Honor

by Jay Crownover

  It felt like love.

  His grip on my hips tightened as he pulled me tighter into his thrusting hips. He growled my name as my body pulled at him, clasped him hungrily and greedily. I couldn’t do anything other than move with him, meet him thrust for thrust, and hold on as we pounded against one another.

  It was hot. It was messy. It was animalistic. It was loud. It was a little rough. It was a lot dirty. It was better than anything had ever been before it. It was everything sex had been missing when I had it with someone that wasn’t him. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell him to never stop and beg him to just end it all at the same time. I didn’t do any of that. I just chanted his name over and over again and tried to hold on to everything I was feeling so that I could remember this moment forever.

  Suddenly he jerked me upright and wrapped an arm across my chest to pin me to his own sweaty torso. His arm landed across my breasts and his mouth bit down on the curve of my neck where it connected to my shoulder, and that was the last little bit of stimulation I could take. I let out a short gasp of surprise as my orgasm hit me like a train. I shattered into a thousand little pieces of pleasure and collapsed in his tight hold as he worked against me until he found his own release. He grumbled my name in my ear and rubbed his forearm across my already overly sensitized nipples, and I was stunned when that was enough to throw my body into another round of orgasmic aftershocks.

  He held me like a doll while my body milked him dry and he panted his own pleasure into my hair. When it was all over I felt hollowed out and empty, like everything that I had just handed over to him. I didn’t argue or even twitch when he pulled out of me, situated himself back into his pants, picked up the shirt he ruined pulling off of me, and bent to scoop me up in his arms. He took the last few steps at the top of the stairs and bypassed the room I had been staying in for the bathroom in the hallway. He didn’t put me down when he reached in to crank on the water and I just let my head loll, useless against his chest. His heartbeat was steady and strong in my ear and it was almost enough to have me drifting back to sleep, until the shock of hot water hit my skin as he walked us both under the stream of the shower head. I didn’t even notice him stripping down to get into the water.

  I sputtered and glared at him as he chuckled and gently set me back on my feet. I narrowed my eyes at him and turned my back so he could scrub the sleepiness and sex off of my skin.

  We didn’t talk much as we both cleaned up, but I did notice he was taking extra care with his bruised shoulder and he avoided scrubbing the top of his head where I’d sewn the makeshift stitches. I rubbed flowery-smelling soap all over my skin and winced when I found the spots his scratchy face had rubbed raw. He just lifted an eyebrow at me when I smacked him in the belly with the back of my hand. It was like hitting a brick wall and he moved around me so that his broad back was facing me and hogging all the water. I was going to yell at him for being an inconsiderate jerk but my gaze landed on all that black ink that was now glistening and wet. It was such a big tattoo and so intricate and violent-looking. It was like an ancient tapestry inscribed on his flesh and I couldn’t help but reach out and touch it with the tip of one finger.

  “How did I never know you had this before that night I got shot? It seems so out of character for you.”

  He reached out and put his hands on the tiles in front of him and hung his head low as the water ran over him and I continued to trace the twisting lines that covered every single inch of his back.

  “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Conquest, Famine, War, and Death. I’ve experienced all of the things that most religions believe will bring about the destruction of man. I lived all of it before I got my first kiss.”

  I recoiled in shock. He never talked about his past and the stark honesty he threw at me was overwhelming. I wasn’t ready for the blunt way he dropped it on me.

  “What do you mean?” I kept my voice low like I might startle him and went back to drawing over the tattoo with my finger.

  “I was born outside Tel Aviv in a time when war was the most profitable thing for any government to be involved in. My mother was the daughter of an American diplomat and my father was an extremist.” He snorted and looked at me from under his arm. “Today he would be called a terrorist, but then he was just considered a man deeply devoted to a cause.”

  I shivered a little at the bitterness in his tone. I had asked for the worst and it looked like I was about to get it. It looked like the devil was going to tell me how he came to be.

  “My mom was young, lonely. Her parents were diplomats and deeply invested in international relations. She knew a lot about war and strife in places all over the world at a very tender age. Her mother was killed on a humanitarian mission with Doctors Without Borders when she was sixteen. It was a huge blow to a young woman that was already mentally unstable. She saw people trying to do good and dying for it and that broke something inside of her. Something about people suffering and the endless struggle to save lives changed her. Her ideals got twisted and turned around. She blamed the government for both her unconventional childhood and her loss. She was suddenly very convinced that people had the right to their homeland and religious predilections without the interference of outside nations. I think the fact that her parents worked for the government and took her to so many fraught places was a huge part of why she picked the other side to fight for. She always told me she was snatched from outside an embassy school along with several of her classmates, but the reality was she set those other girls up to get abducted because she was working with the extremist group my father was leading. She called herself a rebel and a crusader but she was the same as my father, and when they met it was a disaster. Two people warped and fueled by violent ideology. He knew what kind of asset she would be because she was an American who just happened to think exactly like him. No one would ever suspect someone that looked like my mother, a woman that came from a life of privilege like she did, to be a terrorist. He died before I was born, so I have no idea if his ideologies fueled her or if hers made him even more of a threat. I do know that my mother used his death to manipulate and mold me into something that wasn’t even close to human.”

