Christian waited outside the warehouse building as Calix and I exited, leaning his weight into the passenger side door with his ankles casually crossed.
As if he wasn’t surrounded by armed guards who would kill him without hesitation, he barely paid them any attention. They weren’t worth his worry and weren’t worth his notice. He stared at the ground, scuffing his shoes through the dirt at his feet. Dust floated into the air as I took my first step off the concrete surrounding the building, walking on my toes so my heels didn’t dig into the gravel and dry earth.
Christian looked up from beneath his lashes, his face remaining angled down as Calix and I made our way toward him. His stare settled on my face briefly before trailing down my body and checking for injury.
He moved fluidly when he found none, pushing off the car and tugging the door open for me. I strode toward it with quick steps, my urgency to get away from the armed men around me taking over. With the adrenaline of the meeting fading, I realized how foolish I’d been.
I’d baited the council of the six. I’d used my words against them when I’d been taught all my life that I was to remain silent.
I bent forward slightly, lowering myself into the backseat and moving over so that Calix could follow, while he kept his body firmly planted between me and the guns at his back. My gaze snagged on Christian’s once more, the intensity of his stare making me bristle.
“Are we going to have a problem, Christian?” Calix asked, leaning his weight into the arm he’d placed on top of the car. With his body filling the open door, his voice dropped low as he spoke. I stopped in the middle of the seat, watching the exchange between them in confusion.
Christian cleared his throat, meeting Calix’s stare. “Of course not,” he said, pursing his lips as if he was biting his tongue.
“Good,” Calix said, reaching forward to clap a hand down on Christian’s shoulder. “Because I’d really hate to have to kill you.” He lowered himself into the seat beside me, crowding me when I didn’t shift over but just stared at him.
He never bothered to look away, holding my challenging gaze with a quiet stoicism that kept my mouth firmly clamped shut. I couldn’t decide if his irritation with Christian was because he was pissed at me for my behavior or if it was something else that drove it.
Either way, his face remained as hard as stone—chiseled in his indifference as Christian closed the door and made his way to the front.
“When we get home,” Calix murmured in response to my questioning gaze, leaning in to touch his lips to my temple. I swallowed, letting myself feel the affection in his tone.
Whatever had pissed him off, he didn’t seem angry with me. That had to be enough for the moment, because I wasn’t certain my frazzled nerves could take another conflict.
“Out,” Calix ordered simply the moment we stepped into the house. The security within, including Christian, made themselves scarce and disappeared out the front door.
“Who peed in your Cheerios?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. Calix’s gaze fell to my breasts, and the way the position of my arms pushed them up higher. It felt as if they might burst free from the armor of a dress he’d put me in, and I watched as he parted his lips and ran his tongue over his bottom teeth slowly with a smirk that was twisted with depravity.
“I have to be able to trust my team implicitly, especially when it comes to you. They’ll be responsible for your safety when I can’t be, and that inherently means they’ll be spending time alone with you. If there is something I need to know about your relationship with Christian, now would be the time to disclose that so we can avoid a bloody spectacle,” Calix said, moving around the kitchen island. He fussed with grabbing fresh fruit from the fridge, and the motivation wasn’t lost on me.
I often said no to the more complicated foods he prepared, or didn’t eat enough to satisfy his desire to see me properly fed, but I’d never met a fruit I didn’t like. He grinned, turning to deposit the fresh strawberries back in the fridge and emerging with whole berries covered in chocolate. My mouth watered, because although I’d never tasted the combination of two of my favorites, I could just imagine how marvelous they must be together.
“You think I have feelings for Christian?” I asked, resisting the urge to step up and take one of the berries. This was a trap, and he was using chocolate to bait me into a conversation I had no desire to have because of how absolutely ridiculous it was.
“I think he’s attracted to you,” Calix said, grabbing a knife from the block and stabbing one of the strawberries. He used the knife to guide it to his mouth, taking a bite out of the fruit casually, as if he wasn’t intending to torment me. “He’s a straight man so that’s unsurprising. I can excuse that as long as he keeps his fucking hands and greedy little eyeballs to himself. It’d be a shame if I had to cut them out of his skull and feed them to him.”
