by TA Moore
“Sometimes I wonder why I missed you,” he grumbled. “I’m trying to be… gentle.”
“Why?” Cash asked. He tilted his head back and looked up at Arkady through sweat-tangled curls. “I won’t be when it’s my turn.”
Arkady shifted his weight and freed up one hand to drag Cash’s hair out of his face. He kept it tangled around his fingers and tugged until Cash’s back arched and his breath caught.
“I don’t need you to be,” he said.
Cash swallowed. He could feel the gulp in his throat, like a candy he’d just swallowed whole.
“Please,” he said. “I could hurt you if I wanted.”
Something shuttered dimly over Arkady’s eyes, and he let go of Cash’s hair. It flopped back down, tangled and damp with sweat and lube, so he couldn’t see Arkady’s face when he murmured, “I know.”
Flattering, but they both knew it was a lie. Cash would have pointed that out, but—maybe fed up with the complaints from the gallery—Arkady sheathed himself inside Cash in one long stroke. Long, lean thighs pressed against Cash’s ass, the muscles clenched tight under warm, smooth skin. It made Cash tense, his ass squeezed tightly around the cock that filled it, and squeeze a grunt out through his teeth. He wasn’t sure if the warm throb in his guts was the pulse of Arkady’s cock or his own exaggerated heartbeat.
They lay there for a moment, stretched out on the bed in one long, sweaty line of flesh. Arkady moved first. He shifted his weight to the side and freed up one hand to hook around Cash’s chest. His fist, clenched so tight his knuckles showed through his skin like raw bone, tucked into the hollow of Cash’s collarbone. The bar of his forearm across Cash’s throat tightened with each rough thrust that shoved him down into the bed, the ache of his frustrated cock twisted through every misfired pleasure/pain neuron in his head that got off on the… sharp edge of it.
He wasn’t a masochist. Pain on its own was just unpleasant. It was the adrenaline rush. Fucking Arkady felt precarious, the same dizzy temptation that people on the edge of cliffs must feel. Only Cash had jumped nearly every time, when most people showed better sense.
Arkady shifted again, his knee cocked under him to change the angle of his thrust. This time when he thrust home, thighs pressed tight against the slick curve of Cash’s ass, the head of his cock bruised against his prostate and plucked a hot, stupid jolt of pleasure along his nerve endings. It fried Cash’s brain and made his cock throb.
The second time it knocked the breath out of him and left him boneless, a fuck dry and silent on his tongue. The rhythm between them felt clumsy as Cash tried to regain the pace of Arkady’s thrusts, their bodies out of sync as the sheets tangled around them.
Somehow it didn’t matter. It didn’t need to be perfect. Imperfect—the grip of Arkady’s fingers on Cash’s hip as he yanked him up onto his knees and thrust into him, the way Cash’s knees slipped on the silk sheets—didn’t matter when you needed it this much.
Cash clenched one fist in the wet sheets as Arkady thrust roughly into him. His cock bumped against his stomach with each stroke, precome wet against his skin. Cash reached down and wrapped his fingers around himself. Pleasure tugged at him, almost painful as it scraped along strung-tight nerves, and he dragged his hand along the shaft from base to tip. His balls pulsed in rough counterpoint to Arkady’s rhythm as Cash worked his way toward the slick, wet spill of orgasm.
He closed his eyes and bit the inside of his cheek. The tart salt metals of his own blood always helped him make it over the edge. Sweat itched in the small of his back, wet and clammy between his and Arkady’s bodies, as his muscles tightened, ready to come.
“Not,” Arkady said in his ear, “yet.”
He pulled Cash’s hand away from his cock, and the orgasm wriggled free and slipped away. Cash spat a “Fuck” out, finally enough air in his throat to make it a word.
“It’s not all about you,” he spat irritably as he tried to pull his wrist free. “You know that, right?”
“I’ve heard it said,” Arkady teased him. His voice was rough and ragged, breathless. “I haven’t seen any evidence to support it.”
He hooked his arm around Cash’s stomach and took him with him as he sat back onto his knees. His cock slid deeper into Cash’s ass, spread him painfully, ecstatically wide as his weight settled into Arkady’s lap.
