after
I watch Melwas fist a large hand in Greer’s hair and yank her head back, exposing the pale column of her throat, and I leap to my feet, a growl building in my chest.
Wu pulls me down with a hiss. “Stay down or we’ll be seen.”
I squat back down with Wu and Gareth, my blood hot and boiling. I raise the binoculars to my face and aim them at the window of the lodge again. I see her sweet mouth part in a pained cry as he pulls her hair again, and then I feel Wu’s fingers digging into my arm.
“Wait,” Wu says, but I don’t want to wait. It was hard enough to sit still on the plane to Poland, hard enough to keep myself sane on the drive into Carpathia—all hills and horse tracks in the Jeep we’d rented, to avoid Carpathia’s fledgling and as yet ineffectual border control. It was hard to take the time to survey the lodge, hard to pick our way though the steep rocks and thick trees to scale the first fence, hard to stop and wait every time the drones flew overhead. And the very minute we were able to surveil the lodge itself, I see Greer being manhandled by that monster?
I don’t have very much wait left in me.
Thankfully, Melwas releases Greer, and I can breathe again, think again.
“There’s a service entrance on the bottom level, on the side closest to us,” Gareth says. “Just a lock, no guard.”
“There might be cameras or motion sensors,” Wu says.
“So we go when something else is moving up there,” I say, swinging my binoculars down to the road. “The break-in at his house should be happening any moment.” Gareth had arranged the ruse on our way here, a decoy burglary at his presidential palace in the Carpathian capital, a couple hours’ drive from here. We hoped it would be enough to lure Melwas away, or at least some of his security team.
A noise from Gareth has me pointing my binoculars back at the house, and I see the light to a room downstairs flip on. Melwas and Greer are alone, and he’s stripping off his jacket.
“Bastard,” I swear. I’ll kill him, I swear I’ll kill him if he actually attempts to rape her.
Rape.
God, that word. It hung like a fog over the Carpathian mountains during the war, this ever-constant violation ripping through the towns and villages Melwas claimed. The faces of those women—some of them barely budded past childhood—dirty and tear-stained and blank. We’d go in and get them medical help, assure them they were safe, but they still shied away from us, flinched at our male voices. Ash and I had made sexual assault a key issue during the campaign for exactly that reason. For all the women we were too late for.
I won’t be too late for Greer.
Greer’s face is almost as blank as the ones I remember from the war. She has her forehead pressed to the glass and I see her taking slow, deliberate breaths, as if she has to remind herself how to breathe, how to keep her body working.
And then he touches her again, one hand on her throat and the other hand on her cunt. He squeezes and a tear slips out from under those long, dark lashes of hers.
I’m to my feet before Wu can stop me, moving out of the cover of trees to the lodge, and I’m almost to the service door before he catches up to me. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demands in a low voice. “What happened to the plan?”
“Fuck the plan,” I snarl. “I’m going in there before he hurts her.”
“Getting killed isn’t going to help—”
“Boys,” Gareth’s voice comes in over the earpiece. “Melwas is leaving.”
“What?” I ask.
“He’s leaving the room. They bound her with tape and gagged her and turned off the lights. Now he’s going upstairs with his men…it looks like they’re going out the front door. They must have heard about our little diversion back at the capital.”
We hear a car engine start, then a second, then a third, the cracking of tires over branches and gravel.
“How many men are left that you can see?” I ask Gareth.
“One by the front door,” she replies. “And I think one stayed outside Mrs. Colchester’s room.”
Wu looks at me. “Two? Could we be that lucky?”
“If he thinks the perimeter has enough security…if he thinks there’s no way we’d know about this place…” I close my eyes for second, thinking. “I can handle two men. You two stay out here, out of sight. If you don’t hear from me, or if the First Lady and I aren’t out within an hour, then you’ll know you need to re-evaluate the plan.”
“Just like old times, eh?” Wu says as he hands me a handgun. The cool weight of it in my hand is both familiar and strange, a familiarity that belonged to another man, another life. And for a moment, I wonder if Greer’s captivity is my karma. If happiness will always be denied me for all the terrible things I’ve done, all the lives I took in the name of war or freedom or loyalty.
“Just like old times,” I say as I tuck the handgun away and Wu hands me a rifle. I level it at the door’s lock and shoot.
