by Ace Gray
The way her wide eyes fixed on me and her mouth stayed thin, her chest rising and falling fast, I knew the oxy was wearing off. My little show had only prolonged the evening. And likely earned me a punishment.
So I sat back, stone-faced. My father held his goblet up in cheers. As his friends, thugs and fellow demons settled in, they lifted their glasses too.
“To blood,” he toasted. “To yours.” He lifted his glass to the men between us. “To mine,” he sneered and shot me an eyebrow. “And to spilling that of those who betray you.” He eyed me then dropped his gaze to Filly then guzzled the wine in his glass.
I stared at my father without flinching as I slugged the disgusting tasting wine, wondering who would be the first to fall once the ecstasy kicked in.
She reached out, tentatively at first. Her small fingertips hovered above Deirdre’s collarbone where they faced each other, kneeling on the table, their naked bodies revealed only when the light strobed. A slow, deep, bone-chattering bass filtered through the music he’d put on. I was so damn high that I could only hold onto the wood beneath me and stroke my thumbs along the fine grain of my chair. I would have cursed myself for my high if I could have functioned at all.
“Choke her,” my father egged Filly on just beside her ear.
We’d been rolling on ecstasy for about an hour when he’d flipped the lights and placed the girls at center stage. Deep dark red pulsing club lights replaced our civilized chandelier and turned the world inside out. I was turned inside out.
“It’s okay little one,” Deirdre cooed at Filly as she offered her body over to her.
Filly reached her small hand out and sized it up against Deirdre’s throat. Her fingers curled in on themselves.
“I said choke her.” My father pounded his hands on the table on either side of Filly.
Fear shocked some life into her features before they fell back into the haze she’d been in from the wine. She balled her fists and covered her chest. Deirdre reached out and tenderly brushed them aside then let her palm press against Filly’s heart.
If I had a soul, I would have sold it to be her hand.
“Her heart is hammering,” Deirdre let her hand slide down Filly’s body, grazing her skin then reaching for the leash left hanging.
She used it like a reel and pulled Filly forward. Each little bit, Deirdre wrapped the chain around her fist and when she was close enough, Deirdre shoved her free one into Filly’s hair. My heartbeat was the one hammering now, hard enough that it was going to split my chest.
When Deirdre leaned in and kissed her, my world exploded into fireworks.
I groaned and the erection I was sporting hurt where it was trapped both beneath my trousers and the edge of the table. I reached down to stroke myself; Filly was on display.
As soon as Deirdre’s lips locked on Filly’s, she bucked. Deirdre rose up and tried to leverage her body, but Filly reached up. Her hand locked around Deirdre’s throat just as my father wanted and she squeezed. Deirdre purred against Filly’s mouth then kept up her kisses. Her fingers flexed roughly just before she bit down on Deirdre’s lip. The howl that Deirdre let loose was wild and wanton; I shuddered. I knew it was wrong but them together... And the drugs...
The next few things happened so fast I would have had a hard time processing them sober. Deirdre reached between Filly’s legs and let her head roll back as if offering her throat up to Filly. Filly’s hand shifted just enough that her nails dug in. Deirdre gasped then replied with a stroke between Filly’s legs, her pleasured sounds mingled with the men of the room making for a hedonistic symphony.
But then Filly’s free hand came out of nowhere and decked Deirdre. A left hook to her high, rouged cheekbone. My drug-addled ass felt the crunch in my face.
Deirdre’s head snapped back and she fell off the fold of her knees. It yanked Filly’s leash and she flew similarly, both naked bodies tangled on their side. I pushed up to standing and shouted at them, but I was drowned out by the wicked cheer of the other men in the room.
I knew I needed to help Filly, but I didn’t know how. My body wasn’t doing what I wanted, my brain was stirred up. I wanted to tear tooth and nail to get to her. I’d scoop her up and run far the fuck away from here. But the second I touched something, I needed to explore the texture of it. It would absorb me and the lines of what was happening in front of me blurred and snapped back into focus.
