I held a hand to my frantic heart, trying to process the roiling storm of emotions taking hold of my body. The sharpest one of all was the rejection he'd left me with. I was still hot and wet between my thighs and my ass was still stinging from where he’d dropped me on the floor. Shame was my only companion as I touched my puffy lips and bit back tears of hurt.
I grappled with the knowledge that Saint would never let himself get that close to me again and a part of me was glad of that. While another part of me wept. Fuck him for doing that to me. For making me pine and ache for him and bring me to the point of no return only to leave me there on the precipice. It was humiliating. But as I picked up my clothes, I found myself pitying him. Because he was his own worst nightmare and he didn’t even realise it. If I was a prisoner to Saint Memphis, it was nothing to the captive he made of himself.
I stood surrounded by the shattered remains of my bathroom shelf and all the broken bottles of wash products which were slowly leaking across the tiles. Aftershave meeting with perfume, toothpaste and mouthwash and filling the small room with the unpleasantly overwhelming combined scent.
I was shaking. Every muscle in my body trembling with need and hurt and a fucking pain that was rooted so deep within me that it felt like something was tearing apart within my damn soul.
I tipped my head back and bellowed to the ceiling as I fought to vent some of this anger in me, but it only seemed to grow and fester and push harder at the confines of my skin with a desperate need to break free.
I whirled on the mirror, hating the sight of myself falling to ruin as it taunted me from the depths of the silvery surface. The words scrawled across the dark skin of my chest mocking me as they were reflected back in reverse. The days are long, but the nights are dark. And I was staring down the barrel of another night sent to torture me. To make it worse she was mine tonight, due to sleep in my bed and fucking fool that I was, I'd been looking forward to having her that close, even though I'd known it would equal me aching for her all night long. But I was always aching for her these days and it was a wound that was only getting deeper, burrowing beneath my skin and taking all of my attention like an itch that burned with the desperate need to be scratched.
I yelled out as I slammed my fist into the mirror, the whole thing shattering as shards of glass were driven into my knuckles. Blood flew and a spike of pure agony raced through the bone of my freshly healed arm.
I was shaking even harder now, the finely tuned restraints I’d tied on my mind snapping one after another as I fought against the animal in me who wanted to race back down those stairs and find Tatum Rivers. I just didn't know if wanted to punish her so severely that she would never look at me with lust in her eyes ever again or rip what little remained of her clothes off and fuck her until the beast in me had taken as much from her flesh as I could possibly take. Either way, with the last of my control burning away into less than nothing, I was sure she would hate me for whichever choice I made.
I took a furious step towards the shower then changed my mind and spun away from it. My cock was hard and aching in my pants, even the small friction caused by walking making me groan as I imagined fucking my little siren until she couldn't see straight and she forgot all about Kyan and Blake and any other man who had ever touched her.
I wanted to brand myself all over her body inside and out, mark her as mine so clearly that all that anyone saw when they looked at her was a huge flashing sign saying Property of Saint Memphis. I'd tattoo it on that pretty face of hers if I could bear to see her tarnished that way and I’d certainly fuck it into her so deeply that she'd never forget it again.
But I couldn't do that. I couldn't even think about doing it. Because she wasn't mine. Not mine alone. She was Kyan's and Blake’s and Monroe's too. If she was fucking one of us then she should have been fucking all of us. But she shouldn't have been fucking any of us. Because those were the rules.
I threw the bathroom door open with such fury that it slammed into the wall and carved a dent into the plaster with the door handle.
The list of rules we'd all agreed to were still clutched in my left hand and they needed some fucking work done on them if I was going to have any hope of stopping them from getting destroyed.
I kneeled down at the set of drawers beside my bed and opened the bottom one, taking my laminator from it and setting it on the floor as I fought to stop the trembling in my limbs.
I smoothed out the page which we'd all signed so long ago and closed my eyes as I recited the rules Tatum had listed on it by heart, like they were etched into my being, the first one now struck out.
1. No Kissing
2. No foreplay
3. No sex
4. No touching while we share a bed
5. No entering the bathroom while I'm naked or on the toilet
6. I am allowed two hours of undisturbed study time at the library on every weekday
7. I am allowed one friend who you can not be a dick to
8. Once a week we will ALL eat pizza for dinner without cutlery
9. I am allowed to sit wherever I want in classes
Hadn't I eaten the fucking pizza? Hadn't I let her study and have her little friend and watched her choose to sit away from me in class? I'd respected her privacy in the bathroom and I laid pillows between us to make sure I never touched her when we slept in a bed together. I'd stuck to the terms of our agreement, even when she'd flouted them. Even when she'd purposefully tried to lure me into breaking them and damning myself for it.
The rules I'd laid out sat beneath hers and as I went over them, my frustration only grew.
1. You will sleep in a Night Keeper's bed every night on rotation and they will have priority over you for 24 hours (6pm-6pm the next day).