I took out the first man by the front door as silently as possible, a silent, choking struggle until he went limp in my arms. I didn’t kill him, even though there was a part of me that itched to, that itched to kill anyone who had any part in this plan to hurt Greer. I didn’t stop myself because I knew it was wrong, though, I stopped myself because Ash wouldn’t want it. Not only would it be worse for us if we were caught, but Ash hated taking lives. Hated it.
And I hated the feeling after, the guilt, the post-battle misery, and I had no urge to experience that feeling again after all these years. So I simply choked the man until he was unconscious and bound and gagged him with the zip-ties and tape I had with me for just that purpose.
And now I wait close to Greer’s door for the second man to come nearer…nearer still…until I can hear his breath from the corner I hide behind, and I give him the same treatment I gave the first. I’m tempted to plunge right into Greer’s room after I finish with him, but I force myself to be more circumspect. I search the other floors, the other rooms, confirming that there is no other hired muscle lurking around.
“House is clear,” I tell Gareth and Wu through the small mic connected to my earpiece. “Both the guards are taken care of. I’m going in for Mrs. Colchester now.”
“Understood,” Wu says. “Gareth and I are working our way back down to the gate at the entrance to the property to check for guards there, disabling what security systems we can. We’ll signal you if there’s any change or if Melwas returns—otherwise we’ll wait for you at our rendezvous point just outside the fence.”
I click off the mic and go back to the second floor, to the room that holds Greer. And as I slide the deadbolt away from its slot and open the door, I notice my hands are shaking. Shaking when they were so steady earlier, steady with the gun, steady as I fought those men.
I suppose it’s adrenaline or relief. I suppose it’s love.
The door opens, sending a long rectangle of light across the dark bedroom. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, to take in the large room and the canopy bed and the low, slender shape on top of it. And just as I register silk and pale hair, Greer moves into my gaze, rolling from the darkness into the light.
She winces at the brightness of it, but she doesn’t speak, and I remember she’s gagged. Gagged and bound, the silver duct tape striking a discordant note against all that red silk.
Discordant…but pleasing.
What happens next happens in the space of a mere second or two, the pump of a heart, the blink of an eye: I step forward, ready to speak, ready to cut away her bonds, ready to cradle her—ready to wipe as much of this nightmare away from her as I can—but as I do, my shadow falls across her body.
And so there is Greer, her eyes finally fluttering open to see me, her first expression not of welcome or relief but of panic, and she moves, like she’s trying to put distance between us, nearly thrashing in desperation. A wrenching sound comes from her—she’s crying, and her cries are muffled by the gag. I realize that she can’t see my face yet, that I’m merely a male silhouette coming to her in the dark.
And so there is Greer, eyes silver like the tape on her wrists, wide-eyed and afraid, red silk draping and clinging to every perfect curve. There is Greer, her chest heaving with dread, her throat exposed, her entire body bound and vulnerable to the will of any man who passes by.
There is Greer, with my shadow written across her skin like a stamp of ownership.
And what I feel is like a shock, like touching a battery to your tongue. A metallic taste floods my mouth as a thousand awful, cruelly unspeakable things flood my mind. My heart jolts into a rapid tattoo, my fingers itch, heat pulses at the base of my spine, and fuck, I feel it.
This…urge. To take. To hurt. To keep her bound and helpless.
To feel her body open to my control, my squeezing and my penetrating and my violating. And just the idea of it, the possibilities contained in that one image of my shadow on her body…
I’m hard. I’m restless with it. My cock aches with it, for it.
What is happening to me? This isn’t the real me. I’ve long accepted that I’m a man who’s not truly dominant or submissive…even though I’m a man in love with both a dominant and a submissive. But I’ve also let Ash love me and take from me as his fullest, most powerful self, and those are the truest, best moments I have ever known. I’ve also held my body over Greer’s as she whispered to me that she was a virgin, and savored each savage moment that I fucked her, savored the blood and her whimpers of pain and the writhing orgasms I coaxed from her body over and over again.
Maybe it is me. Maybe the same way I can submit to Ash, only after defeat and struggle…maybe I can only feel dominant in the same situations.
All of these thoughts happen in the space of time it takes for Greer to recognize me. Her eyes widen, and then her tears change, transforming from molten terror into a molten relief. That breaks the spell a little, gives me the strength to go her and do nothing other than press my hand to the side of her face as I loosen the cloth gag and pull it down from her mouth. I think of Ash murmuring vy v bezpetsi—you are safe—to the people he saved during the war, but I can’t bring myself to say that to Greer. How can I when I’m still burning with lust at the sight of her not-safe?
“Are you okay?” I ask softly.