“His greedy little eyeballs?” I asked, rolling my own eyes at how ridiculous he was. “You think if I did have feelings for Christian, I’d have asked him to arrange for me to have a one-night stand with a stranger? Not to mention, if you’re going to make threats, they should be achievable. Christian would be dead long before you could actually feed him his eyeballs.”
“You’d be amazed what the human body can survive if the person knows what they’re doing, Little One. Taking out a man’s eyeballs isn’t particularly difficult,” Calix answered, taking another bite of the strawberry.
As appetizing as that sounded…
I gulped.
“I’m going to go take a shower while you work out your mood,” I sighed, shaking my head and intending to turn my back on the volatile man who didn’t seem to realize how alarming it was that removing a man’s eyeballs was an easy task for him. I didn’t want to think about all the other things he’d done.
“You handled yourself well with the council,” Calix said, taking a step around the island. I froze in place, watching him with wary eyes as he moved slowly toward me. He behaved as if I were a feral animal, ready to bolt at the first sign of aggression.
A wiser woman probably would.
“I behaved foolishly, and I will pay the consequences for that when I have to fight for a position at the head of the council, even though I do not want it. I’m under no illusion that I’m capable of taking on Tobias or any of the council members who do not have one foot in the grave. I’m far too small to inflict any major damage,” I said, shaking my head.
“You were brave in the face of a group of men most of the city fears, with good reason. It takes an Θεά to choose strength over life, to choose death over being broken,” he said, taking a few more steps toward me. He stopped before me, a fresh strawberry impaled on his knife as it hung by his side.
“Some would argue that I have spent all of my life cowering and broken down,” I said, quirking a brow at him. Even when he’d known me as a child, I’d done everything I could to remain quiet and out of sight. I’d hidden my flaws and my oddities, trying to be the perfect girl that my father would mold into a biddable woman.
In this city, alliance through marriage was far more important than money.
“You were never even close to broken, λουλούδι μου. You were simply waiting for your time to strike,” he murmured, reaching up with his hand that held the knife. He brushed the back of his knuckles over my cheekbone, the knife pointing away from my face but filling my vision. He drew it back far enough to take a bite, chewing thoughtfully as he touched the rest of the berry to my lips and stained them with juice. “You voted with me. You took my side. Why?”
I parted my lips to speak, and he used the opportunity to slide the berry between them. I sank my teeth into it carefully, all too aware of the sharp blade that was so close to my mouth and the man who wielded it. I didn’t think Calix would harm me, but he was far from the most stable man I’d ever met.
That should have been terrifying, but I couldn’t seem to stop leaning into his presence the more I learned about him. I couldn’t seem to stop taking comfort in his instability, or the unpredictability of who he was. Would I wake one morning and see the unhinged side of him that had motivated him to massacre two families? Or would I continue to experience the side of Calix that fed me incessantly and fussed over the luxuries he’d surrounded me with?
I chewed thoughtfully, considering the answers I could give him. It would have been true to say that I stood a far greater chance of escaping all of this unscathed with him by my side rather than Tobias, but even still….
“Because now you owe me a debt,” I said, swallowing the berry and staring up at Calix. He cocked his head to the side, his lips parting into a bright grin.
“Is that so?” he asked, lifting his empty hand between us. He pressed his open palm against the front of my throat and squeezed lightly as he tossed the stabbed strawberry stem into the farmhouse sink. “And how would λουλούδι μου like me to repay such a debt?”
“I want Malva to come and live with us,” I said, my throat moving against his palm.
“No,” Calix said, his voice lacking any inflection.
“You owe me—”
“When this conversation finishes, I fully intend to put you on your hands and knees on the kitchen island so I can lick your fucking cunt until you scream, Little One. Is that something you would like your little sister to walk in on?” he asked, smirking when my mouth dropped open.
“I didn’t agree to—”
“What did I tell you the first time you let me inside of you? I own your body now. I will do what I want to it—when and where I please. I’ve waited far too long to have you. I will not limit myself so soon,” he said, taking a step back. He kept his grip on my throat as he moved, giving me no choice but to follow as his fingers squeezed tighter.
