after
My life now has two parts.
Then and now.
Before and after.
I’m a married man now, in a way. In a ridiculous, insane, beautifully fucked-up way that no state or church would ever recognize. But that doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t make it any less true. The moment Greer, Ash, and I all held hands and promised—promised something we didn’t even entirely understand but we knew we couldn’t fight anymore—that moment was my wedding. It was all my wedding, actually, that and what came after: the sweat and the tears and the spilled semen, some kind of ancient ritual that we instinctively knew how to perform, a dance we had never learned but had already mastered.
I had thought today would be my perdition. My punishment for being a bad, selfish man, a man who made Ash suffer, who made Greer suffer, who’s made so many countless others suffer in the thirty-five years I’ve been alive. I had walked down that aisle with Greer’s cousin Abilene holding my arm, and all I could think about were the missed chances I had for this to be my own wedding. Ash would have forsaken his precious Catholic church, his career, his future, just to see me walk to him, just to see his ring on my finger, and I’d said no.
Twice.
And this was my penance. That I would walk down the aisle, and instead of standing across from him, I would stand next to him, his bite marks on my neck and his future wife’s taste still in my mouth, and I would have to watch them smile and cry and kiss. I wouldn’t get the man I loved or the woman I loved; instead, they would have each other and I would have no one.
That was what I had to endure. That was what I had to accept.
Except…I didn’t. Somehow, some way, my penance had been paid, my sins lifted from me. Ash wanted me. Greer wanted me. And they wanted to open their hours-old marriage to me—imperfect, awful me. I should have said no. For their sakes, for the sake of my soul. But I couldn’t. I just wanted it—wanted them—too fucking much.
I wanted to hope that it would work. That we could work—the three of us, somehow. Because fifteen years of knowing Ash and five of knowing Greer had shown me that I was never getting past this…this itch, this needy pain for them. I was ruined for loving anyone else, and call it fate or bad luck or genetic compatibility or psychological trauma—whatever it was, I was bound to them like rust to metal, a collision of particles and forces that changed us all irrevocably. There was no going back.
These are the thoughts stirring through my mind as my eyes flutter open in the dark. There have been times in my life when I’ve woken up in a new place, disoriented and terrified, waiting for Carpathian bullets to start raining down on me, but now I wake up in a warmth of lazy contentment. Sweet excitement. Lingering hunger.
There are no bullets here.
Instead, there’s a warm hand on my naked stomach, large and slightly rough, a familiar and unfamiliar feeling all at once. I open my eyes all the way, the light from the bathroom limning the muscular frame of the sleeping President. The sheet is partially twined around his lean hips, dipping low enough to expose the dark line of hair running down from his navel and thin enough to reveal the heavy curve of his penis. In sleep, his full lips are parted ever so slightly and his long eyelashes rest against his cheeks, and the solemnity that usually clings to the corners of his mouth and eyes is erased. He looks younger, almost like that angry young man that once pinned me to a wall on an Army base. Younger and more vulnerable.
My heart twists. Because I love him, because he’s beautiful, and because I can’t remember the last time I saw him truly, actually sleeping. There’ve been catnaps on planes, the occasional doze in the car, but as for deep-breathing, relaxed, limbs-sprawling sleep…not since that first tour of duty in Carpathia. Greer has been good for him.
I try not to feel jealous about that.
Speaking of Greer, I realize that she’s not in bed between us any longer, and she’s not nestled behind me or Ash. I stretch and blink more clearly at the light spilling in from the crack in the bathroom door. Ash and I rode her hard last night…I’m not sure exactly what kinds of things women do to take care of themselves after sex, but Ash has abused my willing body more than enough times for me to have an idea. I decide to give her privacy, although the bed feels strange without her. The rightness of the three of us, the way we fit and breathe together… Even after only a few hours, her absence makes the weight of the air uncomfortable on my skin, makes the bed feel hollow and cold.
My stretching stirs Ash, and he stretches too, the sheet pulling down to reveal his hip and the top of one hard thigh. His hand flexes against my stomach, and the feeling is shocking, the intimacy both new and not new. Despite all the rounds we went tonight—or technically last night, judging from the faint blue light peeping in from behind the curtains—my cock jumps at his touch, stiffening and hardening from nothing more than the graze of his palm across my stomach.
