I reach up with a thumb and try to smooth away the line. “How did you sleep?”
He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I didn’t mostly. I watched you.”
“Must have been boring,” I remark.
He shakes his head, matching my motion and reaching up to stroke my face with his thumb. “I can sleep any time. Getting to see you safe in my arms…I needed that more than I needed a few hours of sleep.”
Safe.
The terrible something presses through, tearing into my mind with claws and teeth, and I stiffen. I can still feel Melwas’s hands on me, taste apples in my mouth. Feel his hand hard on my pussy, grinding against my public bone.
I push away from my husband, breathing hard, and he lets me push away, but he rolls on top of me as I do, keeping his weight on his elbows and knees so that it’s not actually pressing against me, but I’m still caged by him. He presses a hand to my forehead, his green eyes the only color in a world that’s suddenly lost all vibrancy and depth. I can’t bear to see them, not right now when I can feel the ghost of Melwas’s grabbing touch, taste those awful apples in my mouth.
“Greer,” Ash says quietly. “Look at me.”
Reluctantly, and with extreme effort, I do.
“I’m here for your rage and your fear and your shame. Vent it on me, Greer. Strike me with it, burn me with it, scratch it into my skin. Cry it, whisper it, scream it. I want it all. I’ll take it all, because I promised to care for your pain and your pleasure, did I not? And isn’t this pain?” I give him the smallest of nods, and he continues, “So then doesn’t it belong to me?”
He can’t know, he doesn’t know, what a mess this is. My feelings are a hall of mirrors, warped and stretched and grotesque, and yet when I spin to look at one closely, I see all the cheap tricks in the glass that make it so. I understand that my feelings come from this place or that place, I can even name them to myself in an oddly detached sort of way if I try. And yet the moment I lift my concentration, the warped images come back, a hollow mockery of real feelings, real reactions.
I don’t want this—how the fuck can he?
I struggle to put this in words, and I can’t. “This isn’t your problem,” I tell him, glancing away from his face to see Embry, who’s still deeply asleep and snoring.
Ash gently turns my head back to his, but there’s an inevitability in his gentleness, the way that the ocean or the wind is inevitable. I could resist, I could refuse, but he’d win in the end. Not through force or coercion, or maybe some of those things, but it is his will, his singular, unrelenting will, that will overwhelm me eventually, no matter how hard I try. “Let it be my problem,” he says.
I let him turn my head again, let him scorch the inside of my soul with that king’s gaze that misses nothing. “Oh princess,” he says with real sorrow in his voice.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” I hiss. I don’t know why this should make me angry, why his kindness should upset me, but it does.
“I wouldn’t dare,” he says. “You think I pity you? You think that I think you’re weak?” He rises up on his knees, and something about his posture makes my heart beat a little faster. It’s the studied relaxation of his shoulders, the way his hands are carefully open by his thighs. He’s naked, his cock half-hard against one thigh, but it doesn’t make him seem any less dangerous. In fact, it makes him more dangerous somehow, as if all semblance of civilized behavior has been stripped away.
Although the way he tilts his head and studies me is very civilized. Very calm. “Stand by the bed.”
“I don’t want to play games right now,” I say sullenly.
“This isn’t a fucking game. Stand by the bed.”
I narrow my eyes at him, my complicated feelings shifting into one primary one: anger.
“Fuck off.”
“Fuck off isn’t your safe word, angel. You can be furious with me, you can say whatever you want, but unless you say Maxen, nothing changes.” He points to the side of the bed. His cock is fully hard now. “Do as you’re told.”
I chew on the inside of my mouth. I glare at him. How the fuck dare he, after what I’ve been through? After what was done to me? The anger snaps me out of my hollow confusion, peels away the dissociative sadness, and I get off the bed and stand next to it, making as big of a mess of the blankets as possible, making my body as unavailable as possible by facing away from him and crossing my arms over my chest.
