King’s Captive

by Amber Bardan

  My ragged breaths seem so loud, but I can’t force them quieter.

  I back myself against a wall and listen.

  The house is so silent the buzz of the refrigerator reaches me from the kitchen a room away. A door clicks from down the hall. He’s still looking in the rooms adjoining the poolroom. I tiptoe through the dining room, then peer down the hall.

  He turned the lights off behind him. Now the stretch is dappled only by light coming from open doors. I creep down the hall, and into the theater room. Footsteps thud again, only a room away. I crawl over the back couches and squeeze myself into the child-sized gap in the corner.

  Those steady steps get closer.

  “Hiding wasn’t part of the game.” His voice fills the room.

  A snort almost makes it out my nose. As if he doesn’t know I have no trouble cheating.

  I hold my breath, and fold myself tighter. My heart pounds against my squashed ribs. Footsteps pad again. I move my face up the back of the upholstery and peek over the top. He fills the doorway, broad back to me, then steps into the hall.

  I breathe again and pull myself out of the gap and run for the door to the poolroom. A looming figure enters the threshold opposite.

  A squeak leaves my mouth, and my knees jerk in their sockets. I run back the way I came, hard as I can. The thuds behind me speed up.

  I run through the theater room, into the hall, then dive back into the poolroom. The steps close in. I grab the rack of pool cues and throw it to the ground behind me. The crash splinters the air.

  Pool balls hit my heels and roll in front of me. I climb over the pool table and fall over the other side. My knees hit the floorboards, then I drag myself up. He’s moving slow again, rounding the pool table. I shuffle around with each of his steps so the distance between us never actually closes. We’re in nonstop motion. Going round and around. Both panting, both staring, both trembling in the grip of adrenaline. His gaze rakes over me—face, breasts, pussy, face, breasts, pussy—like he’s tracking the order in which he’s about to devour me. My dress may as well be made out of air, because while real, it’s completely fucking invisible. He sees through it.

  My ankles cross, one over the other, as I slink around the pool table.

  There’s honesty in this hunt. The way he is and the way I am now, if this is love, we can’t just push the boundaries between us—we have to burn them down.

  He stalks me, shoulders rolled forward, arms bent at the elbow a little too far out from his sides. He’s still wearing jeans and T-shirt, but he’s so primitive I could cry. Whatever happened to us changed him fundamentally—unleashed the beast civilized men keep caged. That beast faces me now, and I match it snarl for snarl.

  I want his passion even when he’s so full of pain.

  His jaw works, and I see everything he is, each wild emotion, and every desperate hurt. The respite will be when he catches me. I want him to take me down and tear me apart so that when he’s inside me, I’ll know for sure it’s only me and him.

  He lunges over the pool table. I’m hit with yet another burst of speed, and spin away from him.

  I run, but he’s the bigger animal.

  His fist closes in my hair. I thrash, turn myself around in his grip and sink my teeth into his vulnerable wrist. His grip slacks. I shove and run, sprinting through the door to the mostly unused sitting room. He grabs the back of my dress. I jerk in a sling of fabric. My hair falls over my face, and the tear that fills the room is as electrifying as the air that hits my back. He rips the clothing right off my body.

  I start to tumble forward but then his hand is around my throat, and there’s no resisting such a pull. I’m backed against him, and everything slows, everything savage becomes pure.

  If I thought desperate meant ruthless, he proves me wrong.

  He holds me tighter, but gives me this moment. The grip of his hand on my neck, the cocktail of wild hormones breeding in my veins. A moment to feel him, and to feel me.

  I’m so aware of myself—every smooth inch of my own skin, the places it prickles and gets rough, like on my shivering breasts and the beads of my nipples. My deodorant, the moisturizer I lathered myself in, the scent of shampoo—I breathe in every distinct note.

  It’s all so feminine.

  As feminine as the need in my womb, the moisture crying from my sex saturating the fabric between my legs. And all of that femininity, it’s all hard up against the pungent musk of his masculinity. The grind of his cock against the pillow of my ass.