Ash opens his eyes and gives me a sleepy smile. It’s such an unfamiliar look on him, both the openness of it and the happiness, and I stare into his face, drinking it in like a man dying of thirst. After Carpathia, after Morgan, after me, after Jenny—I never could have believed that I would see Ash breathe and smile without all that torment suffocating him. Seeing it, if only for a few minutes, feels like some kind of gift, an unearned blessing. I reach out and trace his jaw, predictably already rough with stubble, and then run the pads of my fingers over his sleepy smile.
“Is it morning?” he asks. My cock jumps again at the sound of his voice. It’s always a little rough around the edges, like someone took sandpaper to his words, but right after sleep, his voice is pure gravel, masculine and hungry.
“Almost.”
“Where is she?”
She. Our Greer. Once again, I feel the hollow space in the bed where she should be, and I have a brief moment of amused anxiety, because if I can’t stand to be apart from her when she’s in the restroom, how on earth are the three of us going to survive the next two and a half years? Or shit—six and a half years if Ash gets re-elected?
“She’s in the bathroom,” I say, trying to suppress this new awareness of how hard our future is going to be. “I just woke up.”
Ash makes a noise in the back of his throat, and his hand moves on my stomach again. Moves down, sliding past my navel. My dick is hard now, hard and pulsing against the cool air.
“I love it when you first wake up,” Ash tells me, his voice no longer sleepy but still graveled and rough. “Your eyes look darker with your pupils that wide, and your cheeks get flushed, and your body…” His wicked hand brushes over my crown, swollen and dusky in the dark. “Your body always looks so willing for whatever I want.”
His hand closes over my shaft and squeezes, and I moan.
“So willing,” Ash repeats in a murmur, and then I expect him to flip me over and push into me, but he doesn’t. Instead he lets go of my cock and climbs over me, lowering his heavy, hard body onto mine so that our cocks are pinned between our bare stomachs and our chests press together. His lips pass over mine, the slightest brush, and then he does it again, smiling as I tilt my face up greedily to catch his mouth in a real kiss.
He teases me once or twice more, coaxing a frustrated whimper from somewhere deep inside me, and then he puts us out of our misery and lowers his mouth to mine, parting my lips with his and licking deep into my mouth. His kiss is slow, but possessive, and he drives the pace and the depth. I can barely breathe, he kisses me so deeply, but I don’t care. I don’t want to, don’t want any air that Ash himself hasn’t given me. After a few minutes of this, he pulls back slightly and then presses his forehead to mine.
“Oh, Embry,” he says, his voice cracking. “How much I’ve missed you.”
My chest cracks open along with his voice. “Will you ever forgive me?” I whisper.
“For what?”
It’s hard to speak the words, even in the dark. “For not marrying you.”
His breath leaves him. “Embry…”
“You can be honest with me,” I say, wanting to be his brave little prince. Just this once. “I deserve it.”
His hands frame my face as he pulls back to meet my eyes. “It will always hurt, Embry. I can’t pretend that it won’t. But surely you must know by now, and I’ve told you before…I’ll take you any way I can have you. If all you’ll give me is a few stolen nights, then that’s what I’ll take.”
My throat closes and I blink away from his gentle expression. I can’t handle it. Can’t stomach all the things he doesn’t know. He’s got it so wrong, who is hurting for whom, and I almost tell him. I almost tell him what happened all those years ago, about Merlin, about the real reason I couldn’t marry him. But the words stick in my clenched throat. I’ve told the lie too long for the truth to come easily now.
He interprets my silence as confirmation of his words. “And Embry, if both of us are in love with Greer, then this would have always been the best way. Maybe it was fate that everything came together in precisely this pattern. If we’d married all those years ago, we wouldn’t have her.”
I can tell he’s trying to make me feel better, and it’s so fucked up, so terribly fucked up that I’m the one who gouged a hole in his heart and he’s trying to comfort me. I can’t stand it. He doesn’t even know all the ways the world has been so cruelly unfair to him—he who deserves it least of all.
“Stop it,” he whispers, ducking his head down to nip at my earlobe. “Stop punishing yourself.” The nip turns into a real bite and despite my misery, my cock pulses against Ash’s hard stomach.
“Let me do the punishing,” he says, and oh God, yes please. Only at Ash’s feet can I feel like I’ve atoned for everything I’ve done wrong. Only under his merciless palm can I find mercy from my own thoughts.
