Grim lifts his lips from mine just long enough to say, “Wanna bet?”
* * *
Grim
Parting her lips, Tricks lightly sucks on the tip of my thumb as I take her face in my hands, sending my rush of dire need into animalistic overdrive. There’s no turning back now. As if there ever was. As if I ever had a chance of NOT taking her.
I pull her down onto the grass and cover her body with mine. I ravage her lips with my mouth, our tongues tangling together. We growl into the kiss like starved animals fighting over scraps.
But that’s what we are. Starved.
For each other. For this. For the connection that never fails to simmer when we’re close, pulling us together like an imaginary tether until we can’t help but to give in. We never stood a chance against fate. Even if I’d wanted to fight this, I couldn’t. But I don’t want to. All I want is Tricks. To feel her against me. To be inside her. To feel her heart beat wildly out of control while she screams my name.
We attack each other’s clothes until they’re in a pile next to us on the ground.
Tricks looks me over, drinking in my body. She gazes up at me with lust-filled, hooded eyes. It sends a jolt of anticipation straight to my cock. Her long lashes flutter as she gasps at the sensation of my bare skin against hers. Her tits feel like perfection in my hands. Against my tongue. I can feel her heart racing in her chest although we’re so close it could be mine because the fucker is pounding against my ribcage like the hooves of a hundred racing horses.
Her lips part as she arches her back, raising her hips. Needing more. Heat from her wet pussy grazes the tip of my cock. I let out a strangled groan. I travel lower and lower down her body.
“Tricks. Fuuuuck.”
I can’t believe she’s here with me right now. That she’s back with me. I can’t fucking breathe. I’m not sure I want to either. If I so much as inhale, this might all go away, just another dream that I’ll wake from with my cock in my hand.
This isn’t just lust. It’s more than that. Desire amplified by a thousand along with some other shit I’m not familiar with but am assaulted by with every thought. Every touch. She’s everywhere. In my cock. In my fucking chest. It’s all too much and yet not nearly fucking enough. Not by a long shot.
I don’t just want her. I need her.
I need us.
The thought is fucking terrifying. I’ve never needed anyone but myself, but then again, that’s a lie I’ve been telling myself for years. I’ve always needed her. She’s the blood in my veins. The air in my lungs. My reason for having fucking reasons. She looks beyond what I’m capable of and sees something in me I can’t see myself. She makes me feel human. More than a reaper. A murderer. A man who doesn’t feel and doesn’t want to. Except when it comes to her.
My Tricks.
I can’t quite get the words out to tell her how I feel. I’m a man of very few words and even fewer emotions. I’ve never even wanted to tell anyone how I felt before now. I whisper the first thing that comes to mind, hoping she’ll understand what it is I’m trying to say, even though I don’t entirely understand it myself.
“You are me.”
Tricks inhales sharply, nails digging into my back. She nods against my shoulder. “I know,” she whispers as if she truly understands what I’m trying to tell her.
It doesn’t surprise me. She’s the only person who has ever understood me.
My chest tightens. My cock swells and throbs painfully, growing thicker and harder as the seconds tick by that I’m not inside of her. Tricks moans against my skin, and it’s getting harder and harder to maintain any kind of fucking control.
It’s not like I ever had any, but I’m trying for her sake. She’s already been through so much. Too much. I brought her back to me with my body, I could break her with it, too.
You want to break her, the devil within me whispers.
“Grim,” she begs, arching her back again. Her voice is lower than I’ve ever heard it before, filled with need and lust in a way that makes me salivate to devour her.
Fuck control.
I hiss and reach around her, pulling her up by her lower back, so her hips are in line with mine. I can see her now. All of her. Wet and glistening for me. I groan and take hold of my shaft, rubbing it through her slick pussy lips. She whimpers. I can feel her pussy tighten in response. My eager cock jumps at the sensation.
In no way is she even trying to be sexy. She just is. It only makes me want her more.
Tricks is all innocence and attitude.
Both fearless and terrified.
Rebellion with a side of caution.
I’m not worthy of her. Of this dangerous life-altering thing between us.
Never will be.
It doesn’t matter. Worthy or not, I’m fucking taking her.
Consequences be damned.
Tricks is mine. She always has been.
I crush my lips to hers and push my cock inside of her with one hard, rough thrust.
Always will be.
* * *
Emma Jean
The earth shifts beneath me. I’m a million miles away, yet I’ve never felt more present in my life. Grim does this to me. Always has. Makes me feel like I’m everywhere at once but never far from him.
I want his hands on me forever. Just like this. I want to smell him. Us. Together. For as long as I live. I want to experience his ruthless thrusts every morning and every night. I crave the way his hips press against mine as he pushes into me with a groan that pushes me toward the edge before the first full thrust. He tries over and over again to get as deep inside me as possible. I spread my legs to allow him more room, and finally, he’s fully seated inside of me. The groan that tears from his throat is the sweetest music I’ve ever heard. I wrap my legs around him, pulling him closer still.
“More,” I beg.
