by Ella Miles
I glance her way and see a thin black cord hanging down from her ear. She’s listening to something, and her eyes are closed.
I sigh. There is no one to save me from Langston. Right now, I’d even take Phoenix’s snarky comments—anything to not be left alone with Langston.
Langston turns sideways in his seat. He places one hand on the window behind me and his other hand on my chin.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asks again.
Everything. I’m not telling you everything because it’s not your burden to bear. You’ve done enough. You’ve protected my son when he wasn’t even your own blood. I’m the only one who can save him now.
“I’ve told you everything.” Everything that you need to know.
“I don’t believe you, Liesel. I know you’re lying. You tore the note in half before you gave it to me. You knew the house was going to explode. What aren’t you telling me?”
His grip under my chin strengthens as his resolve weakens. His voice is low and grumbly. He’s trying to look strong and unbreakable, but there is a hint of the boy I used to know underneath his blonde eyelashes. He wants me to tell him not because he’s worried about our safety but because I want to share information with him. Because I trust him. I do trust him more than he’ll ever know. If I didn’t trust him, I’d take Atlas far away from him. He’s the only man I trust with my son.
I just can’t let him further into the depths of my dark soul. I know what I have to do, and Langston will hate me for it. I can handle the hate if I didn’t know anything else, but I can’t handle him hating me after feeling his love.
“I’m not hiding anything from you, killer. I’ve told you everything you need to know to keep us safe.”
“What was on the other half of the note?”
“Just a personal attack against me. Something about calling me a bitch and whore, I didn’t think you needed to read it.”
His eyes narrow, and his tongue licks his lips. “Liar.”
Of course I’m lying, but I refuse to tell him the rest. Not until I know it’s the truth myself. Not until I’ve done what needs to be done.
“So what if I am lying? You’re not going to be able to get me to tell you the truth, so drop it.”
“Kai and Siren are going to be disappointed their plan failed so quickly. Just like that, you don’t trust me anymore.”
“I never trusted you.”
“I beg to disagree. You seem to trust me plenty with my cock in your mouth and tight cunt. Should I remind you?”
“You wouldn’t do that to Phoenix.” My chest rises and falls in hushed breaths.
Langston smirks. His eyes turn a wicked shade of black.
My mouth dries, just imagining his lips on mine. It’s all I ever crave. If it wasn’t for Atlas, my every thought would be consumed with Langston. I’d fuck him right here and not give a damn about hurting Phoenix’s feelings. But she’s Atlas’ mother. She will always be his mother. I can’t do that to her.
I shake my head and finally pull myself out of his grasp. I’m still trapped in my seat, boxed in beneath his arm.
“Phoenix needs to face reality.” He tilts his head as a lock of his hair falls into his eyes. I want to reach up and swipe it out of his eyes, but I remain motionless.
“What do you mean?”
He huffs. “I asked her for a divorce.”
I blink. I must have imagined him. There is no way he wants to divorce Phoenix. She’s the mother of his children.
“Don’t act like you didn’t hear me. I asked Phoenix for a divorce.”
“And…” my voice cracks. “What did she say?”
“Phoenix and I are getting a divorce as soon as this is all over.”
“Sure, you are. And I’m going to be the next Queen of England.”
His eyes roam down my body. “You’d make one hot as fuck queen.”
I roll my eyes.
And then his lips graze my cheek.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you to tell me the truth or fucking you in the back of this jet. The choice is yours.”
I swallow, but the lump in my throat barely moves. My palms sweat, and my body tingles. I’m not going to survive his form of torture.
I should just give in and fuck him. Everyone already thinks I’m a bitch who steals other people’s men. Phoenix certainly does. I might as well live up to my reputation.
I have a wicked soul that’s been hardened by years of pain. I’ll do enough horrible things with what remains of my life. I don’t have to hurt Phoenix. Not like this.
“I’m not telling you anything, and you aren’t fucking me either.”
His tongue flicks over my earlobe, causing my lips to part and moan.
“You can pretend you have control over your body all you want, but it’s not the truth. The truth is you and I were made for each other. We’ve resisted for years because we knew that if we ever gave in, we would never stop. Now that we’ve had each other, there is no stopping the inevitable. You can’t stop us from happening. Phoenix can’t. None of our enemies can. We are meant to be together, huntress.”
“We hate each other, killer. That will never change. Being together hurts too many people.”
He kisses down my neck to my clavicle. “I didn’t mention anything about love. All I said was we belong together. We belong hating each other. Fighting together. Fucking together. Our lives became more intertwined than either of us ever expected. The second I tore your father’s letter out of your hand all those years ago, you and I became an ‘us.’”
My eyes are trained on the ceiling as my mouth parts. I breathe heavily through my mouth as his hand pushes up my shirt, his fingers walking up my stomach.
He’s right—love may not be in the cards for us, but everything else is fair game.
I’m a horrible, sinful bitch.
“Talk to me, huntress, and this stops.” He kisses the corner of my mouth as his hand continues to climb higher on my body until he’s cupping my breast.
