by Kit Rocha
He’d never said her name in this tone before, low and tense. Soft, which was ridiculous, because nothing about him should be soft. She dragged her legs up his sides and wrapped them around his hips. It settled him more firmly in the cradle of hers, his erection grinding against her pussy to spark a heat she refused to consider.
He shuddered, his breath catching in his throat, and in that moment of inattention she pushed off the mat, surged upward, and rolled them again.
His back hit the floor, but his fingers stayed locked around her wrists, stretching her body above him. Her hips aligned over his, her sweatpants and cotton underwear feeble protection from the grinding pressure of his cock straining against the fly of his jeans.
Deacon wasn’t stern anymore, just bangable, and holy fucking hell, she wanted to do it. Throw caution and preparation and the weight of everyone else’s dreams aside and just tear open his jeans and ride him until she’d fucked every thought out of her head. Hard, sweaty, relentless, because if she knew anything about Deacon, it was that the man had stamina.
He could fuck her until she fell into bed, too tired to stare at the ceiling and fret, until she was weak-limbed and sated for the first time in years. And it would be so, so good...
Until he stepped back into his leadership role, and Ana was stuck being the only girl and the one who’d fucked the boss.
She could taste the curve of his lip under her tongue already, so she broke his grip on her wrists and flung herself away, rolling to her back on the mats with a groan. “Fuck.”
“Well.” He didn’t move, except for the harsh rise and fall of his chest as he panted. “I did not see that coming.”
It was ridiculous to feel the sting of that. It wasn’t like she’d wanted Deacon to think of her sexually--all she’d ever wanted was for him to think of her as a soldier.
But he didn’t have to sound so shocked. “You’re not the first guy to get a boner when I kick his ass. You won’t be the last.”
The look he flashed her was half surliness, half consternation.
That made her feel better, so she poked harder. “What, you’re not even the first Rider to do it. Reyes gets hot and bothered every time I put him on the ground. Of course, I think Reyes gets a hard-on any time Ashwin knocks him over, too. Or any time he encounters a stiff breeze.”
“That’s Reyes,” he rumbled. “Not me.”
Her body was still buzzing with arousal. It was a mistake to touch him at all, even just to nudge his leg with her toes. “Welcome to being human. You can go back to being worshipped any time, you know.”
“Can I, though?” Deacon grunted as he folded one arm behind his head. “How are the others?”
Ana arched to snag a towel from the nearby bench and swiped it over her forehead. “Gabe’s still kinda messed up. And Ashwin’s unsettled. I think he’s waiting for the others to decide he’s done too much bad shit and has to be kicked out. Bishop and Zeke have been spending a lot of time with him.”
He grunted again.
“But the one I’m worried about is Ivan.” Ana rolled onto her side and propped her head up on her hand. It was weirdly intimate, talking to him like this. If she squinted, she could imagine they were sprawled out in bed--
No. She wouldn’t squint. “Ivan,” she repeated. “You know his upbringing was...harsh.”
“I think you mean fucked the hell up.” Deacon sighed and slowly sat up, every muscle working in careful, controlled concert. “I’ll talk to him.”
In a lot of ways, Ivan’s childhood was an ugly mirror of her own. He was only four years old when his father died thwarting an assassination attempt on the Prophet’s daughter. Ana had grown up in the care of a flesh-and-blood Rider who urged her to excel. Ivan had been stuck with a father who decorated the wall of saints in every temple in Sector One, a sacrificial ideal his mother hounded him to emulate with every waking breath.
And that was before his grandfather and uncles had committed treason.
“He might not be able to hear you,” Ana warned, staring at Deacon’s back. It was a nice back. Broad at the top, where his shoulders sloped into strong arms, and narrow at the waist. Ink peeked around where his ravens had spilled from his arm onto his back, as if Del was running out of room to catalog all the lives he’d taken.
“He’ll hear me,” Deacon countered. “He may not believe what I have to say, but he’ll listen.”
