“Thanks, Honeybear.”
He remains near the tub as I step out, but he lets me do it on my own. “Why didn’t you look at a lumberjacking state?”
“Lumberjacking isn’t a word,” I cite.
“No, but lumberjack slam is a sex position.”
I wrap the towel around my waist. “Where do you come up with this shit?”
“The internet,” he remarks as we walk to the makeshift rehab my parent’s house has become. I sit on the triple sheet covered sofa and think about cleaning this mess up. “You gonna get dressed?”
“In a minute, the bath wears me out.”
“You’re weak, which is why you’re not going to go being super sleuth Sal, toting your gun and trying to find your girl,” Deacon points out. I already know. In my current state, I’m a danger to myself and others, including Anna, Iris, and Raine. “Are you hungry?”
“I want a vegetarian pizza, my gray sweatpants, and some Red Sox…”
“Sal, it’s November.”
Without expression, I start bawling my eyes out. I’m sobbing like a baby as I wail, “Can we at least have some football?”
“We can,” he assures, turning on the flat screen and handing the tissue box to me. “Babe, stop crying.”
“It’s this shit still in my system.”
“I know,” he says, flipping on the lights in the kitchen and heading to the bedroom. Returning with my Wiggs ballcap on backward, he tosses the pants and says, “Here are your sweats, Sir.”
I watch him dart off to the kitchen. “What are you doing now?”
“Making you a fucking vegetarian pizza,” he informs, pulling off his rings and digging around in the kitchen. “I need to make banana nut bread for a football team.”
“Ewww! Throw those damn things away!” Sipping on my water, I wish I had a beer. “Hey, what am I going to do about Emlee?”
He pulls out all kinds of ingredients from the fridge. “What can you do? You need to keep Cesario believing we aren’t onto his scheme. It’s not right, and I don’t like it, but you have to keep playing by his rules for a little bit longer.”
“You want me to hurt Emily?”
“You have to decide what you want,” he says, mixing the dough with his hands. “I can’t do that for you. I can tell you even though Iris is mad now. She may not be when we find her. Have you fucked Emily yet?”
“More like we made love,” I confide.
He lifts his hands from the dough. “… Like candles and flowers?”
“Like I fixed her sink and she taunted me with her garter belt until I surrendered, raised the flag, and did her on the sofa.”
He grimaces. “Ouch! You’re fucked if she keeps wearing garters.”
“Tell me! I know! I’m going to break her heart when I dump her.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he insists, patting his makeshift dough into a pan. “You just worry about acting like this is the role of your life.”
“It kind of is,” I reply, standing up to put my pants on. I stumble and catch myself on the coffee table.
“I’m coming.”
“No, I got this,” I persist, straightening up and pulling them on. “It is the role of my life because if I fuck it up, I’m nothing but a dead man sinking in the water.”
“Sharks,” he says as I sit down. “Gods and Kings. Beasts. Demons. Monsters.”
“Stop,” I say, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “I get the last one.”
“You’d rather be a monster than a God?”
I put my feet on the coffee table and get comfy. “Yeah, Gods have too many responsibilities.”
“Give me that smoke,” he says, striding closer. He gives me a quick peck on the mouth before stealing the cigarette from my hands. “Don’t light another one.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you, Snookums,” he says, turning around and grinning. “You’re about to go sleepy time.”
I lift my middle finger. “I love you, too, pizza boy.”
67
Snow Burns Red
Tuesday, November 17, I’m jogging with Deacon, and he’s running loops around me. “You’re getting old,” he chaffs with a devious grin. “Quickly working on that Dad bod.”
“Fuck you, Cruz,” I hiss as the sweat flings off my skin. I bend over, breathing heavily. “I’m younger than you.”
“Take a breather, bro.” He glances up to the sky. “Those are snow clouds. You sure you don’t want to go this afternoon?”
I never want to go anywhere near my father again.
