by Cole McCade
I want him back I want Elijah back he’s mine mine MINE
But he only met her fury with steady, accepting silence. That harsh grip gentled, and he stroked his thumb against the corner of her trembling lips before cupping his palm against her cheek.
“There. Was that so hard?” he asked softly—then gathered her against him again, a broad hand cupping to her nape to guide her head to his shoulder once more. “What happened to your son?”
“Nothing.” Numbly, she let herself fall against him. Right now she could so easily shake apart without the steel of his grasp holding her together, while the empty place inside her rattled and screamed with the memory of Elijah’s sticky candy-sweet little-boy scent and just how soft and tiny his hands had been, when he’d first been born and he’d reached up to grasp on to just one of her fingers and hold tight. She choked back her sob, but it refused to let her swallow it away into the hollow pit in her stomach. Instead it rose thicker and tighter, knotting up her throat until she could barely speak. “Nothing except being unlucky enough to be born with me for a mother.”
“No.” The warmth of his lips pressed against her hair, soaking down to her skin. “I don’t think that was unlucky at all.”
Everything inside her ground to a rusty and painful halt. She pushed against his chest and stared up at him. “…what?”
“If I wear my tattoos like war paint…you wear your love for him like armor.” Something in those gunmetal eyes softened, turning strange and dark and sweet. “I think he must be lucky to have you for a mother.”
“I…I wouldn’t know.” She didn’t deserve to be looked at that way. Like there was something good and worthwhile and loving in her, when… “I left him, Gabriel. I left him with his father.”
“Why?”
“It’s…that’s…complicated.”
“So I see.” Yet there was no judgment in his gaze, in his voice. Only neutral acceptance, neither approval nor disapproval, weightless without the pressure of someone else’s opinion pushing her one way or the other. “Do you think you would find the happiness you’re looking for if you went back to him?”
She gave him a flat look. “If you’re about to give me some kind of lecture about women finding fulfillment through motherhood, Feminism One-Oh-One called and they’d like the fifties back.”
He chuckled. “Not going to lecture you at all. People don’t complete you, little mouse. Not children or lovers or family or friends. They can support you, they can love you, but only you can fill that absence inside yourself.”
“With what?”
“You’ll have to tell me.” He shrugged with the ghost of a smile. “Have you ever heard the saying ‘not all those who wander are lost?’”
“But maybe we are.” She looked away from that smile, from that sense of disquiet building tense and laden inside her, and settled her head to his shoulder again. “Maybe we are lost, and some of us just don’t want to be found.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THEY CURLED TOGETHER IN THE gloom and the quiet, while the storm came to a head. Every rumble of thunder rolled to the rhythm of Hart’s beating heart, pounding beneath her cheek. For once Leigh didn’t ask herself what she was doing here; for once she didn’t fight it. She was scoured to pieces inside, boiling in the lake of tears she’d dammed up inside her, and if she kept struggling she would only drown. The best she could do was float, and Hart was a warm body to hold on to while she treaded water and tried not to sink into thoughts of Elijah. Tried not to wonder if she’d done the right thing in leaving, and if she’d be doing the right thing in turning her back on Crow City—and her son—forever.
What kind of life would they have had, if she’d tried to take him when she’d first run away? Mama and Daddy would have cut her off if she’d divorced Jacob. She’d become his property the moment she’d said I do, and like Maxi had said, no returns. There would’ve been no alimony. His lawyers were too good for that. He’d have taken Elijah in the divorce and left her just as she was now: with nothing, only it wouldn’t have been her choice.
Better to choose her ruin than have it forced on her.
Or so she told herself, so she wouldn’t add her tears to the rain and leave a cloudburst soaking Hart’s chest while he held her in a way he had no right to.
Sleep was a refuge, when it came. A darkness that let her hide where she didn’t have to think, didn’t have to doubt. Didn’t have to hate herself for what she’d really done, when she’d chosen this life for herself:
Taken all choice out of Elijah’s hands, when it wasn’t her decision to make. Wally was right that she overcomplicated things…but there was no simplifying this.
