Blackthorne

13. Shape of Obedience

SHAPE OF OBEDIENCE

DRACO

The study door closed behind us with a sound that felt final. I had not slammed it. I had not needed to. The house understood me too well, and the latch caught with enough weight to make the room go still.

The fire was already burning. The manor must have lit it while we were in the car, thoughtful bastard that it was.

A decanter sat untouched on the edge of the desk, and I did not pour from it.

I stood with my back to them and looked at the fire and gave myself ten seconds to decide what kind of man I was going to be in this room.

I chose honesty.

“Close the door properly, Mateo.”

His hand was already on the handle. “Boss.”

I turned. “Don't start with me. I have the explanation. What I don't have is a reason why you let it happen.”

His jaw tightened. “He was here all morning. He was in the foyer when I stepped out. Thirty seconds.”

“Eighty-three seconds, foyer to gate. He counted them.” That landed, which was the point. “He planned this while you took your morning call like a man on holiday. Your job was one thing.”

“I know what my job was.”

“Then you understand why I'm stripping you of primary detail until further notice.”

“That's not fair.”

Nico's voice came from the middle of the room, and I looked at him.

“Don't punish him for what I did,” he said. “Mateo did his job. I looked for the gap because I knew he was good enough that there'd only be one.”

“That is not a defense of him. That is an indictment of you.”

“I know.” He held my gaze. “So come at me, then.”

“You nearly died, Nico.” It came out louder than I'd meant it to. The decanter shivered on the desk, and Rowan changed his weight by the door without looking at either of us.

“Yeah, I did. And here's the part I keep getting stuck on. You weren't surprised. Whatever tore out of me in that alley, you already knew it was there.”

“You are under my protection.”

Mateo had gone carefully still. Rowan was studying the far wall with the discipline of a man who wanted very badly to be somewhere else. Nico stepped closer.

“I'm a line item in your ledger with a pulse. You keep me breathing because losing me would cost you.” His voice shook and did not stop. “I am so fucking tired of living inside your control without the courtesy of knowing what I am to you.”

The fire lowered itself in the grate. Even the house thought the room had gotten too hot. And I was aware, very precisely, of the necklace under his coat.

“You want me to tell you what you are to me. All right. I want something from you in exchange, because this is not working. You running is not working. My people watching you run is not working. And I do not have the patience left tonight to keep managing the consequences. So we are going to change the arrangement.”

He went still.

“Stricter confinement,” I said. “Or consequences.”

“Define consequences.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Say it plainly. You want to punish me.”

“I want you to understand that protocol exists because the city outside those gates will kill you without ceremony if I'm not standing in front of it.”

“Then do it. But understand that choosing this isn't the same as you winning.”

“I know,” I said. “That's the only reason I'm asking.”

I nodded to Rowan and a hand settled on the back of Nico's neck, and the wall between the bookshelves became the only direction left to him.

Nico went to it with his chin up and his jaw set and the whole line of his spine refusing, on principle, to say anything that could be mistaken for yielding, and I wanted to take that composure apart so badly that I crossed to the desk and opened the second drawer before I trusted my hands with anything else.

The paddle had been in there a very long time.

Dark leather over a solid core, and the heft of it in my palm said what it was for before anything else did.

I had not had cause to use it in years, and I had never wanted to use it on a particular person, which was a different and more dangerous appetite, and one I was choosing not to examine.

I weighed it once across my hand, and the leather warmed against my cold skin almost at once.

Mateo took the coat off him, and Nico let it happen, one cheek nearly to the paneling, his hands open at his sides in a stillness that was costing him to keep. The shirt came off after it. The necklace stayed, dark against his bare chest, and the sight of it almost undid me.

“Hands up,” I said.

Rowan drew his wrists to the iron set into the shelf, which had never been decorative, and the moment his arms went over his head, his breathing changed

I walked around him once and took my time about it.

“Are you going to behave,” I said, close to his ear, “or are we going to be here a while?”

