Chapter 27
Blistering heat warps the air, strobe lights cutting through the haze of smoke. A potent mixture of sticky spliffs, sweet tobacco and fruity vapes. The air wavers in front of me like heat in a desert, despite the icy, minus-degree temperatures outside. In here, it’s like a furnace.
Blaze’s arm slung heavily over my shoulders is a welcome weight. Such a difference to how it felt only weeks ago. I don’t flinch at the contact now, his heat pushing beneath my skin, making itself a home there.
The feel of his skin on mine, my shoulders and upper back bare with the strapless top I’m wearing, sets me alight. It’s lazy, the hold he has on me, his muscular limb draped around me leisurely. But his hold on my hand, my elbow bent, fingers stretched up to intertwine with his as it hangs over my shoulder, is anything but languid. It sears me from the outside in. Souls knitting together with hellfire and blood. The grip tight and possessive. He could snap every little bone in my hand, just like this, but he won’t.
It feels strange to know that now.
Weeks of fighting and fucking and hating. All of them have brought us to this. Some strange semblance of a new normality.
Blaze walks us through the crowd of dancers, the three other men at our backs, close enough to touch, but one of them, still, just a little too far.
Cole is close but keeping his distance, untouching, but it’s like I can feel those fiery orange-hazel eyes searing into the back of my neck like the core of a blue flame. I want to fall into him. His big, strong body, smooth dark skin, fist my fingers in his short, black curls, and climb back up into his lap, straddle that muscular, scarred thigh and ride him like I did only a few days ago.
I don’t know if he’ll ever let me, even though Blaze isn’t going to slit his throat for it now. I’m almost certain he still won’t touch me. Even now, one kiss. More stolen. I can’t imagine him giving in to me. I’m not sure he believes in whatever it is that’s happening between us.
Emotion chokes my throat, and I want to turn my head, look back at him over my shoulder. See him. But I don’t. I already know what he’d do. Glance away from me, peer around the room, have those beautiful eyes on everything but me.
Bodies roll and grind and cling together. Sweat slicked skin, a tinny, booming eruption of gritty grind music blasting from the speakers. It penetrates the inside of my skull like a hammer to the head. Long, blunt needles pushing into my eardrums, buzzing rising in volume. Everything feels echoey, as the bass of the music thuds through me like a pulse. Starting in my feet, thrumming up my spine, pounding in rapid tempo with my thundering heart.
I feel it in my chest, the atmosphere consuming me, like a monster’s dripping maw unhinging at the jaw, gaping. Preparing to swallow me whole. It makes me think of Flint. The tattoo across the front of this throat, the mouth of a demon, and the prospect of being eaten alive suddenly doesn’t feel so frightening.
If it’s by him.
Green, blue and red light cuts through the smoke like lightning bolts. The high ceilings not much more than a thick haze, an endless grey sky that has no end, no heaven on the other side of it, just nothingness. It’s like the outside tonight, rain, wind. Endless and swirling and maddening as we edge closer and closer to Christmas.
Weeks where no one seems to have looked for me. If they have, then they haven’t found me. The boys haven’t been on edge, both Blaze and Cole have each taken me out of the towers. No hiding, no secrecy when we’re out, though Cole and I haven”t been further than the gym that he runs, Blaze has dragged me out to numerous different shops and locations, and never once has tried to hide me.
I think it hurt, at first, when Blaze said no one was looking for me. That no one would. But since our talk, the things about my dad, all of it playing heavily on my mind. I’m not sure I’d want them to look for me, anyway.
I glance to the left, my chin brushing over the back of Blaze’s flame tattooed fingers as he continues to walk us through the automatically parting dancers. Towards the windows at the far end of the room, a view beyond I can’t see, but know it like it were the back of my own hand.
Concrete, graffiti, sky high tower blocks owned and ruled and occupied by The Ashes Boys’ crew. Hundreds of people that run guns and weapons, and are trusted by my boys. Owned by them. And I suppose, maybe, now, they’re also owned by me.
Family.
Flint’s long fingers brush my lower spine, electrifying my skin with little sparks as he grazes those black-painted nails across the sliver of exposed skin between my high waisted jeans and black top, trying to pull my attention, my eye.
My gaze though, despite Flint’s devious touch that hits me deep down in my core with a slash of heat like a knife through my belly, a mixture of thrill and fear and fright compels me to look up.
