before
No one could be more cruel than Senator Morgan Leffey when she was in the mood.
No one.
And so I didn’t know what to expect when I knocked at the door of her Georgetown row house the day after Jenny Colchester’s funeral. I didn’t know if I’d find my sister upset or regretful or angry, I didn’t even know if she’d consent to see me. What I did know was that I didn’t care. Family protects family, Vivienne Moore always said, but Ash was my family too. And after what Morgan did to him yesterday, I felt the need to do some protecting.
Morgan answered the door herself, the picture of “Thirty-Something Senator at Leisure” in her bare feet and sleeveless silk blouse and nine-hundred dollar slacks. She tossed the loose braid of raven hair over her shoulder when she saw me. “If this is about the funeral…”
“Let me in.”
She studied me for a minute, then sighed and stepped aside for me to walk inside. I didn’t wait for her to invite me to sit; I went right to her sitting room and sat in the overstuffed chair I knew was her favorite, sprawling into it with lazy hostility.
She sighed again, this time sinking down into an uncomfortable Queen Anne chair and crossing her legs. “Just say it.”
“When did you learn?”
She raised her eyebrows, as if that wasn’t what what she expected me to ask first. “I didn’t know in Carpathia, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I stared at her, peering deep into those green eyes…the same complicated shade of green that Ash had. They had the same black hair, the same full mouths. The same regal bearing. “I can’t believe I never saw it before, how much you resemble each other.”
She snorted. “I didn’t see it either, so don’t blame yourself.”
“Trust me, I’m not.”
She didn’t even blink at my biting tone, and I didn’t blink at her non-reaction. “So when did you learn?” I asked again.
She looked away, the morning light slanting across her face. “I always knew Mother had another baby. A brother. Father made sure I remembered that, so I would I never forget that Penley Luther killed my mother.”
I nodded a little at that. Goran Leffey, my stepfather and Morgan’s father, had been divorcing Imogen Leffey when she died giving birth to President Penley Luther’s son. Despite the pending divorce, he’d taken her death hard, had resented Luther and the child that had ultimately killed Imogen. That was no secret at the Moore lake house—even Vivienne Moore hated the memory of Luther for Goran Leffey’s sake.
“But how did you learn the baby was Ash?”
She rubbed at her temple with her fingertips. “A young woman who deals in secrets and frankly is a little unhealthily obsessed with Maxen, if you ask me. She learned enough from her grandfather to start sniffing in the right direction, and then she came to me. A couple months ago.”
“You’ve known this for two months?” I was incredulous. I mean, Morgan and I had a very business-like sibling relationship, but if I’d found out I had a secret brother whom I’d slept with, at the very least I would have told the brother I already had.
Well, stepbrother. But the point stands.
Morgan stood up and started walking, her arms folded across her chest. “I was gutted at first. Just…gutted. And astounded. How? What were the odds? That of all the men, it had to be my brother? That I would sleep with him and—” she bit her lip, stopping her words.
“But why did you have to tell him like this?” My hostility crept back into my tone as I remembered yesterday. The October rain spattering against the jewel-colored leaves, the low rolls of thunder. Ash’s face when she told him—shocked, nauseated, numb.
I could have killed her in that moment, right in front of Jenny’s casket and its tasteful spray of orchids.
I expected her trademark cruelty now, however. I expected her to defend what she’d done, to attack Ash, to attack me. Clearly she’d felt justified enough yesterday to tell him in front of me, why would today be any different?
But today was different. She stopped pacing, keeping her arms folded, and turned to face me. “I don’t know,” she said tiredly. “I don’t know. I told myself it was to cripple him, to finish off his campaign in case his wife’s death hadn’t, but the more I think about it, the more I think that I was…lonely…in being the only one who knew.”
“So you told him because you felt sad?” My voice held so much disdain it surprised even me.
She glared at me. “I told him because my party has no chance of winning this election. It’s not even his stupid New Party, it’s him. Maxen is handsome, young, a war hero, charming—everything our guy isn’t. And until the Republican Party can run a nominee like him against him, we’re going to lose.”
“But you don’t have anyone like that.”
“No. We don’t. But I thought if I could force him to drop out…” She shook her head. “Anyway, it doesn’t make a difference. You’re right. I think the real reason I told him is because it hurts me. I wanted to hurt him too, and more than that, I wanted him to share the burden of it with me. I thought it would be lighter after he knew.”
“And is it?”
She pressed both hands against her stomach, as if trying to hold in her feelings there, and looked down at the floor. “No,” she replied, her gaze distant.