She wasn’t sure if it was the thunder or the rhythm of Hart’s breaths that lulled her, but she fell into a dreamless quiet that felt like a second stretched into an eternity. Yet that eternity abruptly cut short, when gouging bolts of pain dug into her sides. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, when she snapped to with the taste of her repressed tears on her indrawn gasp and the world turned fuzzy through her lashes, while red bright sensation speared into her waist in parallel lines. For a panicked animal moment the world didn’t make sense, and she arched, twisted, thrashed.
Until a hoarse cry of pain, muffled into her hair and blasting with breaths as heated as a dragon’s, slapped her back to reality.
She fell still, petrified save for rapid pants that stretched the stitches holding her together to the point of popping. Some time during her sleep, she’d slithered out of Hart’s lap and sprawled out on her side.
Hart.
That was Hart rasping against her back. Hart clutching her hips and waist, until he nearly dug holes in her flesh. Hart who trembled so deeply it rolled through her like the foreshocks to an earthquake. He was a smoldering sickness against her, caught in flesh, too hot, burning through her clothing.
“Gabriel…?” she whispered. That hoarse, hurting sound answered again.
“Little…mouse.” His voice was gravel and rusted metal, grinding out one syllable at a time. “I…I don’t….”
His fingers tightened on her until she cried out when it felt like he reached bone, compressing cloth and skin and flesh down to push his fingertips into her pelvis. “You’re hurting me,” she gasped, arching, fighting her every instinct to keep from kicking out and hurting him when fight-or-flight response told her to run.
“I’m…sorry.”
One heavy, damp breath at a time, his fingers peeled away, relieving the pressure and pain by degrees until she no longer felt like brittle clay on the verge of crumbling in his grip. The moment the last of his hold loosened, she twisted in his arms. The man who looked down at her was a thing possessed—that familiar face lit by the demon skinriding him with its hunger, haunted and voracious and glistening with the slick dripping sweat of withdrawal. She could smell it, that feral tang of a ravenous beast primed for the chase, desperate to feed its craving.
Its addiction.
She caught his face in her palms, lifting his head to meet his wild-lit eyes. His soaking wet hair tangled around her fingers, and his skin nearly burned her. “Tell me what to do to help,” she said.
He shook his head, his trembling deepening. “I can’t…I can’t take it.”
“You want your pills?” When he only stared at her, haggard and desperate, she crumpled inside. This was why Gary had asked her to stay. This was the moment when Hart needed her to be stronger than he was, needed her to have the strength to say, “No, Gabriel. No,” even if it was one of the hardest things she’d ever said in her life.
With a snarl he grasped her wrists and wrenched her hands from his face—a face transformed into something inhuman, something cold and greedy and despairing. Something willing to hurt her, crushing her arms and demanding with a rasping fury, “Give them to me.”
This wasn’t Hart, she told herself while pain sliced into the tendons on the undersides of her wrists and dug deep, driving in like railroad spikes and leaving her s
creaming, vision flickering. This was a monster keeping Hart prisoner, locking him away behind this vicious need that told him he would die if he didn’t get his fix. She had to keep telling herself that. Had to believe it, or she would throw the pills at him and run away and never look back. He’d hurt her before, but she could see it for what it was now: a tease, a wordless understanding, a kinship that said he knew what she wanted, what she liked, and knew how to give it to her—because deep under the skin, he was more like her than she could admit.
It hadn’t been…this. This vengeful, callous thing hurting her just to hurt her; hurting her just to break her will. But she couldn’t break.
Because if she did, so would he.
“No,” she forced out through her teeth, biting back another scream as his grasp tightened and she heard her bones squealing, grinding, threatening to break. “I won’t.”
