Undone

by R Phoenix

  Kolt lowered his hand, letting it settle on the fae’s bare chest and tilting his head just enough for the braid to slide off his shoulders. Most of the work of it was in the smaller braids, and it probably would’ve looked better if he’d had a mirror instead of just the front camera on the tablet.

  “You approve?” he asked with a soft smile. “I wanted to try something new.” His fingers played idly on Leandro’s warm skin while his other hand reached for the tablet to hand it back to the fae.

  “You know how I feel about others touching what’s mine,” Leandro said, not returning his smile. “Especially when it involves making changes.”

  “I only watched some YouTube channels,” Kolt said. “I didn’t touch anything else.”

  “And how did you get into my tablet?” Leandro asked, and he rolled one of the braids between his fingertips.

  A small smirk quirked onto his lips, and Kolt carefully took the fae’s index finger between his own thumb and index finger, shaking it gently. “You were in a very deep sleep, so I borrowed this little piggy. I didn’t want to wake you,” he added innocently.

  Leandro jerked hard at the braid, and unlike before, it was a quick enough motion to catch him off guard. It yanked at his scalp, and Kolt made a pained noise as he ducked his head down to escape the pressure. “This is mine, too,” the fae said, his voice a low hiss. “Or have you forgotten?”

  “No!” How could he forget, when Leandro reminded him of it so fucking often? “You’ve never told me how to wear my hair.” He winced when those fingers tightened and put more pressure on his scalp.

  “You’ve never been foolish enough to borrow anything while I’ve slept.”

  He didn’t, usually. He used small things sometimes, never anything too blatant or too precious, and he always put it back— but it didn’t take a genius to realize Leandro wasn’t pissed about the hair, or even the tablet. The fae had been wrong, and he knew it. Kolt had worn him down so much last night that he’d been dead to the fucking world this morning, and it pissed him off.

  “I didn’t want to wake you!” Kolt repeated his earlier explanation. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,” he assured Leandro. He wasn’t sure if the fae would believe him or if he would accept the promises and the apologies. It wasn’t like he was known for his benevolence.

  “Make sure you don’t,” Leandro finally said, his voice clipped and short. His fingers twisted cruelly in Kolt’s hair, tugging a little harder on the blond locks he’d worked so hard to tame.

  Kolt clearly wasn’t out of the woods yet, despite giving all the right answers.

  “You will also not use me as an all you can eat buffet again. Do you hear me, Kolt?” Leandro asked, pulling him in closer, until he could feel the man’s breath on his skin.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Kolt tried.

  Leandro’s other hand came up and gripped his jaw tightly, cutting off anything else he might’ve said. “Don’t lie to me,” the fae hissed, his eyes dark with rage. “Control your urges. If you behave like an animal again…” Leandro’s words trailed off, but they still sent a shiver down Kolt’s spine.

  He nodded as much as was possible with the fae’s grip on him.

  “Unless that’s what you want to be,” Leandro mused in the silence following his words, his lips twisting into a mockery of a smile. “Do you want to be a beast, Kol’tso? Feeding on any and everything you can?” He plucked at the bracelet on Kolt’s arm with his other hand, pulling until it dug into his skin.

  Kolt wanted the fucking bracelet gone, that was for sure, but he didn’t like the implication the fae was making. He certainly didn’t like the way he said his name like that. He was on thin ice, and he knew it.

  “I’m not a beast,” he said sullenly, not sure how to respond to the rest of Leandro’s honeyed words without losing this particular game. “And you’re hurting me,” he added feebly, hoping to change the direction of the man’s thoughts.

  “No,” Leandro said coolly. “Beasts can control themselves better than you.” Instead of relaxing his grip, he pulled harder on both the braid and the bracelet. “They don’t need to be shackled. They can be trained. Can you be trained, Kol’tso?”

  Kolt should’ve expected Leandro to get nasty. He even had, on some level, and yet the words still stung. As if he’d been born with his cock-sucking skills, as if Leandro hadn’t carefully coached him through just how to do it best, as if he hadn’t had to learn anything! He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to say yes and have it be thrown back in his face. He didn’t want to say no and make himself sound dumber than a fucking animal.

