by Dark, Raven
My brows went up. Steel, ripping Pretty Boy a new one? That was a first. Usually when Pretty Boy lost it, Steel just cooled him off and laughed or drank with him until everything was set to rights again.
“I’d better go and talk to them before this gets any worse.” I headed for the door, but Doc put up his hand.
“Not a good idea, Setora. They’re both still pretty worked up. Let them settle it themselves. Steel’s got Pretty Boy, and Hawk’s off meditating as usual. He will need you later, but you know what he’s like. He’ll come to you when he’s ready.”
I sighed, but nodded. No one was better at setting Pretty Boy back in his right mind than Steel. Or Sheriff, my mind added sadly.
And as for Hawk, Doc was right about him. I’d promised Hawk that when he needed to be alone, I’d be patient and let him be. Then it sank in what Doc had said.
He’d need me later. Something in his tone told me he was referring to more than just his usual fighting with his inner demons.
“Doc, what happened out there, anyway? What was that fight about?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but Bear put his head in before Doc could speak.
“Doc. You’re needed in town again.”
He rolled his eyes with a strained smile. “Doctor on call again.” He clasped my elbow. “Stay with Ali’san and Oran for now. I’ll be back later to after lunch. I hope.”
Fear for the club, anger with Sheriff, and helplessness for both, made for a toxic mixture that left me feeling as if I was floating in a haze. Ali’san beckoned me to join her for more mind-reading exercises. I didn’t want to, couldn’t focus, but I needed to be doing something, anything to get my mind off what was happening to the Legion.
But I couldn’t relax enough to meditate. After over an hour, Ali’san reluctantly ended our session for lunch. We ate, but then continued on for only another hour before she wrapped it up. Thank the Maker. I clearly wasn’t any good to anyone right now. After a good night’s sleep, I’d come back to the matter of finding Julian with fresh eyes. Tomorrow would be better. It had to be.
Doc returned later after I’d spent a few hours talking with Bear, Blade and Grim. Doc joined us for a dinner of fish and fresh-baked bread, and then he and Oran escorted me to Hawk’s hut for the night. He gave me the usual high dose of the sleeping drug meant to ward off Julian, and then set Oran outside the door to stand guard just in case.
Crawling into Hawk’s bed alone, I lay back on the thin mat he used to sleep on and covered myself with a light blanket, more than enough for warmth even though the air outside the hut had cooled with the arrival of darkness. The draft was pleasant, and Doc had put out all but one torch near the door to the bedroom area, so that if I got up in the middle of the night, I wasn’t stumbling around in the dark.
I dropped off into an uneasy, but thankfully dreamless sleep. One I probably wouldn’t have had at all if not for Doc’s drugs.
What must have been several hours later, I woke to the sound of men’s voices talking outside the hut. Oran’s low tones, and Hawk’s even quieter, always calm voice, grew a little louder, as if the two of them had moved closer to the bedroom door.
Hawk. He was back. I sat up slowly, worry for him pricking at me the way it always did when I knew he was hurting. Oran said a few words, and then his footsteps faded from the hut before front door clicked shut.
Hawk stepped into the room, his tall, muscled shadow filling the doorway.
“Kitten.” He moved toward the bed mat, his voice hushed. He sounded tired, but something else I couldn’t identify rumbled beneath the fatigue.
“I’m here, Master.” I sat up a little more, peering into the darkness. The minimal torchlight played across his masculine features, allowing only a glimpse of his strong jawline, a high cheekbone, and the hint of a glow in his yellow eyes that made him look incredibly exotic. “Are you okay?”
He drew closer, close enough that I saw his throat work. I jerked the rest of the way up on the mat. His eyes were filled with worry, with silent pain. He looked…lost. I’d never seen Hawk look like that. The sight of a man like him struggling tipped my world on its ear, shaking the resolve I’d been clinging to these last few days.
“Hawk.” I stood up slowly, my voice trembling. “What’s wrong?”
“Setora…” He swallowed again. The throatiness in his voice unnerved me. I took a few steps toward him until I caught sight of what was on his cut.
