Black Collar Empire

by A. N. Latro

  With only one sentence, he has confirmed the reason she can't help but seek him out, the reason she felt his two years of absence like an extended winter. Never has he failed to be completely unpredictable. With each meeting they've ever had, he has taken her off guard.

  It took her most of those years to admit to herself that she honestly missed him and that the moment she met him he took a place of intrigue for her, a representation of the decadence and danger for which she longed.

  “So is it about time for another verbal lashing?” she asks, folding her hands in her lap to keep them still.

  He sighs into the chilly night, spits a curse into the breeze so that it's barely audible. “I need your help,” he says quietly, voice so heavy with distress that it stops her.

  “Help?” she chokes. Her temper rises to the surface, unannounced and unabashed. She can feel it in her cheeks. “Help!” She can't contain it, so she makes the conscious decision to show him the direction in which he's never witnessed her ferocity go. “The last time I saw you, you were flinging my words in the slush and threatening me. Now you want my help? I don't fucking owe you anything, Seth Morgan.”

  He winces, drops his forehead into his hand, and curses again. “I didn't threaten you,” he answers, voice muffled, so different from its usual pompous air. “I would never threaten you.”

  The anger dies, and she's left hanging onto her defiance. It's the only thing keeping her from crumbling to the sympathy that tries so hard to rise to the surface. Never mind the questions that sound in her quick-fire, journalistic brain—namely, what can bring the head of a fortified empire to the scarlet-lettered town crier for help?

  “What could you possibly need from me?” she demands with a scoff, wishing he would just look at her, just smirk and crook his eyebrow. Just give her some flash of his irresistible audacity.

  “Answers,” he says.

  The admittance is down-trodden, reluctantly given. It makes her sad in a way she can't quite explain or understand.

  “Answers?” she mouths, unable to put a voice to it in fear that the sound will encroach on some sacred magic.

  He must hear her breath, because he turns, finally, questioningly, to her. His expression is all worn nerves and stitched brow. He says, “My family doesn't give them freely, but I need some facts. They're long overdue.”

  Answers?

  “Don't you have people for that?” she asks, tone dragging with incredulity.

  “I don't have people,” he snaps, clearly annoyed. “Listen, if you don't want to do it, I'll pay for your cab fare home.” He stands, shoving his hands into his pants pockets.

  “What exactly do you want to know?” she asks, only barely resisting the urge to grab him and keep him close.

  He's pensive, with his shoulders drawn up and his arms pressed close to his body. She watches his thin sweater bunch around him, watches the tension lines drawn along his forearms. She loves how his sleeves are pushed up toward his elbows, how his arms are thin yet so powerful.

  He stands for a long time with his back to her, teetering, it seems, on the edge of a difficult issue. The foreign aromas and struggling life assault her as she scoots to the edge of the bench, waiting on a pin to rush to him if he tries to leave, despite the consequences.

  With a breath like the old and tired wind, he returns to his seat, meticulously avoiding her probing gaze. She realizes there is something in his hand, a key. It flashes gold in the dirty neon. He says, “I need to know what my brother was up to before he died.”

  All his warnings to leave his family alone, all his pleas for discretion from her come crashing down around them. Each and every time she has brazenly sought the murky details of his family life strain against this single, unorthodox request. The ribbons of veiled concern he has shown toward her threaten to twist too tightly and strangle her heart. She can feel it battling against her as an agonizing catch in her chest. The stormy waters of syndicate trust must be boiling around him if he has resorted to such a risky move.

  Memories dance through her head, reminding her of how long she has been strangely entangled in society's Morgan obsession. How many years ago did she walk into Gabriel's office, head held high and stomach quivering with nerves, hands fumbling with her pen and paper? How many summers have passed since that hot July night when she first tried to win an interview with Seth? He was so young then.

  It's been long enough that she has watched reality chip away at his careless rogue attitude. It's been long enough that she has watched from a distance as he suffered through the loss of the remaining pieces of his immediate family.

  He cannot begin to interpret the shadows that move within her hesitation, cannot begin to fathom the secrets of her own. He sees her fingers tighten on each other. Her foot bounces anxiously.

  “What do you mean?” she asks, fingers itching to take notes. Now is not the time.

  He holds the key out in front of him by its narrow tip. The metal glints dully, its huge surface catching the tints of the disparaging street lamps. “I went to his apartment last night for the first time,” he answers. If she was ready for anything when she agreed to meet him, it wasn't honesty. She had been prepared for war, but she can't fight his rare gentleness. “Except he didn't live there,” he continues.

  “What?” she gasps openly.

  Their eyes meet like liquid fire, like a hammer on a red-hot blade. Sex flashes between them, slicing through the somber atmosphere like a raging inferno so that he looks away again, unable to sustain such a burning connection. “The place is empty, like a magazine ad or idealistic bachelor pad,” he says, letting the key slip back into his palm. “It just—doesn't feel right, like he didn't actually live there.”