I suck in a breath as his thumb brushes over my nipple. My eyes dart to Phoenix.
Please, god, let her be blasting her music and not look back here.
“I can’t.”
He grins against my lips. “Can’t or don’t want to?”
I gasp, and then his mouth is on mine. I try to close my mouth, but I’m not fast enough. His tongue is in my mouth; his lips hungrily eat mine. My mind is mush as he devours me.
Can’t.
Don’t want.
Definitely want.
My hand grabs his neck as I deepen the kiss. I denied wanting Langston for so long that every time I kiss him, I think it’s a dream. It can’t be real. None of this is real.
But then his tongue dances across mine, he lets a throaty growl out, his hand pinches my nipple, and I realize just how real it is. As real as all of the horrible things I’ve ever experienced.
Langston’s hands start moving lower off my breast and down my stomach as he continues to attack my mouth, using his tongue as a weapon.
“Talk to me, huntress, or I’m going to fuck you with my fingers until you scream so loud that Phoenix will hate you forever.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He grins. “Let’s see how quiet you can be when I give you an orgasm that shatters every nerve ending in your body.”
I gulp.
My eyes drift to Phoenix. Maybe it’s for the best that she hates me? We don’t need to get along. We both just have to play our roles in protecting our children.
No!
Get ahold of yourself. You’re better than this.
His hands keep traveling south, and I only have moments to decide. I don’t have much strength in telling Langston no, but I’ll have none left once his hands reach my pants.
He kisses me again, and I moan, quickly losing my ability to control this situation. I’d rather him be holding a gun; I’d have a better shot at defeating him than with his tongue in my mouth.
I don’t know which way Langston would rather me choose either—telling him the truth or letting him fuck me until I lose control. Whatever I choose, he wins.
Forgive me, Phoenix.
We were always doomed to become nemeses. My cousin, who gets to love the boy I grew up with freely. She carried his child, got him to put a ring on her finger and vow eternity to her. I know he says that he wants to get divorced, but when it comes down to it, Langston is an honorable man. He won’t divorce Phoenix unless she agrees.
With every tantalizing kiss, I’m becoming more and more of the tragic whore I was always destined to become. I’m the thorn in his side. The darkness that overshadows his children and brings the monsters in the night.
I may be the cheater, but I won’t be the monster that brings children anymore suffering. It’s just one of the many reasons that Langston and I are not meant to be together. He’s wrong—we don’t belong together in any way. Our lives have become intertwined because of that damn letter that he stole from me and because fate played a sick game on us by having Langston adopt my child.
Knowing that every kiss we exchange is going to break our hearts that much more when this ends doesn’t stop the kisses. It doesn’t stop our teeth from clashing, our tongues from wrestling, and our moans from escalating.
Each kiss brings me further away from reality. I forget to be quiet to prevent Phoenix from hearing, and I no longer flail my arms in failed attempts to push him away. Instead, my fingers curl around the neck of his shirt, holding him tight against me so I can invade his mouth with my tongue.
His fingers continue to drag down my flat stomach filled with enormous butterflies that build into a swarm of feelings that I’m never going to be able to decipher.
“I want this,” I say as his hands lower.
We both lock eyes. I expect a cocky grin; instead, he gives me a seductive gaze that has my insides melting. His hand finds the top of my jeans and begins to unbutton them. We’ve stopped kissing, both intensely focused on what his hand is doing.
This is wrong.
So wrong.
But my whole life has been wrong. After this is over, I may regret the pain I’ve caused, but right now, I just want this man—the only man left in the world that I trust to make me feel good.
“Can you be quiet, huntress?”
I nod as his hand pushes beneath the fabric of my jeans and cups my sex. I moan loudly, before realizing my mistake and biting down on his shoulder to keep from making another sound.
He chuckles. “I’m not going to let you be quiet. I’m going to make you scream until the pilot comes back here thinking he needs to make an emergency landing.”
“Your fingers aren’t that good.”
His scruff rubs against my cheek as his tongue tickles the rim of my ear. “Liar. Everything about me is that good—fingers, tongue, cock. I’m going to make you scream my name with each one.”
All of my brain cells burst with his deeply arrogant words. I slant my head as I resume kissing him. I no longer remember why I don’t want to make a sound, just that I don’t. Kissing him muffles any sounds that escape. He’s right; I will moan, groan, and scream every time he touches my clit or pushes himself inside me.
His fingers push aside my panties and spread my lips before dipping inside.
I moan around his bottom lip that I’ve pulled into my mouth and sucking ferociously, trying to control myself.
“So wet for me already.”
His fingers push further inside me, spreading me and making me feel whole. His thumb brushes over my clit.
I bite down with everything I can—using his lip like someone might bite down on a belt in olden days when they are about to lose a limb. Langston is doing the same to me—except instead of losing a limb, I’m losing my soul.
His thumb is merciless as he rubs faster and faster on my clit until water stings my eyes from trying to keep my screams inside. I taste his blood in my mouth, but he doesn’t surrender. It seems he’s happy to pay the price in blood to make me pay in sin.
