by Cole McCade
Now and then Willow woke in the dead of night to find Vin sitting on the edge of the bed, his rosary in his fingers, fingertips stroking over the beads as he counted under his breath in whispered Italian. The look on his face, each time…she knew it far too well, felt it far too deeply. And in those darkest hours, she understood that even if he no longer cut his sins into others’ flesh only to lash his atonement into his own…
This was his plea for forgiveness, and a chance to start again.
All she could do, in the stillness and the dark, was press against his back and give him her warmth the way he so often gave her his. Eventually the labored, painful beat of his heart against his rib cage would calm, beneath the press of her cheek. And as he reached the last bead, he would always turn, take her into his arms, kiss her, lay her to the bed and touch her with such reverence it was as though when he’d lost his faith, he tried to make it again in her.
In the dark of night, when he touched her with the hand of the divine, she could believe in his mad, strange brand of love. She could believe in him. And while he still made her heart race with uncertainty, with anticipation, with the tremor of the unknown…the delicious spice of fear was gone, replaced by a more intoxicating thrill:
Learning to trust him.
Learning to trust him, and knowing that no matter how far she went as she sought out who she was and who she was meant to be, he would always be there to pull her back from the edge.
Or take that leap with her, plunging headlong together into whatever madness they found.
There was a trace of madness in him now—in how he looked up at her, in how he curled his hands inward to dig a possessive grip into her ass, the sheer raw strength of his touch promising that he would hurt her—hurt her, and make her want it. She caught her tongue between her teeth, struggling against her own desire, but she couldn’t stop how she moved against him when he made her molten, and already she was burning with anticipation as she spread her thighs to flank his hips, kneeling over him on the couch and bracing her hands against his stomach.
“You don’t want to kill the neighbors.” She brushed her lips across his. “You just want to have sex.”
“I am guilty. I confess. I can hardly concentrate at work, for thinking of how to have my wicked way with you.”
Vin moved beneath her, the hot scrape of denim between her thighs as his cock pressed up against her, making her whimper when she was still so sore. She lived sore, the marks of rope bindings under her clothes, her arms and legs aching from being spread, tied, bound, her inner walls battered and bruised from how roughly he took her until she screamed against the gag and pushed back against him and begged for more. And the hard ripple of muscle in his bare, dirtied arms promised more as he caught her wrists in long-fingered, gracefully brutal hands, ringing the marks she’d cut into herself thrashing against her cuffs just so he’d hold her down and fuck her harder.
“All day,” he breathed, stroking his thumb over the bruises on the inside of her wrist, watching her with those fox-gold eyes fevered and intent and penetrating, “I thought of how to bind you tonight. What position would let me look upon your beauty while you writhed and begged for me. What would bring you the most pleasure.”
Willow shuddered, rolling her hips against him, biting back a cry—only to stiffen as Vin abruptly released her. There came the sound of steps on the stairs outside their unit, a familiar patter of little feet, and Vin groaned, thunking his head back against the arm of the couch.
“…but apparently that is not happening.”
Willow laughed breathlessly and slumped against him, burying her face in his chest. “I forgot they were coming.” She stole a quick kiss, then slid off him before he drove her so crazy she wouldn’t care who caught them. “Save it for tonight, tiger,” she teased, and rose to pull the door open just as a small hand poised to knock.
Elijah looked up at her, sweet and solemn as always, standing on the doorstep in his Keds and his favorite jeans with the red stitching down the side, replacing the beloved overalls he’d worn down to threads. But at the sight of her, that grave expression broke into a smile, and he lifted his arms up. “Willow!”
With a laugh, she swept him up into her arms and hugged him, burrowing into him and breathing in that little-boy scent. He was starting to get heavy, but she didn’t care; she squeezed him close while he burrowed into her, his soft candied breaths tickling her neck. She’d missed him more than she’d ever wanted to admit after he’d disappeared with Leigh, and in some strange way…
In some strange way, this little boy was at the heart of everything that had changed her life.
“Hey there, little man.” She planted a kiss on his cheek. “Where’s your mommy and daddy?”
“Gabriel isn’t my daddy,” he corrected precisely. “He’s my friend.”
“Friend is good,” Gabriel Hart said as he crested the stairs, a plastic bag hanging from one hand, his other twined in Leigh’s. Silver eyes swept over Elijah, Willow, flicking past to Vin, that glinting gaze subtly warming. “Friends are good.”
Leigh grinned and held up another crinkling plastic bag that nearly reeked of something tangy and spicy. “We brought dinner.”
While Willow let Elijah down and stepped back to let Gabriel and Leigh inside, Vin groaned and levered himself off the couch, rolling to his feet. “Please, not more Cajun food. My stomach cannot handle another of those culinary atrocities. An excess of capsaicin is not a substitute for a lack of finesse in the kitchen.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes and pulled away from Leigh with a kiss to the top of her head before heading toward the apartment’s little open kitchen with both bags in hand. “You’re too religious to talk that kind of blasphemy. But it’s Chinese.”