I hear a small chuckle, as if my tantrum is cute, and not a real expression of a grown woman’s feelings. I spin around to glare at him, but I’m stopped short by his face, which is folded in a smile of pure, adoring love. “You’re a spoiled princess,” he tells me as he winds his fists in the blankets. “I can’t wait to punish you for it.”
I open my mouth to—well, I don’t even know. To tell him what a bastard he is, what an insensitive fucking asshole. To tell him how strange the abduction feels in my mind, like wearing a cloak of nettles. Move one way and your whole body is stung. Move another and you’re saved from the sharp ends, but knowing it’s only a matter of time before you’re stung again. It’s both feeling and the absence of feeling all in the space of microseconds.
Except when I’m about to say it all, I realize it’s not quite true, at least not right now. My fury at Ash has pushed the memory Melwas back—not far—but enough that I can live and breathe in this moment without the last few days constantly pulling on my thoughts.
Ash ignores me, or at least pretends to, winding the blankets around his hand one more time and yanking them easily off the bed. Next comes the sheet, which is harder, since it’s wrapped around Embry’s hips. But he’s strong, the muscles in his chest and arm flexing as he pulls, and I keep my arms crossed over my breasts to hide how tight my nipples have grown at the sight of that body at work.
Embry’s eyes flutter open and he groans as he rolls over onto his stomach. “I don’t want to go to school, Ma,” he says into the pillow, his voice muffled.
“I can’t decide how I feel about being called your mother,” Ash says dryly.
“You should feel bad about it,” Embry says into the pillow. “She’s mean. Just like you.”
It’s enough to make me smile, the tiniest bit. Enough to make me relax my shoulders.
Ash smacks Embry’s bare ass, playfully, but it leaves a bright red handprint. “It’s time to wake up, Patroclus.”
“Patroclus?” I ask.
Embry rolls over onto his back with a sigh. “Ash thinks we belong in an ancient Greek epic about wife-robbing.”
“To be fair,” Ash says, climbing off the bed, “I didn’t realize how prophetic that would be.”
Embry sits up. “Scoff.”
Ash pauses, arching an eyebrow, saying nothing.
“That’s right, I scoffed at you,” Embry says with dignity. “You chose it because you liked the idea of being the mighty Achilles and me your fucktoy.”
“You know that Plato’s Symposium says that Achilles is the fucktoy, right?”
“Scoff again,” Embry scoffs again. “You quoted Aeschylus to me the first time you kissed me. Not Plato.”
I’m truly smiling now, despite everything, and I have to remember I’m angry. Trying to display that anger. With some difficulty, I muster up a frown again.
Ash delivers a dramatic sigh. “Does it matter?”
“You were the one who brought it up.”
Embry glances over at me, and his fake-scoffing disappears. “Greer,” he says, in a voice that lets me know he can see all sorts of things I don’t want him to see.
“Right,” Ash says, all business once again. “Embry, I need your help.”
Embry looks at me once more, eyes a stirring wildflower blue, and then he looks back at Ash. “Anything.”
Ash walks over to the chair in the corner—not the stuffed one, but the wooden desk chair with no arms. It’s an old chair, one of those things that somehow survived the Eisenhower administration, but the moment Ash sits in it, it becomes a
throne. Solomon waiting to dispense wisdom. Even his nakedness makes him more regal somehow, more honestly powerful.
He snaps his fingers. The six months leading up to our wedding, the scenes we performed, the grooming, the delicious, loving preparation—it overrides everything. I’m over to him within the space of a second, on my knees with my arms boxed behind my back and my head down in the next. There’s no time for anger—in a way, not even room for it. He snaps, I obey. And the moment my knees touch the floor, the nettle cloak is lifted somewhat. No one can hurt me here at Ash’s feet. More importantly, I can’t hurt myself. Not with thoughts or feelings or memories. At his feet, I am His.
I serve at the pleasure of the President.
“Safe word?” he asks, a signal that things are about to get uncomfortable.
With my eyes downcast, all I can see are his shins and ankles and feet, dusted with that coal-black hair I adore so much. I focus on that as I answer, “Maxen.”