“True enough.” She couldn’t stop staring at those little black birds. If she counted them, how many would there be? “Deacon?”
“Yeah?”
She started to reach out, but curled her fingers toward her palm and forced her hand to the mat. “Your ravens. Do you have them for the kills you made before?”
He half-turned toward her. “No. No, those kills are mine to remember.”
With his face in profile, stern was back. Still bangable though, dammit. Even with his brows drawn down and his voice serious and heavy, speaking as though he didn’t need tattoos because the blood he’d spilled as a mercenary weighed as heavily on him as all the little girls’ hopes and dreams did on her.
No, remembering was never the problem. It was finding enough space to forget long enough to draw in a full breath. She wondered if Deacon ever had.
Ana tossed the towel aside and rolled to her knees. “We’re cool, you know. In case you need to hear it. Whatever bad shit you did, you’ve risked your life and bled for twenty years to make up for it.”
He rose and held out his hand to help her up. “I never doubted it. You wouldn’t punish me for something that was always true just because you’re aware of it now. You’re too...practical for that.”
She didn’t feel practical. Gripping his hand tingled, and the air close to him felt too warm. Her hyperawareness of him had lost its uncomfortable edge. What had once been sandpaper across her nerves had turned to silk.
Shit was going to get really, really awkward if that didn’t go away.
Ana released his hand and retrieved her empty bottle. “You should get some sleep. And show up for a meal tomorrow, or something. Don’t shut us all out.”
“I had a very solid plan to wait three days.”
“Very practical.” She paused in the doorway to glance back at him. “Three days is a long time to be alone, Deacon.”
He snorted out another laugh. “Is it, princess?”
Ana had never been a princess. Even though Gideon had gladly brought her to the compound after her mother’s death, it hadn’t been into his household. Isabela had been married already, and Maricela had been little more than a baby. Ana had played with the children of gardeners and servants. She’d snuck into the kitchen to charm cooks, had evaded the tutors to run wild with the sons of the royal guard.
She’d grown up sliding back and forth between worlds, a commoner whose father had one foot in sainthood.
But she’d never been alone.
Something far more insidious than desire slid through her, a quiet, dangerous emotion that blunted the sting of his teasing and softened her voice. “Yes,” she said, fighting a swift and ugly battle against the tenderness rising inside her. “Yes, it is.”
His eyes met hers, and for a moment, it was like looking into a mirror. The same feeling that wound its way through her was reflected in his eyes, deep and endless--
Then it was over. He blinked, shook his head, and turned away. “Thanks for the brawl.”
“Any time.”
She left before she could do anything stupid, popping back down to the kitchen only long enough to rinse out her bottle and drop it into the recycling bin. Then, like a coward, she checked the hallway before bolting back to her room.
When she sprawled out on her bed this time, the quilt felt cool under her skin. She was still running too hot, restless and irritated, balanced on that sharp edge where arousal could come roaring back. If she closed her eyes, inched her hand down her body...
She tried to visualize the last person she’d had sex with. It was back before
she’d become a Rider--hell, before the war, even. The training schedule her father had set once she hit her teens hadn’t left a lot of time for socialization, and he’d only grown more militantly insistent as the sectors seethed toward rebellion. Kora had been checking Ana’s contraceptive implant at regular intervals, but it wasn’t getting a lot of use.
There was that pretty blond orchard supervisor. Ana had bumped into him at last year’s midsummer festival and spent an enjoyable afternoon proving haylofts were less romantic than they sounded but still perfectly serviceable. But when she closed her eyes and attempted to call up his features, Deacon’s face intruded. Hard and brooding, with those dark eyes and stupidly kissable lips--
Fuck. Fuck.
If he were still alive, her father would kill her. Maybe he’d kill Deacon, too, for good measure. To come this far and achieve this much only to be betrayed by hormones, by the aggravating need to rescue Deacon from his loneliness...