He bared his teeth at her in a growl, then flung her away. She tumbled against the headboard, the pillows barely softening the impact, and came just short of falling off the bed. Breathing shallowly, she backed herself against the headboard and rubbed her throbbing wrists, watching him while he pushed to his knees, glaring at her as if he’d love nothing more than to snap her skinny neck, his hands clenching into dangerous fists.
“Is…is this fun for you?” he struggled out. “Seeing me broken? Does it feel like…like revenge?”
“No. But if that’s what you think of me, I wouldn’t blame you.”
She took several deep breaths, fighting to calm herself, to keep her voice steady and even, when the last thing she wanted was to agitate him further. God, was this what it had been like for him, staying calm while she raged and took her fury at the world out on him? Had he felt like he was staring down this rabid animal and trying to make some appeal to reason, to human emotion? She swallowed heavily. She didn’t know what to say to him. How to deal with this. She couldn’t lay out all these calm, certain answers like he could, so firm in her convictions.
She could only be honest.
“It…it feels like pain, seeing you like this,” she tried tentatively. “Not revenge. It feels like pain to see you hurting and know I can’t help. It feels like knowing you’re stronger than this…and I guess I just have to remind you of that.”
He stared at her, nearly vibrating with latent violence, a hot madness gleaming in his eyes. But something else struggled to fight through, something that spoke not in words but in the sharp clenching of his jaw and the swell and fall of his chest and the rough, ragged sound he made as he looked away from her and dug one shaking hand into his hair.
“And if…and if I’m not?” he rasped.
“There’s no ‘if.’” Hesitantly, Leigh uncurled her fingers from her wrist and reached for him, offering the hand he had so often offered to her. “You are.”
He slanted a look at her hand, eyes slit, measuring—then thrust back, rising to his feet even as his bad leg buckled underneath him. Leigh lunged forward, caught his arm in both hands, dug her bare feet against the mattress, and pulled with all her strength.
“No.”
He reeled back, collapsing to the bed. Mid-fall, he twisted and slammed into her, his full weight tumbling her back to the mattress, pinning her with that bulk that was too painfully familiar and yet suddenly a million times more frightening. He stared down at her as if he barely recognized her, half mad and completely feral. Seizing her shoulders in a brutal grip, he thrust her back against the bed, pushing her into the sheets, his weight crushing her, his thighs hard to either side of her, caging her between his spread knees.
“Do you think you can stop me?” he hissed.
Words came to her lips and fell away as she stared up at him, the silence filled only with his breaths and her own, moving like the roar of crashing waves. No. No, she couldn’t stop him, not by sheer physical mass, not when no matter how she fought him, no matter how strong she was trying to be for him, he terrified her like this. He turned her blood to molten ice; her every breath hurt as her swelling lungs fought to find room in her chest around her wild and frightened heart. He could do anything he wanted to her right now. Maybe that had always been true, but always wasn’t right now: this moment when the desperation of his addiction lay between them like a third person in the bed, a devil whispering in his ear to do whatever it took to get his fix, fucking up everything inside him that made him Gabriel.
But if he was fucked up, so was she. Because even with her throat clotted with fear, even when he was a stark wreck of broken lines barely holding together as a man, a part of her burned for this. For the terror of it, the fear adding sweet spice to the twinge of desire pricking at her and rousing her own addiction. And if she couldn’t stop him by physical force…
Maybe feeding her addiction could soothe his.
She wet her lips and held his eyes as she lifted shaking hands to the zipper of her hoodie. His gaze zeroed in on her hands like a telescope as she dragged the zipper downward. The rasp of the tongue felt like a scream splitting the noise of their breathing. Once the zipper popped free, she rolled her shoulders against his grip, fighting for just enough room to shrug out of the jacket and leave it spread beneath her. But when she reached for the hem of her tank top he lashed out, catching her hand, curling it in his fist and holding her immobile. His gaze darted from the strip of exposed skin at her stomach back to her face, accusatory and cutting.
“What are you doing?”