“Son of a bitch,” he gasped as the muscles in his thighs and stomach jerked under the skin in reaction.
He leaned back against Arkady’s chest for support, sweat slippery and cold between their bodies.
“Yes,” Arkady agreed. He rocked his hips, and Cash sucked in a ragged breath at the jolt of pleasure that stuttered through him. “I am. So?”
Cash braced his hands on Arkady’s thighs, muscles clenched in tight bands under his fingers, and pushed himself up. His tightened around Arkady’s cock as it slid out, a dull hollow in his stomach, and it was Arkady’s turn to groan.
“Doesn’t mean you need to act like one,” Cash muttered.
It made Arkady laugh, but the sound choked off as Cash pushed back down onto his cock. Arkady’s mouth moved silently against the back of Cash’s neck with each slow, deep thrust, his cock buried to the hilt each time. Cash expected hands on his hips to set the pace, but—for once—he got to ride Arkady’s cock without interference.
Who said people didn’t change?
Arkady reached over Cash’s hip and grabbed his cock. He smeared lube over the shaft, cold against hot flesh. Long practice guided his strokes as he jerked Cash off just a little faster than Cash fucked him.
It felt like a race… one that Cash was going to lose.
He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on anything but the cock that filled his ass and the scrape of slippery, callused fingers over his own cock. It was impossible. Maybe he could have done it at twenty. He hadn’t always come off worse in these competitions then, but he’d been twenty and having a lot more sex regularly.
Arkady squeezed his balls—fuck too hard—and the sticky knot of pleasure in his balls cracked open. Cash’s head dropped back against Arkady’s shoulder as he came, a whiskey hit that washed through him. It was all smooth notes with a rough bite in the backwash.
“I don’t have to do anything,” Arkady said. He wiped come off Cash’s cock and lifted his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, Cash saw him lick his fingers clean. “I choose to do it.”
He tumbled them back onto the bed again, tangled in sweaty sheets as he finished the race last—and won—with rough, impatient strokes that shoved Cash down into the sheets. His come spilled hot and sticky into Cash’s ass, and he sprawled out limp on top of him.
From somewhere in the hotel, the dinner bell rang. Even fucked out and boneless, the sound made Cash twitch. Arkady’s growl was an inhuman flutter of sound as he pinned Cash down with a leg slung over his hip.
“You keep telling me you don’t work for me anymore,” Arkady said. “So why still dance to my mother’s drum?”
Cash shoved an elbow into his ribs. “I don’t,” he said. Arkady grumbled disbelief into his neck, and Cash was annoyed enough to put enough effort into his next shove that he could wriggle free. He sat up, naked and sticky and bruised, and pulled his tangled hair back from his face.
“Since when?” he asked. “I’ve been the thorn in her side since she took me on.”
Arkady stretched on his stomach and dragged one of the pillows down to rest his head. “You mouth off,” he said, his voice oddly cold and precise. “You stay just on the right edge of defiance, but have you ever actually put my mother out? Have you ever cost her anything?”
The answer to the question prickled on Cash’s tongue. He had. He’d cost all the Abascals something they would have held very dear. So Arkady could kiss his ass. The problem was that if he told Arkady that, then it wouldn’t be a secret. It was a lot safer when it was a secret.
“I cost her you,” he said instead, as the monster snatched his tongue. “For a while.”
Cash winced as that picked an old scab. His worse half didn’t care if it hurt him, someone else, or both. He did appreciate being able to blame it for stuff like this. Cash left Arkady to the sting of that as he scooted toward the edge of the bed, but Arkady caught his elbow and dragged him back over to his side.
“What?” Cash asked warily. He could still see Arkady’s monster, fat on whatever part of this satisfied him and too restless to sink down to his bones. It was always a good idea to be wary around an Abascal monster. Even if it liked you. Especially if it liked you.
Arkady rolled onto his side. He ran his hand up Cash’s arm, over the fine bones of his chest, and down to his nipple. It was still tender, and Cash flinched as Arkady scratched a sharp nail around it.
