by Alison Ryan
“Oh and just so you know,” he grinned. “There are no cameras in here. So if you need to get reacquainted, please feel free.”
“You’re fucking sick, Malcolm,” Atlas said. “But a great actor. I can’t believe how well you hid your true, fucked up self.”
Malcolm’s smile vanished for a moment. “You know we have to, Atlas. No one knows who we are or what we’re capable of. Including each other.” And with that the steel door to the cell was shut and we were alone.
Thirty-One
ATLAS
Once the door slammed shut, Piper melted down. She had stayed so strong when everyone was in the room with us, but now she collapsed into my arms and wept.
“What the hell is going on?” she cried. “If this isn’t about Spencer than why do they want you? Tell me. Why is this happening?”
I sighed. Fuck. Where did I start? What was okay to tell her?
And more importantly: Would she ever be able to love me if she knew who I really was and what I had done?
“My guess is they want me on assignment,” I said. Better to be ambiguous.
“What? Like a journalist?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” I answered. Not at all, I thought. “Piper, once you know you can’t un-know. And if I tell you what’s happening, it could possibly put you in more danger than you are already in. But I’m also hesitant to reveal who I am because you’ll never look at me the same again.” I tilted her chin so her eyes could meet mine. “And the thought of you not loving me anymore isn’t something I would handle very well.”
She kissed me softly, and touched my cheek. Even in the stressful situation we currently found ourselves in, my cock twitched at her mere touch.
“I couldn’t possibly ever not love you,” she said. “No matter what you tell me.”
I sighed, “Piper, that’s just dumb. What if I was about to tell you I had killed people? For money? For promotion? You could still love me?”
I was presenting it as if it wasn’t a possibility when it was exactly what I was trying to avoid telling her. Except about the money.
I had never needed to do much of anything for that.
“If you killed people,” she whispered. “There must have been a good reason. You were a SEAL. You had to protect yourself and your teammates.”
I shook my head, “It was after the SEALs.”
She looked at me, the realization that what I was saying was true, that I had killed people. Her eyes grew large.
“Why?” she asked. “Why would you have to kill anyone?”
“When I was a SEAL,” I began. “I was recruited. By the Special Activities Division of the CIA. A few of my buddies and me. We thought it would be a great way to keep doing what we loved, protecting our nation’s freedoms, protecting our citizens from the bad guys.” I paused. “But it was so much more than that. Working for the Special Operations Group, or SOG for short, was basically like working for a secret society. No one knows the measures that are taken to keep the machine that is our country working. We were asked to do what it took to control hostile situations in foreign countries. Particularly here in the Middle East. This is a place I spent a great deal of my time.”
Piper looked at me, her eyes still concerned, but not disgusted. But she still didn’t know.
“I had to kill many people. Some of them were bad. Hell, most of them were some of the worst people you could ever hope to meet. The kind you see in movies, the men you see blowing up buildings and strapping bombs to little kids. But as the job went on and I learned more about what SOG was really after, I realized that sometimes I was forced to kill people who weren’t corrupt people. They were just inconveniences for people higher up the chain.”
I looked at her, knowing this is when she might want to run. When she should want to run, not that she was capable of doing that at the moment.
“Some of my assignments became more domestic,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t always expected to kill your average terrorist or covert operator from a foreign bad land. Soon I was getting assignments to kill American citizens. People who were getting in the way.”
“Of what?” she asked.
“Most of the time I wasn’t even aware of that,” I admitted. “I was given an assignment and I was expected to get the job done. No questions asked. And none needed. Until I did need them. Until I began losing my friends who were dying in the line of duty, doing a job so covert that their deaths couldn’t even be acknowledged by the very country and administration they were serving.”
She grabbed my hand, “That’s not your fault, Atlas. You were doing your job. Your sworn duty.”
I looked up at the ceiling, “I used to tell myself that. On the nights when it was impossible to sleep. But it was me lying to myself.”
There were times I’d had to seduce women in order to gain trust or information, but somehow that seemed worse now, worse even than the times I’d had to make problems (people) “go away,” as my bosses put it, and I didn’t dare reveal that to Piper.
Piper touched my face, the love and worry in her expression not one of repugnance or even disappointment. She was sad for me. Something I usually would have hated, because I didn’t need pity. But as long as she didn’t hate me, that was what mattered most.
“But you don’t do it anymore, right?” she asked. “You work in San Francisco with your brothers. You’re out of that life. You got out.”
I looked at her, wishing that was true.
“You’re never really out, Piper,” I said. “I know a lot of things about a lot of people. That’s not something you retire from. It’s understood that you’re always on call, always in the reserve for when you’re needed. I’ve been resisting it for a long time. Which has been easy because I’m connected and loaded and protected by the Titan name. And I’ve never had anything they could hurt me with. Nothing they could use over my head.”
I pulled her towards me and kissed her. It was impossible to be near her and not show her how I felt, something that was foreign and also badly hidden. It was why we were in this mess.
