by Ace Gray
And now I was going to full on puke.
“What the fuck?” I murmured as I surveyed the house, drifting toward the sound, hating that it grew louder when I walked inside and the smell got worse.
There was a flicker of shadow on the walls outside of Diego’s room. I rounded the corner before I’d really thought about what to say to Diego.
“Holy shit.” I swore just before I bounded to the garage to find the fire extinguisher where we kept it next to the wood for the fire pit.
The picture of Diego, shaving his hair into a flaming garbage can was disturbing. That it was full of sheets and a comforter, and what I swore were some of Mercy’s clothes made it just plain deranged.
By the time I jogged back things had gotten oh-so-much worse.
“What the actual fuck?” I screamed as I jimmied the pin on the fire extinguisher and aimed it at Diego. At his arm. That he’d lit on fire and sat watching burn. “You are on fire, man!”
The glint in his eyes was partially a reflection but there was some unholy glimmer too. He watched in awe when he should have been writhing in pain. I stood frozen in horror as he raised the inferno to his face and let the flame catch on the peach fuzz of his face. Then his eyebrow. He leaned back as if it was a lover’s caress. Bile rose in my throat, and my limbs felt jerky and wrong. He’d been coming unhinged for a while but I didn’t have to. I wrangled the fire extinguisher and sprayed him. The plume of white that barreled from that small nozzle seemed like an inconvenient fly pestering him. He even batted at it.
As soon as the violent whoosh of air stopped, there was a ringing in my ears. I still heard his words though. “She wouldn’t melt into me, meld with me.” He pulled his hand back and gazed in wonder at it. “So I thought I’d burn hot enough for two.”
“Are you okay?” Max’s timid voice hovered near me just like her fingertips.
“He lit himself on fire.” I’d been saying it over and over since arriving at the hospital.
“Did he hurt you?”
“I mean like full blown gasoline flames.”
It had been creepy enough to watch him shave his head, letting his trademark surfer curls fall into the trash can, but the fire on his skin, the blatant disregard for pain, rocked my world.
Max crouched between my thighs, her hands resting on my knees, her eyes looking up worried—for me, not the man who lit himself on fire—despite everything we’d been though in the past few hours. She didn’t ask me again, but her eyes pled with me to answer
“He didn’t hurt me, but tonight…the things you guys said…the things I saw…”
“Why did you call me?”
And there it was, the undeniable truth at the end of things. I understood. I understood that this was madness, and to play the game she’d had to succumb to it. That she did it for a good cause, for the right reasons. That she—Max Relle—was a good woman.
My woman.
“Because you’re the only thing that makes sense, Max.”
“What?” Her head snapped up, and her bangs fell away from her beautiful eyes.
“When he was talking about burning together, as fucked up as it was, I thought of you.”
The way she bit her lip was disbelieving and damned adorable.
“I mean, I probably would have thought about whether he was gonna turn out like Two Face or Freddy Krueger.” She shrugged with a small giggle that she tried to swallow up right away.
“It’s a little fresh for that,” I scolded her, but I couldn’t quite shove my smile away.
“In West Philadelphia born and raised…” She made a cute little head roll.
“That too.” I laughed.
“I know.” She smiled shyly as I pulled her into my lap. “But I’m scared and in shock and…and…well I use inappropriate humor as a defense mechanism.” She burrowed herself into my chest, and I felt as the whole of her body shook.
“I know, it’s one of the reasons that I love you.” The words just slipped out but I wasn’t upset that they did. I mean, I was upset with her, but not at the future.
“You love me?”
“Yes.” I sighed and found myself swirling in the caramel of her dark eyes. A sucker, that’s what I was. And I couldn’t stop it. “And I think I know how you can put all three of them away for good. For reals.”
Six Months Later…
No matter how many times I watched the video, bile rose in my throat. And schooling my face as I watched it again for the thousandth time was still too much. My hands flew to my mouth and pressed against the heave.
