17. Wolfe Wallpaper Flowers
seventeen
Wolfe: Wallpaper Flowers
Everything in my life has to be just right. The pen on my desk. The clink of change I keep in my pocket to match my stride. The angle of Daphne’s photograph beside my bed so I can stare into her beautiful eyes whenever I rail Lyla from behind. All of it has a form, a place, and an outcome.
All but one.
The only person who has never been into puzzles is Threx.
I still remember the day he showed up outside the clubhouse in mismatched shoes.
Even untrained, he was a weapon. The type of man who could get their hands bloody and sleep at night.
You would think that virtue comes standard down here, but everyone has a line they won’t cross, and for Threx, her name was Daphne.
So I did what anyone in my position would do. I weaponized him, using his cold resolve to cast a net over what would become my inner circle: Jessie, Nathem, Blade, and Threx. All kings needed security, and Thayor Milo Gavros would be mine.
The only thing I didn’t account for was the pale star clinging to his arm, or her gift for humanizing monsters. It was dangerous and… intriguing.
Who would’ve thought a man like Threx had a built-in nightlight?
I mean, don’t get me wrong. We all had them from time to time, especially back then.
A little something to take the edge off, but they never lasted for too long because nothing grows in the Underworld but pain and rot.
Girlfriends came and went, and while there was never a shortage of naked, crawling things to sink your dick into, none of them mattered. But even I knew she was different.
Because around her, he was.
“I am Daphne,” she had uttered behind a bleak smile, surveying the unlit corridor beside the stairwell of the club dorms.
Threx, who was Thayor at the time, flexed. The notes in her voice shifted his entire physiology, and I watched. Daphne didn’t only make him work, control his breath, fill his lungs, and keep him walking straight, but she kept him sane. Lucid. In his skin.
Look, I’ve seen some twisted, fucked-up bonds in my life. You don’t escape the Underworld without them. But never had I come close to the amalgamation that was Threx and Daphne. It was as if their souls only mechanism for survival was to feed off each other for all eternity.
It was love, but not the kind you want to look in the eye. Famine. Feast. A thing that went bump in the night.
“We will be okay here,” Thayor promised, pulling her by the waist into his orbit.
He didn’t use the word safe and I admired him for it because she wasn’t. Especially not with me.
“Anything is better than a park bench.” She cracked a smile, winding into his center. The icy edges of his eyes shifted to her face, reading her expression entirely.
“We will see,” he grumbled, tucking a loose ringlet behind her ear. “But either way, I’ve got you.”
And he did.
Not with his words, or actions, or promises, but with his whole fucking body. Or his heart, if you believe in that kind of shit.
And she?
Fuck me. She had all of him. The bastard couldn’t regulate without her.
It became clear fast that whatever Threx you received that day, whether the cool, calculated assassin or the third-war nuclear bomb, stemmed directly from Daphne’s internal state.
If she were pissed at him, he would burn the world.
If she were sad, then fuck everyone’s opinion!
Watching her moods proved just as important as understanding his.
Daphne was his metronome, and he was her parasympathetic system, so imagine my surprise when I learned that he’d never touched her.
Not truly! Not in the one space that mattered.
“Hey?” she said months later, leaning in my doorframe, the collar on Threx’s shirt slightly torn from the way she was constantly tugging at it. “Mind if I hang out?”
I peered up from the book in my hand, wondering for a split second what she’d look like in my clothes before swatting the image away. Not only would Threx pulverize me if I touched her, but something told me I would never survive her. She was too close and yet too far.
“Threx fucking again?” I smirked, shifting over so she could crawl beside me.
This had been our little game for months, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to how she occupied my space, how her soap stayed on my pillow long after she left, settled something inside me. I knew it was dangerous, but there was a certain sweetness in the way she could never be mine.
Daphne smiled and nodded.
“Ever wonder why he doesn’t just fuck you?”
“All the time,” she admitted before collapsing onto my mattress. “Maybe I don’t do it for him.”
I gave myself permission to trace the line of her jaw, falling into the slope of her neck where several freckles liked to play.
Daphne was beautiful in the way nature offers a sudden burst of color amid a storm.
She didn’t have to work at it. The lines of her body alone did things to my dick I’d never thought possible.
