Page 73 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

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.

He holds there, deep, unmoving, until the tremor in my abdomen becomes a needy roll of my hips. He watches me struggle for friction. He doesn’t move—

“Ask,” he says.

“Please,” I whisper, throat scraped raw. “Please move.”

“Clearer.”

“Fuck me, Elias.” My voice breaks. “Take me.”

He bares his teeth in a grin that isn’t kind and pulls halfway out. The drag makes my eyes water. Then he drives back in and everything lights up again.

He sets a pace that feels engineered, each stroke arranged to erase and overwrite.

I tip my hips to meet him and he slams me flat with a hand on my sternum, pinning me like prey that forgot the rules.

The paradox drives me insane—helpless under him and stronger than I’ve ever been, because I chose it.

“Look at me,” he orders.

I do. His eyes track me like he’ll punish any drift. He thrusts harder, grinds at the top, and the sound I make would embarrass me in daylight. There’s daylight in the room now. I don’t care.

“Mine,” he says.

“Yours,” I answer, without hesitation.

He pauses long enough to free my tied hands, he drags my hand down to the base of his throat, and wraps my fingers there.

He pushes into my palm as he pushes into my body, using me to anchor himself while he uses me to empty himself.

I feel the power he gives me and the power he takes and they are the same thing now, the same animal with two names.

“Harder,” I say, and he obeys with a sound I’ve never heard him make—almost broken, almost grateful.

When I start to climb again, he reads it in the way my legs flex against his hips. He changes the angle and the world narrows to a point where pain and bliss share a face. My orgasm hits with no warning, a detonation that steals language and leaves only sound.

I claw at his back, nails scoring lines he’ll show no one. He keeps driving until he feels me clamp around him and then he buries himself deep and gives me all of it—heat pulsing inside me, jaw tight, eyes locked on mine like he’s carving his name into the softest part of me.

He stays inside after, chest heaving against my breasts, sweat sticking us together. He doesn’t soften right away. He presses his mouth to my throat, a bite that doesn’t break skin, a mark that will bloom later and make me roll it under my fingers when I’m alone.

“I’ll never leave you hungry enough to go looking,” he says into my skin. “Not for power. Not for touch. Not for lies.”

“Good,” I whisper. “Because I’d break this place and set it on fire if you did.”

He laughs, the sound dark and real, and kisses me again until the laugh turns into a groan he pretends isn’t a plea to stay inside me longer.

When he eases out, I feel the emptiness like it’s a loss.

He pulls my wrist, rubs the redness there and kisses it.

Then he pulls me over his chest and covers us both with the sheet, as if he can keep the world out by will alone.

We don’t move for a long time. The sun rises higher. Lydia’s shadow passes the door once, then stops, and I hear the soft weight of her leaning on the jamb. Guarding without intruding. I’ll thank her later. Or I’ll make coffee and place it where she doesn’t have to look me in the eye.

“You’re going to tell me about all the things in your world, every little details,” I say into his collarbone. “The operations, and the men who think the game isn’t over just because the head is cut. You won’t ration the truth this time.”

He strokes my hair back with his knuckles, tender in a way that should frighten me more than violence. “You’ll get all of it,” he says. “Names. Routes. Locks. Where the cameras sat and how I’m salting their feeds.”

“And the club?”

“No more,” he says, simple as oxygen. “That door is shut unless you open it with me.”

“Say it again.”

“No more,” he repeats, and his mouth tightens with the kind of vow that costs. “You are the room.”

It shouldn’t make me cry. It does. He feels it on his skin and tips my face up with a thumb under my chin. He doesn’t mock the tears. He doesn’t pretend they don’t please him. He just watches them fall like they’re part of the language he’s learning.

“You’re not clean,” he says—echoing the words from earlier, bending them into something softer. “Neither am I. But we are exact.”

“Then we go exact,” I answer, wiping my face with the back of my wrist and forcing my voice to steady.

“Lydia gets what she needs from that drive while you shower and scrub off anyone else. I call Celeste and tell her I won’t be in for the rest of the week.

I don’t lie about why. I say I need time.

Then we plan. And when the next door opens, I don’t stand behind you. I stand with you.”

He studies me, expression unreadable for three hard heartbeats. Then he nods. “With me,” he says. “And when I tell you to get down, you do it. When I tell you to run, you run. Consent doesn’t stop at the bedroom. You give me that, and I give you every other choice.”

It sounds like control to anyone else. To me, it sounds like the only version of freedom I can live inside.

“We’ll smooth that out later.” I say, “Right now, I want coffee and food and a list of names in that order.”

“Coffee,” he echoes, amused. “Food. Names.”

“Not necessarily in neat sequence,” I add, and he huffs a sound that lives halfway between a curse and a kiss.

We rise together. He strips the sheets and ties them in a knot for the laundry bag, like everything has to be contained before he lets the next hour in.

I tug on clean cotton and a pair of leggings from the drawer he stocked while pretending he wasn’t planning to keep me. He pretends I didn’t notice.

In the kitchen, I start the machine while he wipes the counter with motions that read as regulation. Lydia leans against the far wall, scrolling, one boot hooked on the baseboard. She looks up long enough to smirk at the two mugs I set down.

“Partnership,” she says. “Who knew?”

“Don’t push it,” I tell her, and she grins, toothy and real, and returns to the feed.

Elias pours. He hands me a mug and brushes his knuckles over mine. The tiny, careless intimacy feels like a promise more binding than any knot he’s tied on me.

We drink standing there, shoulder to shoulder, and when he starts talking—routes, numbers, names—I listen and don’t look away. He doesn’t ration. He doesn’t pretty it up. He gives me all of it, and I take it.

When the plan is sketched and the coffee is gone, he turns to me again. His mouth curves, not a smile. Something heavier.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“Today,” I correct, lifting on my toes to kiss the corner of his mouth. “We start today.”

He swallows that correction like a man who’s been starving for someone to hand him a line and hold him to it. He nods once.

We move. Together.