He turned his head just far enough to cut me a look over his shoulder, and he spat at me.

“Go fuck yourself, Draco.”

I laid my palm flat between his shoulder blades, and the contact went through him like a current, and I dragged my thumb once down the line of his spine, light, unhurried, until I felt the muscle jump under it.

“You don't get to choose how long this lasts,” I said. “You get to choose how loud.”

The first strike landed across the seat of his jeans.

His spine pulled taut and his mouth stayed shut, and under the crack of it I could hear two things he could not hide from me, his breath climbing and his heart climbing faster.

He was setting his jaw against the count.

I let the silence after it stretch, because silence was its own discipline, and a long time ago I had learned that the space between blows was where a man taught himself the lesson, and I was content to let him teach himself a little before I corrected the rest.

The second landed harder.

“Protocol exists because your blood is now a known quantity to three separate factions who want to get into this house.”

I hit him again, harder than that, and the leather cracked clean, and the breath he could not quite swallow came out through his nose, and the back of his neck went red under the hairline. He hissed. He did not tell me to stop. I leaned in until my mouth brushed the edge of his ear.

“You think I locked the gate because I enjoy watching you pace. I don't.”

“Could've fooled me.”

A smile almost reached my mouth, and did not.

“Until I know who sent them and what they want, you do not walk out of this house alone. You do not take a train. You do not run errands. You do not test my security because you're angry at me.”

His breath caught, and his chin came up anyway. “So I'm grounded.”

“No,” I said. “You're alive. And if you want to hate me for keeping you that way, get in line.”

“Very generous of you.”

“I'm known for it.”

That earned me the smallest sound from him.

I gathered his hair in my hand and tipped his head back, just enough to remind him where the leverage lived, not hard, not yet, and his pulse leapt against my wrist where I held him.

He liked that I'd moved on him, and he hated that he liked it, and both truths fought it out across his face where he could not hide either one.

The fourth strike drew a real sound out of him, and it went through me like a key into a lock I had not opened in a very long time.

I set one hand flat on the wall beside his shoulder, close enough that he could feel the cold coming off me against the warmth of the paneling, and put my mouth near the side of his face.

“Still confusing defiance with freedom, little debt?”

“Still confusing punishment,” he said, rough and entirely undefeated, “with having something to say.”

I used a fraction of my real strength on the next one.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He turned his head and looked at me with those eyes, and I came very close to going somewhere I could not come back from. I stepped back and let the air do half the work of holding me where I was.

“Look at me,” I said.

He made me wait for it. Then he turned his head and when his eyes found mine they were dark with fury.

“Good,” I said softly. “Stay there.”

I crouched in front of him.

“Clean my shoe, Nico.”

His gaze dropped to the leather, then came back up to my face.

Then he spat on the shoe.

The room went silent. He looked up at me with his mouth still wet and his chin raised, daring me. I held his stare and let him have the moment, and let him feel exactly what it cost.

Then I stood, and looked at Rowan.

A hand came to rest at the back of Nico's neck and bore down, patient, indifferent to his resistance, until his forehead hung a few inches off the leather.

I crouched again, wiped the shoe clean with the pad of my thumb, and said nothing, because nothing needed saying.

I held him there a breath past necessary, and another, until the muscle in his shoulder started to tremble, and then I set two fingers under his jaw and tipped his face up to mine.

“There,” I said. “That wasn't humiliation. That was honesty. Don't confuse them.”

“I'm not.” His voice had gone quieter. The defiance had not left his eyes.

I held his jaw a second longer. The skin under my thumb was hot, and I felt the bloodstone shift against his chest as he breathed, and the pull of it sharpened in me until letting go of him and putting my hand back at my side was harder than any of the strikes had been.

I looked at Mateo. He was already watching me, and his face said he knew precisely what I was managing and was, in the professional sense, prepared to be useful about it.

He had been in the house long enough to tell an order I was about to give from an order I was avoiding, and tonight he was looking at both at once.

“Come here,” I said.