I stood up, walking close enough to touch her. I didn’t. Even without what happened at Jenny’s funeral, we weren’t exactly the kind of siblings who lavished affection on each other. “You did hurt him, Morgan. Congratulations. He’s miserable and grieving and now he gets to know that once upon a time he fucked his sister on top of all that. He gets to know for sure that his mother is dead and his father never wanted him. The Carpathians couldn’t do it, Jenny’s death couldn’t do it, but you did it. You broke Maxen Colchester. Exactly what you wanted, right?”
She shook her head again, still not looking at me. “I don’t know what I want when it comes to him.”
Fuck, who did when it came to Maxen Colchester? All those years since he proposed to Jenny, and yet I couldn’t make myself move on. I couldn’t stop hungering for the accidental brushes of our fingers and shoulders, those nights when we’d get drunk together and he’d begin running curious fingers along the length of my neck, the stubble-rough lines of my jaw. No amount of fucking or drinking or war drove it out of me, and it never would. I’d be dead before I stopped loving Ash.
But that didn’t make it right, especially now that Jenny was dead. What kind of awful man would I be if I hoped her death made him free to love me back?
You’d be the awful man you already are.
I focused on Morgan again, on the here and now, walking toward the door as I said, “You better figure out what you want, Sissy. Because you’re responsible for it either way.”
“It’s done,” she whispered. “It can’t be taken back.”
“Maybe. But I think if you saw him now, you’d hate yourself for it.”
“You have no idea the things I hate myself for,” she said hollowly. “You have no idea all the things I’ve done.”
“And I don’t care,” I said honestly. “But I do care about Ash. And if you ever loved him, if you ever loved me, then you would care too.”
She didn’t answer. I left her standing in the middle of her sitting room, hands flat against her stomach, her eyes vacant as she stared out of the window and at the empty street outside.
Rap.
Rap rap rap.
Rap.
I’d been drinking since four in the afternoon, and the resulting nap was so liquid and thick that it was impossible for me to find my way to the surface. There were sounds…sounds at the door…knocking… Someone’s here.
I managed to open my eyes and roll off my couch with a groan and a wince. I’d had at least four martinis, maybe five, but honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed myself for having six or seven. Today was the first day back on the campaign trail since Jenny’s death, and I’d gone with Ash to Norfolk for a speech he was supposed to give.
It had not gone well.
There had been a moment during the speech, as Ash’s hands were shaking as he struggled to find the right page in his notes to speak from, as he’d trailed off, unable to focus on what he’d been saying, when Merlin and I had shared a look so filled with mutual panic that I almost felt a kinship with the man, despite how much I disliked him. In many ways, this entire venture was more Merlin’s than Ash’s and mine. He had been the one to spend years building up the New Party at the state level, pulling together coalitions and winning support from disaffected Democrats and Republicans. He’d been the one to groom Ash for the role, to gradually convince him that it wasn’t hubris to run for office—or that it was forgivable hubris, at least. It seemed like his entire life had been about getting Ash to this point…I wondered what would happen to Merlin if it all fell apart now.
The speech had been a wreck, but that’s not why I went home to polish off half a bottle of gin. The pity and sympathy on the faces of the people at the speech assured me that for the moment, the campaign was safe enough. In fact, Ash’s shaken delivery had probably helped the message, which was driving home the importance of the sacrifices servicemen and women made in the course of performing their duties. I half suspected that if we’d been able to put voting booths outside the venue, they would have voted for the handsomely grieving Maxen down to a person.
No, it wasn’t the speech. It was Ash himself. It was those haunted eyes, his faint voice, his hands trembling too much to shuffle the pages of his speech. The slump of his shoulders, the blank purposelessness in his face. Watching him like that, so emptied of himself, felt like drowning.
Was this really the same man who’d calmly and charmingly won his first two debates? The same man who’d fought off a building full of rebels to get me to safety? The same man who looked unflinchingly at the muddy, fog-wisped plain of Badon and urged his frightened men forward?
It couldn’t be. It wasn’t.
I drove back to my too-expensive Capitol Hill condo thinking two things:
One, my king was broken.
And two, I didn’t know how to fix him.
Those two things made me miserable, and thus the gin. Which I regretted now as I forced myself to my feet and over to the door. The large clock Morgan’s decorator had picked out told me that it was almost midnight. Fuck. How long had I been asleep?
The rapping was insistent now, like the visitor was trying to break their way through my door with their fist.
“Hold on,” I muttered, fumbling with the locks and chains. Jesus Christ. Didn’t people have any respect for politicians trying to sleep off a bad day?
The moment I unlocked the door, it opened with a bang and there was my running mate, soaked through with rain, not even wearing a fucking coat, the ends of his black hair clinging to his cheekbones and neck.