Grim slams into me faster. Harder. Furious. Determined. He holds one of my legs in the air with one arm, and the other hand grips my hip tightly, as if my sweat soaked skin is seconds away from slipping out from under his grasp.
His face twists in both pleasure and pain while he makes me come undone with each forceful thrust.
“Fuck, Tricks. You. Always you,” he says along with some incoherent murmurs I can’t quite make out.
I’m a million miles away yet more present than I’ve ever been in my life as he thrusts hard and sends me sailing over the edge. The pleasure pulses inside me, exploding like dynamite. My fragile nerve-endings are floating on wave after wave of toe-curling pleasure.
My orgasm is everywhere, not just where he’s stroking me from within.
His thrusts grow faster and harder, more erratic. He’s looking deep into my eyes as my name tears from his chorded throat on a strangled cry that has me involuntarily squeezing him with my tight heat as he comes and comes until I’m sure I’m so full of him I could burst.
It doesn’t matter what Grim says. He can’t send me away. I won’t let him.
I’m not going anywhere. Not now.
Not ever.
Grim and I might not be married, but there’s one part of marriage that applies to us. An unspoken vow. Since the day I met him, long before our first kiss. Long before he made me his.
’Til death do us part.
Twenty
In the aftermath of our lust, I dress while grim pulls up his pants. We lie back in the grass trying to catch our breaths. I’m in the crook of Grim’s arm with my cheek flattened against his chest. I run my fingers up and down the ridges of his defined muscles. He’s watching me as I move on to trace every tattoo on his torso.
“I’ve never gotten a good look at all of these before. Tell me about them?” I ask. “What do they all mean?”
“You don’t know?” he asks as if the answer is obvious.
He takes my hand and guides my fingers to his neck. “This one is self-explanatory,” he says of the black rose tattoo at the base of his throat.
“Bedlam.”
I smile. “Naturally.”
Grim continues, “The eye, well, it’s not exact, and the blue-green color has faded over time, but the artist only had the description of my memory to go off. He did the best he could.”
I suck in a breath and flatten my palm over the tattoo. “It’s me,” I whisper.
“It’s you. For you,” he says. “Tricks, most of them are for you. The bleeding heart, the peach lips…why else would I have a magician’s top hat on my hip?” He chuckles. “And then there’s this one.” He points to some script lettering above his sculpted V line right above his left thigh.
Those who have a strong sense of belonging have the courage to be imperfect. - Brene Brown
I recognize the quote instantly. It’s one of my favorites. “It’s from my letter.”
“It is.”
“This is all…” I begin without knowing what exactly it is I’m trying to say. “I can't believe these are all for me.”
He takes my wrist and guides my hand over his rapidly beating heart. “Do you feel this?”
I swallow hard and nod.
“Well, I didn’t. Not before you came along that first day. It wasn’t lust at first sight, you were too young for me to think of you that way. And I can’t say I fell in love with you that day, but I became capable of it because of you and felt it for the first time when I finally found you.”
I’m silent because I don’t know what to say. I’m so overwhelmed by it all. “I just…holy shit.”
“This one is my favorite,” Grim says flipping around to his stomach. “This,” he points over his left shoulder. It’s another rose.
“It’s white,” I remark.
Grim flips back over. “Bedlam is the black rose so that makes me the black rose,” he tucks a strand of hair behind my ears, “I’ve always thought of you as the white.”
“Oh, Grim,” I say, feeling my eyes well up with tears.
“After you disappeared I wasn’t old enough to get a legit tattoo yet, the ones I already had were from juvie, so I scratched your name into the skin of my forearm.” He shows me a jagged scar that’s healed poorly over time. You can’t even make out your name anymore, but you really couldn’t then either.” He pauses to think for a minute. “It was strange, you know. To feel so connected to someone I barely even knew, but yet I felt like I knew you. There was something almost…I don’t know if comforting is the right word, but it’s close enough. So, yeah, there was something comforting about feeling the pain of marking your name on my body, about watching the blood spill to the floor, knowing it was you I was bleeding for.
My chest tightens. “If that wasn’t so gruesome, I’d almost think it was kind of romantic.”
He wags his eyebrows. “You know me, babe. I’m all about the romance.”
I rest my head on his chest, soaking in his warmth and the surge of emotions swelling up in my heart as a result of all he’s just shared with me.
Grim props himself up on his elbow. He then fills me in on the events that took place since the last time we’d seen each other at Belly’s service. He tells me about the planted drugs the task force found in his house and about Gil’s dead body in his room. About how he spent time locked in a cell at the sheriff’s station and then about his dramatic escape with the help of a friend before coming to my rescue.
“I would have come for you sooner. I’m so sorry it took me so long.” The pain and regret in his voice are palpable.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I search his eyes, holding his face in my hands like he had with mine. I smile as a tear escapes my eye and rolls down my cheek. “You came just in time.”
He pulls me back down to him, and we relax into each other’s warmth.
Despair is a disease that rots the soul a little at a time. A disease where both the culprit and the cure, is hope. I’ve been plagued with it for so long I don’t know how to take in the happiness lying right next to me.