Ana rolled over and buried her face in her pillow, muffling a frustrated groan. Then, giving in to the inevitable, she rolled back out of bed and gathered up her towel and robe.
She’d take a bath. And if she couldn’t summon that damn orchard supervisor’s face from memory, she’d fucking well track him down. Or find a suitable substitute, whatever was necessary to get her head back in the game. Anything to satisfy the itch beneath her skin before it got so pressing that she did something she couldn’t take back.
Deacon got to put down the burden of being worshipped. But Ana had a long, long way to go.
Chapter Seven
People tended to assume that everyone in Sector One eschewed technology as much as the Prophet had. And it was a fair assumption, though it wasn’t entirely correct. Such things were only forbidden by the religious teachings of the temple if they made you less mindful--of yourself, other people, your surroundings.
Deacon enjoyed watching videos in his downtime and listening to music while he worked out. He appreciated lights and heat and refrigeration, and whenever Zeke cobbled together a new handheld device or computer, he made sure to at least look at it, just in case. But he always made sure he knew how to survive without any of it.
Sometimes it slowed him down, but that was the entire fucking point. Rushing led to mistakes.
Now, for instance, he and Ivan were working on framing a cottage for one of the royal guards and his wife. It was a task Deacon usually despised. He was fond of construction in general--the sheer labor of it exhausted him, in the very best ways--but he loathed framing. It was persnickety and precise, the kind of task he might have been tempted to hurry through, if he’d had the tools to do so.
So he passed over the drivers and nail guns in favor of a simple, old-fashioned hammer. The mindful choice, because the bones of a house had to be exactly right or the whole thing would be crooked. Walls would crack and windows would leak, all because Deacon hated framing so much that he half-assed the job.
Beside him, Ivan worked in careful, focused silence. Deacon knew he didn’t like the job any more than he did, but for different reasons. Ivan didn’t like any tasks that pulled him away from what he considered his primary duty--protecting the royal family. Which would have made him an excellent royal guard, but was a hell of a fixation for a Rider.
One of them had to break the silence, and Deacon knew it would be him. Because Ana had lain on the training room floor, her head propped on her arm, and all but asked him to in her soft, rasping voice.
He missed the next nail.
He cleared his throat. “Do you have anything to ask me?”
Ivan froze with the hammer hovering over his shoulder. After a few tense seconds, he followed through with his swing, pounding the nail deeper into the wood. “How did you get close enough to Gideon for any of this to happen to begin with? After the shit with Mad and Adriana, they should have had the royal family protected.”
A deceptively simple question with a shit ton of complicated answers. Things were in chaos. Their attention was focused elsewhere. You’re underestimating how good I was at infiltration.
It was in the Prophet’s best interest to allow me to complete the job he hired me for.
No, that last one wasn’t his secret to tell. Besides, none of that came close to the deepest truth of all. “You know Gideon now, but he was a different person back then. Young and cocky, out to single-handedly rebuild the sector. He wasn’t about to let them keep him under lock and key. Made my job easier.”
“I met him back then. Once.” Ivan hit the nail again. “I was about eight, and he was seventeen or eighteen. He came to take me and my mother to a new apartment he’d secured for us.”
Deacon had heard the story. Ivan’s mother had been shunned because of her family’s involvement with the insurrection that had led to Adriana’s kidnapping and eventual death. It didn’t matter that she was devout, that she would have stepped in front of a bullet herself to save the lowest member of the royal family. She was tainted by association of blood.
After that, she struggled to raise her young son alone. For nearly two years, she managed. She worked for people who sometimes wouldn’t pay her, because they knew she wouldn’t report them. She sold off bits and pieces of her family’s past, heirlooms that should have been handed down to Ivan.
They were practically on the street by the time Gideon found out and immediately interceded on their behalf. The only injustice that mattered to him was the one before him--a woman and her son, abandoned and surviving on nothing.
No wonder Ivan was so fanatically devoted to him.
“Then you already know the real reason,” Deacon told him simply. “Gideon will protect everyone but himself.”
