Cade growled into the hollow of Marlow’s neck. He closed his hands roughly around Marlow’s hips and dragged him closer, his thrusts rough and impatient now. Marlow could feel the play of every muscle against his back and his thighs with each stroke. He licked his lips with his dry tongue and grabbed his own cock, that fucking unfuckable silver bar cold against his fingers as he pumped his fist along it in an erratic, broken rhythm.
Heat flushed up his spine, from his ass to the nape of his neck. Almost.
Cade spilled them both back down onto the bed, sprawled on their sides with his arm hooked over Marlow’s chest. He pressed wet kisses against Marlow’s throat and shoulder as he fucked him, teeth and tongue and enough pressure that some of them would leave bruises.
His fingers certainly would when they dug down into Marlow’s hipbones as Cade buried his cock inside him and came. The wet, liquid spill of it sent sympathetic tremors through Marlow, clenched in the back of his throat and just behind his balls.
“Now,” Cade drawled as he rolled over onto the pillows and pulled Marlow with him, sprawled along his chest and thighs. “Do what I tell you.”
Marlow lolled his head back, sweaty hair stuck to a sweaty chest, and swallowed the lump in his throat.
“What?”
“I can’t touch you,” Cade said. He draped his arm over Marlow’s shoulder and lazily grazed his nipples with a calloused thumb, proof that wasn’t exactly true. He recognized that himself with a pause and an amendment. “Not there. But I still get to make you come. Give that piercing a tug.”
Marlow stalled for a second as he thought about it. People thought he was easy to push around because he didn’t push back unless it was necessary. They were wrong. But today he wasn’t going to cut his nose off to spite his face.
Or his cock.
Marlow did as he was told and pinched the ends of the bar between his fingers as he pulled on it. The pulse of sensation that ran down his cock to his balls made him suck in a ragged Cade-scented breath and hold it.
Rough-voiced orders in his ear directed him as he worked his hand along his cock. After his initial pause, Marlow just obeyed as his brain hazed over with lust and pent-up pleasure. Cade’s restless hands on his shoulders and along his thigh helped keep him unfocused as Marlow squeezed tight around the base and twisted his fist around the shaft on the downstroke.
It didn’t take long. Marlow arched his hips up into his fist as he came, a messy spill of sticky fluid that dripped over his knuckles and onto his thighs. It left him boneless and lazy against Cade’s chest.
Cade smoothed Marlow’s hair away from his forehead and pulled his head back with it until Marlow looked up at him upside down. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“I don’t—”
On the bedside table, where it had been discarded, Marlow’s phone started to ring. Not his phone, he remembered halfway through reaching for it, Cade’s phone. The one Piper had the number to.
The screen showed a blocked number, and Marlow couldn’t remember how to breathe.
“Die out there or die in here. Your choice.”
The memory of pain spiked out from just under Marlow’s collarbone and spread up into his shoulder. It didn’t matter how many years passed; the moment Piper shot him was always raw and fresh under his skin, in his bones.
“I can try to talk to him,” Cade offered. “Right now, he needs us as much as we need him.”
Marlow made himself pick up the phone. The satisfying pop as the joints adjusted cut through the bitter slurry of old fear and anger. It had been a while since he’d felt panic. Been panicked, sure, but after years on Night Shift, his brain just tuned it out 99 percent of the time. It was like a drunk who couldn’t get a buzz on beer anymore, but needed a shot of whiskey and a Baileys chaser.
The last time he’d felt panic the way God intended had been that night, and the memory bypassed his usual functional shortcuts.
“No,” he said. “He doesn’t get to think he can still manipulate me.”
He swiped to answer and put the phone on speaker.
“What did I always tell you, Marlow,” Piper said. The bite of reprimand in his voice—five years and anattempted murderlater—still made Marlow’s shoulders go back and his spine try to straighten. “Night Shift aren’t lone wolves. We work in a pack for a reason.”
Chapter Seven
CADE SAT UPand leaned back against the headboard.
The deal with Piper made sense. Whatever he’d done back in the day, he was the devil they knew and the one that was locked up. It was easier to remember that when Cade couldn’tseethe scars Piper had left Marlow with. Or the flinch that tightened Marlow’s shoulders at the jibe, the muscles clenched under his skin.
“How long has Franklin been dirty?” Marlow asked. “Day one?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line; then Piper chuckled. “Almost,” he said. “You’re not giving him due credit, Marlow. Franklin was dirty long before I recruited him. You didn’t actually believe him that he’d left San Francisco of his own volition, did you?”