  My life’s been stripped bare and everything is honest and everything is simple.

  I breathe the connection. How everything is reduced to the two of us. His fingers dig against the raging pulse in my throat, and my moment is over. He shoves my panties down just enough to push his hand between my legs. I squeeze my thighs together, and strain in his grip. I’m not done fighting yet.

  He hitches me up against him so my head arches back against his shoulder, and only my toes brush the ground. My breasts push out, nipples straining against the underwire of the broken bra now bunched under my arms. I twist my hips against his probing hand, but the lust’s now dripping from my body.

  His fingers slip around the outer lips of my pussy.

  “Let me in,” he says and leans back enough that my toes leave the floor.

  I grab the arm holding me up, and hang on, but I keep my thighs locked tight.

  “Let me in,” he growls against my cheek. “It’s mine.”

  I won’t, though. Won’t let him in. Not when I know that this time he’ll actually make me.

  And he does.

  He exerts a little of all that strength he has, and forces his hand deeper, plunging two digits inside me. Pressure bursts in my vagina—a kind of relief I’ve never experienced, as though I’ve been holding in something with all my strength and all my senses, and now everything runs free. He moves his fingers in sharp deep jabs, and that pressure becomes friction—exquisite friction that sends my entire body static and fills my eyes with light. His touch between my legs is urgent, yet there’s reverence in the way he pins me to him, as though he’s absorbing what he does to me—as though I somehow sustain him.

  “Want me to let you come?”

  I can’t speak. I can’t answer. It’s not the way he grips over my windpipe that has me breathless, it’s the pleasure stealing all the way into my lungs.

  He moves his fingers back and forth and every single freaking time, his palm torments the top of my mound and sends me almost over the edge. “Whose wet little pussy is this?”

  I moan and hold on to him tighter.

  “It’s yours,” I spit out, because I need this. I need to come just as much as I need to give myself over to him.

  His movements slow, but he’s got his fingers stroking right on the blissful spongy place on the upper wall of my vagina and he masters my anatomy. “It’s my what?”

  My knees twitch. My legs strain in the bind of the underwear still caught around my thighs. The pleasure reaches a peak that drives water into my eyes. “It’s your wet little pussy, Julius.”

  He laughs in a deep chuckle that makes my abdomen contract. “Yes, baby, it’s my pussy and I’m taking it now.”

  He bends me over right on the spot. My palms hit the floorboards, and my broken bra falls off around my hands. His belt snaps, his zipper creaks, and the familiar round tip of his cock breeches my entrance before my knees even make it to the ground. I’m consumed by hunger, a gnawing ache beginning in my belly and taking me over. A kind of hunger like being so close to death that I know I won’t survive if I don’t get what I need inside me right now.

  My knees thud to the floor. He drives through the tight grip of my sex. My pussy stretches, and the pleasure is so piercing it reaches the back of my jaw. His T-shirt hits the floor beside my face. He grab
s my wrists and eases my hands off the ground and pulls them to the small of my back. My spine curves and his cock hits deep. A low scream leaps off my tongue, and all my blood pulses so close to the surface of my body. He grips me carefully but not gently. My panties keep my thighs pinned together, and I’m stuck, trapped and pinioned, and all I can do is give.

  He pulls out, then slams in deeper, and I scream again.

  His cock strains the walls of my pussy, and I swear he enters my bones. I’m so full of him. He clenches my wrists in one hand, and fucks me hard. My mind caves inward. Pleasure expands my cells. I arch my ass up, taking the full brunt of his intoxicating thrusts.

  My head lightens, but my body is heavy. His cock drives in and out, but for the seconds he’s inside me, I picture every ridge on his cock exactly as it fills me.

  He takes and I yield.

  Tension winds up my spine and my system edges on the cusp of bliss. I can’t move, but I shake. His free hand grabs my ass and spreads me so I know he watches my pussy stretch so full with his cock. So I know he sees the juices leaking from me, and I don’t care.