The devil’s inky eyes are already flicked down, those long curls of obsidian lashes a splayed fan atop them as he dips his face to mine.
“You think I don’t know when one of them touches you?” he asks, his voice deep, monotone, just loud enough for me to hear over the music. “I know everything.” Licking my lips before I pull the bottom one in between my teeth, he watches the movement, slowly dragging those onyx orbs from my mouth to my eyes. “It is with my permission, Pretty Girl. I can take it away,” he says casually, reaching up with his free hand and tugging my bottom lip free.
“No,” I whisper, the pad of his thumb stroking across the front of my lower teeth, shaking my head, and he can’t possibly hear me, not in here above the din, but his teasing mouth lifts a little at one corner.
“No?” he repeats my answer as a question, the tip of his thumb grazing my tongue, still walking us forwards without any worry of bumping into something.
After all, he is the only reason the earth rotates, the birds sing, and the sun rises and sets. This devil of mine, he controls the world and everyone in it. So of course they part for him as though demanded.
I swallow, “No.”
That’s when I see it, that tiny thread of jealousy. Thrumming in the back corner of his jaw, a jump to the pulse in his neck, and there’s a vein, sometimes, when he’s really mad, that pops up bright blue in his left temple. That’s what it does now, a frown denting between my brows. And keeping my eyes on it, I reach up with my free hand, running my fingertip over the squiggly ridge of it.
“You love me, Pretty Girl?” Blaze rasps the question, low and throaty and thick.
I gasp in response, my heart thundering in my chest, galloping hooves attacking my ribcage. Lungs and feet both stilling, I hold my breath, peering up into those deep, dark gravel pits of all-seeing eyes. We’re stopped then, in the middle of the room, dancers grinding all around us, our three other men moving in to surround us. They won’t listen in, like some unwritten law, but they’ll wait, and they’ll watch, keeping us safe.
I’m not really sure how I can even begin to answer. When I think I’ve known since childhood how I feel about him. Somehow, this is different.
After everything we’ve been through, the secrets I know he’s still keeping, because Blaze McCoy is nothing, if not secretive. But I’m at the stage where I’m trusting it, instead of questioning it. Lately, he hasn’t given me any reason not to.
I think back to the night we collided, only weeks ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
I am so consumed here.
By these men.
This place.
Everything haunting.
But nightmares and dreams were always meant to war.
It is my greatest sin, willingly staying here, and yet, I do not want to repent.
And this man before me, who is possessively obsessed with me but is, albeit his jealousy, sharing me with the three men he loves more than anything else in the world. Because it makes me and them happy. And Blaze McCoy would do anything for his family. Which now, incredibly, includes me. Perhaps it always did, and I was just too far away to realise.
It’s that realisation that something inside of me starts to unfurl, softening to him, a slow, simmering heat, long devil fingers curling around my heart and choking my throat.
I look into his eyes, the colour of a starless night’s sky, and I wonder why I was ever afraid of the dark. When I could have just imagined it was this. His arm around my shoulder curling me in towards him, chest to chest as he gazes at me with his darkness.
“I love you,” I tell him, and I feel it in my soul, my marrow, that it’s true.
In fact, I don’t believe there has ever been anything truer.
And it’s in his eyes. This bright blazing hellfire burning through his irises, making them look like oil slick as he brushes his lips over mine. Licking into my mouth with a fervour that cannot be matched, that he tells me he loves me too.
Fire burns in my lower belly, wetness already seeping from my clenching core, desperate and wanting of him and only him. He has ruined me.
“You’re all I’ve ever wanted,” he breathes into my mouth, kissing me again.
It’s like sipping shadows, this kiss, as his tongue rolls across mine, plunging deep, feeding me all of his darkness and sins like they’re my very own. And I welcome it, everything he has to give me because I’m not going anywhere.
Nowhere without you.
Did you ever think of me?
I asked him before, before we got to this place, and he ignored my question, making my heart clench painfully in my chest when he wouldn’t answer. But this, now, I think I know.
Because it’s the very same answer I’d give him if he asked me the same.
Always.
Blaze releases me, a soft kiss to my lips that feels like ice compared to the way he plundered my mouth with hot, fiery flicks of his tongue, but I love it all the same.
Him.
Drawing back, his eyes reluctantly leaving mine, he scans the room, uncurling me from his chest so we’re both facing forward once more and continues to lead me across the room.