Page 68 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

His fingers circle my clit once, twice, then he slides his fingers inside me, thick and unyielding. I cry out, the sound muffled when he catches my mouth again. He thrusts them slow at first, stretching, testing, then faster, curling deep until my vision bursts white at the edges.

I writhe beneath him, desperate, clawing at his shoulders. “Elias—”

“I know,” he growls. His thumb finds my clit while his fingers work inside me, merciless. The rhythm builds until I’m shattering, convulsing around him, a broken cry torn from my throat. He doesn’t stop. He pushes me through it, keeps me trembling and gasping, wringing every drop from me.

His eyes lock on mine like a chain.

“Say my name.”

“Elias.”

“Again.”

“Elias.”

He smiles, small and private, the one that says he’s exactly where he wants to be.

When I collapse limp against the sheets, he pulls his fingers free, glistening with me, and sucks them into his mouth like he’s tasting proof. My cheeks burn. My pulse crashes. He looks at me like I’m his last sin and his only salvation.

His hand leaves my thigh to grip my knee, pressing it open, widening me until humiliation pivots into surrender. I can’t hide anything in this light. I don’t want to. He lowers, not rushed, not gentle, just absolutely certain, and puts his mouth where I need him most.

The first touch is a claim. The second is a sentence I cannot translate.

The third strips the language from my head.

He holds me down with the spread of his hand across my stomach while he works me with ruthless focus, reading every flinch, adjusting pressure, changing pattern when I chase, punishing me when I try to grind against his mouth.

He keeps me right where he wants me, and I let him. I let him own the climb.

“Eyes on me,” he says into my skin, the vibration is a shock that detonates between my ribs.

I drag my gaze down. He looks up from between my thighs, pupils blown, mouth slick, triumph written in the hard line of his jaw. He increases the tempo by a fraction and my vision whites at the edges.

“Color,” he orders.

“Green. God, green.”

“Then fall.”

The words are permission and key. My hips jerk, a helpless arc he anticipates with an arm across my pelvis, holding me to the mattress while he pushes me over.

The rush hits hard enough to steal sound.

I shatter and keep shattering, every pulse wrung out of me with precise cruelty until I’m shaking, until my throat works around a cry that never fully forms.

He eases off only when I go loose. He kisses the inside of my knee, then my ankle, then climbs back up my body, dragging his mouth along my stomach and ribs, marking a path that feels like claim stamps. When he reaches my face, I’m still panting through it, eyes wet, mind blanked clean.

He kisses my mouth like he’s tasting the wreckage he made and approves. “Good girl,” he says, softer now. “Again.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” His thumb strokes my cheek. “You will.”

His boxers stay on, grinding the hard line of himself against my hip through fabric that does nothing to blunt the message.

He sets a new rhythm with his mouth and hands, one that coaxes rather than commands.

The restraint at my wrists keeps me from clinging, which means I feel everything he does with nowhere to put my hands. It is maddening. It is perfect.

He takes my leg over his shoulder and bends me open, never breaking eye contact, never giving me room to hide.

He toys with me until I push into his touch like an animal, until I whisper please without even hearing myself say it.

He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t gloat. He just moves back and pushes his boxers down.

He’s thick, hard, veins standing under flushed skin. My mouth goes dry at the sight. He strokes himself, watching me watch him, then grips my thigh and drags me closer to him, as he continues stroking himself, daring me to beg for it.

“Stay with me,” he says. “I have you.”

I hold the line. Anticipation getting the best of me, as the world narrows to his mouth, his hands, the sound of his control. I claw at the headboard because my wrists can’t reach him. The knot bites. The mattress shifts.

His eyes dart to the headboard, then back to me with something that looks close to pity.

He stretches his hands and releases the belt from the headboard, rubs my wrists, presses his mouth to the tender skin where the leather marked me.

Care that feels like ownership. Ownership that feels like care.

I cannot separate them and I don’t want to.

“Color,” he asks once more, because he is who he is.

“Green,” I whisper. “Please.”

“For what?”

I pull him down by the open placket of his shirt and find his mouth. “For you to finish in me. For you to use me. For you to remember me in your bones tomorrow.”

Something raw passes through his eyes. He nods once, short, like a man accepting a sentence. Then he lines our bodies up, and presses the head of his cock against me, slicking himself with what’s left of my climax, then he pushes forward in one firm glide that steals every thought I had left.

The sound he makes hits the base of my spine. He braces a hand beside my head and presses the other over my mouth, not to silence me but to anchor me while he sets an unforgiving pace, hips driving a rhythm that pins me to the mattress and writes his name under my skin.

I meet each thrust with everything I have left. The friction turns fierce. The air tastes like sweat and want and the edge of prayer. He curses under his breath, voice rough, face tight with effort and need. He is beautiful like this. Ruined and relentless. Mine.

My nails score his back. My thighs tremble. He leans over me, lips brushing my ear. “You’re mine.”

“Yes, Mara, and you’re mine.” Then he thrusts.

Hard. The bed slams against the wall. My body jolts with each stroke, pleasure sharp enough to feel like pain.

He drives into me with ruthless precision, owning me, breaking me open.

And I take it. I meet every thrust with my own, chasing the burn, needing more.

“Say it,” he demands, fucking me harder. “Say whose you are.”