2. You must cook breakfast for us every day.
3. You will wear whatever we decide on the day you are in our possession.
4. You will do as we say without complaint unless it conflicts with your rules.
That was the most baffling thing of all. She’d stuck to those rules almost to the letter. The only time she had really flouted them had been when she stayed with me every night while I was healing and she’d taken her punishments for that from me daily. So the only rules she was breaking generally speaking were the ones she had laid out herself.
It was like she didn't care about her own limits, or like she had just changed her mind entirely since making those rules, or like...a trap.
A snarl tore from my lips as I considered that. That she was using her body to tempt and lure us, forcing us to break the rules and using her beauty to tear us apart from the inside out. Blake had been smiling a lot more since he'd been fucking her again. He was sweet to her, attentive. Even Kyan did shit for her beyond just fucking her brains out over a coffin like some kind of sex starved incubus who had been waiting for prey in the dark.
In fact, that whole thing had been a trap of its own. She'd encouraged all of us to chase her down there. I bet she'd known I was watching them from the moment she took their cocks inside her and had been hoping to tempt me to take my turn too.
Because if she had us all firmly under the spell of her pussy and grasped by the balls then she could rule over all of us. And fuck knew what she'd do with power like that once she claimed it.
I gritted my teeth and slid the rules through the laminator, watching as the page was coated in plastic and they were rendered a lot less vulnerable to acts of random scribbling. If any of the rules were going to change then there was going to be a proper fucking meeting about it, not a spur of the moment strike of a pen.
But even as I thought on that, my brow furrowed further. Because if she removed that rule then she couldn't punish me or any of us for breaking it. So her plan to have reasons to punish us made no sense. So what was it? What was I missing here?
For a fleeting moment I remembered how wet she'd been against the tip of my cock, how hard she'd kissed me, how certain she'd seemed to want what we were about to share. But
it couldn't be that fucking simple. Nothing in this world was that fucking simple. And if all she needed was someone to fuck her then she had two perfectly willing volunteers waiting in the wings.
I took the freshly protected rules and pushed them beneath my pillow before turning and storming downstairs.
I was breathing so hard that the pain in my ribs was reawakened and I welcomed it, needing something to draw my gaze from the girl who was the sole focus of all of my problems recently.
She'd clearly decided against getting any of her own clothes from my closet to replace the ones I'd torn off of her and I was further infuriated to see her wearing one of Kyan's fucking hoodies. It hung down to her mid-thigh and made it impossible for me to tell if she had her skirt still on beneath it or not.
"Saint," she began, moving off of the couch and raising her chin in defiance as she crossed the room to intercept me.
"What?" I snarled at her, the roar in my head almost drowning out the sound of her voice.
"We need to talk about this."
"About the way you seem determined to fuck with everything in my life that keeps me sane?" I demanded as I advanced on her, unable to stop myself from getting close to her again even though I knew she was a poison designed specially to incapacitate me.
"That's not what this is," she replied in a hard tone. "This is you using a few words scrawled on a piece of paper as an excuse to keep away from me. To punish yourself. I just don't understand why."
"You think this is me punishing myself?" I laughed darkly as I came to stand so close to her that I could smell the honey blossom scent of her shampoo. "Do you seriously not realise that in all the times I've punished you, I've never even come close to subjecting you to the things that I've been through? You don't know the meaning of punishment. I'm soft on you and you don't even realise it."
"What happened to make you like this, Saint?" she breathed, reaching out for me like she wanted to comfort me, understand me.
I barked a humourless laugh as I let her hand fall on my cheek and I closed my eyes for a moment as I remembered being torn from everything I knew with no notice at all, time and again. Of having all of my possessions removed and replaced, my routine interrupted. Let alone the real punishments. Days in the dark, muscles cramping, white noise blaring, time slipping away from me without me having any way to know how much of it had passed.
"I was raised in a certain way," I said in a low voice as I moved closer to her, dominating her personal space and inhaling the scent of her mixed with Kyan's vile stench of leather and gasoline from his hoodie which made my jaw grind even harder. "A way that perfect little girls like you could never even comprehend."
"I think we both know by now that I'm not perfect, Saint. The difference between you and me is that I don't flinch away from the stains on my soul."
My hand closed around her throat before I'd even made the full decision to move and I squeezed hard as I walked her back across the room until I'd driven her up against the stained glass window at the front of the church. Rain hammered against the other side of it and a shiver raced along Tatum's skin at the contact with the cold glass, but she made no move to try and remove my grip on her.
There was no denying the hard press of my cock against her thigh as I panted heavily and I felt like I was even closer to breaking than I had been earlier.
"You clearly want me, Saint," she hissed, though my grip on her made it hard for her to get the words out. "So why not just get it over with?"
"Because if I were to fuck you right now, I can assure you that nothing about it would be soft or gentle or make you feel like you knew any more about me. It would only confirm in your mind what your instincts have been warning you about from the very first moment we met. There is no good in me, Tatum Rivers. And I'll ruin you in every way that I can if you give me half the chance. If you make me break the rules for you, you'll regret it more keenly than anything else that's ever happened to you in your miserable life, including the deaths of your loving family."