  “So you want me to find out where Caleb parked his boots at night?” Vera asks, blinking several times, as if it will make this conversation seem more real. Of course, it seems perfectly reasonable in a syndicate like his to hide one's greatest secrets from everyone.

  Seth shrugs. “Most likely, Caleb stayed out most of the night, but he had to crash sometimes. He wouldn't do it in such a big, cold bed, and he wouldn't make it up when he was done.” The words are so casual, personal, and given so unusually freely. “His old friends are also dead, and his only residence on our books is this one,” he continues, indicating the key in his hand.

  She blanches in the semi-darkness. Part of her wants to be brave, to ask why Caleb's best friends are dead, yet a part of her, one that she will hardly acknowledge, is scared as shit to know.

  “It feels like he wanted to keep someone out of his business,” says Seth. “I need to know what that business was.”

  He can't say it aloud, but the prospect of finding pieces of Caleb's life that have been untainted by the syndicate's secretive ways and meddling hands would be invaluable for Seth's peace of mind.

  “You expect foul play,” she says. Her tone is not a question, not speculation. She knows both from the flicker of surprise on his face and his cryptic, minimal information. More than ever, she believes Caleb did not die in the frozen waters of the Hudson. She wonders, for the first time, if Seth watched his brother die.

  “I don't waste time on expectations,” he answers with a shake of his head. “And foul play is pretty standard practice in my world.”

  “So you just run through life with your gun trained on whomever is closest,” she says, her words biting into his flesh, “because those are the ones who present the most danger to your emotional blockade. I won't help you if you make it this difficult. I shouldn't do it all.”

  She hopes her bluff will hold. She's hanging on his every nuance.

  “Look,” he demands, and she does, directly into his loaded gaze, like hard coal in the half-light. “I'm forgoing logic and common sense by coming here. I'm doing you wrong as we speak. What I'm asking you to do is dangerous and stupid for us both. Learning the details of my life can only make yours more unsteady, as my family doesn't take it very well when people start digging up bones
. Please, please, don't fill in the blanks.”

  He must know he asks the impossible. The details are like a drug to her, like sex and passion and need. How can he not realize that once the pieces begin to be clear, the blanks fill themselves? How can he not know that his pleading tone makes her weak? She should get up, walk away, have a drink, lead the simple life, but she simply can't resist the truly intriguing offer he has set before her. He knew before he came here that she would do it. “So what do I get for my effort?” she asks, hand slipping almost imperceptibly to land softly on his knee.

  He stiffens.

  She's drunk on the moments alone they have stolen, the thrill of adrenaline at the prospect of a perilous and hushed assignment. And of course, the sight of him will always make her think about sex, for their very first meeting had resulted in hard, sweaty fucking. She remembers being pleasantly impressed by his stamina. “Money,” he says through gritted teeth.

  “That's too easy,” she breathes, leaning so that their arms are touching. The current between them is highly charged. “I don't want money,” she whispers.

  He's so warm. To touch him again after so long feels like pure ecstasy in her blood. Her hand inches up his thigh. He acts like he wants to make her stop, but still he doesn't move.

  “I have nothing else to give you,” he says, voice solid, though spoken so softly she couldn't hear him if she were a few inches more away from his inviting lips.

  She extends her fingers, brushes his length under his pants. He's hard beneath her touch. That's when his hand closes over hers, stops her assault, though his internal battle is evident in his wounded gaze.

  “Then let me do the giving,” she answers with a shark's smile.

  She slips her hand from his grasp and presses it firmly against his obvious arousal. She hears the hitch of his breath, feels his body shudder despite himself.

  “Everybody wants something from you, don't they?” she asks in his ear, lips grazing the supple skin just barely.

  She watches his eyes widen, knows he wants to present some defense, but again he says nothing. For all her tempestuous nature, the heart of the journalist lends attention to the subtleties of the human experience. Any personality as high-profile as his is inherently also in high demand. That's exactly why the gossip papers have recently revived their lavish and outlandish dedication to presenting his beautiful face as often as possible. He is everyone's wet dream.

  Perhaps she is exercising cruelty at this point, but she wouldn't go so far as to call this manipulation, or seduction. She likes to think of her actions as relief from reality for someone who has returned to her life through unlikely situations.

  She continues, “Everyone has strings attached to you, don't they, by deep-seated hooks, and they're all pulling on you, aren't they?”

  For a blazing moment, he curses her way with words, her intimate relationship with them and the way she can make them appeal to a well-guarded part of his psyche. The stress of his status should never hold him back, never break him down, yet isn't that what drove him here in the first place?

  Her palm applies pressure on his erection, stirs the fire within him in a way with which he can't contend. Their sex has never been about attachment or cuddling afterward. Theirs has always been forcefully detached from their responsibilities, deliciously detached. His eyes battle to close, an instinctual reaction to her commanding touch. Her thumb works circles on the head of his penis just as it forces the tension to uncoil at the base of his spine. “Let them tear me to pieces,” he says, nearly a groan. He wants to push her away, to fight for himself. He can only grind his teeth.