“I’m leaving in the morning because I need to recoup before I take Emily to Maine.”
Handing the water bottle over to me, he says, “I know you don’t want to do any of this, but we don’t know who has Anna and Iris.” I give him a discouraging look, still refusing to understand. “For all we know, your father paid Mierne and Jack to abduct them, and if you don’t abide by his wishes, then he’s going to do something terrible. You are the fuse. Don’t trigger him by being hard-headed.”
Probably because of the lag in my brain, I haven’t considered this.
“I don’t want to go back,” I yell at the foreboding clouds, knowing they cannot help me. No one can. “But I have to go back.”
“Yes,” he agrees with a nod as we walk to the house. “You have to go back, or you ignite the bomb. And I’m so goddamned sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not fair,” he says, kicking up a cloud of dust on the road in front of the house. “None of it is.”
“Keep your promise to me. If something happens to me, you go make my girl Mrs. Iris Cruz.”
His eyes weep with an unexpected hit of emotion. “You say it like we can pick up and do it so easily, but what you haven’t seen is that you are the glue holding us together. Do you honestly think the moment you left—we hit it?”
I blankly stare at his question, unsure of how to respond.
“Because we didn’t. We rode around the country, barely saying a word to each other for weeks. Iris and I aren’t the same without you.”
“Did you…”
Lighting a cigarette, Deacon stops and ducks his head. “Does it matter now? What good is this going to do?”
“Because I want to know if you’re capable of taking care of my business or if I should recruit Dom who bones her every fucking chance he gets.”
His jaw tightens, and those sad blue eyes strike every chord in my soul. “I took care of your girl. If that isn’t enough for you…”
He walks off, smoking like a chimney, but I’m pissed. I want a damn answer. I chase after him, grab his shoulder, and pull back like the belligerent bastard I am. “Answer the question, Cruz.”
“I’m not doing this.” He stirs away from my grasp, but I go at him with a relentless fight.
“Answer the fucking question! Did you or did you not stick your dick in my girl?” He takes a final drag and exhales in my face. With everything I’ve got, I swing for his pretty face, and he grabs my fist in his. “You fucking bastard!”
“Do you want to know what we did?” he angrily bellows. “Cause I’ll tell you. I ate more cake than I have in twenty-eight fucking years. I washed her hair. I held her when she cried. I calmed her down when she woke up screaming because she thought you hated her. I pulled her off ledges and stopped her from doing anything stupid. That is what I did. So, if you want to be mad at someone for what happened, then be mad at me.”
“You fucked her.” I shrug and walk away.
“That’s right! Classic Nero moves right there. Shit gets hard, and you leave. You get in your truck and drive away. You grab a bottle. You drown your feelings. And that is why you are going to lose her, even if you do get her back!”
I lift a middle finger and keep heading for the door when he comes running at me full speed and knocks my ass to the ground. “Is this how we’re playing this?”
We wrestle and jab one another.
We aren’t playing anymore; w
e may kill one another.
“I don’t want to do this with you!” Deacon roars.
“We’re beating the shit out of each other for a girl we both love?”
“Because you can’t handle her!” he yammers as I roll him on his back. I’m throwing punches with both hands, and then I suddenly stop and sob as I realize what he’s doing.
Anger is a great motivator.
But it doesn’t stop him from sinking the blade in. “You want to know if I fucked her—no, I didn’t fuck her. I made love to her like you would’ve wanted me to, and then I put a collar around her neck.”
I instantly lose all feeling—everywhere.
“You did—what?” I panic, unable to breathe, as no amount of chemical torture can compare to the epic landmine he detonated. I get up as my lungs collapse, my heart flatlines, and my brainwaves cease. “She took my collar off… Iris is done?”
“No, you motherfucker—Iris had both chains on when I left.” With his cheek banged up, he smirks like the devil I love as he growls, “You’re ready to go back into the ring, street thug.”