  He shook his head from side to side, sending water droplets flying everywhere. “I existed to avenge my father’s death and to carry on his fight for his beliefs . . . not mine, never mine. She was so twisted by hate and anger that I don’t think she even remembered what she believed in at the end.”

  I sucked in a breath and frowned at him but he wouldn’t look up at me or move even though the warm water was running out.

  “Death and War shaped my life before I left the womb, and once I was old enough, all that mattered was Conquest. How many enemies could I kill? How many nonbelievers could I take out? How much damage could I do to a world that was full of sinners and enemies? I didn’t understand any of it, but it was what sustained me. My mother starved me of love, of any kind of maternal care and kindness. To her I was just a tool, a weapon, and she used me as such. Famine doesn’t just mean lack of food. I was hungry for any kind of human interaction. I was ravenous to make any kind of choice and decision that was my own.”

  I was crying. I could feel the hot tears tracking down my cheeks. I wrapped my arms around his waist and moved forward so I could press my damp face against his tattooed back. The devil existed because his life had been horrific and he wouldn’t survive anywhere else but in hell. It was all he knew.

  “You tell me I’m a control freak, and I am, but only because I have to be. I fought to be in control of my own life, to have a future away from anyone and everyone that only wanted to use me to kill. I feel like if I loosen my grip on that hard-won control, I might lose it. The things I’ve done . . .” He shook his head again. “I’ve seen the end of days, Key. I’ve been the man behind them. I can’t afford to let any of that catch up to me here, so I keep my business and this city in an iron grasp to protect it. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you
?”

  “I understand you do what you do because you think you have to, and that’s good enough for me, Nassir.”

  He reached out and cranked the water off, and finally turned around to face me. His eyes were sharp points of amber in his face. His jaw was clenched tight and a muscle was twitching furiously in his cheek.

  “Nassir Gates isn’t even really my name. After my mom left me in the hands of an offshoot of one of my dad’s terrorist groups, I got recruited by the Israeli Special Forces. They wanted me to kill too, only they wanted me to go after the people that had made me the way I was. Once again I was in a place with no control, no say in anything I did. I was unleashed and told to make it rain blood, so that’s what I did.” He reached out and put his hands on my shoulders and made sure that I was looking directly into his eyes. “I blew my cover to hell and got dragged into the desert and was left for dead. I killed everyone to get away. So many people.” He blew out a long breath and his fingers curled into my skin. “When I got to the States I knew that man had to die, so I picked a name from each of the two nationalities that were responsible for making me who I was, and started over.”

  He leaned forward until our foreheads were touching, and when he breathed out again his breath feathered over my lips like a ghostly kiss.

  “I was free but I had nothing to live for, no focus, no drive, and no reason for being. I had no skills beyond causing death and destruction and I was quickly falling into a place where I was sure all I was ever going to be was someone else’s means to an end . . . but then I stumbled into the Point and I came across you.”

  I shivered in his hold and lifted up my arms to wrap them around his wide shoulders. I could feel that he was shaking just a little bit and I couldn’t believe that this impossible, hard man was letting his armor break apart for me.

  “You were too young, too soft, and too vulnerable and you knew it . . . but you were there on that stage anyway because you had a purpose. You wanted something and you were willing to do whatever it took to get it. That did something to me. In that split second of understanding, I found a reason, I found a cause of my own.”

  His arms wrapped around me and we were hugging while he shook and while I tried to process all the information he had just handed over to me. I always thought Nassir was the one with the upper hand, that he was the one moving the players across the game board in the way he wanted, but from what he just told me, it sounded like I had always been the one in the driver’s seat. I wasn’t sure what to do with that information. That kind of power over a man like him was intoxicating.

  He broke the somber mood by dragging me back into the here and now. “I need to eat and find a bucket of Tylenol for my head. Come downstairs and I’ll feed you.”

  I watched him rub himself down with a towel and pull his black pants back on. He shoved his dripping hair out of his face and winced when his hand brushed over the wound on the top of his head.

  “Okay?”

  I was far from okay but I stepped out of the shower and took the towel he offered me. I grabbed his hand when he turned to leave the bathroom and looked at him from under my lashes.

  “I don’t know who you were before you became Nassir Gates, but the man you are now . . .” I bit my lip and lifted both my eyebrows up at him. “He deserves every bit of the respect and control he’s earned over the years. You also have parts inside of you that have always been worthy of kindness and care. Those parts are the ones that brought me back, Nassir. Those are the parts that make it impossible for me to hold on to my heart.” He just stared at me for a long silent moment before dipping his chin down in a jerky nod and striding out of the bathroom.