On the right breast, where his Undergeneral’s patch usually was, there was a new patch. One with a single word sewn on it in threads that looked fresh.
It said General.
Maker, this couldn’t be happening.
Chapter 12
-Escaping from Tomorrow
As soon as I saw that patch, a hundred implications slammed home at once, each more painful than the last. I swore the shift in the club’s paradigm had become a physical thing, something that jolted through me like a lightening bolt, crackling in the air itself with a malevolent and unforgiving energy.
A crack split across my heart, deep and sharp. That was the patch Sheriff had worn, the one I’d seen on him every day since I’d first been captured by these men I now called my family. My home.
It felt as if Damien himself had reached out from the grave and ripped away the stability of the Legion’s existence. He’d threatened to destroy the Legion, to take it from Sheriff. He was dead, and yet here and now, somehow, he was still making good on that threat.
My eyes blurred with tears. Tightness formed in my throat, suffocating. “Hawk, no…” The words came out high and choked.
Hawk’s eyes lowered, his mouth the familiar scowl he wore when he was really struggling to keep that stoicism of his intact. Stoicism I’d foolishly come to see as infallible.
Hawk reached inside his pocket and pulled out what I’d seen him stow in it earlier during his row with Pretty Boy. A familiar wooden gavel was clutched in his grip.
Oh, Maker, the gavel. The General’s gavel. Sheriff’s gavel. Only now it was Hawk’s.
“I…” Hawk shook his head. “I had to.”
My eyes slid closed. Tears splashed my cheeks. The guilt and hurt in Hawk’s voice tore at me. Crossing the space between us, I took his face in my hands and pulled it down toward me. Wishing I could make this right and take away his hurt.
Hawk let the gavel drop to the floor with a thud. He grasped my arms and rested his forehead against mine. Every muscle in him was corded tight, as if he was desperately clinging to his control. Laying my hand on his chest, I could feel the erratic hammer of his heart.
“He left me no choice.” Hawk spoke so softly that I barely heard him. “He deliberately attacked me to get me to…” His chest shook on a breath.
“He forced you to take his title from him.”
Hawk put his head back on a nod.
“He’s given up.”
Another nod.
The thought of what it meant for Sheriff if Hawk was the General tore a hole in my heart a mile wide. I reached up a trembling hand and tried to touch the General’s patch on his cut as if I needed to feel that it was really there. It looked so strange there, freshly sewn onto a cut that wasn’t Sheriff’s.
Unable to bring myself to touch it, I dropped my arm to my side and spun away from Hawk in some vain effort to escape the truth. Hawk let me go, his hands sliding from my arms.
This was what Pretty Boy and Hawk had been fighting about. This was why Pretty Boy had gone after him. In Pretty Boy’s anger and fear for Sheriff, he saw Hawk as having taken the gavel by force, from a blind General who couldn’t fight back.
I knew Hawk well enough to know he never would have done such a thing, but in that wild, irrational, angry way of Pretty Boy’s that was now becoming so familiar to me, I understood why he saw it that way. The notion made my heart ache even more for Hawk, knowing how that must have felt for him. And it made me hurt for Sheriff, enough to bury my anger with him. Enough to confuse me until I was no longer sure I had the ri
ght to be mad at him.
I turned and found Hawk standing right behind me.
“I can’t do it, Hawk,” I rasped, fresh tears falling as I met his amber gaze. “I don’t think I could ever call you General.” Doing so would have made this whole thing too real… “I just can’t…”
“I don’t want you to.”
That was it. The choked pain in his voice, the devastation in his eyes broke the last of my resolve. That this was killing him as much as it was me broke my heart into a million pieces so that it shattered apart like a fragile crystal.
One minute I was standing there in front of the Dark Legion’s newly appointed leader, and the next I was covering my mouth, my shoulders shaking with sobs.
Hawk let out a low, empathetic growl that sounded as wounded as I felt. He drew me to him roughly, his big arms holding me against him, warm and strong as steel.
