Chapter 28
KILLIAN
Death day has come for Wilmore’s uprising.
The Lordes and Wildes have spent the past week weeding out what remains of his sick plan to avenge his family’s extinction. In the meantime, Logan and I have spent nights together, sharing blissful experiences like the ones we shared on the floor of my study.
By Friday, the last of the men we searched for is killed, and we share a celebratory fuck.
He likes it rough.
He likes it to hurt, but only just enough.
He likes to be taken.
And bred.
As he lies across the bed, his wrists tied to the headboard slats, he catches his breath in a way that’s becoming familiar to me. I push up close to him, pressing my abs against his side as I force another kiss.
“I can definitely get used to this,” I whisper into his mouth, thinking that soon, he really will be mine to possess entirely.
He snickers, a reprieve from the intensity I’m used to with him, especially in passion-filled moments.
I admire his figure, the perfect shape of his body, which I’m learning is in no small part due to his dedication to his fitness, the time he spends running in the courtyard and working out in our fitness center.
I move my hand down his body, the muscles that feel so good to caress and grip on to when I fuck him. My touch settles where his cum is pooled in his navel, and I enjoy each rise and fall of his abdomen as he takes steadying breaths.
“Do you feel better?” I ask him.
“I guess you fucked me okay,” he teases, but even as a joke, it pisses me off.
“Hush. You know I’m not talking about the fuck. That was a given. Now that we’ve eliminated Wilmore’s threat.”
“Yes. I’ll sleep a lot better knowing those fucks are dead.
And I’m sure Malaki and Rory will be relieved they can get back to school.
They’re both very social creatures, unlike me, and it must’ve been getting to them, being away from all that.
Also, it’s for the best because if it’d gone on any longer, Wrath would have wound up sneaking off and getting himself killed. ”
“That sounds like something he would do.”
We enjoy a laugh.
“Now the only thing left to do is set a date,” I say, eager to fully possess my Wilde man. “I would want to aim for next week. Maybe Saturday.”
His eyes widen. “Next week? Wow.”
“Too soon?” I press, anxious about his reply.
“No. I guess it’s better to get it over with.”
He’s not as eager as I would’ve hoped. If anything, he sounds resigned to his fate.
“Get it over with?” I ask, offended.
“No, I just…it’s obviously not how I imagined my wedding to be. Not that I’ve had much time to consider anything like that.”
It doesn’t bring me much comfort, and a part of me wishes I could be patient and give him the wedding he deserves. I grunt. I don’t like the thought of delaying this, but… “We could—”
“No, no. I want to be done with it,” he insists. “I’m sorry for reacting that way. Please, let’s do it next Saturday.”
Relief pulses through me. “It’s decided, then.”
His gaze drifts off as he seems to ponder some element of our wedding, maybe the timing or the practicalities.
Whatever it is, I want to know. “What are you thinking? Tell me.”
There’s a shift in his expression. This isn’t about the details or the resignation to the date. This is something else. What are you hiding from me, Log?
“Nothing,” he replies.
“Liar.”
“Really? After what we’ve been up to this week, you’re surprised I’m stressed?”
Despite the flurry of sensations in my belly from what we’ve shared and having him in my bed like this, there’s a sting of pain in my chest.
“You’re still lying.”
He’s quiet before saying, “Omitting.”
“If you were anyone else, I’d slap you right now for the way you’re hurting me.”
“Hurting you?”
I’m surprised by how thrown he appears to be. “I don’t like being lied to, and I don’t mind punishing those who hurt me.”
“Why don’t you just do it, then?”
“Because I only want to put you through the enjoyable kind of pain.”
He flinches, looking taken aback, then shakes his head. “I should get to bed.” He wiggles his wrists to indicate I should release him, as I’ve done every night since I killed Wilmore.
I start to loosen the knot but stop myself, my wicked gaze trailing over his body.
“I said let me go, Kill.”
An honorable man would obey. But I’m not an honorable man.
“Tell me what you’re thinking about.” I caress his chin with my fingertips, and he jerks it away.
“Just let me go. I want to shower and get to bed. I need to be out of here early.”
“Where are you going? You didn’t tell me you had plans.”
“I don’t need to tell you when I have plans.”
He’s so disobedient, but this time like he’s purposefully trying to grate on my nerves, and he knows how to do it so well.
“My little falcon trying to fly again.” I imagine him flapping his wings to gain some height, only to tumble back to earth. And I derive even more satisfaction from seeing him trapped right here beneath me.
“I really do need to get to sleep,” he insists.
“If you won’t tell me where you’re going, you’ll have to sleep here in my bed, covered in yourself and filled with my seed.”
He grits his teeth. “I guess you haven’t been listening in on my conversations, otherwise you’d know I was going to see Mom.”