  Once he was gone I let out the breath I was holding and sat down heavily on the seat of the toilet. I winced a little as muscles that had been given a thorough workout both last night and on the stairs earlier let me know that they were there and pleasantly tender.

  Nassir had always been a complicated man with layers and layers I was too afraid to dig into because I was sure I couldn’t stand side by side with him when I got to the core of what made him the way he was. And I was right. His story about his family and what his youth had been like wasn’t even something I could comprehend. Granted, my own childhood was a nightmare, but I didn’t have bodies and war as my first memories like he did. I had no idea how he saw anything besides that. I had no idea how he had seen me all those years ago or why my inability to save myself from that grabby customer had been enough to make me his cause, but I was grateful that things had worked out that way.

  When we first met I had been too immature and stubborn to understand what the attention of a man like Nassir meant. I wanted the same things he had been after. I wanted to be free and to control my own life. I wanted no man and no master in charge of the choices I made and the direction I traveled to make something of myself. Even back then, I knew if I tied myself to Nassir all of that would stop. It would just be him and that was the only thing that would matter to me, and that couldn’t happen because I wanted to live.

  Now I knew he was going to give just as much as he was going to take and I had to be deserving of all of it—good and bad—and I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I was up to the task. His bad was scary, but I was used to it. His good was devastating, and every time he showed me a piece of it, I couldn’t see anything else. I grumbled every bad word I could think of under my breath as I put myself back together to eat breakfast.

  Chapter 12

  Nassir

  It took two days to clear out the vermin and clean up the club. That was a lot of money down the toilet and a lot of aggravation I had nowhere to put besides on Key. Luckily, she was made of strong stuff and could take everything, from my sullen and sharp mood to the less than delicate sex I kept throwing her way. She rolled her eyes at me a lot and told me to stop pouting about things I couldn’t control. I grumbled at her until she got on her knees in front of me and wrapped that sassy mouth around my dick and I forgot what it ever felt like to be pissed off and stressed out. She made being trapped in my house for two days bearable, and shutting off business and the Point feel like second nature. Here in my mountain retreat, it was just me and her and that was all that I allowed to matter for a few quiet moments when she smiled at me or taunted me into going after her.

  The reprieve was broken when the cop that had been on the scene of the accident called and told Key they were releasing the woman who ran me off the road with nothing more than reckless-driving charges. He said they couldn’t charge her with anything harsher since I had refused medical care on the scene. I thought Key was going to try to reach through the phone and choke the police officer as he relayed the information. When she hung up she ranted about how I could have died and about how unfair it was that the woman was getting away with just a slap on the wrist. She was convinced it was all some conspiracy because I was a less than upstanding member of society. She kept muttering about how justice was for everyone, not just for people that stayed on the straight and narrow.

  I kissed her on the forehead and told her she didn’t have to worry about me getting justice. That was one of those things I had no problem taking care of all by myself. I was way better at an eye for an eye than any kid in a police uniform was ever going to be. That revelation didn’t make her very happy, but when I asked her to drive me into the city since I was currently carless, she didn’t argue or pepper me with the million and one questions I could see clouding her eyes.

  We got to the club and I could see her hesitancy when I went to pull open the back door. Luckily, nothing furry and disgusting rushed out at us and the cleaning crew had done a great job, leaving the place looking polished and back in its pristine condition. Key walked in front of me across the empty dance floor and to the back hall that led to my private elevator, dragging her fingers across the wall as we went. She looked at me over her shoulder with a soft grin pulling at her mouth.

  “I never thought I would actually miss this place.”

&nb
sp; “The club or the Point?” I reached around her to push the button on the elevator and punched in the code to get it to go up to my office.

  “Both.” She walked in and leaned against the back wall and lifted her eyebrows at me as I followed her. I kept moving until my front was pressed up against hers and I could feel her nipples bead up against my chest. I put my hands on the mirrored wall next to her head.

  “There’s good stuff in both of those places if you know where to look for it.”

  She lifted her hand and put her fingers at the base of my throat where my black shirt was unbuttoned at the collar. She tapped her fingers in time to the beat of my pulse and stuck her tongue out to slick across her bottom lip. It made me growl at her and I saw satisfaction flare to life in her fog-colored gaze. She liked how easy I made it for her to handle me.

  “I don’t think I actually knew what good looked like until very recently. It can be hard to spot when it comes disguised as something else.”

  I lifted an eyebrow at her and bent my head just a little to replace her tongue with my own. I licked across the plump curve of her lip and then sank my teeth into it, making her groan quietly into my mouth.

  “What was the good disguised as?” I pushed off the wall and stepped away from her as the doors whisked open and dumped us into my office. Chuck was standing in front of the bank of monitors watching surveillance video of the club and there was a thickly muscled man covered in tattoos sitting at my desk with three laptops open in front of him. They both looked up as we entered the room.