“You said the nipple ring was mine. Just for me?” Arkady said.
Sharp. Cash glanced down briefly at the thin black claws that tipped Arkady’s fingers. They looked like sharpened smoke and had points like needles.
The monster said. Cash licked his lips. They tasted like salt and sex. The question hung between them. He could back down, admit himself the liar they both knew he was. It would get him out of whatever this was about to become.
“Yeah,” he said instead. “I did.”
Arkady and the monster both smiled at the same time, with the same mouth, and… pinched. Black nails punched easily through the raised nub, and Cash whined a high note in the back of his throat as he struggled to stay still. Muscles trembled under his skin as he locked them and sucked in a sex-musky breath through his nose.
The flash of pain snapped through him, from his head to his heels. It caught the after-tremors of orgasm on his nerves and fooled them it was one of them. Cash trembled as the pain slipped over to pleasure in its confusion, dark and drug-heady as it roared up toward his head.
He felt blood wet against his skin, and then Arkady leaned in and breathed on it, his breath wispy and gray as it left his mouth. It felt like a poison ivy rash for a second. Then it faded to a chill numbness, like when your foot went to sleep.
Cash swallowed and looked down, his mouth dry. It wasn’t beyond possibility that he had lost a nipple. The addition of a little humanity had not made monster relationships any less weird.
Luckily it was still there, bruised dark against his pale skin, but there. A heavy garnet ring was threaded through it, thicker than the ring he’d taken out and with flickers of smoky darkness at the core of it. His blood and Arkady’s magic.
That was… not what he expected. Cash poked his nipple with a finger and flinched when it hurt. It was real, then, and any monster who saw it would think he was married to Arkady. More than married, actually. Marriage could be dissolved by either party, for good reason or because it would be funny.
This—Cash turned the ring gingerly—was a claim that only Arkady could dissolve, since Cash had been cock-struck and stupid enough to just agree to it on the assumption that Arkady wouldn’t do something like this. Not to him.
“What the fuck?” he spluttered.
Arkady rolled away from him and got out of bed. His back was long and lean, strapped with bands of wiry muscle that ran from his shoulders down to his lean waist. What it wasn’t was expressive. Even Cash couldn’t read much from the tight curve of Arkady’s ass. So, under the circumstances, he reminded himself, he really shouldn’t be so distracted by it.
“You’re here to solve my problems,” Arkady said over his shoulder as he opened his wardrobe. “Not make more. I don’t intend to save the family name from the Prodigium only to have my name become a laughingstock when my lover throws me over for my sister. Again.”
The flash of old hard-done-by irritation was a familiar distraction from the knot of… whatever it was Cash felt. Uncertain, maybe.
“For fuck’s sake—” he started.
Arkady cut him off. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You know that. The perception would be enough. So now it doesn’t matter how many private chats you have with my sister, everyone will know you’re mine. Which is why you’ll wear the clothes I left out for you.”
Cash could feel the frustration in his jaw. He hated being out-angled. “Did you plan this?” he asked.
There was a pause as Arkady considered the question. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I didn’t mean to, but it all kind of fell into place, didn’t it? Does it matter?”
“Yes. No.” Cash scrambled off the bed and grabbed the clothes from the floor. He ached dully in all the right places, a satisfying feeling of being thoroughly fucked, and he was sticky where he didn’t sting. “And after this weekend?”
His breath caught in his throat like he didn’t know the answer. Except they both did. It was a deal, and the Abascals kept their deals to the letter. It wasn’t a matter of choice.
“After this weekend, everything will go back to normal,” Arkady said. “As agreed. Nothing has changed.”
“No,” Cash said. “I guess it hasn’t.”
It never did, but the hope that it might one day had always been the hook his heart hung from. The admission—that he had never had his cock or his pride, or at least not just them, at risk—dropped like a stone in his brain. His temporarily sated monster let it settle without comment. It didn’t seem worth its while to comment on the obvious.
“You worry what they’ll say if they think I’m still sweet on Yana?” he said sourly as he stalked out the door. “What, and see what they say when they see you dragging mutton dressed as lamb around the floor.”
