“Breathe,” Minnow ordered, tapping his cheek.
He drew a ragged breath, like he’d run a marathon, his heart hammering wildly and his ass aching. Why did people do this? Why did Minnow let them do this to her?
Severin gently rolled his hips, convincing Rodrigo’s body into submitting to his cock’s invasion.
“Son of a bitch,” he mumbled thickly, feeling drunk. He felt pried wide, so full he was sure Severin’s Prince Albert was nudging against his fucking tonsils.
“That’s a good boy,” Severin grunted, his thrusts getting harder. “I love not having to be as careful with you.”
He moaned. Even though it still hurt, there was something else building. A pleasure that made him weak and feverish. Garbled Spanish words escaped him, but he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, if anything. Mostly profanity. Every thrust jolted him forward into Minnow’s pussy, and they were both helpless to do anything other than take what Severin was giving them.
“Yeah, that’s it, pretty boy.” Minnow wriggled beneath him, finding leverage somewhere to meet his unintentional thrusts. “You like him deep inside you like that.” She moaned and angled her hips to take him deeper. “Fuck. I wish I had a camera. You two are the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Kiss the bitch and shut her up,” Severin ordered.
Rodrigo lowered his mouth to hers, taking her lips possessively. She sucked his tongue and Severin bit his neck and the pressure in Ro’s balls built to the point of pain.
“Please,” Rodrigo begged, but it was too late to wait for permission. The orgasm sucker-punched him. Every muscle in his body seized for long, irregular heartbeats, then released to spasm in a blinding flash of pained ecstasy. Minnow whimpered, clawing at his arms as she bucked under him, her own release milking the come from his balls as Severin’s cock plunged hard and deep into his tender asshole. He bellowed helplessly, skewered between them, agonizingly aware of every pulse of come they conspired to force from his body.
“Fuck,” Severin choked out. His teeth locked down on the back of Ro’s neck, the rhythm of his hips becoming fitful, his breath hot, but the come shooting into him hotter yet, dripping to mingle with his own come that he could feel sliding from Minnow to coat his thighs. He shuddered and both Minnow and Severin clung to him, kissing him. He felt completely raw and vulnerable and empty, but Minnow seemed to know and wrapped her legs around his body once Severin had slowly withdrawn. Sev left for a moment, but came back, wiping come from Ro’s ass with a cold cloth that made Rodrigo try to edge away by thrusting harder into Minnow.
“Good thing you’re at half-mast or that would have left a mark,” she teased, kissing him with unhurried pleasure, as though the wooden bench was more than comfortable enough for her.
“You’re not bleeding. Come on.” Severin coaxed him up, but only to guide him to one of the biggest tables in the room. It was only marginally more comfortable than the bench, and only because it was harder to fall off of. “I probably should have waited for a bed.”
“Oh hell no,” Minnow said, glaring. “I got the floor in the fucking ballroom. If Rodrigo had gotten a bed for his first time I’d be lodging a grievance with the union.”
“The submissive’s union?”
“Yup.”
“Submissives don’t get to unionize.”
Minnow laughed, sounding giddy. “I’m being repressed!”
She followed them to the table and crawled up beside Rodrigo and nuzzled into his side. He pulled her close, but draped an arm over his eyes. Fuck, his ass was sore. It was satisfying, though, to feel where Severin had been, although that was probably the endorphins and elation influencing things. Having come dripping out of his ass was a weird feeling. He wanted Severin to come over and check on him, but he also knew he’d probably gotten all the aftercare he could expect. He’d already gotten more than he thought he would.
A rough hand grabbed his wrist, and something warm and hard closed over it. When he looked, Severin was fastening something there – a smooth metal bracelet that matched Minnow’s collar. It was plain and expensive looking, but in a masculine way.
“What’s this?” Rodrigo asked, proud about how little his voice shook, considering the roiling emotions in his belly.
“You’re mine, Rodrigo. You already agreed.”
“I did.”
“You don’t get to fucking leave us, okay?”
“But...I have to work.”
Severin flicked his fingers dismissively. “When I give you permission, I’ll let you travel, but you have to come to me to get this off or security won’t let you through.” He stared Rodrigo down, and Ro’s whole body responded, knowing damned well who owned him, and reveling in that ownership.
And just like that, he was Severin’s slave. Typical Severin.
“You should marry us,” Minnow murmured dreamily, burying her face into Rodrigo’s shoulder.
He carefully avoided looking at Severin, who’d withdrawn somewhere in the workshop – maybe he’d gone back to working.
“What’s between you and Severin is different,” he admonished, his neck heating. She shouldn’t be volunteering Sev for anything, let alone that.
He pulled away from her, feeling like an asshat. He felt too vulnerable like this...talking about this right after what Severin had just done. He sought out his swim shorts, wishing he had more clothes to put on.
The world was designed for twos, not threes. It was only right that she and Severin get married. Minnow needed protecting, and Severin needed her just as much if not more. The two of them loved each other. What they had was real and lasting and normal and...just right. Rodrigo was entertainment more than anything serious. Besides, he wasn’t some sort of starry-eyed teenage romantic – he never had been. It wasn’t like he needed a wedding to make him feel fulfilled.