  “Shhhh,” she whispers with fluid rhythm. “Don't fool yourself into thinking you'll ever let them get the best of you.” Her fingers work the cold, metal button of his slacks loose from its hole, then she slides them beneath the band of his silky boxer-briefs. His skin is searing. His body belies his rebellion, betrays him to her persuasions. She catches the back of his head in her hand as it falls in surrender. She captures the hot sigh that seeps from him with her lips as they taste his. She works him gently, tauntingly. She pulls away just enough to let him feel her say, “I have never been your enemy. You don't have to treat me like one.”

  He draws in a sharp hiss at her massaging touch, lifting his head far enough to crack his eyes and give her a weakly admonishing glare. “It's worse,” he growls through gritted teeth, “to be my friend.”

  She folds one leg under her and brings the other against the bench, pressing up to his hip. One bare fingernail presses against his lips as the other hand makes a long, slow stroke. If he has anything else in mind to say it never reaches the air.

  She kisses him until his head again falls backward. Then her lips stray down his firm, spicy throat. She takes an indulgent breath of him, then says, smiling, “You've been telling me that for some time now, but I stopped believing you a few years back.” Nimble fingers retreat; her lips return to his. He feels his zipper separating, but he can do nothing to make himself protest. He finds one arm snaking around her waist, the other hand reaching to barely cup her breast, the most tender touch he has ever given her. She pulls away from his contact and his kiss. “Though we'll never exactly be friends either,” she says and frees him from his open fly. Then she really tastes him.

  He can't help but make an audible “Ah” when her tongue slides from his tip to the base. His fingertips latch onto a slot in the bench. She teases him with her mouth until she hears his breathing escalate. Then she takes him in, still achingly slow so that he growls again. “Mmmmmm,” she says onto him, letting the vibrations of her personal victory intensify his need for release.

  His hips buck the slightest bit when she pushes him to the back of her throat, flaunting the many skills she has learned in her time. He hates that he has missed her.

  She finds a moderate rhythm, moving her hand in time, and she takes him back to the same excruciating depth with every motion. The most delicate suction draws a low moan from his lips. One hand fists into her slightly curling hair, devilishly red even in the sub-par lighting.

  She smiles around him, loves every minute of it, each tiny reaction, the building friction of the little death. She moans again, as he bucks slightly, fucking her mouth.

  The subway rumbles beneath them, in tune with the soul shaking at street level. A honking horn from a nearby street hardly disturbs them. The white haze of the city blankets everything in a strange muted state. The city itself yields to its king.

  Give yourself to my care—a delicate scream resounding through her actions. There are no strings here, but the hooks . . .

  And she reminds him, again and again, of his dangerous fascination with her, of the natural headiness of her presence and the way she controls his sexuality so easily. Then she makes him forget, blurring out thought with a talented tongue. He loses his grip on his burdens as the pleasure pulls him into pure physicality. His muscles tighten and strain. His back arches; she feels him writhe under her sway. This is true power. They both know it, have lived by it.

  She sucks him until he is utterly defenseless, a slave to her wet siege. She sucks him until he comes, his hands gripping fiercely on the bench and in her hair, his legs pushing against the ground. A naughty girl giving fellatio in a city park, she swallows.

  He lifts his head as if it all he can do, disentangling his hand so that he can pull her close by the waist. She gives him a dark smile and stops him, puts more distance between them as she tucks him back into his pants. He searches her face for some sort of sign, brow furrowing the slightest bit. She says, “I'll let you know when I find any answers that might be useful to you,” and zips his pants.

  His eyes are like galaxies of desolation, watching her every move keenly.

  “Oh,” she adds over her shoulder when she turns to leave. “Tell Emma I said congratulations.”

  Irving Prep, New York City. May 22nd.

  Seth walks through the marble halls, déjà vu chasing him like a ghost. Distan
tly, he can hear the murmur of students and their wealthy parents. He doesn’t know what to expect of Irving today—he didn’t attend graduation, and Caleb dropped out before it became a necessity.

  He smiles, remembering that. Bethania was furious and indignant when Caleb dropped out. She stormed in, screaming. Seth and Caleb grabbed Emma and retreated, using risqué stories and a lesson in poker to shield her from the fight brewing in their father’s office.

  “Sir?” a voice intrudes on his memories, and he twists to look at the speaker. It’s a teacher, not much older than him, with pretty doe eyes and long, shapely legs. For a heartbeat, her downcast lashes and curious, sneaking glances pique his interest; then he remembers what brought him here.

  “Sorry. I’m looking for my cousin.” He flashes a smile, all bashful charm and hot sex. “Emma Morgan?”

  The woman’s gaze darts up at the name, eyes widening a little. She swallows and nods. “Third classroom on the left.”