“You’re so mean,” I bawl, kicking back and popping his ass with the side of my foot as he chases me. “Was all that necessary? I mean you could’ve just answered the question like a good little bitch.”
“You wouldn’t want me if I was easy.”
Stripping off my filthy clothes, I leave a trail to the shower as Deacon picks up every garment. I crank on the water and think about how long he’s been collecting pieces of me.
Since Kaci died years ago, he has been painstakingly maintaining my refuse. He is my garbage man, my private investigator, and my book of secrets.
From lint on my jacket to a bloodstain on my shirt, he keeps me in tiptop shape. Deacon Cruz is my right-hand man, and this family is my court, each serving a distinct purpose. Dom is my negotiator. Nicky is my hitman. Jas is my researcher. I realize how much I’ve denied Cesario Raniero’s mafia, and maybe it was because I had already constructed the framework for my outfit.
To be my own man.
To stand on my own two feet.
I’ve been running in circles for so long, and I never considered the parallels between myself and Luca Raniero. He, too, started small. One man with a mission to build a business his way, and he did. I needed the knowledge of his mistakes as much as the break I sought in prison. We never anticipated the virus someone would infect our mainframe with.
I am the computer.
And I was hacked.
“How long are you going to stand there?” Deacon lays his hand on my shoulder in the shower. “Are you okay?”
“If we can find her, she’s coming back to me,” I whisper, turning around in the water. “She won’t leave me.”
“Yeah,” he replies with a soft smirk and a nod. “She will come back to you. I can’t replace you. And I don’t want to. But you need to trust her. You need to trust us—all of us—to do what is necessary to protect you.”
“Amber…”
“Amber did what she thought she needed to do to keep you safe. She didn’t keep Raine away from you because of malice. Put yourself in her shoes for a second. If she had gone running to you, you would’ve have gone balls to the wall crazy to get that kid back. She knew you’d be so passionate, and you’d both end up dead. In a way, Amber saved you. Should she have told you something over the last four years?” he rhetorically asks, wetting his hair and spitting water. “Yeah, she had plenty of opportunities to confide the truth in a non-pressurized setting. It didn’t have to turn out this way. Your mistress handled some shit very poorly. The execution of the delivery is critical. Your running off in the middle of the night is a constant challenge.”
“I have to stop running.”
“You have to stop running,” he confirms, washing his blonde mane. “We can’t do this if the leader is quick to flee.”
“Was prison a mistake?”
“I don’t think so, but I know Iris disagrees. I understood why you went in. You wanted time to process all that had occurred, and you thought we could keep her on the move and preoccupied with finding the USB drives while you dealt with your father. But I don’t think you truly considered how challenging being apart from her for that long would be. You knew logically in your head, but you failed to think about the emotional ramifications to your psyche.”
Leaning my forearms up on the shower wall, I duck my head. “I don’t deal with those feeling things very well.”
“We all have shortcomings.”
“What’s yours?”
“I can be quick to anger, feel rejection, and disappear, but I’m working on it. You’re just numb. And we won’t succeed with a numb dark prince.”
His hand smooths over my bicep and the week-old shadows on my cheeks. I open up, raw and vulnerable, feeling everything as his mouth washes over mine.
“Cruz…”
“Stop the denial.” We slam into the back wall of the shower as his hand’s pin mine above my head, and his lips and tongue warm my frozen core. He slathers kisses on my mouth, neck, and chest. “Let me take care of you. Stop fighting me. Stop fighting Iris. Drop the walls, Lucas Salvatore.”
Deacon Cruz is the only person in the world who could confront me with the truth of who I am. He knows the real me. And though our roles may seem reversed, they aren’t. Suitable submissives are never passive, and as much as the Dominant enhances the sub, the sub should equally enrich the Dom. There should be a balance. I keep an even keel with Deacon. Hopefully, I get time to work through the struggles with Iris; we’re young in this. Deacon and I know one another; we are seasoned.