“No,” she sobs, sucking in wet breaths through dry lips. “I thought you were—he was coming back and I thought—”
Her tears reach for something deep inside me, tugging on my need to soothe her, protect her, destroy what would hurt her.
They also tug on something darker.
“Greer, it’s okay, you don’t have to cry,” I entreat. “Please, sweetheart.”
“I do have to cry,” she says, and her voice is fierce and loud and thin all at once. “I do, I do, I do. He touched me, Embry, and he wanted to…he was going to—” Her words dissolve into more tears. I try to calm her, reassure her.
“Melwas is off the grounds,” I say, moving my attention to her wrists. They’ve wrapped the tape too tightly and the tips of her fingers are a dark red. They’re cool to the touch against my palm. “And I’ve taken care of the guards here. We have people waiting for us outside the security perimeter, so all we have to do is get out of the house. You’re safe now. We’re almost back home.”
She rips her hands out of mine with force, and I’m stunned by it, stunned and scared. This is my Greer, my quiet professor, my reserved, austere political princess. I’ve never seen her like this—violent and incoherent to reason. It scares me. It makes me want to castrate Melwas with my bare hands. It makes me want to fuck her.
“Greer,” I say, closing my hand over both of her smaller ones and trying to shove down that despicable part of me. “It’s over now, I’m here, we’re going to get you out of here—”
“What would he have done if you hadn’t gotten here?” she asks, still in that thin, wild voice. She looks up at me. “What would he have done to me if he could?”
The question is too dangerous, too close, and I’m grateful the dark room hides my face, my body. “It doesn’t matter, angel. He can’t do it now.”
“It does matter,” she says. “It does. He touched me and said things to me, and I can still feel him, his hands and his erection in my back and his voice in my ear.” She swallows, the following words quavering and weak. “It’s like he began casting a curse on me and it’s no less powerful for being unfinished.”
“It is finished,” I promise her. “We’re so close to safety.”
“I felt so helpless,” she continues, tears still leaking from those sweet, silver eyes. “There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say, no way I could stop him. I was going to try to fight back, before he left, but even then, even if I had fought him off, there were all those men outside…”
She’s trembling. Violently. And I hate myself for it, but those violent shivers both tear my heart in half and make my cock throb.
“How am I supposed to leave here like this? Leave here with only the things he made me feel and think?”
“We’ll talk to Ash,” I say a little wildly. Don’t make me do this, don’t make me answer these questions.
“Ash isn’t here,” she says. Her body arches the tiniest bit—agitation or frustration—and the silk pulls against the taut lines of her body.
I groan at the sight, turning away from the bed, and she reaches up with her bound hands and captures one of mine.
“Be Ash for me,” she begs, eyes wide and moon-silver in the dark. The light catches the now-drying tear streaks on her face, and for a moment I’m plunged into the past, into a moonlit Carpathian forest with my shoulder and calf torn open with bullets and Ash stalking around me like a hungry wolf.
You think you want to give that to me? Ash had asked.
No. I want you to take it from me, I’d said.
My voice is sharp when I answer Greer. “What?”
I feel her cool fingertips run up the inside of my wrist. “If you don’t want to take care of me, then pretend you’re Ash,” she says. “He would do it.”
“Do what?” My voice is still sharp but low now, and I can see her body respond.
“Show me what Melwas would have done to me.”
I hear the echoes of a long-ago Embry in her voice, remember that night where I begged Ash to wreak his violence upon my body because he’d needed the release and I’d needed the defeat; I’d needed to feel both alive and conquered. “God, Greer, that’s…that’s fucked up.”
“I know it is.” And it’s the way she says it that really gets its hooks into me, because it’s not ashamed—but it’s not cynical or devoid of emotion either. She says it like someone would ask for a kiss after a hard day, like someone would nestle into the hollow of your arms seeking comfort. It’s the woman I love sad and scared, and nearly inconsolable, when normally emotion never seems to touch her. “Please see it like I do. Melwas was going to hurt me, and there’s nothing I could have done to stop it, but if you—if you do it, then I’ll know I can stop it. I will want it and it will be mine, something I control. I get to—” she searches for the words as I search for my breath, for my self-control “—I get to rewrite it. It becomes mine,” she repeats
“You want me to pretend to—” I can’t say the words, they turn to vinegar in my mouth. I rephrase. “You want me to pretend to be Melwas?”
“Pretend to be Ash being Melwas…if it makes it easier.” She closes her eyes. “This isn’t easy to ask for, Embry, but if I leave here without—”
I pull free from her hands and go to the door.