  He certainly didn’t want to say he already was trained. So he said nothing and tried to pretend his eyes weren’t beginning to water under the strain of the grip Leandro had on his hair.

  “I asked you a question.”

  He felt his rage rise up to meet his ample energy, and he audibly ground his teeth. He didn’t want to fucking answer the question. “Yes,” he ground out softly.

  “So if I take this off, you can control yourself now? You’ve learned your lesson?” Leandro asked as his grip began to loosen. He twirled the braid around his finger instead, relaxing his grasp on the bracelet too.

  Kolt’s heart almost skipped a beat. He wanted it off in such a desperate, pathetic sort of way that it took effort not to debase himself. He wanted to scream yes, he wanted to nod frantically, he wanted to plead. “Yes,” he said, his voice tight. He couldn’t help the quick nod with the release of pressure from his scalp. “I’ll be good,” he promised, not even questioning the sudden shift in Leandro’s mood.

  “Good boy,” Leandro said, finally letting go of Kolt’s hair completely. He gazed at Kolt’s face, mesmerized.

  Kolt hated knowing the fae was getting off on this — on his desperation, on his anger, on his fear.

  “Show me.”

  Kolt gave him a bewildered look, not sure what trick he was supposed to perform. “How?” he asked, glancing down at the bracelet. “Will you take it off?”

  Leandro touched the clasp, and it opened, the beautiful torture device dropping from Kolt’s wrist and into the fae’s open hand. “Do not disappoint me, Kolt.”

  As if it could be avoided. As if this wasn’t just another fucking trap waiting to spring shut on him.

  “I won’t,” he lied.

  Leandro held the bracelet up, letting it dangle from his fingertips. His face was paler than usual. The confrontation had left the fae breathless already, and he was uncharacteristically weak.

  “Why would you lie to me now, Kol’tso?” Leandro asked quietly, his gaze unnerving, steady.

  Kolt wished he’d just murdered the bastard when he’d had a chance.

  He drew his wrist back, rubbing at it as if the bracelet had been an actual shackle that had left a mark or discomfort. “I always disappoint you,” he said quietly — honestly!

  It was quiet for a moment, and in the silence, Leandro softened. He set the bracelet aside and pulled Kolt into his arms. “No,” he murmured, his voice gentle, almost tender, like he hadn’t just fucking treated him like he was a naughty puppy by rubbing his nose in his mistake. “No, my Kol’tso. You’ve simply lost your way. But it’ll be better. Just try harder, hmm?” He touched Kolt’s chin, kissing him gently, briefly. “Be good for me.”

  Kolt felt like screaming.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Is he a sociopath?” Bryce asked Percy, who looked up from his notes.

  “Who?” Percy asked.

  Bryce just cast him a knowing look.

  “No,” Percy said with a shake of his head, though he did interrupt his work for a moment to glance up at Tobias.

  Bryce had learned that Tobias was Percy’s direct superior, and that was only because Tobias was human, and Percy wasn’t. He drew in a slow breath and shook his head as he watched Tobias in his lab coat as he went around the crime scene like a kid in a candy store.

  “Pretty sure you’re wrong,” Bryce muttered.


  “I’m not usually wrong about these things,” Percy said matter-of-factly, but he didn’t sound as convinced now, even as he went back to his own findings. “Don’t you have work to do?” Percy asked him, drawing his attention away from Tobias and back to the scene at hand.

  “Nah,” Bryce said with a shrug. “It was humans. Not our division, right?”

  Percy looked up at him with obvious surprise. “Humans?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” Bryce said with a nod. “Boy meets girl, girl likes boy, they date, girl meets another boy, boy 1 gets jealous, they fight, he strangles her,” Bryce crudely shorthanded his version of events. “It’s a classic crime of passion. There’s no—” He gestured. “Otherkin, at work here.”

  “There was residual magic on the scene,” Percy said skeptically.

  “Boy went to Leandro’s casino several weeks ago. He could’ve picked something up there.”