  I don’t care about the skin burning around the wound on my arm, and I don’t care about the pleas dribbling from my mouth, and I don’t care that at some point I started begging.

  All I care about is this.

  Our delicious sin coats my tongue thicker than blood. I crave its taste. I’m hooked.

  Pleasure squeezes tight around my lungs as that first beautiful hint of orgasm burns.

  “Not yet,” he says and his cock jerks free of me.

  I fall flat against the floorboards, then roll to my side and pull my knees to my chest, because I’m kind of coming—mainly not coming—mainly just trembling with a life-threatening urgency to unravel.

  He grabs my knee to draw my legs open, but my underwear keeps them stuck—almost as stuck as my seizing thighs. He breaks the fabric and the tear of my panties is almost silky, as though the lace just melted in his hands. Then my legs fall open, and my swollen aching sex is exposed. He rubs his whole enormous hand over my spread pussy, and the muscles all the way up the backs of my legs twitch. I slam my fists into the ground.

  He laughs, and I almost fall off the edge, but it’s not enough, I’m hungry and empty.

  Julius tugs his pants off the rest of the way, then climbs over me, and apparently he’s not done with the holding-me-down thing, because he grabs my throat when he plunges his cock into my cunt. My teeth clench with expanding tension. His momentum knocks through me, and my knuckles bang against the floor.

  I draw my knees up as high as they will go, because I’m right there.

  He holds my neck and looks straight into my eyes and he’s so fucking intense I can’t take it. I can’t take it. I handle the punishing thrust of his cock, the way it fills me to bursting. I handle the sensations my body won’t contain, but I can’t handle this—I can’t handle the way he pours these feelings into me through our eyes.

  I erupt—literally, sounds explode from my voice box under his hand, and ecstasy gushes from my vagina. Pleasure pounds through my blood in endless circles, and all of this happens with our gazes locked together, and it’s so much more than just his cock inside me.

  He makes a noise low in his belly, and his cock gets harder, and even as I keep on coming, I watch his control snap. The skin around his cheeks and neck pulls tight, his jawbone protrudes and he shoves deep. I’m filled with liquid warmth, inside my body and right down to my core.

  He pulses inside me. All his tension smooths, his face relaxes, and his eyelids droop, but he still stares at me. There’s pulsing between my legs but I’m not sure which of us it is from. He kisses me and the salt of our sweat sweeps across my tongue. I open my mouth and kiss him as though my energy isn’t burnt up at all. My arms wrap around him and I revel in the way he relaxes, the way his weight compresses my breasts. He pulls back and rolls us to the side. His cock slips free of me, but we hold each other just as close without penetration.

  We’re pressed together naked on the floorboards, the scent of our sex and a film of moisture clinging to us, matching heartbeats thumping between the flimsy barrier of bone, flesh and skin. I let out the words that have been dancing around my tongue and flirting with my soul. “I love you, Julius.”

  He squeezes me hard enough that my ribs creak. “I believe you.”

  Everything under my squished ribs contracts too. A gentle joy washes through me. I hold on to his biceps. We lie together and my mind floats free. My pulse slows to a restful rhythm. His breaths wash against my forehead, growing deeper.

  He makes a speaking sound, then stops. I draw my head back to take him in better. There’s a gravity in his eyes that lays waste to my fleeting happiness.

  “Baby.” His lips seem to get pinker, and wider, and fuller. “If this is all there is—” his gaze flicks across mine “then this is all I ever want—you.”

  My eyes blur, and the salt that runs into my mouth isn’t only sweat.

  “I needed to tell you.” He wipes my cheek with his thumb. “You need to know that.”

  There’s so many feelings coming and going so fast from me I’m caught in emotional vertigo, and I’m spinning. There’s so much I still don’t know. So much he won’t say. Other answers I deserve as much as this one.