Vin trailed after him, peering over Gabriel’s shoulder and peeking into one of the bags—before turning his face away with an offended sniff. “That is not Chinese food. That is deep-fried chicken in sweetened jelly.”
Willow watched them fondly. Their apartment was still threadbare and empty, the barest trappings of a life, but somehow with Gabriel and Vincent needling each other with that dry familiarity and Leigh swinging Elijah around until he squealed, the simple little space felt so entirely full.
And so entirely like home.
She shook her head and slipped closer to trace her hand down Vin’s back. “Vincent. Stop being a food snob and set the table.”
“Yes, dear.”
He opened one of the overhead cabinets and pulled down a stack of plates. Gabriel immediately relieved him of half the stack, the two of them moving with practiced synchronicity.
“I’ll help,” Gabriel said, then grinned. “Never thought I’d see you whipped.”
Vin arched a brow. “Metaphorically, or literally?”
With a disgusted sound, Gabriel thudded the stack of plates down on the unvarnished pine of the kitchen table. “I really don’t want to know context for that, Vin.”
“Likely not,” Vin retorted with a wolfish grin.
Willow leaned against the counter, watching them as they set out plates and forks and napkins. Leigh leaned next to her with Elijah clinging to her leg, and as Willow caught Leigh’s eye, they both smiled.
Gabriel nudged Vin with his elbow. “We good?”
Vin paused, tilting his head. His gaze slid to Willow, to Leigh, to Elijah, then back to Gabriel, and he nodded. “Yes. We are, as you put it, good.”
Leigh chuckled. “They’re idiots, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Willow shook her head and turned to start unpacking the cartons of Chinese food from the bags. “But somehow, I find myself not really minding. Maybe because somehow, I’ve found myself.”
“And you only had to run halfway across the country to do it.”
Leigh’s voice mocked—it was how she was, impish and thorny and all full of sharp edges like pretty bits of broken glass—but it was gentle, understanding, and there was warmth in how she fell in next to Willow, working with the
same easy synchronicity as she lined up beer bottles from a four-pack and pried the caps off with a bottle opener in quick, sharp snaps. She brought with her that comfort, that familiarity, of people who had become a part of each other’s lives. Who trusted each other.
Who’d made a family, somehow, piecing whole cloth out of fragments into something safe and lovely and so very, very right.
“Funny how that works,” Willow murmured. “I never thought things would turn out this way. I could never see my life this way in a million years, but somehow…somehow, in some way, it works.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Leigh pressed a chilled, wet-dewed bottle into Willow’s hand, and lifted her own. “Cheers.”
“Yeah.” Willow clinked her bottle to Leigh’s. A toast; an inauguration; maybe not the beginning of something auspicious, but a celebration of something already begun. Of this life she’d found—and the strange, wild love in Vin’s gaze as he lifted his head and caught her eye and smiled, those fox-gold eyes so brilliant—and all for her.
Always for her, as she was for him.
“Cheers,” she said, and tilted her head back to take a deep draught as bitter yet sweet as the changes and twists in her life. It wasn’t a life most would look for, wasn’t a life most could love, but it was hers and she’d make it however she wanted.
And she could definitely drink to that.
THE END
AFTERWORD
AT THE TIME OF THIS writing, the United States is entering a new and unprecedented era—and dragging the rest of the world kicking and screaming with us. We’ve just elected a highly unqualified, bigoted charlatan into the highest office of the country, and even if we’re gaining traction with protests and determined efforts to leverage the system of checks and balances, it doesn’t change that we’re trying to use reason, logic, and the rule of law against a speeding bullet train that’s leaped gleefully off the tracks.
A lot of things are at risk, in the broadest terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and in individual terms of safety, freedom, livelihood, personal dignity. Already the current administration is seeking to strip away many human rights in a boldly and unbelievably egregious fashion, undoing much of the work done under President Obama and setting us back by decades in terms of equal rights. One of the many issues on the table in our political landscape is defunding the Affordable Care Act, with nebulous to terrible plans to replace it with anything viable in terms of socialized healthcare or, at the very least, accessible healthcare. The replacement ACHA bill is an atrocity without human reason, without human heart, and it stands to do irreparable harm to millions.
I’m one of the people affected by this; before ACA, I spent ten years without insurance as a self-employed consultant, surviving on a shoestring, healthy living, mild paranoia, and the occasional visit to cheap out-of-pocket clinics when I felt there was a need. I was lucky that I never suffered a severe injury or ailment in that time, even if I had some chronic conditions to deal with. ACA gave me the tools to better deal with those conditions and drastically improve my health; ACA gave me the capacity, when I had a severe medical emergency at the end of 2016, to obtain a swift diagnosis and a strong prognosis for treatment and recovery.
And ACA makes sure that people like Joseph Armitage, people living with disabilities whose social and economic costs far outweigh what any one human being should have to carry fairly, have the freedom to live without the bulk of society’s punishment for disability crushing down on them.