It was Rousse and Danger fighting. Danger was spitting all the reasons that Dantè deserved to hang. Rousse was standing up for Dantè. My chest always puffed up a little when I heard him defend Dantè, only to come crashing down when Diego entered the conversation, and combined with Danger, they obliterated Rousse’s protests. In the end, Rousse always acquiesced.
It was the last piece of evidence in a trial that had been positively wicked to endure.
“Do you think it’ll be enough?” Bert asked under his breath as he watched the back of Max’s head where she sat in front of us, next to the paralegals from her firm all of whom had worked so hard on this case. His hands flexed at his sides as if he wanted to reach out for her.
“It’s all going to work out,” I reassured him. I didn’t add that it had to.
“I can’t believe Dantè isn't here.”
I swallowed down the pain that had flashed in his eyes when Bert found this video in Danger’s pile of filmed conquests. If I’d had any questions about whether he was still my Dantè, about whether his heart had gone too hard, that moment answered them all. The tears that glistened in the corners of his eyes betrayed his broken heart every bit as much as their words had betrayed him.
But then came the rage. Glorious in its righteousness. I couldn’t deny that version of him. Not his anger. Not his desire for revenge. Not even remotely how savagely beautiful it made him.
“He couldn’t swallow the idea of them being found innocent.” I sighed, simplifying his desire to simply kill them himself. But there was the other part of the man I loved too, the part that ached. “Between you and me, I don’t think he could swallow the idea of them being guilty either.”
Bert nodded as he narrowed his gaze, and I got the sense that he didn’t believe me. Looking over at Danger, Diego, and Rousse, I suppose I didn't blame him. Dantè had wrecked them, both body and soul. Even sitting in fully pressed suits with false hope and hubris, they looked destroyed and defeated. But I knew Dantè’s heart. He showed that only to me. The good of it.
While we waited for the jury, everyone else passed their judgment, but me, I tried to see Dantè’s jigsaw puzzle. The one that he had seen of that night. The one that had left him guessing. I could see it. The way they’d jerked him back and forth. The way that blinded him to me.
“Will the defendants please rise?” The judge asked as he folded a paper and rested it in front of him.
My heart lodged in my throat as my hand flew to find Bert’s and dug in. I saw Max do the same on the edge of the table in front of us. Bert rubbed in soothing circles across the back of my hand but he jerked every time Max did; I knew he wished he was holding her hand.
“In the murder of Leo Villiers, the defendants are found,” he paused, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. What if they weren’t? What if after everything they went free? What if all the crimes I’d bore witness to—large and small—went unpunished? My heart hammered in my chest. “Guilty,” the judge finally finished.
I had to swallow the giggle of relief that bubbled up in my chest.
“In the premeditation of aforementioned murder, the defendants are found guilty.” The judge continued to read and with each passing verdict, each passing guilty, I felt freedom. And confusion. And hurt.
When the counts and verdicts ran together, I looked up at the strangers who had once been my brothers. Fury and hate riddled Danger’s face but when he moved, his whole bod
y twisted in pain from the fresh surgeries and forever scar tissue that surrounded his bullet wound. Rousse, to his credit, looked resigned and I half expected him to offer up his wrists for a cuffing before they even moved to sentencing.
Diego though, looked at me. Whatever had snapped inside him really had broken completely. The boy I use to know was gone completely, right along with the hair Bert had caught him burning. The man that sat in his place was a special brand of crazy. His wide and sullen eyes begged me, and while it should have been for forgiveness, I know it was to love him. To save him. He still thought he was worthy.
I couldn’t look away as they clapped steel on his wrists, his eyes still fixed on me. His plea still hanging between us as if he had a right to ask me for anything. I held his gaze until they hauled him away, hoping, that at some point, the man with feelings, with a sense of right or wrong, would flash back. If only for a moment.
When he didn’t, I had to swallow back bile.
“Mercy?” Max asked, finally freeing me from Diego’s hold.