“Embry?”
I shut the door, pressing my forehead against the cool wood for just a moment. “We have to be fast,” I say, hating how my heart hammers with excitement. How eager my body is.
“Yes,” she whispers, her voice as eager as my body. “As fast as you like.”
You’re going to hell, Embry Moore. Not just for doing this. But for liking it.
But I already knew I was a bad man, right? I was already going to hell.
I click on my shoulder mic, my forehead still against the door. “I have Mrs. Colchester. We’ll be at the rendezvous point in thirty minutes,” I tell Wu. He radios back that he heard me. I unclip the mic, take out my earpiece, and I turn around, facing her. It’s almost completely dark in the room with the door closed, the only light coming from the full moon outside. It changes things, that kind of light. Witching light, my aunt Nimue used to call it. The kind of light necessary for performing deeds that couldn’t be done in the light of day.
The red of Greer’s silk almost looks black now, dark water flowing and rippling over her body. I’m so hard it hurts, and I take a step toward her, ready, ready, ready, God help me, and then I remember. I’m Ash, right now, not Embry.
And it’s so much responsibility, having this kind of power and control. The weight of someone’s safety and catharsis. How does he do it? How does he hold that corner of his mind open for compassion and evaluation while he gives himself over to the monster inside? My monster has no corners, my monster has no compassion. He has only need.
I pull a pocketknife out of my pocket. “Before we start,” I say, fighting to keep my voice normal as I walk over. “Just one thing.”
She understands almost immediately as I reach for her wrists and holds her hands up to me. I cut one layer of the tape open, unwind it, and make her flex her hands several times until the circulation is back, and then I reapply the tape, looser this time. It’s sticky enough to hold, weak enough she could break free, if she needed.
“Can you snap your fingers when your wrists are taped?” I ask, trying to remember all the things Ash does before he claims one of us. Limits, safe words. Though with me it was never that straightforward. Never that safe. There were times I’d walk into the Oval Office and be yanked into a dark room, a silk tie shoved in my mouth, no words uttered at all…those summer nights in the Carpathian mountains with a belt between my teeth so the other soldiers thirty yards away wouldn’t hear my grunts as Ash drove my body into the dirt…
“I can snap them,” Greer answers, bringing me out of my memories.
“Show me.”
She shows me.
“I’m putting your gag back in,” I inform her. “Snap if you need me to stop.”
She shivers as I move the gag back and tighten it. I can feel the lingering teardrops on her cheeks and in the satin net of her hair, but she’s not crying anymore. Her eyes instead are large and fascinated, imploring and a little bit curious. Goose bumps cover her skin, and I run my fingers along the exposed curve of her breast to feel them under my fingertips.
And just like that, the nice playboy I thought I was disappears. The monster who’d once had Greer’s blood on his thighs is back.
I move my hand to her neck, feel the delicate inner workings of her throat as she swallows underneath my palm. I press down, relishing the give of all that soft skin, the sensation of exquisite muscles and veins relenting under my grip. A moving mosaic of panic and desire shifts on her face, rippling and interlacing the way shadows do at the bottom of a sunny pool.
I lean down, still squeezing her throat, and kiss her shadowed face. I kiss her forehead and the edges of her mouth around her gag, and then I give into the sickness and bite her. I bite her cheeks and her neck, I bite her earlobes and the edges of her jaw. I bite her like I want to eat her, like she’s a thing to be consumed or used, not loved.
But I do love her. I can feel that love, just as present as the sickness, as the monster, all one and the same.
Fuck, I’m hard.
I let go of her throat and I hear her struggle to take in air through her nose. I press my ear to her chest and hear her heart thudding, a bird’s wing beating against the inside of her ribs. And then I bite her breasts, biting the bottoms through the silk of her dress, biting the bare skin of the tops, and then I take the dress in both hands and tear it down to her waist. Her nipples are furled and tight, their usual pink hue looking crimson-dark in the moonlight. I see the blooming crescents of my bite marks on her tender skin, and the sight of it is like blood to a wolf. Some primal part of me growls in hunger.
After I pull off my shirt, I palm my cock as I give one of her tits a rough squeeze. Then I start to unfasten my pants, and that’s when she does it. She bucks underneath me, catching me in the lower stomach with her feet, and it knocks the wind right out of me. I stumble back with a muttered fuck, genuinely pissed, and she tries to wriggle to the far edge of the bed.