Two thoughts come to me in quick succession: The first is that maybe I do need to bug more rooms now that he’s staying with me, and hire someone to go through the audio and tell me what he said and when. But more importantly… “Mom?”
To most of the world, Clara Wilde killed herself when Logan and his brothers were children. The underground, however, knows she’s locked away in a facility where those like the Wildes and the Lordes tuck away their darkest secrets.
“She’s locked away at—”
“I know where she is,” I clarify. “But why do you need to visit her?”
“She’s the only living parent I have, so I want to tell her about the wedding.”
“Get her blessing?”
He smirks wryly. “I doubt she’ll give me that, but I want to tell her before some other fuck has a chance to.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Maybe a year ago. Wrath visits her more regularly, every few months, but he’s the only one with some fucked-up connection to her.”
“Is it fucked up?”
He chews his bottom lip. He’s resisting telling me something else, and I find myself pissed about it.
“Tell me what you’re hiding,” I demand. I don’t mean for it to come out so angrily, but I can’t help myself. Just as I want him to submit to me, I want to know all his secrets. I want to download every thought he’s ever had into my brain, even the most painful parts.
“Tell me,” I say, gentler. “You are mine, which means your secrets are too.”
His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. His stoic expression and the tension I detect in his arms suggest the secret he carries isn’t anything to joke about.
I’m expecting defiance, but he says, “When we were kids, Mom snapped. I was a freshman in high school, and one day, when I got home, I saw blood everywhere, all our security murdered… I was so worried, thinking someone had come for our family, but then I found Wrath and Masters, who’d been tied up, and they revealed she was running a bath and intended to drown Malaki and Rory.
When I tried to free them, she tased me and tried to drown me in the tub.
” He speaks the words unemotionally, like someone who’s either dissociated from the experience or had so much time to dwell on the nightmare that it doesn’t faze him anymore.
Rage sears within me, not from sympathy, but from selfishness, knowing what being deprived of Logan would do to my body right now. “That’s horrible, Logan.”
He swallows again. “I managed to break free, fight her off, and render her unconscious. Dad figured out the rest to get rid of her.”
“She sounds evil. What kind of person does that to their own children?” I already know the answer, of course.
“She wasn’t always like that. She needed mental support, which she now gets at the facility, but I obviously don’t have warm feelings toward her, and I really can’t imagine how Wrath can after everything that happened.”
“But you still want to see her?”
“Blood is blood, right?” he insists, as if hoping I’ll tell him he doesn’t have to.
It’s true, though, and despite what he just shared, if it were my mother, I’d feel obligated as well.
“And as pissed as Dad was over it, I know he’d want me to,” he adds, eternally loyal to his father. It’s one of the many qualities I admire about him.
His eyes water, as if the pain he was dissociating from is catching up with him. It’s so beautiful seeing my wounded bird. He struggles with his restraints once again.
“Now let me go, Killian. You can’t need more than that.”
I place my hand against his face and force him to look at me. “I do need more than that. I need more than you can bear, but I won’t ask that of you. Just that you share this moment with me.”
“Let me go!” he demands, jerking his head away and twisting in his restraints. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it…it’s too much.”
I can tell how serious he is, so I untie him, figuring he’ll punish me for denying him his freedom sooner, but once he’s free, he comes at me quickly, hooking his arms around me and tugging me close. I freeze in place as he trembles against me, sniffling.
“Oh, my beautiful falcon,” I say, stroking my fingers through his hair. I keep him pressed against me, despising his mom for what she did to him, wishing I could go back to a time before she had the chance to traumatize him.
It takes Logan a moment to collect himself, and when he pulls away, it’s as though he’s yanked away a part of myself from me.
“I should get to bed,” he says, starting to get up, but I seize his wrist.
As his gaze meets mine, I tell him, “You won’t be sleeping anywhere but beside me tonight.”
In the nights he’s stayed with us, he’s kept to his room, but given the state he’s in, I don’t want him to be alone.
“I don’t think I’ll be good company tonight.”
“I don’t want good company. I want you.”
He considers this before yanking his wrists free of my grip, and I swear if he tries to leave me after what he’s just revealed, I’ll lose my goddamn mind.
“I should at least shower. I’m covered in me.”
“And filled with me,” I remind him, and a sliver of a smile creeps across his face, filling me with pride. I settle under the covers, commanding him, “Come here.”
He crawls to me and hooks his arm around me, resting his head against my chest, where it belongs. I slide my hand down to his torso, feeling some of his cum that still stains his flesh.
There’s a hollowness to him that I’m sure has to do with what he just shared with me.
As I think about that monster who tried to kill her own, I pull my hand to my face to taste my Logan, cherishing every drop while gripping him firmly, hoping he knows that if Death himself came to collect his soul tonight, it would be the biggest mistake Death ever made.