“I know.” He sighed into my hair. His hand massaged my back, the other cradling my nape. “I know.”
He did know. He knew how much it hurt, how completely my heart was broken, how frightened I was for Sheriff, for the future of his club and his men.
The warmth in him, the protectiveness—and the knowledge that he was right there with me—made me cry harder. I clutched his cut in my fists and sobbed.
I cried for the Legion, for its men, for Sheriff. For Hawk, and even for Pretty Boy, because I knew he’d only attacked Hawk because he was in so much pain. I was also beyond livid with Damien for taking Sheriff’s sight, with the rules of the club that tore away from Sheriff a part of himself I knew he wouldn’t know how to live without.
“This can’t be happening. There has to be another way. He can’t…” My voice broke.
“I know.” Hawk rocked on his feet, swaying me with a slow, comforting motion as he crushed me to him and buried his face in my hair. “I know, Kitten.” Hawk’s voice cracked, and he sounded like he had a cold.
I froze, my heart squeezing painfully tight. Was he… No, he couldn’t be. I snapped my head up just as Hawk gave a heavy sniff and put his head back.
Maker, he was. A single glistening tear leaked out of the corner of my warrior master’s eye. “Hawk…” I reached a shaking hand up to wipe the traitorous tear away.
His grip flexed on my arm before he tore his hand away. I caught a glimpse of a wince on his lips before he started to spin around on his heel.
“No…Master, don’t.” I grabbed his arms. Hawk’s jaw muscles flexed.
“You shouldn’t have to see that—” he started.
“See what?” I took his face in my hands again, holding it still so that his eyes were on mine. They were wet, like pools of liquid gold. “See you in pain? See you worried about your friend, your club?”
“A woman’s master shouldn’t fall apart in front of her. And a Yantu can’t—”
“Stop. Hawk, stop. Fear and sadness don’t make a master weak. It takes strength to be able to trust someone with your heart, especially when it’s hurting.”
A broken sort of smile twisted his lips. He crushed me to him again. The heat of his cheek pressed against mine, brushing my skin with moisture.
“It’s not fair that you’re so wise, Kitten. I should go.” He squeezed my nape, putting his forehead against mine once more. “I’ll have Oran watch over you.”
“No.” I grabbed his cut. “Don’t. Please…Master, please don’t leave.”
He shook his head, obviously about to argue the point. The protectiveness in his eyes made it clear why he thought he had to leave. I wouldn’t stop him from needing to be by himself, but I wouldn’t let him leave because he was afraid of looking weak—or because he was afraid he’d hurt me.
“I know I promised you that when you needed to be alone, I’d let you have the time you required. If... If you have to go because you need time, I won’t interfere. But—”
Hawk’s hand seized the back of my neck almost painfully, and suddenly his lips crushed mine.
I whimpered against his mouth, shock and heat jolting through me at the raw need in his kiss. Need fueled by pain and anger I knew he felt over a situation that had so quickly spun out of control and showed no signs of stopping its catastrophic trajectory.
Hawk pinned me to him and kissed me with such force that I thought he was angry with me for begging him to stay. Especially when he stalked across the hut and shoved me against the nearest wall, his mouth still bruising mine.
He broke the kiss and buried his face in my neck, his chest heaving against mine. Had I gone too far, pleading with him when his beast was so close to the surface?
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t want to be alone,” I whispered, wishing I hadn’t allowed my weakness to show so easily.
He groaned, squeezing me close and drawing back. “I don’t either.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t know if he kissed me or I kissed him, but in the next instant, our mouths collided.
Hawk slanted his lips on mine. Heat and need washed over me in a wave, and I devoured the kiss. Our tongues mated furiously, our bodies rubbing against one another with a desperation I’d never experienced with him before. We kissed long and hard and hot, as if both of us were trying to scour away the horror of these last few days, trying to wipe away what was tearing this club and its men apart. As though we could lose ourselves in each other until the world around us ceased to exist.
