Page 256 of Fractured Loyalties

“My father died all alone, just like Caleb and some other men I’ve killed,” he says. “No last words worth hearing. I witnessed it happen. I learned there that begging doesn’t buy anything that lasts. Control does. So I built a life where every door opens when I tell it to. Every person who belongs to me knows exactly what that means.”

He waits for me to flinch. I don’t.

“Say the decision you’re making,” he murmurs, a kind of plea he’d deny with his last breath. “Say it out loud so it sticks.”

I take air in slow, steady gulps until my chest stops hurting. “I’m not afraid of what you are,” I say. “Only of a day when you keep it from me.”

His reaction is not dramatic. No collapse. No broken man at my feet. Just a long look that feels like heat and winter at the same time. He nods once, a clean cut of assent.

“Then we seal it,” he says.

He reaches for my wrist the way he always does before he binds—fingers pausing at the pulse, checking for more than consent. Checking for me.

“Color?” he asks again.

“Green to start,” I answer. “Yellow if I’m sliding. Red if I’m done. You give me the same.”

“You think I won’t.”

“I think you forget you’re human,” I say, and it lands the way I meant it to. He huffs a rough laugh that has no light in it and all the truth.

“Bedroom,” he orders.

I step back, and the island leaves my spine. His hand rests at the small of my back, not pushing, not guiding, reminding. We pass the doorway where Lydia’s shadow is a smear along the hall. She doesn’t turn. She knows when doors are closing that shouldn’t be opened.

In the bedroom, the sheets are a map of last night. He doesn’t touch them. He reaches for the belt draped over the chair and for the length of soft black rope in the drawer he keeps shut when we aren’t this.

“On the mattress,” he says. “Hands above your head.”

I go where he points me and lace my fingers into the headboard slat. He doesn’t leave me waiting long. The rope kisses my wrists and the knot that follows is a language he speaks in his sleep. Firm. Symmetric. Space enough for circulation. No space at all for doubt.

He strips his shirt, then the holster, then the rest, discarding steel and leather and fabric in a line that looks like a fallen path.

He doesn’t tear the shirt I’m wearing. He unbuttons it, one by one, mouth following his fingers down, tongue tasting each inch of skin he uncovers like he’s collecting proof I’m anchored to this bed, to him. When he finds the scar under my ribs, the one only seen by doctors and a man I try not to remember, he sets his mouth there and stays until the memory retreats.

“You’re thinking,” he says against my skin.

“I’m here,” I counter, and lift my hips to find his hand.

The first touch isn’t careful. He circles me with two fingers and holds me open for his mouth. The sound that rips out of me doesn’t belong to a woman who hides in her life. It belongs to someone who climbed out and threw the ladder away.

“Eyes,” he says.

I drag them down and find his. The sight of him between my thighs, hair messy, jaw set with a kind of focus that would unnerve anyone who’s only seen the colder version of him—it tips me to the edge before he even seals his mouth to me.

He tastes. He tests. He punishes me for chasing his tongue by pulling back and letting the cool air sting. Then he praises me for holding still by flattening his tongue and pressing until the bed frame taps the wall in a small, helpless rhythm. He reads me like I’m not made of skin but dials and switches. He knows where my mind tries to sprint and he cuts it off until it sits at his feet.

“Color?” The word vibrates through me where his mouth is.

“Green,” I manage. “Please don’t stop.”

He doesn’t. He adds fingers, two at first, then crooks them until my legs shake. When I start to climb, he eases. When I start to curse him, he gives me three strokes that unravel the curse into a plea. He holds me there—an agony of almost—and then he presses his shoulder into my thigh like a pin and finishes me with cruel patience.

I come hard. It rips through me in pulses that leave me blind for a second. He rides it, mouth still working, fingers still inside, drawing the aftershocks out until my hands ache against the rope from clenching too tight.

“Sweet girl,” he murmurs, climbing up my body. He kisses my mouth, letting me taste what he did to me.

He doesn’t give me space to protest. He slides into me in one long, devastating push, thick and hot and impossible to take without a cry. He swallows the sound with a kiss that feels like a claim signed in blood.