  “Why?” Percy asked.

  “Humans like to steal things from restaurants and hotels they’ve been to, Percy. It’s what we do,” Bryce told him with a shrug. He wasn’t willing to discuss the matter further, certain they would come to that conclusion sooner or later — or at least, that no otherkin had been involved. It just wasn’t weird enough, which was Bryce’s barometer for otherkin involvement. “Can I ask you a question?” he asked Percy, not giving the younger man a chance at arguing him further.

  “Since you already did…” Percy sighed.

  “Why don’t we just… bind the magic of the otherkin that have crossed the line?”

  “You say that like it’s simple,” Percy said with a snort.

  “Well, is it harder than trying to figure out what to do with them when we can’t lock them up?” Bryce asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Maybe not. But it’s not a great idea. Otherkin are magical beings. Cutting off their magic is like cutting off your… oxygen.”

  “You’d die?” Bryce asked, aware that the question made Percy uncomfortable. He just wasn’t entirely sure why.

  “No. Okay, so maybe not your oxygen, but... your access to clean water,” he amended. “You won’t die right away, not necessarily, but you won’t last long either. You’d start hallucinating and get desperate.”

  It sounded vague, and he wasn’t sure he got the comparison.

  “I think I’m too privileged to understand that,” Bryce muttered, shaking his head. Maybe he didn’t want to understand it either.

  He didn’t like to think of himself as a racist. He had no problem with race, but… otherkin? It was proving difficult. Especially after he’d been drugged, fucked, and beaten by them.

  However, when a guy like Percy, who was a telepath no less, was somehow the subordinate of a guy like Tobias? Bryce knew exactly who he would want to handle his cases, and he wasn’t wearing a fucking lab coat like a child on career day.

  “It’s hard to imagine when you don’t have any magic,” Percy said with a small smile and a slow nod. “Not sure I’d call it privilege to be… normal,” Percy added thoughtfully, but he didn’t elaborate on it.

  Neither did Bryce. He didn’t want to open that can of worms, but he was rather glad he was normal. It seemed like a lot of work to be otherkin and have to stay hidden, out of trouble, and alive.

  He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, shaking one out of the box and finding his lighter with his other hand. He struck off the lighter, and Percy coughed pointedly at him. He stopped, glancing at the man, who gave him a look even more pointed than the cough.

  “What? We’re outside,” Bryce remarked.

  “On an active crime scene. Let’s not spread your DNA around it,” Percy advised, provoking a guffaw from Bryce.

  Bryce had the sneaking suspicion the poor telepath didn’t understand what was so funny about his particular choice of words. Spread his DNA around…

  He nodded anyway. “Yeah, all right. You can unclench your sphincter,” Bryce said, clapping Percy on the shoulder before turning to the yellow police tape and ducking under it to… go question some of the witnesses. Or smoke, rather, which was what he was really doing.

  At least, that had been the plan until he spotted Leandro’s lackey among the crowd.

  Gideon crossed toward him, and people moved out of his way without even seeming to realize they were doing it, despite all trying their best to get a peek at the crime scene. He had a direct path to Bryce cleared within seconds, but he seemed to take it for granted.

  “Detective,” the man said, as blandly as if he hadn’t been one of the people to beat the shit out of him the other night.

  “Asshole,” Bryce responded cheerfully. “How’s your hand? My face didn’t hurt it too much, did it?”

  “I’ll live.” Gideon flexed his hands, and there were at least still scrapes on his knuckles. “Did your brain get too rattled to remember you have a deal to live up to?”

  Bryce drew in a lung full of smoke. He’d quit before, but since the revelation that magic was real and he’d fucked some sort of sex creature, smoking suddenly didn’t seem like his biggest problem anymore. Plus, it gave him good time to think and mull things over before he answered dickheads like Leandro’s grunt.

  “What were you gonna do?” Bryce asked. “Make me?” Just because he’d had adequate time to think over his response didn’t mean he was going to come up with a good one, after all.