Filly was clawing at Deirdre when my vision barreled back. My father was cheering them on, his head bent almost between them, his spittle wetting their cheeks as they tussled. The lights still flashed. Darkness. Red. Darkness. White. Darkness. Red. My stomach woozed. I reached for them though—for her.
“Dessert,” my father commanded over the music and moaning. My vision flashed again and when I shook off the haze, chocolate was being poured over both of them.
Deirdre arched her body up to relish in the sweet. Filly took advantage and climbed onto Deirdre. The difference between the two of them was night and day. Deirdre’s hips bucked up and she threw her head back as she lapped at the splashes of chocolate that made it near her lips.
Filly fought. Both of her hands wrapped around Deirdre’s throat. She squeezed until Deirdre’s body went a little frantic.
“Stop,” my father said coolly. “Stop!” he bellowed over the bass.
When she didn’t, I knew what was coming next. I made my body start moving beforehand, but I wasn’t fast enough.
My father backhanded Filly so hard that she released the grip on Deirdre’s neck and she reached up to cover her cheek. Bright red mingled with the chocolate smeared on her chest. I wanted to taste it. But before I could, my father took Filly’s leash and yanked. Like a little rag doll, she tumbled off the table, hitting a chair on the way.
I darted for her, but my hand slid along Deirdre on the way.
The slick of her skin and the artwork my touch made in the chocolate coating her stole my attention. I gasped as I reached for her with both hands and let them swirl on her body. I should have stopped. I mean I wanted to.
Filly was there. Filly was hurt.
Get it together. Get it together. Get it together.
But I couldn’t. The wine I’d slammed to save her was my undoing.
“Brye,” Deirdre moaned, dragging me from my barely formed internal debate. “Your fingers are pulsing in time with my heart.” Each word dripped with pleasure.
My jaw went slack when I felt it too. The black swirls and handprints covering her skin thumped the same as my heart, her heart, the bass, my fingers… fuck, even the room.
I climbed onto the table where she was splayed out and pressed myself to her. Our heartbeats rocked all of existence as I sat still on top of her, fully clothed. I didn’t need to undress, I could feel each inch of her with wool between us. Her hands traveled up my back, moving beneath my suit jacket and each digit was alive and wild, independent as it moved along my body.
Fuck off was on the tip of my tongue but I wanted to keep touching her. Needed to. The X made me. My body started rolling against hers as if it was as natural as a heartbeat or an expanding rib cage. Our fingers wove together, and I extended them overhead only to find my father staring with a wicked curl on his lips.
Somewhere in the faint recesses of my mind, I knew I should stop. There was a good reason. I had just known it. But what was it? God, I wanted to stop, but…
The art.
Being pressed to Deirdre had made the most amazing print. The chocolate had twisted up and risen on certain spots, leaving a zebra-like effect that I found almost as bewitching as the feel of her skin itself. I studied it in the changing light, felt the whomp of the ecstasy add to the effect, and I wanted to touch it.
My fingers gravitated toward the swell of her breast, not because it was her breast but because the pattern was so intriguing there. I followed the outline of the dark chocolate and studied the flecks still stuck to her skin. Her nipple peaked beneath my touch, adding new landscape to the artwor
k she’d become.
I flicked it.
She bent off the table so wildly, that the chocolate spilled again, making new patterns to tempt me. My fingers reached for her again. I smeared it this time, watching the paint change shapes as she moaned. Over and over, I pushed and pulled and flicked, letting her body respond, all the while watching how the design wrapped up with the music with the mood, held me captive.
But then her voice changed. And the way her body moved beneath mine too. Her shriek was rolling like a boil and her body followed suit. She was having an orgasm. A soul-shaking one by the looks of it.
I looked down at my hands like they were monsters or aliens from another planet. One minute I’d been looking at art and the next…
Deirdre moaned and it mixed perfectly in all the wrong ways with my father’s laugh. Both of them were punctuated by a steady bass beat of the electronic heart filling the room. But somehow mine was gone.