I swallowed, knowing there was no way around that. As much as I could have negotiated with any normal man to be more willing to save sex for the bedroom, the dark gleam in Calix’s eyes made it clear that he would not be making that concession.
He brushed his fingers against my shoulder, pushing the strap over the edge until it draped along my bicep. Spinning me so suddenly that I grabbed the island to steady myself, he wrapped himself around my back. Holding my throat to keep me arched back, he reached around to pluck one of the remaining strawberries off the island. He pressed it to my lips, the flavor of chocolate melting against the heat of my mouth as my breath came in ragged gasps.
“Eat,” he ordered, and I parted my lips, letting him slide a chunk of the berry in and force my jaw wide open. Sinking my teeth into the flesh, I winced when the chocolate cracked and crumbled, falling to the top of the island.
I chewed as he pulled what remained of the berry away from my mouth, trailing it over the side of my neck and down to the back of the shoulder he’d bared. A cool line of juice slid over my skin, and I looked over my shoulder at him to find his silver eyes gleaming as he watched my face. He lowered his mouth to the trail he’d created, dragging his tongue over my skin and licking the strawberry juice off me.
“What else is it that you want from me, Little One? How can I repay the debt I owe to my wife?” he murmured, his mouth hovering at the sensitive spot just behind my ear. He kissed the skin there, then shifted slightly lower and sank his teeth into my flesh hard enough that I suspected I might bruise.
I whimpered, trying to form a coherent thought that wasn’t drowned out in the sinful acts of Calix’s mouth and the filthy promise of what his mouth would do if I allowed it.
He released my throat, trailing calloused fingertips over my collarbone and brushing the strap off my other shoulder. “I want to be able to see her whenever I want,” I said, swallowing as his fingers went to the zipper at the back of my dress.
He guided it down slowly. “I won’t have you around my father without me present. I don’t trust him with you.”
“But you trust him with my sister?” I snapped, spinning on my heels to glare at him.
“He won’t harm either of you unless he wants to find his way into an early grave, but we both know that words have a far greater capacity to hurt you than any physical abuse he could inflict. He stands to gain nothing by spewing his nonsense at Malva, but if he believes he can drive a wedge between you and I, he will torment you. I won’t subject you to the verbal warfare he will use to harm you. I’ll have my mother bring her here when you want to see her if I cannot accompany you. Is that acceptable, λουλούδι μου?” he asked, grasping my chin and holding it as he leaned down to press his lips to mine.
He lingered just a breath away, giving me time to respond before he took from me. I knew what would happen the moment he viewed our negotiations to be over. I glanced back at the kitchen island, swallowing and sighing. “Yes. That’s acceptable to me, η ψυχή μου.”
His mouth spread into a closed smile, pressing into mine as he dropped his hands to the top of the boned bodice of the dress and pressed it down. I shimmied my hips to help him get the structured top down over them, closing my eyes when he touched a hand to the small of my back and drew me against his chest.
Something about the fabric of his suit touching me felt like sin. It felt like being his plaything, with him perfectly composed. He draped my hair over one shoulder, spinning me to face the island again. His fingers grasped the waistband of my underwear, tugging them slowly over my ass until they slid down my thighs and fell to my feet. “Up on the counter, Little One,” he ordered, laying a sharp slap on my ass. The swat echoed through the kitchen, making me turn a shocked look at him as I climbed up onto the stool beside me.
Using that to get up onto the counter, I hesitated as the hard marble dug into my shins and knees. “I’m not sure—”
“Bend,” Calix said, holding my questioning gaze as I glanced at him over my shoulder. I swallowed, leaning my body forward and touching my hands to the countertop. Calix spread my knees slightly, and the coolness of the air conditioning kissed my bare pussy as my thighs opened.
He didn’t touch me, leaving me in that position while I waited in the silence for his touch. But there was nothing, just the sound of my breathing. I turned to glance over my shoulder, earning a sharp slap of his palm against my ass cheek again.
