in my shoulder, as a burning village, as the bodies of the men I’d vowed to protect in those godforsaken mountains. But I don’t care. It just does, and I promise myself right then and there that Melwas won’t get to hurt the people I love ever again. Somehow I’ll make sure of that. Some way.
Ash unbuckles Greer and carries her out of the helicopter. I follow, feeling strangely out of place as we make for the big house. Early summer wind ruffles through her long white-gold hair, fluttering the collar of Ash’s button-down, and they are so beautiful together, an ideal couple, America’s Hero and America’s Sweetheart. Hand-drawn for storybook perfection.
And where does that leave me?
Ash dismisses everyone except for me from the house, and together we walk into the master bedroom. I sink into a stuffed chair in the corner, not realizing how beat I am until now. My entire body seems to melt into the upholstery; a defeated exhaustion creeps into me. I watch Ash set Greer gently on the edge of the bed. She looks up at him with gray eyes so empty and tired that I have to look away.
“Little princess. I’m going to undress you and wash you,” he explains, “and then you are going to sleep.”
She doesn’t respond, merely turning her head to look away from him.
He catches her chin, and when he speaks, his voice is as tender and deep as it was when he promised to love her in sickness and in health. “The answer is yes, Sir.”
The words bring a flicker of life to her face. She looks back to him, as if really seeing him for the first time, and with her chin trembling and her voice thick, she responds, “Yes, Sir.”
He glances over to me. “Wait here, Embry. We have things to talk about after I’ve cared for my wife.”
I nod, lean my head back against the chair, and it’s the last thing I know before the exhaustion takes me.
“Embry.”
My eyes open to see Ash standing above me, a strange expression on his face. His hair is wet and water drops still cling to his bare chest, but he’s put on a pair of sweatpants that hang low on his hips. I steal a look over at the bed and see a slender form piled high with blankets. In the late afternoon sun coming through the window, I see the glint of blond hair on the pillow.
“She fell asleep the moment I laid her down,” Ash says.
“You look like you could use some sleep too.”
Ash passes a hand over his face. “I can’t sleep without her anyway. Knowing the two of you were out there made it more than impossible.”
“She’s safe now.”
“And so are you. Let’s go to my office and let Greer rest.”
We go, closing the bedroom door quietly behind us and moving into Ash’s office, a wood-paneled room with a large desk and several heavily laden bookshelves. He bids me to sit on the couch near the large windows and he sits in the chair next to it. For a few moments, we both look out the window at the tall, leafy trees outside, aspens and maples and oaks, all green and summer and so different from the scrubby evergreens of Carpathia.
Then he moves his gaze from the window to me. “She has fresh bite marks on her,” he says.
I’m still trying to figure out how to answer him, when he says, “Tell me it was you, Embry. Tell me it was you and not him.”
I exhale. “It wasn’t him. I—after I found her—” the tiredness is not helping with the complicated swirl of feelings and fears right now, and guilt infects me. “We never talked about what would happen between the three of us. Rules. I didn’t think it was wrong because we hadn’t laid out any boundaries.”
“We didn’t have time to lay out boundaries.” His gaze and voice are still filled with a cool kind of calm. I resist the urge to shiver or look away, knowing he’ll see. “You fucked her? Just the two of you?”
“It’s not what it sounds like, I swear. Melwas wasn’t able to rape her,” I say all in one breath, “but he touched her. If you’d seen her, Ash—”
He stands up and walks over to a window, pressing his forearm against the glass and leaning forward. The posture highlights the muscles in his arms and shoulders, the place where his sweatpants hang from his sharp hipbones and hug his firm ass.
“What, Embry?” he says, and it’s all in his voice, his wounded, bitter voice. “What would I have done if I’d seen her?”
The tiredness falls away, my place as Vice President falls away, everything falls away, and I do something I rarely ever do unless I’m wrestled into it. I go and kneel at his feet, lowering myself down to press my lips against the top of one foot. There’s a light sprinkling of dark hair near his ankle, the thick cords of tendons, and the clean soap smell of his recent shower.
He freezes as I do this, not saying a word, not moving. I switch to the other foot, letting my lips linger on his skin long enough to feel it warm under my mouth.
Finally he sa
ys in an almost indifferent voice, “Did you come? Did she come?”
“Yes,” I whisper against his foot.
“Did you think of me?”
“Goddammit, Ash, you know we did.”
“That’s Goddammit, Sir.”
“You might as well have been in the room with us. Sir.”
“Did you pretend to force her?”
The words puncture me, lodge in me, expertly shot arrows. I look up at him, desperate, and he takes pity on me, bending down to stroke his fingers through my hair. “It’s what she would have needed, little prince. Wanted too.”
I duck my eyes in shame.
“Ah,” he says. “And it’s what you wanted.”
My hands are shaking, and he gets to his knees and wraps my hands in both of his. They’re steady and warm, like him.
“I walked in and she was tied up—I mean, taped up. Ankles and wrists. A gag. She begged me, she cried—” My voice threatens to break, but I keep going, keep confessing my sins to my priest. My king. “I asked you for something like that once—how could I deny her? And she said she needed it, but Ash…I wanted it before I thought of all that. I wanted it the moment I walked into that dark room and my shadow fell across her body.”
“Did you have a safe word?”
“We agreed on snapping fingers because I…I put her gag back in her mouth.”
Ash nods, acknowledging that we’d done it safely, but his eyes are already growing distant. I wonder if he’s imagining it, picturing the lurid, fucked-up scene for himself. “Did you leave her taped up?”
“Yes.”
His sweatpants do nothing to hide his growing erection. “Did she fight you?”
Shame and arousal come in equal measure. “Yes.”
“And you fought back and won.” He closes his eyes.
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