His bites trail fire from my earlobe to my jaw, from my jaw to my throat, and then he starts working his way down my body, bites on my chest and stomach. His eyes glitter in the dark. “Do you want Greer to see?” he asks in between bites. I squirm under his mouth, feeling precum leaking out of my tip. “Do you want her to see what it looks like when you kneel?”
“Yes,” I moan, trying to arch to him. A cruel hand pushes me back down.
I fight it.
I struggle against it. I always struggle against it, actually. And then at the very end, when I’ve been broken, I feel it. The calm. The peace. The space Ash has carved out for me where there is no guilt, no self-loathing, no agony. Just the quiet and the love, his hand on the back of my neck and my tears drying on my face.
Greer, the perfect submissive, born to lead outside the bedroom and serve inside of it…would she understood if she saw the way Ash and I are together? She submits because she feels safe that way, because she was born to submit, but I submit because I was born to suffer. Because I like suffering.
Because I like the fight and I like the defeat that follows.
“Yes,” I repeat, once Ash has clamped his bruising hands around my hips so I can’t move. “Please.”
“So eager.” He bites the tender flesh right next to my penis, and I cry out. “Usually I have to make you want it.” Another bite. Another whimper from me. “I’ll go get her.”
The bed dips as he shifts his weight to one knee and then moves away. I watch him walk across the room, the shadows tracing the swells of muscle along his back and arms as he walks. Prowls. Even completely naked, he looks in command. Deadly, even.
I don’t stroke myself as I wait, even though I’m so hard there must be no blood left anywhere else in my body. I’m so ready to fuck, so ready to be fucked, and my skin is on fire from waiting—
“She’s not in here.”
Ash’s voice is calm, but it’s a kind of calm I know very well. The same calm he exudes when his chief of staff leans down to whisper bad news in his ear. The same calm he had when the doctors finally diagnosed Jenny’s cancer. The same calm he so easily mustered when bullets started cracking through the trees in Carpathia.
I’m on my feet immediately, going to the bathroom to see for myself. Sure enough, it’s empty, and by the time I turn back around, there’s a pair of drawstring linen pants knotted low on his hips and he has his phone in his hand.
“Her phone isn’t here and the deadbolt isn’t locked from the inside,” Ash says, still calm. “I’m going to check in with Luc. Perhaps she left to use the gym or the pool.”
I doubt it. Greer is many perfect things, but an early riser is not one of them. All those mornings she had to smuggle herself out of the White House in the fuzzy hours near dawn…every single time, I’d walk in with coffee and a newspaper and find her perched on the couch, swaddled in Ash’s giant bathrobe, blinking owlishly at me when I flipped on the light. Ash once told me that most mornings he had to physically pluck her out of bed and carry her into the living room so she wouldn’t fall back asleep, and there’s something so painfully sweet about that image. I looked forward to seeing their morning ritual for myself, maybe even being the one to gather her warm, sleepy body into my arms and cradle her until she woke up.
I don’t say any of that, however. I simply grab my tuxedo pants, still crumpled on the floor from last night, and pull them on. I’ve just fastened them when there’s a knock at the door. I’m closest to it, and I yank it open, expecting to see Greer, ready for relief to come crashing through me, but it’s not Greer. It’s Merlin, looking uncharacteristically tired and disarrayed.
“Greer’s been taken,” he announces quietly.
Twenty minutes later, we are fully dressed in the suite, gathered around the coffee table with Merlin and a Secret Service agent named Bors. Kay—the chief of staff and Ash’s adopted sister—is there in her hotel bathrobe, pacing by the windows as she talks into her phone. Belvedere, Ash’s personal assistant, is off to the side, also on the phone, surrounded by a cluster of grim-looking Secret Service agents.
“Neither Luc nor Lamar answered when it was time to check in,” Bors is explaining to us. “So that’s when I came up from the stairwell post to find them. I found them unconscious and bound at the far end of the hallway, around the corner.”
Ash rubs his hand over his face. “How many agents were attacked in total?”
“Including Luc and Lamar, only five, only the ones they absolutely needed to attack. The people who took Mrs. Colchester were surgical. Silent. They cut out a second story window and seemed to have left through the alley. That’s also where we found the body of a man named Daryl—an employee here at the hotel.”
I can’t sit anymore. I stand up and start pacing behind the sofa where Ash sits, mirroring Kay. “It was Melwas, Ash. You know it was.”
“I know,” he says heavily. “I know.”