Tatum swung her fist at me with a savage brutality that sent pain bursting through my jaw and knocked me away from her as the taste of blood coated my tongue.
"What the fuck is going on here?" Kyan's voice interrupted us as he and Blake stepped through the front door and I stormed away from Tatum with a pure force of will. There were marks banding her throat where my fingers had dug in and the fury burning between us made it painfully clear that that hadn't been part of some fantasy we'd been playing out.
"I'm just explaining to our resident whore that not every member of the Night Keepers wants to fuck her," I sneered, the words burning on my tongue as my own cock taunted me with its hardness and called me out on my own bullshit from within my pants.
I'd expected Kyan to strike at me but when Blake's fist slammed into my gut, I was taken off guard, stumbling back against the wall just as Kyan leapt at me too.
I didn't even care that these were the most important men in the world to me as every rotten, ruined, tainted piece of me broke loose and I launched myself into the brawl with reckless abandon, bathing in the pain and relishing doling out more of it.
I only realised that Tatum was screaming at all of us to stop when someone hauled Blake off of me and I spotted Monroe standing there looking savage as he tried to piece together what was happening.
"What the fuck is this?" he bellowed as I shoved myself to my feet, my ribs aching in a way that said Kyan's fists had just set back the healing process. But I didn't give a fuck. I didn't give a fuck about anything anymore.
I shoved through the press of bodies surrounding me, snarling at all of them as they tried to speak or intercept me or talk about me like I wasn't fucking here and I kept going until I made it outside.
The rain was hammering down over the lake and my bare skin flared with goosebumps as I strode straight down the path that led away from The Temple and kept going towards the water.
The other Night Keepers and Tatum were yelling behind me, but I couldn't hear them over the feral beast that had laid siege to my mind.
I kept walking towards the lake at a fast pace, the hand that had gripped Tatum's throat clenching and unclenching. I could never lose control with her like that again. I'd just come so close to snapping with her and I knew in the depths of my dark and depraved being that if I ever did that there would be no salvation for me.
She was the one person I'd ever met who made me even consider being a better man than the twisted thing I'd been born to become. She made me question things I'd never questioned and made me care about hurting her like I'd never done for another soul. I couldn't let her see the very worst of me. I couldn't bear it if she did.
I strode straight down the bank and out into the freezing water as the rain slammed down on it and the wind howled all around me.
I couldn't feel any of it. My flesh was dead to the pain of the cold and the rage of the storm just like my heart was dead to normal human feelings of love and kindness. There was no saving me. But I could try my hardest not to corrupt her too thoroughly.
I didn't stop walking until the water lapped up over my waist and the shouts of the others and demands for me to return to them were stolen by the wind.
I didn't even suck in a breath before plunging my head beneath the water. I blew out what little air there was in my lungs as I pushed myself down to sit on the lakebed, the freezing water enveloping me and memories of the cold and the dark welcoming me in like an old friend.
I wasn't the kid who had been beaten. I wasn't even the kid who had been yelled at. My father was a cold and controlled man. I'd never even known him to raise his voice. If my behaviour was deemed unsuitable or my emotions too readable, he had simply and effectively punished me. The dark was where I'd learned to find myself. All those hours trapped and confined for one reason or another with nothing but the silence to keep me company had taught me how to lock onto the few things about me that truly mattered. Those that could never be stolen away.
I h
ad my brothers. Men I'd chosen for myself and sworn to stand by through the worst the world might ever throw at us. And I had my music which even now seemed to writhe and pulse beneath my flesh. But there was something else sitting with me in the dark as my lungs burned and strained and I refused to head back up for air. A girl with blue eyes and the strength to tame monsters.
It hurt me to know how close I'd come to losing it with her. It felt like I'd been attacking myself. My own...heart. And I couldn't bear that. Because I needed to keep owning her. I needed to know that she was mine and I was starting to think that I might just be hers, too. I wouldn't have just lain down my life for anyone else the way I had for her when I'd taken that bullet. I knew it. She knew it. I was just too stubborn to voice what that meant, to allow the idea of the rules shifting to accommodate what I ached for so much. Because if I was honest with myself, I was afraid of claiming it. Of claiming her in any more ways than I already had. Just in case I couldn't figure out a way to keep her.
I pushed to my feet and breached the surface, sucking down a breath a moment before I would have started choking on the rancid water at the bottom of the lake.
When I turned back to the shore, I found four silhouettes waiting for me, standing in the thundering rain like it was where they'd always meant to be.
Blake and Kyan were holding Tatum's arms as she fought to get away from them, but as I strode back towards them with my control more firmly leashed at last, they released her.
She ran to me, taking no more notice of the freezing lake water than I had as she moved straight into it and by the time she made it to me, it was over her knees.
Tatum threw her arms around my neck, gripping the back of my hair in tight fists as she stared up at me, Kyan's drenched sweatshirt clinging to her body as it pressed against my bare chest and the rain continued to pound down on us.
"Don't you dare run from me again, Saint Memphis," she snarled like she had any right to tell me what to do.
Kings of Anarchy Page 24