“Use it if you need it,” he says, and it’s still Ash for the moment, still the man who can’t sleep without me next to him. “I’m going to push you. It’s going to be hard.”
“Why are we doing this? Sir?” I remember to add.
He leans forward; I see the ends of his fingertips in the field of my vision. “Because you think that I think you’re weak. Because right now, you’re afraid that you are weak. Because your pain belongs to me and no one else, not even yourself. Because…” he takes a breath, and I can almost feel the pain, the need, radiating off him. “Because I almost lost you, Greer. Believe me when I say that I wish holding you for a night was enough to relieve this ache, this new distance between us, but it isn’t.” His fingers tangle gently in my hair. “I need it too, you see. I need to have it this way.”
I lean into his touch as much as possible, pushing against his hand like a cat. “So it’s for both of us?”
“Maybe me more than you. Embry told me what happened in Carpathia, what you asked him to do.”
Embry shifts behind us. I glance up at Ash, alarmed, but he trails a finger down to my lips, pressing its pad against them. “One demon at a time, Greer.”
“No one can wrestle one demon at a time,” I say from under his finger. “Demons link arms, join hands. They’re a package deal.”
He sticks two fingers in my mouth, silencing me. “Not today, not for you. I’m glad Embry was there to give you what you needed. I’m not angry…jealous, perhaps.” He looks at Embry while taking a deep breath and then looks back to me. “Okay, yes, I’m very jealous, but he saved you from Melwas. I would have given him anything. And you…you’d been through the pit of hell—do you think there’s any balm, any comfort I could refuse you after that? We won’t even think about it today—today is about having you here at my feet, where we both know you belong. My jealousy will keep for another day.”
I give his fingers a long suck, and then I nod. This is for both of us. One demon at a time.
I can do that.
He leans back. “Do you want to walk through what I have planned?”
I bite on the inside of my lip, my mind torn. Professor Greer wants to walk through it. In fact, Professor Greer wants to say Maxen right now and demand a back rub instead of a scene. But the more elemental part of me chides Professor Greer’s cowardice. In eight months, Ash has never harmed me, never pushed me where I didn’t need to go. If he thinks I need this, then I have to consider that he might be right.
And I do need it. In a way I can’t properly explain. I need something rough. Something grounding. Pain to drive out the pain.
Finally, I shake my head, still looking down. “I don’t want to know. I just want…” Fuck. Will I never be able to express what that unwanted touch made me feel? “I just want to feel like I’m yours. Not his.”
I don’t have to say his name for Ash to understand. His hands curl into fists. “You’re not his,” he says fiercely. “You’re mine.”
I nod, although tears are burning at my eyes. It’s such a basic truth—Melwas doesn’t have the power to change who I am, who I give myself to, how I crave my sex—yet right now the nettle cloak is back and it stings. Would Melwas have tried to rape me if I didn’t have Ash and Embry’s marks all over my body? If I didn’t have that undeniable scent of submissive on my skin? Was it something about me that invited his assault?
A finger comes under my chin, still wet from my mouth, and my face is lifted to my husband’s. It’s not Ash I see there, but my Sir.
“Tell me one thing you are remembering about it,” he orders, his gaze implacable and searching. “A color or a smell or a taste—”
“Apples.” I shudder out the word like it’s poison in my mouth. “There were apples at dinner before he brought me back to my room, and I could still taste them while he…” I trail off.
Ash releases my chin and looks over at Embry. “Kitchen. You know where they are.”
I hear Embry leave the room, and after he’s gone, Ash taps his fingers on his bare thigh. I stare at them, not dropping my gaze to the floor nor looking up into his face, staring at his hands and thinking about apples instead. The sour taste of them, how they brought saliva flooding to my mouth, how I couldn’t make that taste go away no matter how much I swallowed. How I could still taste them when Melwas touched me.
Ash’s fingers stop tapping. “Say it, angel.”
“I don’t want to do this,” I blurt.