“Hey. Yes. What?” I stumbled as I shook his daze from my head.
“I need to get out of here. Get some fresh air. You?” she asked, her voice full of kindness and understanding.
I managed a weak smile for her and followed her and Bert out of the courtroom. At the giant door, I paused, feeling the weight of the heavy oak and gold gilding in my hands but also the weight of what had happened here today. They were gone. That was real. When I let the door finally seal behind me, I said a small prayer that all the demons would stay locked behind it.
“So beautiful she shames the stars themselves.” A familiar voice accompanied the whistle that greeted me on the courthouse steps; my heart settled in my chest.
“I thought you weren’t coming down here?” I questioned as I turned to find Dantè leaning against a marble column, hidden in the shade.
“Well…” he started then stared off into the distance, stroking the perfectly maintained scruff on his chin—the shorter, sexier version that he’d decided to keep. “I had to see them in handcuffs.”
I closed the last little distance between us at the same moment he reached for me, tucking me under his chin.
“You were in the courtroom? Did you hear them read the verdict? I mean, confusing, but overall it felt right, right?” I asked as I breathed him in.
“Sure.”
“What?” I asked, knowing by both the tone and the tensing of his body that he didn’t completely agree.
“Don’t worry about it.” He melted beneath my hands and pushed his hand into my hair, using his grip to tilt my head up so my eyes could search his. There was a darkness there I hadn’t expected, that I hadn’t seen recently, but a moment later he kissed me. His kiss was the definition of everything a kiss should be—strong, possessive, caring, and careening off into another orbit. He broke it only to speak against my lips. “I’m going to take you home, make love to you…until you scream my name. Scream it so loud fate itself remembers it’s not me going to jail. That it’s not my future. You are.”
My knees wobbled but he had me. Dantè would always have me.
I’d tried to stay home. I’d tried not to give a fuck.
I had Mercy and a future. I could let it all go and still have everything. Including revenge. Seemed simple, right?
But it wasn’t.
The longer I sat in our house, the harder I tried to shove it—them—down. Their faces, the good and wicked ones I’d known, flashed before me. They taunted me, tormented me, cried with me, and railed on and on. I couldn’t let those faces be the last ones I saw.
So I’d gone just to watch them be escorted out of the courtroom and willed those to be the only faces I ever remembered. Danger furious. Diego gone and looped. And Rousse resigned. I played them over and over. The push and pull of them versus the police as they lead them through that side door and straight to hell. That vision was peaceful as I stepped out of the courtroom and into the hallway to replay it. Until Mercy came out.
She was a different peace.
She was the gentle wave lapping at my shore, coaxing me into her depths. She was beautiful in her conviction and confusion, the mirror of my insides. And though it was outdated, from a time when all we knew was innocence, I called to her.
“So beautiful she shames the stars themselves.”
The brightest star turned to find me. Fold into me.
She shone brilliantly as I kissed her in the Uber on the way back to the temporary apartment we’d gotten six months ago. Each kiss was every bit as possessive as it was a reminder. Have her. Hold her. Consume her. Honor her. And in the end, it was Mercy who gave me the idea.
A glimmer just like she was.
“I’m going to carry you across that threshold,” I said softly, brushing against her lips when we were outside of our door.
“I thought we were moving soon?”
There were, in fact, piles of boxes on the other side of the door, we’d never bought a couch, and I was living out of a suitcase heap. I’d used Priest’s money to buy a company, cars to pave my road to hell, but now I was going to use it for something good. For a house on the beach with a darkroom for Mercy, just like she’d always wanted. But this, today, still meant something.
“This is the first day of a new forever. One that the past can’t take away.”
“It never could,” she whispered as she wove her arms around my neck, and I took the opportunity to scoop her up. “Were you worried?”