I crumple as his fingers thrust in and out, crushing all my walls I’ve built to keep him out.
His hand slides down my back before he dips me sideways in our row of seats until I’m lying on my back. He settles between my spread legs, his hand still inside me, but our mouths separated. I no longer have his lip to bite down on, nothing to muffle my cries.
He smirks down at me, knowing once again that he’s won.
Why did I need to keep quiet again?
With one hand still inside me, his other hand moves to my stomach, pushing my shirt up before running down my center. Then his fingers dip lower, tracing over my C-section scar.
A scar he has avoided touching or commenting on until now.
My scar.
Atlas.
I prop myself up on my elbows abruptly, pushing through the fog that has surrounded my head since he started touching me.
“Stop.”
He does, but he doesn’t remove his fingers from my slit.
“We can’t.” I shake my head. “I’m already a cheater, a whore, a bitch. And as bad as my body wants me to become a cheater again, we can’t. I won’t hurt Phoenix. I won’t hurt the mother of my child. Before, I thought we were going to die. Now, we have a choice. I won’t make the same mistake again.”
My breathing is erratic, and my hands shake. My entire body is calling me a fool for telling Langston to stop.
“Tell me what you’re hiding, or I keep going,” Langston says with a devilish smirk.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
My breath hitches, and my heart rate skyrockets. How do I get out of this with my body and sanity intact?
Tell him the truth—at least what you can of it. Tell him the why.
“You tell me I should trust you. That we are on the same side—both looking for the treasure and a way to protect our kids.”
He nods.
“I trust you,” I say.
His eyes widen at my admission.
“And now I’m asking you to trust me. I can’t tell you any more than I already have. At least not yet. It’s not safe.”
“Not safe for who?”
“For you! Our kids need a father alive.”
He pauses, and I’m not sure what he’s going to do—keep torturing me to tell him the truth or let this go.
Slowly, he slides his fingers out of me. He pushes my panties back in place and even zips up my jeans and fastens the button.
Then he lifts his fingers to his lips and sucks my juices off them. I’m so close to coming that I’m afraid just watching this enchanting man suck his fingers is going to make me come, so I look away.
“They also need their mother to stay alive,” he says as he holds out his hand to me.
I take it, and he helps me sit back up.
“They already have a mother,” I say, my eyes locking on the back of Phoenix’s head. She’s still looking straight ahead, and I have no idea if she knows what happened between us.
He stands up and looks at me sadly. “Maybe they need two.”
8
Langston
Trust her.
That’s what Liesel wants—trust.
I sink back into my chair next to Phoenix. She doesn’t even glance up from her phone. She can pretend she doesn’t know what I went back to Liesel for all she wants, but pretending we are one big happy family isn’t going to make our children’s lives any better. We have to face the truth.
Liesel said she trusts me. I assume that must be true since she didn’t immediately demand her child be removed from my custody. To some extent, she must also trust Phoenix.
But do I trust her?
I want to. I want to trust her desperately. I want to trust that everything I thought I knew about Liesel isn’t true—that she didn’t do the horrible thing I discovered. I want to believe that the reason she’s hiding things from me is truly to protect our kids. I want to trust her.
But I don’t.
She’s broken my trust so many times, as have I.
I don’t know why she’s changed her mind and now trusts me. Or maybe that’s a lie, like everything else she speaks.
I do know that we have to figure out a way to trust each other if we are going to survive this; I just don’t know how.
Phoenix finally looks at me and smiles weakly as she puts the hood of her hoodie up over her head and then leans on my shoulder, her hand resting against my inner thigh. It doesn’t bother me how blasé she is with touching me. Phoenix has earned the right to touch me however she wants.
The problem is I don’t crave her touch. I crave the spicy blonde in the back who wants to castrate me as much as she wants to fuck me. The woman hates as much as she loves me. The woman who is mine and yet will never actually be mine.
When Liesel told me to stop, I thought I was imagining it. There was no way I could be feeling like I felt touching her, and her have the capacity to tell me to stop. The burning desire bolting through me was buzzing through her body too. I saw it in her hooded eyes, her parted lips, and the way she bit down on my lip.
I tortured her with my body not because I actually thought it would lead her to tell me the truth, but because I needed something to ground myself in her again. I thought she needed the same—an escape from reality together.
But then she asked me to stop.
Does she have more control over her urges than I do? Or is her lust just not as strong as mine is?
I move my head, and a drop of blood splotches Phoenix’s cheek. Her thumb swipes across her pale cheek, and then she looks at the red-colored liquid on the tip of her thumb.
I don’t know how she’s going to react to seeing evidence of my interactions with Liesel. I watch curiously as she waits a beat before placing her thumb into her mouth, sucking the blood off.
Nothing.
A sight like that in the past might get me hard and horny as hell. I’d be pulling her into the nearest bathroom to fuck her senseless. That was who I used to be—a horny bastard content on fucking everyone.
My eyes sear back to where I left my heart—sitting next to Liesel, my huntress.