“Ash, what the f—”
His lips were on mine before I could finish my sentence, his body pinning mine against the wall as he kicked the door closed with his foot. His lips were hungry, his body hungrier, all of him hot and firm and soaking wet. And that body and mouth were so familiar, so achingly familiar, and yet brand new at the same time. Seven years. It had been seven years since the last time his mouth had chased mine, had pressed against it, had claimed it and invaded it.
I could taste the rain on his lips.
One hand fisted my shirt at the shoulder to keep me against the wall and the other ripped through my buttons, my belt, every barrier between my skin and his. I pulled back to see his face, expecting to see the same empty mask I’d seen this afternoon, but when his eyes met mine, they were the eyes of my king.
I stared at him in wonder. “Ash?”
“I need you,” he growled, still pulling at my belt. “Can I have you?”
My chest felt open and exposed, full of tender, unburied hopes like soft green shoots in barely-thawed soil. “You’ve always had me,” I murmured, and I had to close my eyes as I said it or else he’d see too much, and I couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear him knowing how I starved for him, how I ached down to my marrow for him. How these last seven years had scooped me out and left me a keening husk, wandering in the cold while he’d been warm and happy at Jenny’s side.
My pride refused to let him see, but also my compassion—I couldn’t bear for him to know how much pain he’d caused me for Jenny’s sake, not so soon after her death. But as always with Ash, what I wanted didn’t matter, because when I opened my eyes again, I knew he saw it all anyway. His gaze moved from my eyes to the rest of my face, and he said tenderly, “Patroclus.”
I didn’t want to hear what he might say next, and it didn’t matter anyway. I’d chosen this life, I’d chosen to put his future above ours, and so in a way, I deserved all the pain I’d felt. And I didn’t know what had caused this midnight visit, this rain-soaked vision of sex and desperation, but I was too frantic and starved to let it pass without savoring every moment of it. I leaned forward and kissed him so he couldn’t speak, and my kiss seemed to reignite whatever flame had been burning inside him when he tried to knock down my door.
Tenderness gone, he was back to yanking at my belt and devouring my mouth. “I can’t wait,” he muttered against my lips. The urgency was plain in his voice, his hands, the erection straining the front of his pants. I was dying to know what had happened between the speech and now to get him into such a state.
“I’m sorry,” he said, finally working my pants open and wrapping my cock in a fist so tight and big that I forgot how to think. “I used to think this moment…if we ever were together again…I thought it would be different, longer and sweeter, but…”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said back, breathlessly, my entire being tightening into a bowstring of tension as he tugged and pulled on me. “Please don’t be sorry.”
“Well, I can’t be that sorry.” The hidden dimple flashed, and for a moment I saw a young man standing over me in the woods wishing I would beg. And then the next moment, I was tossed over my dining room table, the centerpiece—again from Morgan’s decorator—crashing to the floor. Both of us ignored it; Ash bent over me and turned my head so I could kiss him, and then bites were trailed down my back, dulled somewhat by the thin cotton of my shirt. My pants were yanked down to my ankles, my feet kicked apart.
“Embry,” said Ash.
“Bedroom,” I panted. “Top dresser drawer.”
It only took him a second, although bent over and exposed like that, that second felt like a month, panic chasing lust all over my body. Would he change his mind? Would he decide it was too close to Jenny’s death? Would he walk into my bedroom a king and walk back out a broken shell again?
I needn’t have worried. He strode back out with all the watchful hunger of a tiger approaching his prey, running his hand down my flattened back as he came around the corner of the table, a smile curling his voice. “Have you finally learned obedience, little prince?”
“Fuck you.”
“Such a mean mouth on you. And here I thought we were friends.”
He fisted a hand in my hair to arch my back off the table. My eyes watered; my blood sang at the sight and feel and sense of him, this part of him I’d been denied so long. This part of him he’d denied himself for so long.
As I was arched, a finger entered me, probing in the perfunctory, callous way I’d grown to crave during our years in Carpathia. The lube was cold, the finger was warm, Ash’s voice was both as he whispered, “Just like I remembered. So tight and so fucking strong—” his hand left my hair so he could grab my ass, the muscles of my left thigh, squeezing and slapping my flank as if I were a prized stallion. “—so you.”
I could feel my heartbeat in my dick. I could feel my heartbeat everywhere, like my heart was outside of me and filling up the room.
Of course it was outside of me. I’d given it to the soldier behind me years ago.
“I can’t wait,” he muttered again. I felt the loss of his finger like the loss of some part of myself, and then I heard the noise of his belt, the metal hiss of his zipper. The moment his crown kissed against the sensitive skin of my anus, I started shivering uncontrollably.
“I haven’t,” I said in a shaking voice. “With anyone. Not since you.”
If I thought this would give him pause, gentle the tiger, I was wrong. If anything, this seemed to stoke a new fire inside him, flare up some dark, primal satisfaction.
“Good,” he snarled.