My voice cracks, raw and unashamed. “Yours. I’m all yours Elias.”

“Eyes,” he grits.

I drag them up to his. He stares down like he’s memorizing my face from the inside out. His control frays.

His groan rips through the air. He pistons into me faster, sweat slicking our bodies, his mouth crushing mine until I can’t breathe anything but him. The pressure coils inside me again, unbearable, explosive.

He feels it. His hand snakes between us, thumb grinding against my clit, ruthless, perfect. “Come on me,” he growls. “Come while I take you apart.”

I shatter. My cry is strangled against his mouth as my body convulses, clamping tight around him. He snarls, slams deep, and holds there as his own climax tears through him. I feel him pulse inside me, hot and endless, his teeth in my shoulder, marking me.

When it’s done, we collapse together, tangled and wrecked, bodies slick and trembling. His chest heaves against mine. My legs wrap around him like I’ll never let go.

He keeps himself inside me as if leaving would be an insult to the vow he just made with his body. His hand cups my jaw. His mouth finds my ear.

“Mine,” he says, not loud, not soft, a verdict. “Say it back.”

Yours, I think, already gone. “Yours,” I say. “Only.”

His whole body loosens by degrees. He kisses me like a seal set to cooling wax. Then he threads our fingers together above my head and settles in, still joined, still heavy inside me, refusing to break the hold.

Outside the door, Lydia’s steps pass once and fade. In here, the world is a locked room with no clocks. Elias keeps me caged in the safest way I’ve ever known, and suddenly, my mind goes quiet enough to hear my own heartbeat.

I feel claimed. Chosen. Burned into him as deeply as he is burned into me.

Tomorrow can wait. He won’t let it in yet. Neither will I.

The room smells like sweat and skin and soap. The sheets cling to me, damp and twisted around my legs, and Elias is still inside me, heavy and unyielding, chest pressed to mine like he can’t let me breathe without him.

His mouth is at my shoulder, teeth grazing the bruise he left there. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. His body says it all—every thrust that still echoes in me, every drop of heat he spilled inside me, every mark on my skin that no one else will ever touch.

I shift beneath him, trembling, trying to catch a rhythm in my lungs again. He notices. His weight shifts enough for me to draw air, but he doesn’t move away. His hand finds my jaw, thumb dragging across my swollen lips like he’s checking his work.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.

I swallow. “Because of you.”

He huffs something close to a laugh, though it’s darker than humor. His fingers slide down my throat, feeling the frantic hammer of my pulse. “Good.”

A flush burns through me. I should resent the word, but I don’t. The admission makes my body tighten around him, and I see the flicker in his eyes when he feels it.

“You like it,” he says, voice roughened. “Being wrecked by me. You hate it and you love it.”

I don’t deny it. I can’t. My nails press crescents into his back, desperate anchors against the truth that he’s carving into me. “I don’t hate it.”

His eyes search mine, cold steel softening at the edges. The predator pauses, watching me like I’m not prey anymore, but the only thing left that matters. He leans in, presses his forehead to mine.

“I could kill every man who’s ever hurt you,” he whispers. “But it won’t erase them. I can only overwrite them. With this. With me.”

The words hit like a confession. My chest constricts. He isn’t wrong. Caleb’s shadow has haunted me for years, but tonight—right now—it feels drowned out by something fiercer, darker, Elias’s heat scorching over every scar.

I arch against him, needing the contact, needing to feel alive under his weight. “Then do it. Don’t let him take any part of me back.”

His breath shudders against my skin. Then his mouth is on mine again, slower this time, deliberate, lips softer, almost reverent. The contrast steals my air more than the brutality did. It’s worse, because it threatens something deeper: it feels like care.

When he finally eases out of me, I feel the loss like a wound. He pulls back enough to strip his boxers off completely, tossing them aside, then drags the sheet over both of us. His arm bands around me, iron and heat, dragging me to his chest until my cheek rests over the hammer of his heart.

Neither of us speaks for a long time. Lydia’s presence is a quiet shadow outside the door. It should feel like a prison. It doesn’t. It feels like a cocoon, the last fragile stillness before the world cracks open again.

My fingers trace the scar along his rib. He doesn’t flinch. He lets me.

“Tomorrow,” I whisper.

“Tomorrow,” he echoes, voice low but certain.

He tilts my chin up until I meet his stare. “If we go after Volker, you don’t look away. You don’t run. You see me for what I am and still choose me.”

I nod. My throat tightens. “I already have.”

The words hang there, thick and dangerous. His jaw flexes like he’s fighting himself. Then he kisses me again—gentle this time, as if it’s the only thing that might undo him.

And for a moment, before the storm swallows us, it feels like we’re the only two people left in the world.

His palm moves to my lower back, heavy, anchoring.

I listen to the beat of his heart. It’s steady now, even after the violence, even after what he left in me. I wonder if it ever falters. I wonder if I’ll be the only one who makes it stumble.

“You’ll sleep,” he says, almost like an order.

“I don’t sleep easily.”

“You will,” he replies. And for some reason, I believe him.

The last thing I feel before the dark takes me is the press of his mouth against my temple. Not rough. Not claiming. Something stranger, something that feels almost like a vow.

And then I fall, knowing when I wake, tomorrow will no longer be just a word. It will be a reckoning.