“Because you think it won’t help? Or because it will be hard?”
“Both. That it will be hard and it will be for nothing.”
My chin is lifted again, and green eyes bore into mine. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he says. “Because it’s my risk, isn’t it?”
I frown. It certainly isn’t—it was my body that was forcibly subdued and exposed to Melwas, it’s my mind and my memories blighted by it—and—
Cruel fingers reach down and pinch an exposed nipple. I squeak, a squeak that turns into a long cry as my husband twists my nipple hard. “Did that hurt?”
“Yes, Sir,” I gasp.
“And whom does that pain belong to? You or me?”
“You, Sir.”
He lets go of my nipple to slap my breast. “And that pain?”
“Yours.”
He grabs my hair and yanks my head to the side so he can bite my shoulder unimpeded. By now my body is singing, my nervous system baffled, sending all kinds of electric signals to my brain. “And this pain?”
“It’s yours, Sir,” I manage.
His hand drops to my chest, running fingertips down to the top of my left breast, where they come to rest against my heart. The movement is possessive and careful and deliberate. Very quietly, very slowly, he asks, “And this pain? Whom does that belong to?”
I want to argue, I want to scream at him that it can’t be his, it didn’t happen to him, it happened to me, but I’ve fallen enough in the cadence of our moment that I answer, “That pain belongs to you too.”
And the moment I say it, my face crumples and there’s no more hiding, no more pushing it away. It’s right there, and I find I’m begging him to take it. “Please make it go away,” I beg, tears running down my cheeks. “Take it away from me.”
“Always.” With no effort at all, he leans down and takes me into his arms, kissing away the salt water on my face. I feel his tongue flickering against my cheek as he licks at them, like a vampire feeding off of tears instead of blood. “It’s my risk because it’s already my pain, angel. Give it to me for the next hour, trust me for just the next hour. Let me carry it for you.”
I nod, still sniffling, curling into a ball on his lap. He runs his hands through my hair, and there’s an appreciative rumble from low in his chest when he lets the silky stuff fall through his fingers. I feel his erection burn against my thigh, and I almost smile at that—his thing for my hair never ceases to amuse me.
Embry comes in, an apple in hand. Those blue eyes warm with something I can’t read when he sees me in Ash’s la
p, something molten and jealous. But it leaves as quickly as it came, and he closes the bedroom door and walks to us, apple extended.
“You ready, little princess?” Ash asks. “Snap your fingers if you need to stop, and we’ll stop. Otherwise, remember that your pain is my pain, and that I’m doing this for us. All of us.” I can feel him look up at Embry; Embry’s cock stirs under Ash’s gaze and he nods.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I’m ready.”
“Open your mouth then, angel. Just like you do when I want my cock in there. Oh very good, very good. What a pretty tongue you have, my little wife, so pink and so wet. Just like other parts of you. Embry, you know what to do.”
Embry’s face is slightly apologetic when he comes forward to put the apple in my mouth, but his cock is completely hard now, the skin at the crown stretched tight and dark. And the moment Ash murmurs, “Bite down,” and my teeth break the flesh of the apple, Embry’s face becomes angles and planes of pure, dangerous lust. Lost-to-himself lust, the kind I saw in Carpathia when he pretended to be my husband pretending to be my abductor, the kind I saw the night he pounded the virginity right out of me.
I’m so distracted by Embry’s face—like Mr. Darcy if Mr. Darcy fucked women to within an inch of their lives—that I don’t even think about the apple until the juice hits my tongue. But the moment it hits my tongue—sweet and tart and slightly floral—I buck and shudder in Ash’s arms, about to spit the damn thing out.
“Drop that apple, and you get the belt,” Ash warns, right as it’s about to fall from my mouth, and I have to bite deeper to keep it from tumbling. Juice runs out from the corner of my mouth and down my chin. I really don’t want the belt. Really, really, even though I know the high I have afterwards is like none other, that the way it drags me into the present and forces all other thought from my mind is probably exactly what I need right now.
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