I’m not sure I really know how to even be happy anymore.
But I can learn.
I glance up at Grim and smile.
His lips twist. “What?”
“So, this is how it can be,” I whisper.
“How what can be?” he asks with an amused gleam in his eyes.
I roll off him into the grass and spread my arms to the sides. I take a deep breath of fresh air and stare up at the sky until he appears, hovering above me. Our eyes meet. “Life.”
Something falls from the sky and lands on Grim’s back. We both leap to our feet and look around, but there’s no one in sight. At first, I think it’s a soccer ball that landed on us. When Grim kneels down in the grass and stands back up with it in his arms, I realize how wrong I am. It’s striped and furry and very, very dead.
Grim looks down like he can’t believe what he’s holding. He takes a step toward me, and it’s not a what he’s holding at all, but a who.
The dead cat in Grim’s arms is not just any cat.
It’s Mr. Fuzzy.
There’s an open piece of paper stapled to his tiny body. Blood is smeared across the crude, colored-pencil drawing of a skull, wearing a yellow bandana over the lower half of his face. There's a message at the bottom. It’s only two words, but the short length doesn’t make the message any less powerful.
Gabby’s next.
Grim plucks a necklace from around Mr. Fuzzy’s neck, and I don’t have to get close to know what it is.
My locket.
A full-body convulsion washes over me, twisting my insides like the wringing of a rag. I clutch my midsection and lurch to the side, heaving into the grass until my stomach is empty, and my heart is full of dread.
Twenty-One
Marci brings me a shoebox. “Will this work?”
It looks about the right size. “I think it will be fine, thank you.”
I take it from her and set Mr. Fuzzy inside his makeshift coffin, sponsored by Nike.
I close the lid and grab a marker. The outside of the box becomes more like a message board to Mr. Fuzzy as I decorate it with quotes. All I can remember about love and loss, and even a few about cats.
A cat is a lion in his own lair.”
-Indian Proverb
As every cat owner knows, nobody actually owns a cat."
-Anonymous
What greater gift than the love of a cat.”
-Charles Dickens
Haze crosses the room carrying a different kind of box, one filled with office supplies and not a dead pet. He sets it down on the far end of the long table.
“How’s your shoulder?” I ask, gesturing to where he’d been shot on the night of my rescue.
He shrugs. “Sling came off yesterday. It’s basically just a scratch.” He ruffles my hair. “Don’t you worry about me. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot, kid. Won’t be the last.”
“Hopefully it will be the last,” Marci argues.
“What’s in the box?” He points to Mr. Fuzzy’s final resting place.
“Don’t ask,” Marci says.
Sandy weaves around Haze and grabs a beer from the fridge.
“Well, now I’m more curious.”
Sandy hands Haze a beer. “Don’t ask, you know what they say, curiosity killed the—”
“Sandy!” Marci scolds.
Sandy raises his shoulders to his chin. “What? Too soon?”
She slaps his chest with the back of her hand. “Yes, too fucking soon. It will always be too soon. Show some respect.”
“To a cat?”
“To Tricks. To your brother.”
My smile is small and tight-lipped. “It’s fine. He’s right. It’s a cat.” What I really mean is At least it’s not Gabby.
Marci picks up on my unspoken words. She wraps her arm around my shoulder and kisses the to
p of my head. “We’ll get her out of there. Bethany’s made contact with her. It’s just a matter of time.” She looks to Mr. Fuzzy’s coffin. “This threat isn’t really a threat. It’s a play to get you to go back.”
“That’s not fucking happening,” Grim grates. He enters the room much like a cat. Muscled and lean. He prowls toward me with a possessive look burning in his golden eyes. “Ever.”
“I’m not going back there,” I say.
“But you thought about it,” Grim accuses.
“Yes, I thought about it. Of course, I thought about it. But only to weigh my options for Gabby’s sake.”
Grim runs his fingers through his hair.
“But I’m not. I promise.”
Grim looks tired. His eyes are sunken and his forehead is lined with worry.
“You need some rest,” I tell him.
“I need to blow up that fucking compound with everyone inside!” he tosses an empty beer bottle from the table. Sandy ducks as it crashes against the wall over his head.
I want to argue with him, but he’s not in a state for a fight. I try a gentler approach. “Not while Gabby’s in there, right?”
He blows out a long sigh. “Right. Not while Gabby’s in there.”
I stand and tug on Grim’s jacket, with the intention of leading him to one of the rooms for some much-needed rest. I’d completely forgotten about Grim agreeing to Chief David’s ritual until there's a knock on the back door of the brothel and Sandy lets him in.
“We’re kind of dealing with something right now,” Grim says to the Chief, pointing to the shoe box.
“I know. You told me over the phone.” Chief David reads the messages on the top of the box then lifts the lid to peer inside. He quickly covers it back up. “It’s all the more reason for the ritual. I’m not taking no for an answer. So get your shit and let’s go. The council members are waiting.”
“Chief,” Grim starts.
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