Arms wrapped around him from behind. Startled, he struggled, but Severin was determined. Wordlessly, they tested each other’s strength, but eventually Severin pinned him to the wall beside the door, pressing Ro’s face against the rough wood.
“You’re just as important to me as she is,” Severin whispered in his ear. “Find a way for the three of us to get married, or to have something like it. If there’s no way to patch legal documents together, you should be the one who marries her. You’re more stable, and it’ll mean more to your mother.”
Fuck. He’d marry her in a heartbeat, but there was no way in hell he’d leave Severin behind. She wouldn’t agree to abandon Sev either, and Rodrigo knew it.
Severin slid a hand up between the wall and Ro’s chest, hand over his heart, holding him close in the only way Severin could tolerate. He rested his forehead on Rodrigo’s shoulder.
He didn’t say anything else but he didn’t need to.
Chapter Seven
The noise of the puppies barking and crashing through the underbrush made walking in the woods behind the house very different than it had been months ago. The pups made everything sillier. They reminded him of his nieces, always ridiculous and getting into mischief. He’d never tell Minnow, but he was glad she hadn’t found homes for the clumsy dorks.
His phone vibrated, and when he checked the text message he snorted.
Rodrigo 8:46am: What did you do to her, you evil bastard?
Severin 8:49am: Nothing she didn’t deserve. Why?
Rodrigo 8:49am: She just sent me a picture of her sad face with no explanation.
Rodrigo had gotten up early to go see a client in town, so Severin had woken Minnow by licking her sweet little pussy. He’d edged her for so long she’d begged to come, but then he’d stopped and given her a bath, leaving her pouting and needy. The sound of her final pleas as he’d left for his walk was still making his balls ache.
Severin 8:50am: I’m making her wait for an orgasm.
Rodrigo 8:51am: Again? How can you say no to that face?
Severin 8:52am: Are you insinuating that I’m cruel?
Rodrigo 8:52am: Wow, he caught on.
Give the dominant a cookie.
Severin arched a brow at his phone, waiting for what he knew was coming.
Rodrigo 8:52am: I apologize, Severin. I shouldn’t have said that.
He chuckled, then walked for a few minutes, letting Rodrigo sweat it out after saying something that disrespectful.
Severin 9:06am: We’ll be discussing that text when you get home.
Rodrigo 9:06am: Fuck. Now I’m going to have a hard-on through this whole meeting.
Loïc sighed. Severin had almost forgotten he wasn’t alone with the dogs.
“You just saw them earlier, and now they’re texting you?” he asked derisively. “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to talk to me so much.”
“Apparently relationships are like this. Especially new ones.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Severin slid his gaze to the younger, more socially aware version of himself. “You’ve never...”
“Been in a relationship? Well, I guess that would depend on your definition.” He had a stick in his hand, and he smacked it against almost every tree they passed on the path. There was a subtle violence about it that wasn’t lost on Severin. Reading Loïc’s non-verbals was so easy when they were so similar to his own. “I had regulars who knew a few things about me, but it was my job to know them, not the other way around. Most men didn’t care who I was beyond getting their egos stroked and dicks sucked. People prefer talking about themselves than learning about you, especially when you’re just the help.”
“Martine didn’t see you as a business partner?”
“Behind the scenes, yes. In public I was a customer loyalty perk.”
Severin grunted, not sure what to say. The conversation with Rodrigo had been a fun diversion, but Loïc was the reminder that life was usually much less pleasant. Like he could ever forget.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, not sure what else to say. He sucked at stuff like this.
Loïc shrugged. “It’s not like I fought them or got beaten.”
“Did you ever try to refuse?”
He breathed a humorless laugh. “I was better trained than that.”
Severin called the pups back as they frisked after a bird.
All of the years he’d spent with his surrogate family, feeling sorry for himself, and he’d had no idea how good he’d fucking had it. Loïc had lost so many more years of his life compared to what had been done to him.
“Was anyone kind to you?”
“Sometimes after the Johns hurt me Martine would kiss it better,” his brother replied, his voice cool and mocking.
Loïc’s jaw tightened, and the words and their implications sunk in.
“She didn’t.”
“Who do you think trained me, Severin? You think Martine hired some sexy call girl to teach me? She was my first – my only woman. She was almost the mother of my child. She was also the last person I slept with.”
The contents of Severin’s stomach tried to come up, but he swallowed the bile. The poor bastard.
“Yeah, yeah. How disgusting. I should see a therapist. Spare me the fucking lecture.” Loïc strode ahead, then broke the stick in his hands into pieces and tossed them into the bush. The dogs watched, but then looked up at Severin for permission to follow the discarded pieces of stick.
“Therapists are only useful if you actually want to get over things. If you believe they can be fixed.”
Loïc gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Exactly. There’s nothing left to save. I should have let myself go when she died, but I wanted to meet you first. Now I’ve met you and I’m clinging to you and your life like a drowning man.”
“What do you mean, you should have let yourself go?”
“I should have blown my head off. What the hell do you think I mean?” Loïc stopped, jamming his hands into his pockets and glaring. “Don’t lie and tell me you never consider it.”