“Blasphemy,” I declared, freezing when she buried her face in my arm.
I wasn’t the type of person who liked to be touched.
It felt like an assault on my senses, branding into my skin like dry ice.
But that sensation never happened with her.
In fact, I remember waiting for the urge to remove her from my orbit, and the feeling of death when the temptation to draw her near overpowered me instead.
All she had to do was look at me, and suddenly I was no longer floating away.
“You smell good,” she commented behind a yawn, rolling into my heat. The dorms were freezing, a tactic my father used to “build character.” Asshole. The only thing it built was sickness. I think I spent five years of my goddamn life with a cold.
“Like sweat and getting punched?” I asked in a laugh, still noticing the sting in my fist from the afternoon’s festivities.
“No,” she inhaled. “Try forest wind and vintage books,” she corrected.
Forest wind. God help me! If she were not so damn cute, I might smother her to death.
Daphne knew romance was lost on me. That humans were anything more than pieces of shit who sometimes got it right felt like the wrong kind of fiction to escape into.
It was illogical to believe in lies, but she…
she made me want to reach for it. Or at the very least, stare in the mirror long enough until whatever version of me she’d created to help her cope with the fact she was living with criminals came true.
It wasn’t.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s probably good that Thay doesn’t want me.”
She was always doing that, breaking the goddamn rules, calling him Thay, and draping herself over our humanity like a silent kiss.
“Why is that?”
She laughed into my muscles. “I don’t know,” she bit her lip. “Maybe I am not very good at it.”
“At what?” I closed my book, tossing her a look.
“Sex. I mean, it’s…”
What the hell was she talking about? Everything about this girl made me want to get naked.
More than that, she was intuitive, always searching for deeper meanings and underlying truths.
I had watched the way she adjusted when breaths changed, and muscles tensed, noticing how the slightest inflection in tone shifted her entire narrative.
If that wasn’t the recipe for a life-changing fuck, I didn’t know what was.
“What?” I stared down at her. “Sex is what?”
“Boring,” she confessed with a shrug, and I nearly died beside her. “Never intense enough. I mean, I don’t even come.”
Heat slid into my veins in slow, thinking waves.
Part of me wanted to find whoever touched her first and cut off his dick so I could shove it up Threx’s goddamn ass for allowing this to happen to her.
That some man taught her she was just a hole to fill and walk away from made all the quiet parts of me go violent, even if that was how I fucked most of the time.
“It’s probably me, though,” she took a breath. “Maybe I’m broken.”
I winced. She was too damn perfect to be fractured like the rest of us.
I knew it from the first time she slept beside Nathem until his fever broke, applying cold compresses to a stranger’s forehead, and the anchoring circles she drew on Jessie’s arms in the quiet light of the common room.
Nothing about Daphne was loud or performative; she just made everything better.
I stared down at her, feeling the shadows creep into my vision until my knuckles tightened.
“Daphne?” Her eyes snapped up, clocking the edge in my voice as if I had her by the throat.
There was another part of me that craved her in the dark. A strange ache I had never given to anyone else but wanted to give to her.
“Yeah?” She braced for impact.
So fucking smart. Such a good fucking girl.
My dick swelled and stretched toward her the way it had since the moment I saw her. I couldn’t help but get hard at the thought of being the person who would teach her all the things that she refused to admit to herself.
“You’re not broken.”
She quirked a brow, shoving me slightly. “Well, my body is.”
“No, it is not,” I growled again, hating how sure she was about this. “You are just fucking halfwits who don’t know a pussy from a hole in a wall.”
“Or,” she sneered, and my grip fell to the line of her panties. She eyed it warily, but continued to speak, “I am broken. Like I said!”
A trace of defiance hit me in the chest, and my hands dropped low between her legs in a tight squeeze.
“Oh,” she moaned as I rolled it against her, palming her so fucking hard until she was dripping. Sliding. Grinding. Taking the world with me!
“Doesn’t feel broken to me,” I whispered into her hair.
That was when I knew I wanted to wrap my arms around her pretty little throat forever.
Daphne whimpered when I removed my touch, and I would spend the rest of my night talking myself out of the very thing I would do to her hours later. I did not know then that the sound of her breaking over my cock would tie a knot in me so deep that I could never carve it out.