Leigh caught her tongue between her teeth and slipped her other hand down to curl in her skirt, inching it upward over her legs. A slow tremor started between her thighs, quivering the soft inner flesh and reaching up to lick at her cunt with a sort of deliciously frightened anticipation.
“Do you still want me?”
“Do you think I want a pity fuck?” His upper lip curled; furious contempt brought that cold precision back into his voice. Contempt and—fuck, had she hurt him? “I told you I’m not like that. I don’t want you if you’re just using your body to buy what you want out of me. Whether it’s Gary’s car or my obedience.”
“I’m not buying anything,” she said quickly. She let go of her clothing and twisted her hand from his grip to reach for him again, to touch her fingertips to his lips. “I just want to make it hurt less, Gabriel. Even if you have to take your pain out on me.” Please, she thought, and twined her arms around his neck. Please understand. “That’s all it is. You and me and nothing else.”
He remained immovable, unyielding to the pull of her arms—until, after a moment, he sank closer to her, searching her eyes with a fierce demand. “And after, will you hate me again?”
“I might,” she admitted. “I won’t know until after.”
His eyes hardened—and there it was again, the rough hard crushing grip of his hand against her throat, fingers fitting into the faded necklace of bruises, pressing just hard enough to remind her of what he could do. Just hard enough to make her gasp, make her lift off the bed, rising into him…and into the unforgiving hardness that stretched his jeans tight and made it feel like rough hard sex, when the pressure pushed her skirt up and the coarse, thick ridge in the denim dragged against her panties.
“I could kill you,” he rumbled, and she knotted up tight inside with need.
“I know.” She took a breath that tasted like the wildness of fear and the heat of his sex. “But you won’t. You’ll just frighten me enough to make it good. I…I want that. I want you.”
His jaw clenched. His grip tightened on her throat, and she choked on a whimper—but didn’t fight him. Not this time. She trembled in the deepest spaces of her heart with a submission at once fierce and meek, a thing that wanted all his savagery, that would take everything he had to give.
She lifted her chin and bared her throat to him and silently whispered test me, hurt me, take me, punish me. Harder he pressed, harder, cutting off her air, challenging her, daring her to fight him, daring her to claw and scream and cry and beg. But she only held tight to him and slid her th
ighs together and gasped shallow and hot as her nipples peaked hard and sparking with that hungry ache to be touched. Even when her head went light and a dizzy kind of euphoria rushed through her, even when pain danced in melting spots against her vision, she just held on, because as long as she was holding him he wasn’t hurting himself.
Hart wavered into a blur above her. The pain vanished and her throat opened, air rushing in, but she barely took one gasp before heat rolled over her. Hart’s weight crashed down, pinning her to the bed. His hands found their familiar home against her wrists, dragged them over her head, pinned them to the pillows. She writhed against him helplessly. He took her mouth—and took and took and took, rapacious and insatiably hungry, tearing inside her with his kiss as if everything he craved was hidden in the depths of her mouth. He tasted like chocolate smoke and the wildness of a storm and the hot scent of gunmetal from a fresh-fired round, and every thrust of his tongue scored deep and opened scattershot wounds she didn’t think would ever heal. He stretched over her and parted her legs with his knees and fit his bulk between her thighs. And as he settled against her like he belonged, she ignited like tinder to a flame, going up quick and hot and burning so fierce she was afraid she’d dissolve into ash in seconds.
“Hart,” she panted, and his growl rocked her with the ferocity of a lion’s roar.
“Gabriel,” he corrected firmly. He tore back, looking down at her with a mad desire glinting in dilated, darkened eyes, snarling through clenched teeth. “You know my name. Say it.”
She couldn’t. She’d said it before, but not like this. Not while he held her captive with his body. Not when she’d said I want you and meant it not because she wanted to be a balm on his wound, but because she craved him with a desire she hadn’t felt since the first time she’d spread her legs and bled down her thighs and trembled to every whisper of Daddy’s dirty little girl.