“But I guess when I called Zahra to get us away from DC, that’s when they knew they had an opportunity. A chance to bring me back into the fold. They could use you, as a weapon against me,” I said. “I just never expected… Zahra is a very old friend, someone who I thought I could trust.”
“Was she…” Piper started and then stopped. “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”
“Was she someone I was with? Like I’m with you?” I said. “No way. Zahra is the widow of one of my best friends. She also happens to be a spy and someone who is also in this line of work. She’s Mossad though.”
“Oh,” Piper said. “Israeli special forces?”
“Yep,” I said. “She’s a friend, nothing else. Or she was a friend. They must have used her son to blackmail her. Which, if that’s the case, I can’t hold it against her. I mean, they’re doing the same thing to me.”
“So once Zahra knew you were on your way here she told them,” Piper said. “This is so fucked up. What could they possibly want you to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Or I do know. I just don’t want to think about it.”
Thirty-Two
PIPER
It was a lot to take in.
Atlas was an assassin. A government assassin, the kind that crazy conspiracy theorists would write my mother about, begging her to do an expose on the dark underbelly of government affairs. They’d point to the scientist who claimed he’d developed a cure for cancer, only to disappear. Or the guy who could make a car run on rainwater who committed suicide when he couldn’t get anyone to invest in his idea. She’d shake her head and laugh.
“People would be disappointed to know it’s really not that deep,” Mom would haughtily say. “Some people just like to believe they know things no one else knows. They watch too many Jason Bourne movies.”
But this was real. Atlas was Jason Bourne. Or a version of him anyway. A hotter version,
who demanded that I beg him for permission to climax.
God, I thought. Even now I couldn’t stop thinking about sex with him.
“So what do we do?” I asked. “Will they come back?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re just fucking with me. But I doubt they’re back until morning. Which in here is hard to tell when that will be.”
I nodded, “True. But there’s no way I can sleep. No possible way.”
He laid back onto the bed and opened his arms up, motioning for me to let him hold me.
I was more than happy to oblige. I pressed my body against the hardness of his, breathing in his scent, never wanting to be more than this far away from him ever again.
“Piper,” he said. “When I realized you were gone… I almost went insane. If not for you, I would have murdered our butler staff. But I was afraid if I did anything drastic, I would lose my chance of making sure you were okay. It scared me, the thought of anyone hurting you.”
I looked up at him, “I looked for you. I missed you and I went to the salon. I saw you with Zahra, she had her hand on your back and I assumed… I’m so stupid. When I came back I was told you wanted me to meet you in the lobby. When I refused they must have chloroformed me. I woke up here and Zahra was here.”
He was clutching me now, his large hands pressing against the curve of my lower back.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I was talking to her about Spencer. She knows some of his people and we were trying to figure out why he’s after you and if it has anything to do with me. But now I know it was all a ruse. Fuck.”
He laid his head back and closed his eyes. His chiseled features took my breath away. He was handsome and rugged and also beautiful. I loved him in the worst kind of way, the kind that’s uncontrollable and outside of myself.
“I love you,” I said. “I’m just glad to be with you again.”
I was straddling him now and I could feel his hardness through his pants.
“I know this is impractical and probably incredibly stupid,” I said. “But I need you, Atlas. I need to feel something that isn’t stress or fear. And when you’re loving my body, I feel safe. I need to feel safe, baby.”
He looked at me for a long moment and I thought for sure he was going to push me off of him, that we couldn’t do this right now.
But instead his hands slid up my thighs and then up my camisole tank top to the peaks of my breasts where the nipples were already waiting for him. They were stiff and his fingers brushed against them I gasped.
“Please,” I whispered. “Just for a moment.”
“It can never be just a moment,” he said, picking me up by my hips and rolling me onto my back. He hooked his fingers into the elastic of my leggings and pulled them down.
“No panties underneath,” he said. “Lay back. I know how to relax you.”
His tongue started in the middle of my torso and traveled further and further down, slowly passing my hip bones before it reached my vulva. His lips brushed against my clit and my back arched, wanting desperately to come in his mouth, over and over again.
I heard him inhale deeply through his nose and then I felt him exhale all over my aching sex. He inhaled the aroma of my arousal again and held it, making eye contact with me.
“Fuck, I love the smell of your pussy. Just that scent alone turns me into a wild animal.”
I whimpered as he kissed me softly right where my thighs met my pelvis. Reverential kisses. Passionate.
He moved down my inner thighs, covering them with kisses, his stubble scratching at the tender flesh there, sending me into a frenzy of desperation.
“Atlas, please, please do it, I need it, don’t make me wait I need it so badly. Please…”
Between kisses, he spoke to me, his voice impossibly deeper than normal and just above a whisper.
“Piper, I’ll decide what your body needs and when. Remember that. But right now I want you to be perfectly still. And silent. If we make any noise, we may get an audience. So no matter what, don’t make a sound. I’ll give you what you need, when you need it. Understand?”