Mateo went to him and set a hand to his jaw first, gentle in a way the size of the hand did not predict, and Nico looked back at him with that burnt, furious, wanting face and breathed, “Yes, just, yes,” before Mateo had asked him anything at all.

It was the clearest consent the room had produced all evening, so I let it count.

What came after, I watched. Pride held Nico three seconds longer than his spine did, and then it didn't, and his head dropped back against the paneling and his hips rolled and Mateo took the weight of him and set the pace with a steady hand and a mouth that knew its work.

I stepped in close enough that the back of my hand brushed the bloodstone, set my palm to the wall beside his head, and put my mouth near his temple until the smell of him was the only thing in the room.

“Look at me, Nico.”

He did, and the effort of it showed. His eyes were wet at the corners and bright at the centers, and he was three seconds from coming apart, and I was the thing he had to keep looking at while it happened.

“This is what it feels like to be kept,” I said against his skin. “Remember it the next time you decide the gate is a suggestion.”

His mouth opened on no sound. I let him hang there.

“I'm going to ask you something, and you're going to answer me honestly, because I will know if you don't.”

His eyes cut sideways without his head moving. “Then ask.”

“When I put Ilya down. Did it turn you on?”

His pupils widened a hair, his throat worked, and the heat coming off his skin shifted into a register I had spent three days pretending not to track. I had told myself it was the necklace I was reading. I had told myself a number of things.

“I don't...”

I caught his jaw between thumb and finger. “I could smell you, Nico. You smelled like every want you have ever had at once, and you have been pretending since then that I didn't notice. I noticed. Tell me the truth.”

His lips parted, his hips jerked without his permission, and it came out of him.

“Yes.”

The room held the word.

“Yes what.”

“Yes, it, fuck, Draco, yes, it turned me on. Watching you do it. Watching how easy it was for you. How quiet.” His voice broke on it and he shut his eyes against me, which I could not allow.

“Look at me when you say it.”

He looked at me. “It turned me on. Are you happy?”

“No. But I am paying attention.”

I let go of his jaw and slid two fingers down the side of his throat, following the carotid like a road on a map I had memorized lifetimes ago.

His pulse jumped under them, the answering pull came up at the back of my own teeth, and I let him feel the shape of my hand resting there, over the place I had decided, a very long time ago, not to take.

Mateo took him to the root and stayed, and Nico's whole frame shook against the wall, the iron above him creaking once under the weight of his pulled wrists.

“Draco,” he managed, wrecked. “If you don't...”

“If I don't what?”

“Let me, please...”

“No,” I said softly, and a small shift of my eyes sent Mateo's hand tighter at his hip and changed his pace again, and that was the cruelty of it: every drag of his mouth a held note, every breath Nico took the breath of a man trying not to come and being denied even the dignity of the trying.

I stepped back half a pace to watch, then looked at Rowan. “Belt.”

He understood at once, uncoiled the leather from his own waist, and I looped it once around Nico's throat. His breath stuttered above it, his cock pulsed, and Mateo had to grip harder to keep him still.

He was close. It struck me, watching him, that he guarded himself against pleasure the same way he guarded himself against pain, and that I wanted, very much, to be the thing that finally took the guard down.

“Stop,” I said.

Mateo pulled off clean, sat back on his heels, and looked at me. Nico sagged against the wall, cock flushed and untended, chest heaving under the necklace, eyes very bright.

“Draco.” Most of the edges had gone out of his voice. “Don't you dare...”

“You're done,” I said.

The silence was enormous.

“Bastard,” he said, very quietly, with great feeling.

“Yes.” I looked at Rowan. “Release his wrists. Take him upstairs, clean him up, put him to bed.”

Mateo rose without saying the thing he was thinking, which I appreciated. The iron gave up Nico's wrists, and he came down off the wall slowly, reassembling himself in real time, and he put his shirt back on without looking at me.

Then he went out between Mateo and Rowan.

I sat down on the edge of the desk and pressed the heel of my hand to my chest.