Severin shrugged, meeting his own familiar gaze in his brother’s face. “Why would I deny it? Doesn’t everyone think about it?”
“I don’t know.” Loïc’s eyes sheened with tears. “I don’t think they do.”
Severin opened his mouth to assure him fantasizing about suicide was normal, but truthfully he had no idea. Maybe normal people never thought about it – never thought through the plans in gory detail as a balm to a pointless existence. He didn’t want to die now though. Not when he finally had a reason to stick around.
He shrugged then pulled his brother into an awkward, one-armed shoulder hug. Loïc pulled stiffly away.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“No one needs pity, dickhead. You just need to know that I’m glad you chose to meet me first. You’ve given me answers I never expected to have, and I’m glad I got to meet you.”
“What? No ‘don’t do it, Loïc, you have so much to live for’?”
“What the fuck do I know? Maybe you have nothing to live for. Maybe our relationship means nothing to you, or isn’t enough incentive to put up with the rest of the shit in your head. It’s not my place to tell you whether your life is worth living. I’m too ugly to be a fucking motivational poster.”
Loïc snorted a laugh and a tear fell, but he dashed it impatiently away. He pasted on a plastic smile then let his mouth relax. “It’s strange not having to pretend I’m happy anymore. There’s no one to entertain.”
“You own your face now. You get to choose your expressions, even if they’re ugly ones. I could teach you some really terrifying ones, if you like. Years of practice.”
His brother scowled off into the distance. He let the scowl fall away then did it again as though testing it out.
“You just let yourself be angry?”
“I’ve been angry for twenty-five years. You have a lot of catching up to do.” He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “You’re also allowed to be sad here.”
The wind rustled the trees around them, whipping Severin’s hair into his eyes. He stripped it away.
Loïc shook his head reproachfully. “Men don’t get sad.”
“Men turn everything that isn’t happy into angry. It’s not good for us.”
“Your therapist tell you that?” Loïc asked, mocking him.
“Yeah, but it’s true.”
They walked for a long while, saying nothing.
His brother cleared his throat. “I’m being smothered,” he finally said. “It’s dark. Like a pillow being shoved over my face. No matter how much I want to, I’m too tired to scream. I’m too tired to push it away.”
Severin bit the inside of his cheek, remembering the feeling far too intimately.
Loïc patted one of the dogs. “The truth is even if I could scream, no one would give a shit.”
*
“So you’re basically marrying both of them? Can’t do anything the easy way, huh?” Church laughed at the other end of the phone.
Severin paced around his office then sprawled out on the padded coffee table, tolerating the attention of whichever mutt had decided his elbow needed licking as soon as he was horizontal.
“The easy way sounds good, but it’s never really been my way of doing things.”
“Maybe this is the universe’s way of making up for the rest of your life.”
Was Church including himself in that? Severin hoped not. “The rest of my life wasn’t so bad, man. Not after five. I had people who loved me, food in my belly, a roof over my head. Some people aren’t so lucky.”
Church whistled. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Who are you and where’s my brother?”
“The dick?”
“The dick.”
“He’s gone.”
“What happened to him?”
Severin sighed and stretched his legs before letting his booted feet drop heavily back to the floor. “I think it’s a tossup between them and Loïc. I was dwelling on the wrong fucking shit. I thought things would have been different if Martine kept me. I was right. They would have been. Loïc had it way
fucking worse than I ever did.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Sometimes you have no idea how lucky you are when your wishes don’t come true.” He pet the dog – Montgomery – trying to convince him to give up his slobbering assault on his elbow, only to have the mutt start rubbing his neck on the top of Severin’s head. He sat up and ran a hand through his hair, finding some of it just as damp as his elbow.
There was a sound like a sigh from the other end of the phone.
“Everything good with Ilse and the kids?”
“Yeah.”
Severin could feel something wasn’t right, though. They’d been alone together so much in life that sometimes he knew Church better than he knew himself.
“What is it then?”
Church snorted. “It’s stupid.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m fucking jealous.” Church barked a self-conscious laugh. “I’m so fucking happy you’re not alone, but your biological brother has just kind of...slid in there and taken my place.”
“No. It’s not like that.” Loïc was a nice kid, but he couldn’t replace his brother. Church was the one who had been there for him when he was a child and too angry to talk – who taught him to read and to trust. He was the one who stole cookies from the kitchen with Severin, and got up early with him to watch cartoons. Their boyhood tree forts and swimming adventures could never be replaced by a stranger. “You and I share memories no one else was there for.”
“Yeah.” Church’s deep voice was hoarse. “You seem so at peace now. I wish our moms could see you.”
“See me? I look the same.”
“Then tell Minnow to give you a fucking haircut, already! At Christmas you looked like the kind of guy who has bodies buried in the basement.”
Severin chuckled. He thought it was quiet enough, but some of the sound must have reached Church.
“Okay, you laughing is officially freaking me out. I’m going to go now. Tell the real Severin to call me when he gets in, and tell him he really needs to hire more believable replacements if he’s trying to get out of talking to me.”
Tragic King (The Dominant Bastard Duology Book 2) Page 14