There’s no thought, no consideration about what happens next. It’s pure, unfettered male instinct. Which is why I’m going to hell.
I leap over the near side of the bed and I get my hand on her upper arm, yanking her hard onto her back. Within an instant, I’m straddling her, my knees sinking into the mattress on either side of her squirming body, and I’m gripping her face with one hand as I lean down and speak low into her ear.
“Is that how you want to do it?” I ask, and in that moment, I don’t know who I am, if I’m Embry or Melwas or Ash, or Ash pretending to be Melwas, or me pretending to be Ash. All I know is that I’m angry and aroused, and the woman I want is trying to get away from me.
Greer pauses her struggling, blinking up at me.
I ask her again. “Is this how you want it, little princess? Because I’m not afraid to take it from you like this.”
Which is a lie. I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid of the monster inside.
She gives me a slow, deliberate nod.
I bite her neck, hard enough to make her cry out, and the way her cries sound through the gag is arresting. Hypnotizing. I bite again and again, still straddling her, and she starts to thrash underneath me, trying to get away, and God, it just stirs me up even more, wrestling her arms down, clamping my thighs around her hips, biting and biting and biting. My cock is so hard that it’s worked its way out of the unbuttoned waistband of my pants, and as I grapple with her, the silk of her dress brushes against it over and over again. It’s soft and warm from her skin and I can’t wait any longer. I know Melwas or Ash or the monster inside me wouldn’t either.
I give one of her breasts a vicious slap, and it seems to stun her, which is what I want. Her squirming stops, and then I’m using her hips to flip her onto her stomach.
She knows what I want, and so she wriggles even harder, trying to throw me off of her, but I just laugh low and mean into her ear as I finish my work and rip the dress all the way down to the hem, leaving the ruined silk in a tangle around her taped ankles.
I shove my pants down past my hips, freeing my cock, and then I slide my hand into that white-gold hair and yank her head back. My other hand smacks her ass with a loud crack and then goes searching for her cunt. I find what Melwas never would; a cunt that’s swollen and eager for me, a cunt hot and slick and wet, so wet that the soft outer folds of her are wet too.
“I knew you wanted it,” I taunt, sliding two rough fingers inside her. For a moment, she forgets our game and arches toward me, pushing herself deeper onto my fingers, shivering when I curl them inside her.
I don’t forget our game though. Releasing her hair, I lean over her and pull down her gag, shoving my fingers into her mouth, just far enough to make her uncomfortable. She tries to squirm away, and again I trap her with my thighs clamped on either side of her hips.
“Do you taste that?” I ask, pressing the pads of my fingertips onto her tongue. “That’s the taste of the pussy I’m about to fuck.”
She bites my fingers and glares back at me as much as she can from her position on her stomach. Laughing, I pull my fingers from her mouth.
“Fuck you,” she spits out.
I smack her ass again—hard—and she cries out. “I’m glad you’re getting the idea, sweetheart.” I run both of my hands along the generous curves of her ass, palming and gripping and pushing the cheeks apart to see the sweet heaven inside. She’s wet enough now that I can smell her, that smell so particular to women, and I let out a low growl.
I tilt her hips up with a quick, jerking motion, brace one hand by her head, and fist my cock, guiding it to the wet entrance between her legs.
“Please don’t,” she pleads. I glance at her hands, where her fingers are curled into fists under her chin; no sign of snapping fingers. “Please. My husband will pay anything, anything you want.”
Her husband.
A vicious spike of jealousy pierces my chest as I pierce her, real jealousy, real anger, creeping its way into the make believe. My wide crown pushes past her folds, tunneling forcefully deeper, and just like the first time we had sex, I give into the savage urge to thrust and penetrate, to stab and spear. To claim.
She doesn’t cry out, she seems to have lost her breath, her mouth parted and her eyes closed, and the goose bumps are back, along with the shivers.
“Your husband isn’t here,” I whisper harshly as I press in as deep as I can go. It’s a snug fit. Her ankles are still taped, keeping her thighs together, and fuck, it makes her tight, every clamping inch a new kind of heaven I’ve never felt before. But this doesn’t soothe the monster, smooth away the real jealousy. Not even close.
Because I’ll never be her husband. I’ll never have what he has, I’ll never get to hear that word from Greer’s lips and know with certainty she means me.
“He’s not here,” I repeat, driving my hips into her ass, punishing her, punishing myself. “But you’re going to take me anyway. You’re going to feel every inch of me inside you. You are going to know that you belong to me.”