I didn’t answer as I cradled her in my arms and walked forward, toward forever, and shut the most meaningful door of my life on the past. Instead, when I set her back on her tiptoes in front of the bed, I reached for the hem of her dress and pulled it up and over her head, her long hair fell back into the valley of her spine and dusted her shoulder blades. I smirked when I discovered she hadn’t been wearing anything underneath. She just smiled.
I shoved out of my shirt and dropped my jeans to the floor. Mercy wiggled her eyebrows. She’d made no secret that she liked my hard won body, the tattoos that marked my skin, and the way my beard tickled against her skin.
She leaned forward but I stopped her and turned her around, letting my eyes sweep along the curve of her body. To the freckles. My thumb traced her soft skin then I bent my knees to reach them.
“One,” I kissed the first. “Two.” And again. “Three, four.” Two more times. “Five.” I rubbed my nose along her skin then let my lips follow. “My Cassiopeia.” I barely breathed.
“The gods hung me upside for a while after all,” she murmured. I wrapped my hands around her hips and leaned my head against the dimples at the base of her spine. “I knew you’d right me.” Her hands found mine and rubbed.
I blew out a breath, accepting that the separation, the vengeance and everything that went with them was a part of our past that I would never accept. It was all a weight I’d always wear. But mercifully she would share my load.
Then I folded her over until her hands shot out to catch herself above the mattress. I bent and slid my tongue between her thighs. My first lap made her shudder. My second made her cry out. My third was a flick of her clit. A fourth slipped inside. And five, that magic number five, sent her knees crashing to the edge of the bed.
I smiled against her skin. Her delicious bits served up on a platter for me, and I ate as if it was my last meal. My fingers moved in and out of her over and over. My hand worked in tandem with my mouth, circling her clit and threatening to short circuit her entire system. She gasped, going rigid before her body melted into the bed.
The warm sunlight cast brilliant shapes across her skin; they shifted with her ragged breaths, with any change in position. My fingers let my tongue to do its work and they explored the bright lines where they blurred on her body. When her skin goose bumped in my wake, I couldn’t hold off anymore.
I slid onto the bed behind her, losing my boxer briefs as I went. I lined myself up with her, sinking right in.
“T
ey,” she moaned, dragging my nickname out.
My hips answered as I rolled them against the fine curve of her ass. Over and over again. She moved against the mattress but only as much as I allowed before I pulled her back to me.
Sweat built the sheen up along her skin, even going a little glittery over top of her beautiful constellation. I bent down to cocoon around her. She wiggled a little and flattened completely, her long lean body trapped below mine.
I rolled us to the side and took my cue from the water we loved so much, waving and rolling against her. Her hand came back and cupped my ass, pulling me in. I groaned as I tucked into the curve of her neck, never slowing my thrusts. Her hand moved up to hold me cradled against her neck.
My lips toured the shape of her neck as I pushed into her again and again. My hand slid up her body, to her nipple, and pulled. She arched against me, throwing her head harder against my shoulder, giving me a new angle inside her. I twisted the soft skin peaked in my hand. She dug her nails into my short hair.
I groaned this time, and she answered me with a breathy laugh.
We moved together, rolling like an unending sea, building up the froth of sex, riding each burst of pleasure. I slid my hand from her breast, over her ribs, past the dip of her bellybutton, and in between her legs. She jerked against me and, before too many strokes, went taut.
I felt her orgasm before she made a sound. More waves—my favorite in the world—rolled along my cock. I thrust lazily, relishing the way she gripped me then let me go with her most intimate bits. Squeeze and release until she sagged into me.
“Dantè.” My name was barely more than a whisper covered up all too soon in the sounds of my pleasure.
I moved faster now, she didn’t hesitate to match my pace. She gave and gave and gave. When I thought about how I would protect her, how I’d keep her. How I would never let anyone take from her again, I came.
Her breathy giggle was the first thing I heard when the roaring in my head subsided.
“You find something funny?” I asked, joining her in short shotgun laughs as I wound my arm underneath her and pulled her even tighter to my chest.