At the heart of this mad administration’s actions, that’s what lies at the core of their extreme behavior; it’s a form of punishment that already has a platform in existing social bias, using that to push through measures that directly harm people without stopping to consider their humanity—or our own. Because it takes a grave lack of humanity to strip away healthcare options from people who have no other resources; it takes a significant lack of empathy to look at a disabled person who can’t afford their medications and hospital care, and lay the blame for that at their feet with a shrug of, “Well you shouldn’t have been born disabled or should have been born rich, really, so how is that my problem?”
It’s everyone’s problem. As humans, we are no greater than the least among us, and how we treat the least among us shows who we are in every aspect. Disabled people are by no means the least among us; like anyone else they are vibrant, varied, multifaceted people with individual lives, strengths, pains, desires, hopes. But they’re also the people who are most often overlooked, when discussing issues of inequality, social disenfranchisement, privilege, intersectionality. How we treat social and legislative matters impacting people with disabilities says a great deal about who we are.
And right now, it’s saying that we have lost sight of what it means to be human. What it means to be a society, in a civilization that relies upon the interdependency of all involved to survive. To be civilized, to be human, means that we hold each other up when the road gets too hard. And if you have the resources, the capacity, and the desire to help those who are struggling on this road, then I hope you’ll consider checking out these resources that offer opportunities to support and help disabled people.
• American Association of People with Disabilities: www.aapd.com
• Benchmark Institute’s Resources for the LGBTQIA Disability Community: www.benchmarkinstitute.org/glbt/disability-and-glbt-resources.htm
• Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund: https://dredf.org
Whether you can give time, money, or any other resources…every bit matters. So many people from so many walks of life stand to lose everything, in the days to come. Many more have always lived on that edge, because so often we turn a sort of willful oblivion toward the needs of the disabled. More often than not you’ll find ways to help disabled people not through national organizations, many of which are only dedicated to a specific need or don’t have the resources to serve the unique needs of other marginalizations…but through social media. You’ll see people posting GoFundMes and other crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for medical expenses, for the right to live, because they have nowhere else to turn. These people aren’t looking for handouts. They’re asking for your understanding; they’re asking you to see them, and truly realize the dire state of disability rights, costs, and care that pushed them to this point in the first place.
Don’t ignore that plea.
We are all vulnerable in some way. All frightened.
And the only way we’ll get through this is to stand together, and give each other the love we all so desperately need.
-C
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’VE THANKED PEOPLE SO MANY times, with each new book in the Crow City series—and yet still, I’m grateful. There are so many people who’ve been a part of my life, and I couldn’t manage without you. You know who you are. Whether you’re the friend who texts me in the dead of the night or the writing partner who keeps me on task or the reader who reaches out to tell me that what I do is worth it because it meant something to even one person…
Thank you.
Thank you, too, to the people who helped me get this book out the door. Every last book I write involves Herculean labor by a team of people, but this one in particular involved monumental effort from a number of dedicated friends and professionals—and your hard work and commitment are amazing. Thank you so, so much.
Every last one of you means everything to me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COLE MCCADE IS A NEW ORLEANS-BORN SOUTHERN BOY without the Southern accent, currently residing somewhere in Seattle. He spends his days as a suit-and-tie corporate consultant and business writer, and his nights writing contemporary romance and erotica that flirts with the edge of taboo—when he’s not being tackled by two hyperactive cats.
He also writes genre-bending science fiction and fantasy tinged with a touch of horror and flavored by the influences of his multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual background as Xen Sanders. He wavers betwe
en calling himself bisexual and calling himself queer, but no matter what word he uses he’s a staunch advocate of LGBTQIA and POC representation and visibility in genre fiction. And while he spends more time than is healthy hiding in his writing cave instead of hanging around social media, you can generally find him in these usual haunts:
• Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: @thisblackmagic
• Facebook: facebook.com/xen.cole
• Tumblr: thisblackmagic.tumblr.com
• Facebook Fan Page: facebook.com/ColeMcCadeBooks
• Website & Blog: www.blackmagicblues.com
Looking for more? You can get early access to cover reveals, blurbs, contests, and other exclusives by joining the McCade’s Marauders street team at:
• facebook.com/groups/mccadesmarauders
THE CROW CITY SERIES
THE LOST: A CROW CITY NOVEL (CROW CITY #1)
Haunting erotica with the taboo appeal of V.C. Andrews.
goodreads.com/book/show/26119463-the-lost
Praise from Publishers Weekly: “If the romantic character study is a genre, this fascinating contemporary novel is its exemplar. McCade digs deep into the difficult topics of rape, incest, and sexual abuse via the remarkable voice of Clarissa Leigh VanZandt.”
On the day Leigh threw her perfect life away to disappear into the streets of Crow City, she gave up on love. She gave up on happiness. But her addiction to nothingness brings her to Gabriel Hart—the one man who can satisfy the desperate needs of her body and soul, who gives her the roughness she craves, who understands her the way no one else can. Yet she can’t escape her past, the predator stalking her memories…or the lonely ache for what she left behind, and the loss of the most precious thing in her life.