Chapter Fourteen
AS IT turned out, Cash still looked pretty good in leather. In the humid, unwholesome lair of monsters, anyhow, where mouse-nibbled ruffs of tea-colored lace came straight from the best underground fashion houses and brocade was evergreen. If he turned up at Ellie’s school gates in skintight leather, his shirt cut down to there and his pants laced up to just about decent, he’d look a bit more desperate.
Not any sweatier, though.
Cash wiped sweat off the back of his neck, his freshly washed hair damp again under the rough ponytail he’d pulled it back into. Had it always been this sticky down here, or had years of air-conditioning just spoiled him?
“The child is at camp, of course?” the bogeyman said to Arkady. He was tall and thin, stretched out like a child’s drawing in a stylish gray suit nipped in to exaggerate his exceptional boniness. Cash could have told how many buttons there were on his frock coat, but not the color of his eyes or the set of his mouth. There was definitely a face there, but it refused to stick. A human would have seen something to upset them—a hated teacher, diseased features, his own death—but the bogey’s powers didn’t work on monsters. His aura was shriveled and starved, all rags and tatters that picked and plucked at everything on the way past. “My son goes next year. His first time. How has s… the child… found it?”
Behind him the party was in full swing. Everyone had stuck to their human forms for now, draped in capes and designer shrouds. Some of the jewels that sparkled on fingers or around throats still had the grave dirt on them. Things that could live for centuries didn’t value aged things as much. A bit of fresh graverobbing showed a certain rakish style.
“Ellie,” Arkady said. He stole a blood-red crisp from Cash’s plate and popped it into his mouth, his fingers stained pink from the seasoning. “My niece. Cash’s daughter. My mother’s granddaughter. That child?”
The bogeyman ducked his head. Somehow the shabby stovepipe hat he wore didn’t shift on his head as he did so. “I meant no offense, Arkady. It is just hard to navigate such… civility. In my day, the child would have been fostered out to peasants, and at least two people would be dead or buried alive. But I suppose one must move with the times if one wants to kill with them.”
He laughed. The teeth caught in Cash’s memory—small, rounded, and creamy white. Baby teeth in a grown thing’s mouth. His flicker of disquiet came from his mom, and the bogeyman’s aura rustled in response. Tendrils of pallid gray shuffled toward him and picke
d at his… aura, although he couldn’t see his own.
Cash poked the monster out of its sleep. It reluctantly uncurled, and the dull ache of its hunger came with it. He’d need to grab someone real to eat, not just drink a full bottle of lust and hope it solved anything.
The bogeyman’s aura sagged in disappointment as it realized the mistake.
“Civility is one word for it,” he said. “Ellie’s doing well at camp. She missed her friends—”
That made the bogeyman’s eyes widen. Probably? That was Cash’s take, but he couldn’t pin down the actual expression.
“Human friends? She’s… popular?” he asked as he leaned in. “My boy couldn’t make a friend out of a corpse, popsicle sticks, and a free plug socket. Is there a trick to it?”
“I don’t know,” Cash said uncomfortably. He wasn’t used to being the one spoken to. Usually he was either behind a camera lens or, back when he’d come to these more often, at Arkady’s heels. One step up from a servant, one step down from someone who mattered. “I think she’s just a cool kid. She’s fun to be around.”
The bogeyman sighed and took a drink of whiskey. “That’s not going to work for Grub…. Greg.” He made a face. “Apologies. Your mother’s hospitality takes us all back to the old days. Sometimes it is hard to remember the new rules.”
It was. Donna had been known to use that to her advantage.
“If you keep them, no need to remember them,” Arkady said. His tone was mild, his words weren’t. “The Prodigium’s edict on names is not new.”
Despite the general impression of pallor, the bogey managed to blanch. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just a pet name for the boy. Not one the humans would understand, is all.”
“Not exactly wise,” Arkady remarked.
“Maybe he can come over for a playdate with Ellie sometime,” Cash said, before the bogeyman said anything worse. “I’d like her to have some friends who aren’t human, even if they can’t cut loose like they do at camp.”