  He hadn’t wanted to accept the so called ‘debt’ he’d been tricked into. He wanted to inform on the Organization’s activities regarding the fae even less, and he wasn’t inclined at all to help these otherkin fuckers after the humiliating display at the casino. He was in no rush to help anyone whatsoever, but to have a thug come around to collect already—

  “What the fuck do you expect? Do you people even understand how things work, like—” Bryce gestured around them with the hand holding the cigarette. “In the real world?” he asked, shaking his head. “This is my fucking job, okay? I just got here. This is my first field case, and I’m being babysat by Beaker and Dr. Bunsen,” he pointed out, casting a sidelong look at Percy and Tobias. “You think they’re going to let me — me — anywhere near an active and highly classified taskforce right the fuck away after being in a,” he paused to get the wording just right, “compromising position as an average human at a prominent fae’s casino?” He drew his eyebrows up in wonder at the grunt to see if any of this was processing in what had to be a mythically small brainpan.

  Gideon didn’t interrupt him. Bryce wasn’t even sure the words were getting through the grunt’s thick skull or if he was even really listening. Perhaps the Terminator had powered down.

  “Not to mention the sick leave I had to take to explain my fractured eye socket,” he added with a scoff, never mind that he had been healed by Percy’s magic touch in the end — which was a terrible thing to call it, even in his head.

  He shook his head, taking another drag from the cigarette, and reaching for a notepad to at least pretend he was fucking working so he wouldn’t have to field more questions he had no answers for.

  “Do you know how the fae see humans?” Gideon asked. “Even humans in the Organization, or maybe even more for humans in the Organization?”

  Bryce flipped open the notepad and cast the man before him a tired look. “Playthings. I got the memo,” he said.

  “Expendable,” the man corrected him.

  It didn’t sound like Gideon was threatening him. It was like he was just stating something like… the sky is blue, the grass is green, Leandro and his pet bouncer are fucking assholes. Facts of life.

  “Is that why you had to recruit a rookie in the Organization? Because you’ve got so many Organization agents just waiting to work for the fae?” Bryce asked, making a fucking note of that, because he could.

  Gideon shrugged. “If he told them to, they would,” he said, just as matter-of-factly.

  He looked up at the guy, with the look of a dead fish, at that. “Then what the fuck does he need me for
?” He held up a hand before Gideon could even begin to speak. “If you say plaything, I will shoot you,” he added before lowering his hand.

  Gideon looked decidedly unimpressed. “You need a crash course on the fae, pronto.”

  “Yeah, kinda trying to get there, but you guys keep interrupting me with beat downs and bullshit,” Bryce muttered, dropping the remnants of his cigarette on the ground and stepping on it. He didn’t want to make it look pointed, but if it did, fuck it.

  Gideon looked at him, and his words were quiet, almost hesitant somehow, “Did you mean it? What you told Kol’tso?”

  There was no real indication as to how the guy felt about it, which made it feel decidedly like a trap. He’d gotten beaten to a fucking pulp over it last time, after all.

  “You really think a rookie could get a slave out from under someone like Leandro?” Gideon went on.

  Bryce narrowed his eyes a little.

  Were these guys fucking morons, or what?

  “A rookie with the Organization. I might not have my voodoo doll binding classes down yet, pal, but I’m not a fucking rookie anywhere else,” he pointed out darkly. “I’ve been a cop for nearly twenty years. You think Leandro is the first piece of shit I’ve accidentally stepped in?” he asked, drawing his eyebrows up again — which was something he was doing a lot, and distinctly.

  “You can’t get him the information he wants, and the Organization didn’t bother to even try to chastise him for the response to your stupidity and arrogance,” Gideon said bluntly. “Going against Leandro’s business is bad enough. Trying to take his slave could damn well mean suicide. You don’t seem to get it, Detective. Fuck, you’re as arrogant as—” The man cut himself off, shaking his head.

  “Good thing he doesn’t have slaves then, isn’t it?” Bryce muttered bluntly, ignoring the hollow ominous sense of foreboding. “Last I checked, everyone was there of their own free will,” he mused, tilting his head and drawing a doodle on his notepad: a stick figure taking a shit, to be specific.