I know when he releases my arms and drops to his knees, this isn’t about just getting me off, but loving me wholly. His hands rest on my thighs, and he kisses the cross, worshipping and paying his respects. “The water is getting cold.” I declare with a firmness, “Get up.” His fingers twist the handle as I step out and hand him a towel. “Come.”
With the snow falling in the darkness, the pasta dishes sit empty on the coffee table as I build a pallet of blankets and pillows in front of Deacon’s roaring fire. “I’m not sure you should sleep on the floor.”
“I had a foul experiment blow up in my brain,” I maintain with a smile. “I am not sick.”
“You’ve always been sick in the head,” he declares, wearing a pair of my gray sweats and sitting in the mess of my creation. “… Do you think Dom knows?”
“About us?”
“Yes, I’m certain he does,” I counter, rustling around in my backpack on the counter. “He isn’t a stranger to giving his all to a man or a woman…any submissive worthy. If you’re invited to step into Dom’s world, you’ve earned a coveted spot.”
“It’s a very big deal,” he mutters as I stride over and stand behind him. His blue eyes spark at the sight of the heavy banded leather cuffs. “You don’t have to…”
“If you say no to me, you will regret it,” I warn.
“That deviates from consent.”
“Not when the bottom unit is being a pill for the sake of being difficult,” I remind, snapping the belt. “You consented a long time ago, Cruz.”
He mischievously grins. “Because sometimes, you just know.” Lifting his arms, I fasten the cuffs to his wrists and lock them together. “I have a question,” he gently mutters, and I peer down. “You’ve talked about me marrying Iris if something happens to you, but what do we do if something happens to her?”
“I’m not marrying you,” I assure as he laughs. “If you need a ring, I’ll stick one on your cock.”
“Motherfucker.”
I switch my position to stand in front of him. With a tantalizing tug, I open my jeans and show him the erection right before his face. “In all seriousness, we’ll make do,” I urge, gripping behind his head and shoving my cock down his throat. I eagerly buck my hips as he welcomes me. He gives amazing head, but even better than my dick nudging his throat is the look of innocence he imparts with every blink of tho
se sad blue eyes. I have a weakness for them, and he knows this, exploiting my desire and turning it into a carnal lust. I’m rock hard, pounding between his lips when I say, “Down.”
He attempts to roll over. “Get on your fucking back, Deacon. Hands above your head.”
“You may have every scar and spot on my backside committed to memory,” I growl, kicking off my jeans and pacing around him. “But I’m taking your soul because you are mine.”
By dumb luck, we ended up stranded in a shanty shack deep in the Louisiana bayou. Sitting on the window ledge, I said, “You wanna talk, Cruz?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about it,” he whispered with silent tears.
I took the smoke from his fingers, in the hazy ganja-infused cloud, and I muttered, “You wanna forget about it?”
“Yes. And then I never want to talk about it again.”
Without any more words, I snapped my belt off and commanded, “Kneel.”
“You don’t mean that,” Deacon said, flabbergasted.
“Don’t fucking question me twice, boy.”
“Yes, Sir,” he deferred, dropping in front of me. “You can’t be serious… You are Salvatore-fucking-Raniero.”
“And you’re going to be fucking Sal Raniero in about ten minutes.” The rebellious biker boy understood respect and grace as he did what I asked. “Why do you want this?”
“Because I want you.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, not knowing what to say. “You want…”
“What you won’t do,” he answered, raising his gaze to meet mine. “You have that no men clause, remember?”
“Famous last words…” I paced around, assessing—his baggy jeans, the chain holding his wallet, his muscled tattooed chest, and his rugged black boots. “If I agree to this, we play by my rules.”
“I’ll do whatever you say,” he begged, breathing. “I promise I will be good to you and never tell another soul.”
“You want to be my submissive, Deacon?”
His blue eyes blinked. “Yes, Sir.”
Famous Last Words (a Tomb of Ashen Tears Book 2) Page 54