“Sometimes Gideon gives us more credit than we’ve earned. More than we deserve.” A final swing pounded the nail home, and Ivan finally turned to look at Deacon. “While we spend the rest of our lives trying to live up to the person he sees when he looks at us.”
“Some people, maybe.”
“You don’t?”
Maybe it seemed backwards from the outside. If anyone deserved to spend every day trying to live up to an ideal of grace, it was Deacon. “Gideon isn’t delusional. He knows who I am. That has to be enough.”
A frown creased Ivan’s brow as he turned back to the frame. “Does it feel like enough?”
“What it feels like doesn’t matter.” Deacon abandoned his hammer and fetched two beers from the ice bucket beside the lumber pile. He opened both and offered one to Ivan. “If you spend your life only being satisfied when you’re perfect, you’ll be worse than disappointed. You’ll be nuts.”
Ivan sipped his beer and shot Deacon a knowing look. “Maybe it’s too late for me to be anything else. I assume Ana told you to talk to me.”
“Of course she did.” The sun was high in the sky already, and sitting down in the dappled shadows cast by the half-framed house felt good. “But don’t make the mistake of thinking I wouldn’t have done it anyway.”
Ivan nodded. “I know. You’re a good leader. And if you meant to do the Rios family harm, you’ve had a thousand opportunities.”
“But?”
“No but.” Ivan sank to the ground next to him and tilted his head back against the house. “Being perfect’s not the point. We’re all damned anyway, Deacon. All that matters is the good we do before we go down. I’ve been thinking about how skilled you are with tactics. You know how the bad guys think. If you weren’t here, maybe more of us would be dead, along with all the people we’ve saved.”
On occasion, Deacon had wondered if that was Gideon’s very practical, very human rationale for asking him to join up. He still wasn’t sure it wasn’t. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” he murmured.
Ivan twirled the bottle between his fingers. “That’s just it, isn’t it? Gideon looked into your eyes and saw something worth saving. He looked into Ashwin’s eyes and saw the same thing. If I start doubting him, where does that leave me? I don’t care if we’re all de
vils. Gideon knows us. That’s enough.”
An image of Ana’s earnest face and pleading eyes formed in Deacon’s head, and he shook it away. “And the others?”
“Gabe’s gonna be a problem.” Ivan glanced sidelong at Deacon. “Not for you. He’ll work his way around to making things right with you. But you know how he’ll have to do that.”
By killing as many of the Suicide Kings as he could get his hands on. “If this goes the way I think it will, we’ll all have plenty of chances to fight the Kings, whether we want to or not.”
“So you think they’re coming for you?”
He still wasn’t sure they’d seen him investigating in Three. Posting sentries after a kill was standard operating procedure, but they might have been long gone by the time he and Lucio showed up. Hell, they might not have needed to see him, because they’d known where he was the whole goddamn time.
That was the thing, wasn’t it? He had no idea. “I think...it feels like something’s about to happen. The way the air gets heavy before a storm.”
Ivan nodded. “Then we should be ready.”
“We’re Riders.” Deacon finished his beer and set the bottle aside. “We’re always ready.”
Ivan twirled his bottle again, watching the glass catch and refract the light. “I’ll fight beside you. I don’t care why you’re good. I just care about doing our job.”
“Why?” he found himself asking. At Ivan’s puzzled look, he shook his head. “Not why will you fight with me. I’m grateful for that. But why is this your job? Why be a Rider? We both know your heart is in guarding the Rios family.”
Ivan set his bottle aside and rose. He gripped the edge of the house’s frame and stared into its open recesses, as if seeing into the hazy future when it would be finished and filled with a cozy little family. “Back in my father’s day, there wasn’t much difference. The civil wars were so bloody that the Rios family was in constant danger. A week couldn’t pass without someone trying to kill one of them.”
“I know,” Deacon reminded him. “I was there.” Hell, he’d been one of those people.