“I thought we had prepared for this! The different hotels, the last minute switches!”
“It wasn’t enough,” Merlin admits. “We underestimated him. I underestimated him. I’m so sorry, Maxen. This is my fault, my own lapse in judgment. I should have expected this.”
Ash stands too, putting a gentle hand on Merlin’s shoulder. How can he be so fucking calm right now? So steady? “I don’t blame you, old friend,” he says to his advisor. “We all should have been more guarded, but even so, I don’t know that we could have foreseen this.”
Merlin sighs, his expression troubled. “I should have.” And even though Merlin and I have had our differences in the past, I am able to take a moment aside from my fear and anger to feel a pang of empathy for him. Because I should have done better too. If I had stayed awake or slept lighter, if I had told Greer to wake me before she went anywhere, if I had done literally anything other than fall asleep like a teenage boy after we fucked, maybe she’d still be safe.
And even though it’s not productive to blame myself, the blame feels like an old, familiar cloak. I toss it over my shoulders and feel more settled somehow, more in control. The world makes sense again. It’s my fault.
It’s always my fault.
Ash looks around the room with an even, surveying expression. If I didn’t know him as well as I do, if I hadn’t been by his side as we watched soldiers getting their faces blown off, as we faced freezing nights in the mountains with no food and barely any water, then I would have thought he wasn’t affected by this at all. I would have thought that he was able to close off his feelings while he thought, or maybe even that he wasn’t worried about Greer in the first place.
But I do know him. I can see the tightness around his eyes, the way he keeps rubbing at his forehead with his thumb. There is panic written quietly into every line of his body.
“We have to assume they’ll make for water,” Ash says, dropping his hand from his face and addressing the room. “We’ve already got the airports and airfields on alert, and they know how closely we can watch the airspace. But if they can make it to open water, their chances of success open up immediately. Mobilize the Coast Guard and we’ll need seaside police agencies to boost patrols of marinas and docks. Bors, how much of a lead do you think they have?”
“Less than three hours. More than one.”
“Then we don’t have much time. Once they get to water, there’s no telling which way they’ll go. Or how long they’ll stay. Embry, Merlin, Kay—could I have a word with you privately?”
Kay ends her phone call, and the rest of us follow Ash into the en-suite sitting room. “I don’t think Melwas is going to ask for ransom,” Ash says as soon as we’re there with him. “I think he wants to make it impossible to prove that he has Greer. A ransom demand would be unequivocal confirmation of his role in her kidnapping, but if he says nothing? Then to the rest of the world, there will always be the doubt that we are faking her disappearance as an excuse for military action.”
“The world will believe us,” I say fiercely. “They know what kind of man Melwas is. They’d even help us!”
“I don’t want help, and I don’t want war,” Ash replies with firmness. “Not if war can be avoided. It’s what he wants, Embry. He wants us to fight again, but this new treaty ties his hands. He can’t exercise military power unless he’s attacked, so he’s trying to goad us into attacking. I won’t give in.”
“What are you saying?” I demand. “That we just ask him nicely to give her back?”
“No,” Ash says. “Because the other reason he took her is because he…wants…her.”
His words curl with distaste, and I know he, like me, is remembering the diplomatic dinner in Geneva where Melwas danced with Greer. The look in Melwas’s eyes that night had been unmistakable. Aggressive.
“Then what do we do?” I ask.
“I go and find her.”
Kay, Merlin, and I stare at Ash, stunned.
Ash clarifies. “I’m supposed to be on my honeymoon for the next week, which means I’ll already be absent from the public eye. There’s no reason I can’t use that time to find my wife.”
“Are you suggesting,” Kay asks, “that you—the President of the United States—go personally to find your wife?”
Ash meets her incredulous gaze with a determined look. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
Kay throws up her hands and turns away, wheeling back suddenly to say, “Absolutely not.”
Merlin clears his throat. “There are innumerable reasons why that’s out of the question,” he tells Ash. “Your safety and sovereignty cannot be compromised if you want to keep this country away from war. We need you here, protecting this country.”
“Then who is going to protect Greer?” Ash asks, and there’s no missing the controlled anger threaded through his words. “This is my call, Merlin. My wife.”
My wife. For some reason, those two words sting me a little. A lot. It stings that we are standing in a room full of people who don’t know what happened here last night, the promises sealed with sighs and sweat. It stings that Ash will always, always get to care about Greer publicly and I won’t. It stings that I can’t care about Ash publicly. That I can’t drop to my knees in front of him right now and beg him to let me help, let me go after her.