“Well I think that was a grand finale if ever I saw one,” my father clapped. “Tonight, I feasted. Tonight, I’m pleased.”
He glanced once down to the far corner of the room and I remembered. All of it. All of her.
I wobbled as I slid off the table and stumbled on the discarded chair. I crashed to the floor, inches from her. I looked up to find her doe eyes narrowed, her lip split and bleeding. The X told me to reach out and feel the soft butter of her skin. The kernel of myself I was trying to hold on to said don’t you touch her at all. She’d had wine, and that meant drugs, but the girl in front of me wasn’t high.
I’d dragged her so damn low.
The room emptied slowly but, eventually it was just Filly balled in the corner beside the dining room table where things seemed to fall completely apart. The music still thumped in that hypnotic way and the lights were still tuned to it. Above it all, I felt her and the lump in my throat that made it hard to speak.
“I hate you,” she whispered. “Just when I think I’ve forgiven you, or that I’ve found the good in you, you do…” Her tears poured down her cheeks until she had to hide her face in her delicate hands. “You do that!” she sobbed, her muffled voice breaking out above the shit in the room.
“I’m not a good guy. I never was,” I whispered.
“You were. For a moment you were.” Her face was red with the tears, the anger. “You were a boy with soft and sweet lips, who spoke about art as if he felt something. Who spoke to me as if the world was something he wanted to know. As if I was something he wanted to know.” Her voice was ratcheting up, every bit of her was coming more alive with the raw disappointment inside her that was turning into hatred. “But then you do this.”
She clawed at the back of her neck for long enough that I wanted to reach for the buckle of the collar myself, but at the last minute, she got it, freeing the leather just to throw it at me.
“Fuck you for being both.” She stood and looked down on me with so much disdain my stomach churned. “I hate you for being both.”
Those words broke down the wall between her and I. The one that I’d been keeping in place for myself more than anything.
“That makes two of us.”
I knew two things for sure. One, I believed in soulmates. Unequivocally. Two, they didn’t matter in the least.
Brye MacCowan was mine. I saw him earlier today in the man that crawled into the bathtub with me. I even glimpsed him in the depthless well of those blue eyes across the floor from me. Each time he was that man, my insides felt like kindling ready to catch fire.
But then he’d be this, and I didn’t want this.
I didn’t care what he could be anymore, or about the glimpses that I caught. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. Especially when he stood and started leading me back toward his bedroom.
“Let go of me.”
“No.”
I tried to rip my arm away from him, but he was too strong. “That’s your favorite word isn’t it?” I was starting and I didn’t much feel like stopping. “Does human life mean anything to you? No. Do you care about anything? No. Anyone? No. Is there anything in that chest besides a cold, dead, heart? No.” I spewed.
“I did all that for you,” he roared back, finally rising to fight me from his shame.
“You drugged me, put me on a table, let people touch me, then fingered a whore for me?” I raised my free hand to my chest in mock appreciation. “Do me a favor and don’t do anything for me ever again.” I cocked my hand back and let it fly, feeling the sting of my palm as it acquainted itself with the sculpt of his face. The sound was as satisfying as the sting that shot up my forearm. I backhanded him almost as quickly.
He didn’t say a word he just clung to his cheek for a moment and worked his jaw out like he was chewing bubble gum. I didn’t move besides the fire flaring my nostrils and the too shallow breaths shaking my chest.
“What would you have had me do?” he asked, his voice back to low and menacing. “Kill him?”
The thought made me sick. If anyone deserved to die it was Connor MacCowan but pretending I was worthy of judging was just fucked up. But then again, so was Brye.
“You’re your father’s son.”
The volcanic eruption backlit his stark blue eyes a moment before the violence burst from inside him and came roaring at me. He grabbed my upper arms on both sides and squeezed so hard that I thought I might snap. I screamed and thrashed against him as he started backing toward the stairs. As soon as I could harness the pain and regain control of myself, I sent my knee to his groin.