I clung to him for dear life, grabbing a fistful of his cut and loving the merciless way he pinned me to the wall, the way lost himself in me. His tongue stroked mine hungrily, and I groaned, keeping my mouth open to him, letting him take what was his. What he needed.
And he did take it; he kissed me as if he needed my mouth to survive, and to stop touching me would end his world.
Right then, I thought it would end mine.
“You should have let me go,” he growled when he broke the kiss. His lips left a fiery path along my neck. That kiss had made me incredibly wet. When he shoved my leather top up over my breasts, and then pushed my skirt up to my waist, my sex slicked, the ache unbearable.
“Never, Master.” I clung to his shoulders, my arms around his neck.
He pushed my legs apart and bent his knees, grinding himself into me. His cock brushed against my sex, hard as iron through his leathers. Need speared me, desperate and intoxicating, a drug I’d gladly take to escape the hell this club and my beloved Four had fallen into.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” He ground harder against me, a warning of what would happen now that I’d chosen to spend the night with him.
“I can take it,” I panted. “Please, I want it.”
A needy growl escaped him. Hawk made swift work of his belt and pants, barely getting them open and letting his cock spring free before he lifted me onto his hips and thrust into me in one swift stroke.
I moaned and gripped his shoulders, tossed my head and clawed at his back. Hawk’s mouth claimed mine. His calloused palms gripped and squeezed my ass, driving him deeper inside me. Grunting into my mouth, he slid in and out of me, long deep thrusts.
Every stroke of his cock was a salve on my fear, on the anger and pain that slashed at my insides, the fear for Sheriff that cut at my soul. He fucked me as if taking me meant the difference between damnation and salvation.
I rocked my hips, feeding off his pain, and yet somehow soothing my own. Giving him this outlet he needed, the release that would save him.
He gave me a few more deep thrusts, then turned us away from the wall. With his cock still sheathed inside me, he crossed to the bed mat in one step and dropped to his knees before laying us both out across the mat.
His lips seared mine. I tilted my head back, inviting his ravenous kiss.
Hawk’s palm angled my head the way he wanted while he crushed me to the mat under his powerful frame. He slid in and out of me.
“I’m going to spend the night inside you, Kitten. Just like this.”
“Yes…”
His groaned and his tongue flic
ked over my lips, teasing them. My muscles coiled, my sex clenching around him. I spread my legs wide for him, taking everything he had to give.
“Fuck.” He cupped my ass and drove in and out of me fast and hard.
“Master…” I clawed at his back.
Hawk’s cock twitched in response. He seized my wrists and pinned them to the mat. “I want this to last all night, and I won’t if you keep doing that.”
I moaned, wetter than ever. The feel of his grip on my wrists, taking control, nearly made me come as much as the hunger in his voice.
Then we were kissing again, our tongues licking wildly. My hips rocked, meeting him thrust for thrust, every stroke chasing away an uncertain future, driving it further from this solitary world of him and me that we’d locked ourselves in.
His thrusts sped up and so did mine. He drew back, watching me watch him. Watching me taking him. Neither of us spoke, both of us panting into the near darkness, beyond the need for words.
The look in his eyes made me clench tighter around him. He cursed and thrust into me a few times. I careened toward release. He pulled out and turned me onto my stomach. I got the message. He was losing control.
I bit my lip to keep from moaning and drew my knees under me. Reaching back and grasping for him, needing him far beyond the desire for sex.
It wasn’t necessary. I’d barely put myself on all fours in front of him before he was inside me again. His cock filled every inch of me, his chest heating my back, covering me while he slid in and out. One of his arms slid around my waist, trapping me against him so that I could only take what he gave me.
I whimpered, tightening my sex around his cock and sliding slowly over him. Hoping he felt my adoration, my connection, my love for him with every stroke.
Hawk growled as I panted and bucked my hips. He slowed me down and that made me needier. I mewled. The sound must have gotten to him, because his thrusts turned savage.
We went over the edge as one, me thrashing and crying out, him grunting and pounding me several times. He cursed and spilled into me.
