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I’m nowhere close to finished. I put her on her hands and knees and slam my cock back in, and this time she actually screams into the mattress, though it’s too muffled to carry far.
I can’t stop myself now. I’m chasing my own release, and I’ve lost the will to hold it off any longer.
“Good girl, you feel so perfect,” I pant, and then the name falls out of me before I can catch it, low and helpless against her spine: “Lena.”
She goes still for half a breath. Then, to my surprise, she smiles back over her shoulder and clenches down harder around me, taking the name like a gift instead of a wound. Her open, unguarded answer burns clean through the last of my control.
“Lena,” I say again, and again, low and lost, and the name feels like closing my hand around something I set down twenty years ago and never once expected to hold again.
And then another face rises up behind my eyes with the very same name attached to it. Flaxen hair fanned across a hospital pillow, pale blue eyes, and colorless lips that never held much warmth even at the end.
Yelena, the woman I once carried a ring for. I had the box in my coat and a whole evening arranged, every detail set the way I set everything, and I was certain of her saying yes the way I’m certain of very little in this world.
She ended it before I could ask. She told me my need to hold and arrange and command everything around me smothered her, that being loved by me was living inside a beautiful cage. She wanted air, and space, and a life she could steer for herself. I could move armies with a single phone call, and I couldn’t manage to loosen my grip on one woman for the length of an evening. I gave orders to men who feared me, and I could not give her the one simple thing she asked of me.
The ring stayed shut in its box. I locked her away in there with it and didn’t take either one out again. And now another woman lies beneath me, warm and alive and mine, and refuses to leave, and the hollow place I sealed shut all those years ago is quietly, frighteningly beginning to fill.
She’s nothing like Yelena, for all that their two names fold into the same soft sound. Delaney’s eyes are brown and full of fight, not that drowned, exhausted blue. Her body is soft and warm and strong beneath my hands, not thin and failing the way sickness left the other one.
Because of that difference, I can take her hard and hold nothing at all in reserve. I can bury myself to the root and fill her with my seed and know she will rise up to meet me for it instead of breaking under it.
She pushes back into every thrust now, greedy, and the last of my control finally goes. My hips snap forward on their own, chasing the edge.
“Where do you want it?” I grind out.
“Inside,” she begs. “Please, inside me.”
Her plea shoves me straight over the edge. I bury my cock to the root and come harder than I can remember coming in my whole life, spilling everything into her, and she clenches down and milks every last hot pulse of my cum out of me.
When I pull out, my release slides down the inside of her thighs, and the sight of it lands somewhere old and primal in me. She’s marked now, filled and claimed, mine in the oldest and simplest language there’s ever been.
I collapse onto the narrow bed beside her, and she curls into me at once and lays her ear over my heart. The tension of the last several days, the blood and the rage and the hollow ache, all of it smooths out under her slow breathing.
She doesn’t ask where I’ve been. She doesn’t demand to know why I vanished for days or why I turned up at her door past midnight. She simply stays, quiet and warm against my side, and asks nothing of me at all.
Her fingertips find the base of my right hand, the old scar where the little finger sits stiff and ruined. Plenty of people have seen that scar. They flinch away from it, or they praise it in that false, frightened way, hoping to be liked. No one has ever touched it the way she does now, soft and curious and without a trace of fear.
“Does it still hurt?” she asks quietly.
“Sometimes,” I admit. “On rainy days the ache sinks down into the bone. I stopped noticing it years ago.”
Her eyes go bright and wet in the dark, and she lifts my hand and presses a kiss to the scar. A jolt runs straight up my arm and lands somewhere in my chest, and everything in me draws tight.
I don’t know what to do with this much tenderness. It sits outside anything I was ever trained for. Violence I understand. Fear I understand, and money, and the plain math of who owes whom and how much. A soft mouth pressed to my worst scar with nothing wanted in return is a language I never learned.
So, I only pull her in closer against me and hold on, letting her think the shiver that runs through me is from the cold.
“Are you and Milo safe here?” The baseball bat is still leaning against the wall in my mind. My small measure of peace curdles into a restless, protective dread. The door is thin. The lock is a joke. A child sleeps behind another door just as flimsy as this one.
“We are perfectly safe,” she says. “There’s no danger here at all. We love this place, honestly. It’s small, but it’s ours, and it’s the first thing that’s ever felt like ours.”
Her contentment stops me short. I want to move them both tonight, somewhere with real walls and men on the door around the clock. I also know exactly how she would hear that, as one more set of bars closing quietly around her, and I have already lost one woman to a cage she could not breathe in.
“Then check who is knocking before you open that door,” I say instead, holding the rest back behind my teeth. “And call me first. Always call me first.”
She hums and kisses along my jaw, easy and unhurried, the way a woman kisses someone she has loved for years, as though there were no such thing as gunfire or betrayal anywhere in the whole world.
The gesture makes me picture, for one dangerous moment, an entirely different kind of life. A house with real walls. This woman and that sharp-tongued boy living inside it. My spine tightens at how badly I find I want it.