  “Do you trust me?” I place my hand over the one he rests on my cheek, and the way everything in me braces in hope feels a lot like praying. Yes I love him. I’ve given everything because I’m learning there’s so much more to him than I ever let myself see. I have faith that there’s more of him I just don’t have yet.

  But there’s such a long way to go.

  “I want to.” His eyes close.

  It’s not a yes or a no, and it’s not nearly fucking enough.

  “What was in Dad’s safe?”

  His eyelids drift open and the ice in them is biting. “Black books.” He inches back from me. My skin chills where he no longer touches.

  “Logbooks, inventories, suppliers, customers. Every secret transaction Mercedes Shipping ever conducted.”

  I take a breath and ready myself for what’s coming. “What kind of transactions?”

  He slips farther away from me.

  In a blink I’m cold, wet, naked and alone on the floor.

  “Weapons,” he says, then reaches for his pants.

  I sit up. My mind ticks, and ticks, and ticks. I’m not surprised about the weapons. The last weeks, if not the last years, have forced me to consider these possibilities. The heaviness that settles over me is more like resignation than anything else.

  “You weren’t just there for me?”

  “No.” He puts on his pants, then scoops up his shirt. He just answered my question, yet there’s an unfathomably enormous door being swung toward my face.

  “Then why else? So you could take customers and suppliers? Expand your territory?”

  He doesn’t speak and he doesn’t look up at me. It’s like the answers are all there but I’m just not asking the right questions.

  He raises his arm to slide on his T-shirt. His tattoos ripple, and my gaze is drawn to the colorful side of him and all its painful secrets.

  “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you did any of this for greed.” I stand and approach him naked and without shame. “You said I could believe you, Julius.”

  His movements stop, and his gaze locks on mine. “You’re right, it sure as fuck wasn’t about greed.”

  My bones start to ache. I have this horrible festering suspicion corrupting me to the marrow. “Was it revenge?”

  He stares at me, and there’s no ignoring the flashing of anger in his expression, or the grip of pain pushing veins to the surface of his neck.

  “What happened to us?” The suspicion becomes acidic and corrosive, dissolving the h
ope that I’m wrong. “Why’d my family take me and Thomas and leave you to die?”

  He clears his throat and wrenches his gaze from me. “There’s no revenge, baby, because what happened can never be atoned for.”

  I bite the side of my cheek, and my eyes shut for an instant. When they open, it’s to watch my husband disappear.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I lie in bed. It’s only midday, yet it feels as though weeks have passed since this morning. My skin feels pounds lighter from the way I’ve scrubbed myself raw. Only there wasn’t enough hot water on this island to dissolve the sick feeling filling me up to my neck.

  My family had something to do with our accident.

  It’s bewildering the way I’d never have noticed the blank spaces lingering in the back of my mind until Julius shined a beam on them—look here. No matter what I don’t remember, there’s things I still do. Like the way Dad would hold my hand. The way he’d get this lingering frown when I was sick or had a headache. There’s just no way he’d ever have been complicit in hurting me.

  Even if I know nothing about who my father really was, I believe that.

  I’ve let myself fall for Julius after everything I’ve seen, but I will not be blind.

  I run my hands over my face, which is somehow sweaty again. My hair frizzes and no matter how I try to smooth it back it keeps springing up. That’ll teach me for letting it dry this way. I push my fingers along my scalp and clutch it all in my fists. There’s so much flying around the inside of my head, obscuring my vision far worse than a few wild curls.

  I roll out of bed, then go to the wardrobe and drag a dress off a hanger, tug it over my head and proceed to the bathroom.

  I have to talk to Julius.

  I really don’t give a crap if he doesn’t enjoy answering.

  The sight in the mirror makes me flinch. I swipe a thin layer of tinted moisturizer over my face, then wet a hairbrush and drag it through my curls. An image keeps flashing in front of my eyes. The snake—the one on Julius’s neck. The picture keeps appearing over and over. I squirt two pumps of frizz serum into my palm and wipe it through the ends of my hair, then stumble out of the bathroom and shove my feet into a pair of shoes.