“Ow!” I screeched, turning forward again.
“Did I say you could move?” he growled.
“I was seeing if you’re still there! What the hell are you doing?” I asked, a flush heating my cheeks when I thought of him behind me, doing God knows what with my pussy and ass bared to him.
“I’m enjoying the view. There is more to savoring a meal than simply eating it, Little One,” he said. His hands finally touched the top of my ass, sliding over the oversensitive skin that must have been pink from his harsh treatment.
He lifted my cheeks, spreading them wide as everything inside of me clenched. “I don’t think—”
“There is no corner of your body that will be hidden from me. No part of you I will not know intimately. I may not take your ass today, but I will when I decide you’re ready. There’s no point in hiding it from me,” he said, and the warmth of his breath brushed over that part of me.
I whimpered, squirming and trying to force my hips to still. I was under no disillusion of what he might do if I moved against his instructions.
He’d made that much very clear.
His breath dipped lower, caressing the heat of me. I waited for the first brush of his tongue against my folds.
I was wholly unprepared for the way he sprang on me, because the first brush of his tongue was not soft or tentative. It was the kiss of a man who knew what he wanted, the firm pass of a tongue through my flesh a reminder of whose pussy it was. He devoured it from the first touch, getting to know every inch of me before sliding his tongue inside and fucking me with it.
“Fuck,” I groaned, hanging my head forward as he licked me like his life depended on it.
His mouth disappeared as quickly as it had touched me, his fingers replacing his tongue as he slid two inside of me and curved them. Pumping them ruthlessly, he stroked over my g-spot with expert precision. “Calix,” I murmured.
“That’s right, wife,” he said in return, pressing a kiss to my lower back. He dropped his mouth lower, kissing over the curve of my rear and biting the flesh harshly. I squealed, knowing that the bite itself would leave a mark. “This is where you belong. Whimpering and needy for my cock, your pussy dripping wet and practically begging me to fuck it.”
He pulled his fingers free, grasping me around the hips and tugging me down from the island. I scrambled to grab hold of the far edge as my legs dangled until my toes could barely brush against the ground. I’d only just found my purchase when he unzipped his pants, lined his cock up with my entrance, and shoved inside.
I grunted, arching my back into him as he filled me. Wrapping his hands around my throat, he pulled my head back and held it against his chest, pinning me still. Pressing me between his cock and his hands on my throat, he pounded with ruthless thrusts that struck the end of me. The pinch of pain entwined with my pleasure as I saw stars and my eyes rolled back in my head.
Calix’s dark chuckle made his chest shake. “You’re so fucking perfect for me, aren’t you, my flower?” he asked, something dark tinting his voice deeper. “Here I was thinking I’d have to work you up to taking me the way I’ve wanted to fuck you, but you’ll just keep begging me to fuck you harder.”
He dropped a hand to my clit, stroking it as he moved inside of me with furious strokes. “You’re not a girl who was broken by her life. You handle yourself like a queen, and you’re going to make me into a fucking king,” he grunted, shoving deep.
My orgasm crashed over me as I cried out, turning my legs to jelly as they trembled and struggled to hold me up. Only Calix’s hold on me kept me standing; only the place where I was impaled on his cock kept me from collapsing to the floor.
He kept fucking me as I went limp, chasing after his own release until he grunted, his cock twitching deep inside as he filled me with his release.
It wasn’t until he released my throat and let me straighten my neck that I realized how battered my body felt. How exhausted I was. When he pulled his cock free from my pussy, the rush of fluid that followed made me spin to glare at him.
Every time he finished inside of me was another shock, as if it was the first time. I couldn’t seem to remind myself enough that he wanted me pregnant, while I just wanted to discover myself as a person first.
I glanced down at where it dripped down my thighs, drawing Calix’s attention to it. He used two fingers to gather up the evidence of his orgasm, slipping them back up to my pussy and pressing those fingers inside of me once more. A brutal smirk twisted his lips and his eyes gleamed in victory as I swallowed. “A good girl doesn’t waste what she’s given, λουλούδι μου.”