And he pushed inside of me as rough and fast as he would a woman, shoving the blunt head in on the first push, the rest of his cock in on the second. Grunts left his throat as he forced his way inside, and his massive hands curled around my hips to keep me in place as I squirmed underneath him.
“Fuck.” It was so big. So impossibly big, and he was splitting me apart with it. “Holy fuck.”
There was no mercy from the soldier behind me, no relief. He wedged in, he dragged out, he wedged in again. I writhed, he pushed me down, I tried to move my legs and he kicked them back apart. It was him, inside me and over me and behind me; it was him taking what he wanted, what he needed; it was him, the one I had craved so hard and so long that I had forgotten what not craving felt like.
It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t fair, the only attention he gave my body was the occasional slap on the flank or rake of nails under my shirt, and I was going to come so embarrassingly fast if he kept it up.
“I’m going to fuck the cum right out of you,” he said in my ear, and then he made good on his word, reaching around and pulling my swollen cock down between my legs. The edge of the table kept it there, pointing straight down, all the blood and sensation in my body pooling into eight throbbing inches, and then he let go.
I wanted to beg him to keep hold of it at least, even if he wasn’t going to stroke me, because it was unbearable otherwise, as if the pleasure was too much to bear on its own. I wanted to beg him to stop or to go harder, I wanted to beg him to forgive me or punish me, I wanted to beg him to leave and to stay. I wanted everything in that moment, every painful, electric thing, as long as it came from him, as long as he gave it to me.
“Ash, please,” I moaned. “Touch it or let me—”
He easily caught the hand I was trying to get down to my cock and laughed. Laughed.
“No, Patroclus. Not this time. This time I want to see you come just like this. Just from my cock inside you. I’ve waited so. Fucking. Long. To. Have. This.” He punctuated each word with a thrust, thrusts so deep that tears burned behind my eyelids, so well-angled that my toes curled helplessly against the polished wood of the floor.
“I’m going to—it’s too—I’m gonna—”
“Show me.”
I couldn’t breathe. Actually couldn’t breathe; the air twisted in my chest and grew claws, there was no blood or oxygen anywhere in my body but in my throbbing cock, and it felt like my soul was being pulled out through my groin. All pressure and heat, and down down down, and then I was crying out and bucking underneath Ash, jetting ropes of cum onto the floor. My hands scratched against the tabletop and my hips were jerking so hard with each pulse that the table itself was moving across the floor. I’d have bruises on my hips the next day, but I didn’t care, couldn’t care, the twin spots of discomfort lost in the thick, milky waves that pulled at me, jerked out of me, and I was helpless against it, against him.
He stayed in control right up until the very end, but my orgasm pushed him over the edge, and at the very last he let loose with a series of brutal thrusts that kept me throbbing and throbbing until I drained my balls of every last drop. And then right before he emptied himself into me, he stilled his thrusts and whispered my name.
“Embry.”
And then he spilled with a grunt, his fingertips digging into my already bruised hips.
I savored every moment of it—the wet heat, the thick slide, the residual throb in my groin. Every sound and sigh he made, every flare and pulse of him in the most secret part of me. How had I forgotten what it was like to be fucked by Ash like this? The peace and quiet that followed? The way I felt more like myself than at any other time?
How loved I felt by him and how much I loved him in return?
His movements slowed and stopped, until it was just the two of us breathing, still joined together. I risked a look back at his face and almost wished I hadn’t because what I saw there undid me.
“Little prince,” he said in a voice that could move mountains.
But I didn’t want the mountains moved, not yet. I didn’t want to talk about Jenny or Morgan or anyone else, I didn’t want reality and history to intrude. I just wanted this. Him, us, the release only he had ever been able to give me. And I knew that was selfish. He had a wife who’d just died, he had a campaign to win, we both now shared a sister.
A good man would have cleaned up, given Ash a drink, and unselfishly listened to everything he needed to say. A good man wouldn’t grab Ash’s still wet shirt and drag him into the bedroom for more. A good man wouldn’t spend the next five hours in rough, filthy embraces without any thought of the ring still on Ash’s finger.
But I already told you at the beginning of the story:
I am not a good man.
The truth was this, in those five hours, I swore over and over again my undying loyalty and fealty. I swore it with my fingers and lips and all the muscled flats and curves of skin I offered up to his loving, fierce abuse. I swore it without his asking, I offered it to him because of his grief and his shame over what he’d done with Morgan, I pledged it because in those five hours, he’d been more himself than he had in the last five years.
And I refused to let reality intrude. Maybe there was a campaign, maybe there was still my sister, maybe there were a thousand reasons I could never truly be Ash’s and he could never truly be mine. But that night, none of it mattered. What mattered was that he was my king and I was his prince, and I would always, always be by his side.