He howled and dropped me. I wobbled for a moment as he doubled over, but once my feet were under me, I ran. Or started to. His hand was around my calf a moment later with such authority that my momentum halted outright. I smashed into the floor, chin first and felt the hot metallic of blood split from my tongue to match what already came from my lip.
My tears were back, more a reaction to the searing pain than to the realization that he was a worse monster than I believed.
“Let go of me,” I wailed as I kicked at him.
“Never.”
It was so protective, so possessive that the tendril of soulmate still wrapped around my heart paused. But only long enough for him to grab me like a caveman, throw me over his shoulder and head back for the stairs. I grabbed on to the railing.
“I will not go back to that room of painted lies with you.”
“It’s that or the basement.”
“I’ll take the basement.”
He pivoted on his heel and pressed my legs into his chocolate coated chest. I thought about kneeing him again just out of spite. Instead, I went silently.
When he carried me into that cold basement and set me down, shivers wracked my spine simply because the concrete was frigid, but I leveled my gaze at him and raised my arms overhead to the shackles.
“This is what you want?” he asked.
“This is the furthest thing from what I want.” I stretched higher. “Except for maybe you.”
He pressed his body to mine and for a split second, I remembered what it had been like to kiss him before we somersaulted into shitsville. My body wanted to move toward his, to bow toward him and let him graze my hips and gaze on my chest. My traitorous asshole body that had gotten all sorts of wet over the things I’d seen today. Over Deirdre’s touch.
I had to make a conscious effort not to flinch or groan as he drug his fingers up along my body from the sides of my ribs all the way to my wrists. He cocked his head, less than an inch away from my lips as he fiddled with the steel above my head. Our breath mingled again, that scent, that flavor called to me, and I leaned back the slightest bit.
But then the cool steel pinched on my bones and it became hard to stand flat foot. The small click seemed so final as he stepped back and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if he was just taking in every inch of my body on display or seeing something deeper.
Without an answer, he turned and strode toward the steps. He paused on the last one and shot me a look over his shoulder.
“For what it’s worth,” he started softly. “I think I would kill him for you, but I think that alone is the reason that I’ll lose you.”
I didn’t remember sleeping the first two times I’d hung in the basement. Waver in and out of consciousness sure, but not sleep. This time, I was about to pass out, twinging shoulders and all.
Brye had stolen the last little bit of energy from me. Between the drugs, the stolen touches and his stupidity, I’d lost too much tonight. And if I started to think about the last week…
The tears blurred my barely opening eyes.
And I surrendered to it. To the exhaustion, the sweeping sorrow. My eyes sagged shut and the weight on my shoulders tightened until there was nothing.
Well, nothing but the clang, clang, clang of something heavy as it echoed down the stairwell. I opened my eyes and my lashes were crusty, making it difficult to really see. The light had shifted, telling me I had slept, it hadn’t been restorative. The clang, clang, scrape had woken me.
“Well hello there, pet.” A deep and unfamiliar voice popped my eyes open.
Two men that looked vaguely familiar from dinner stood in front of me.
“They’re both fucking fools,” the other said as he reached out and ran his hand down my chest and cupped my breast.
I was disoriented, still half asleep and when my mouth opened nothing came out. One of the men’s thumbs went in. He plied my jaw for a second and let the pad of his fingertip brush over my lips, my tongue.
“Nice.” He pulled my mouth open as wide as it would go.
With what little bit of my foot that reached the floor I tried to shove away. The man took his hand from my mouth and pulled my legs up. I tried to buck away from him, but he grasped my ass and held me tighter to his body.
I’d finally found my screech, but it was interrupted with a new sound. The other man was holding a blow torch to the shaped end of a long metal rod. The swish of a gas-fueled fire filled the room just as my scream jammed back in my bone-dry throat.