With that, his eyes met mine. I bit my bottom lip to keep from jumping out of my skin and nodded at him before laying my head back and closing my eyes, trying to forget where and why we were and just focusing on Atlas and his magnificent mouth.
Thirty-Three
ATLAS
I could stay there between her legs forever and be perfectly content. The view, the taste, the fragrance, it was an aphrodisiac cocktail like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The way Piper’s body responded to my tongue made me throb from deep inside. I was so hard I felt like I could hammer nails through bricks with my cock if asked to.
She’d agreed to remain motionless and silent, and although following my orders was the most prudent course of action given our circumstance, I intended to do everything in my power to force her to mutiny.
I continued to kiss, lick, and nibble all around her opening, feeling the muscles in her legs tensing and feeling her hips rolling in small circles despite her effort to keep still. I glanced up to see her eyes tightly shut and her mouth open, her head rolling slowly across the pillow. I pulled back and blew softly on her clit, which was standing erect and angry.
When I watched her lick her own lips, involuntarily, I imagined, I lost the ability to resist any longer. I had to taste what I was smelling.
My tongue went flat across the width of her labia, dragging slowly from the bottom to the top of her cleft.
I paused at her clit, swirling my tongue around it before repeating the full motion of my tongue twice and then three times. She was softly shaking and mewing almost imperceptibly when I captured her entire vulva in my mouth, forming a seal. My tongue was moving wildly inside her, but aside from that, we were both as stationary as if sitting for a portrait. The volcano threatening to erupt inside her was her precious secret.
My tongue became a U shape around her bud, massaging it and coaxing her to surrender to the pleasure I hoped she was feeling.
Thirty-Four
PIPER
I wanted to make Atlas proud, to prove myself to him, to follow his commands, but he was making it impossible. His hands on my waist were all that kept me from thrashing and bucking against his face, and I was biting my own tongue so hard to keep from screaming that the flavor of my saliva became slightly metallic.
When my orgasm commenced, it took full control of my body. My hands flew to Atlas, my fingers tangled in his wavy brown hair to hold him in place. At that moment, despite our obvious difference in size and strength, I think the adrenaline rush I experienced could have overpowered him and held him there even if he’d wanted to disengage.
But he obviously had no intention of stopping. I felt the gush of fluid as I climaxed, and I feared he might be close to drowning, such was the intensity of what I was experiencing. My body felt a physical impact as I came, as if a runaway sexual locomotive had impacted my very soul. Try as I might, silence wasn’t an option. I yanked the pillow from beneath my head and used it to muffle my screams, shouting his name into the silk over and over again. “Atlas! Atlas! ATLAS!”
My body felt like jelly when he finished, and I was only vaguely aware that he had risen to his feet and then climbed atop me on the bed.
His voice guided me down off the cloud I was on and his hand cradling my face focused me on the present time and place.
“Piper, I’m going to fuck you now. Don’t make a sound. It’s going to be slow and deep.”
Thirty-Five
ATLAS
Believe it or not, I hadn’t planned to do anything more than go down on Piper to help her relax. No matter how much it might thrill Malcolm and his thugs to see my naked ass, I didn’t intend to give them the pleasure again. But Piper’s body was irresistible. When she reached her crescendo, it had taken nearly all of my strength to hold her fast to the bed. My cock couldn’t be denied a moment longer.
I reminded Piper of my earlier instruction
s to her and she nodded her assent. I felt harder and thicker than I had ever felt, and I tingled all over with the need to be inside her. I feared that my arousal might be such that I’d come instantly upon entering her. The dreamy, post-orgasmic glaze over her beautiful eyes made my job no easier.
Despite her wetness, I was met with resistance at first, and had to adjust the angle of my hips and probe hesitantly to find the access my cock demanded of her.
Once I found it, we locked eyes and I buried myself inside her. Deep inside, I felt the remnants of her climax as her muscles still twitched and clutched at me.
My arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her body tightly against me as I kissed her. Our kisses were voracious, punctuated by the powerful throbs of my cock lodged in her core.
I pulled away so I could stare into her eyes as I gave her a second thrust. Arms hooked under her shoulders, hands on the back of her head, my eyes staring directly into her soul, I withdrew and slowly entered her again.
And again.
And again.
In the time it would normally take me to hammer in and out of her a hundred times, I’d given her only four thrusts. Yet we were both trembling, walking a silent tightrope together.
Again.
This time, when I’d entered her my cock had pressed firmly at the top of her opening before sliding mercifully inside, and we both knew our destination was close at hand.
A final slow plunge and our lips met as I emptied myself into her.
Thirty-Six
PIPER
As powerful as the climax I’d just experienced all over the perfect face of Atlas Titan may have been, scant moments later it was surpassed. His girth and deliberate, yet relentless thrusts returned me to the precipice in record time. His expert kissing and maddeningly slow pace kept me suspended there, at his mercy.