“Send me,” I say urgently. Everyone swivels their heads to look at me, but I keep my eyes on Ash. I will him to see my thoughts, my mind. “You can’t go, Ash. It’s impossible. If you get caught—if Melwas catches you—the consequences would be too much.”
Ash steps forward and slides his hand around the back of my neck, pulling our foreheads together. Like he doesn’t care what anyone else in the room thinks. “Do you think that you are any less important to me?” he asks roughly. “Do you think I can risk you, as well as her? Do you think that if you were caught I wouldn’t come after you too?”
“I…I don’t know,” I whisper. “But it has to be me.”
“No. I won’t risk you, and as far as I’m concerned, both you and Greer belong to me. Your safety is my responsibility, as is your pleasure and your pain.” He says this last part so quietly that no one else can hear him. “I’m not worthy of the promises I made in this room, not worthy of what I take from the two of you, if I can’t protect you.”
“It’s because you’re worthy that we can’t let you go,” I reply. “But me…no one will miss me. My capture doesn’t have to mean war—and don’t interrupt me; you know it’s true. A President being taken is different than a Vice President being taken, it just is. And if I do get captured, then you’ll let me go because it’s the right thing to do.”
“I never leave my soldiers behind,” Ash says, a low growl behind his words.
“You’re responsible for more than soldiers now,” I remind him. “It’s the price you paid for this office. It has to be me, and who could you trust more than me to find her and bring her back? Does anyone in this room, anyone in the police or CIA or Presidential Protection Division or the military, love that woman more than me? Would anyone else in here risk more than me to bring her back?”
Our foreheads are still touching, our words still too low for anyone else to hear. “You’ve always had a death wish, Embry. It frightens me more than I can tell you.”
“More than Greer being at the hands of Melwas? More than her being raped or hurt? Murdered?”
Ash’s fingers dig in hard, and for a moment, I feel every ounce of frustrated rage and fear he’s caging inside his body. “God forgive me,” he mutters.
“It should be him,” Merlin says, stepping close to us. “It’s still tricky, but Embry was also scheduled for a vacation out of state this week. And while it’s reckless and logistically thorny, there’s no real reason why it shouldn’t be him. We are in new territory with your wife’s abduction, Mr. President, and new territories require new solutions.”
Ash reluctantly releases my neck. “I feel like a coward staying here,” he replies bitterly. “Letting everyone else risk everything.”
“They risk it of their own free will,” Merlin says. “And even the great Maxen Colchester can’t stop people from using their free will.”
Kay is close now too, her hand on Ash’s arm. He relaxes the tiniest bit. “We are going to get her back, Ash,” she says. “We’ll keep this from the press, long enough for Melwas to think we aren’t taking any action, which might make him uncomfortable enough to make a mistake. We’ll send the best of the PPD and CIA and Special Forces, and we’ll send Embry. Between all those things, we will disrupt all the plans Melwas has made about Greer and we’ll stop any harm from coming to her.”
He swallows, closing his eyes. “I hate this,” he whispers. “I hate this so much.”
My heart twists, and before I can stop myself, I’ve got my arms around him. His head drops to my shoulder—the opposite of how we stood in this room last night, right before Ash palmed my cock and made me come all over his fist. Now I’m the strong one, now I’m the one offering comfort and release.
I hold him tighter. “I’ll get her back,” I swear.
“It should be me,” he says into my shoulder.
“But it can’t be.”
“You have to come back to me. Both of you. If I lose you, too—” His voice cracks suddenly. “My little prince. Please come back.”
People are casting sympathetic glances at us, at our seeming display of fraternal comfort. But I see the way Kay and Merlin look at us, the only two people in the room who know our past, and I see them wonder. About me and Ash. Me and Greer.
I step back, shuddering slightly at the feeling of Ash’s stubble rasping against my cheek as he pulls away. “I’m coming back,” I promise. “And your wife is too.”
After all, if it weren’t for Greer all those years ago, I wouldn’t have believed myself capable of love again. If it weren’t for Greer, I wouldn’t have Ash again. If it weren’t for last night, for the vows we spoke to each other and the promises we made with our bodies, then I wouldn’t have my own soul.
I have to rescue her.
She’s already rescued me.
