Chapter 9
I lit another cigarette from the dying ember of the last one. The army surplus cot creaked under my weight as I leaned back against the concrete wall and let the smoke curl past my lips without tasting it.
I thought about the blood on Diego’s chin. The split lip. The way he'd touched it with his fingertips after Danior landed that blow, casual, like it was nothing.
Something sick and wrong inside me had wanted to lick it off.
That was the part that disgusted me most, not the guilt that he'd fought for me, but the heat that had flooded through me when he'd done it.
When he'd stood there with blood on his mouth and said I was worth fighting for.
I was not worth fighting for. That was the fact of it.
I'd grown up bred to be a weapon, not a cause.
But my body had its own opinion, and my body was an idiot.
The room sat in the basement of Valentina's house, concrete and steel, built by people who understood that the world could turn hostile at a moment's notice.
The pile of cigarette butts by the cot leg had grown steadily.
I'd been here for what seemed like hours, long enough to go through most of my pack, staring at the flickering bulb overhead.
The door opened, and I stiffened before I registered who it was.
Diego filled the doorway like he'd been built to the exact specifications of the frame, broad shoulders and narrow hips, head ducked to clear the low ceiling. He still wore the shirt from the fight, stained with blood. His, Danior's, I couldn’t tell anymore.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The lock clicked, loud in the small concrete room. He crossed the floor toward me, each step measured, like he was giving me time to object. To run. To do anything but sit there with my heart hammering like I was seventeen again.
He stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him. His lip was still split, a dark line against the fullness of his mouth. A bruise was forming along his jaw where Danior had connected. He'd scraped his knuckles raw.
All of it because of me.
He reached down and plucked the cigarette from between my lips. "Enough," he said, and stubbed it out against the wall, letting it fall to join the others on the floor.
I started to speak, to apologize, to say something about the fight, but Diego grabbed my jaw hard enough to bruise. He dug his fingers into the hinge of my jaw and tilted my face up to his.
Then he pressed his lips to mine. I froze for a second, guilt still a cold weight in my stomach.
But then I opened for him, and I tasted copper from his split lip, reopened by the pressure.
The copper hit the back of my tongue and spread, and I pressed into it, my tongue running along the cut, chasing the taste of him.
I grabbed his shirt, bunching the fabric and pulling him closer. He came willingly, pressing me back against the wall, his body a line of heat against mine.
When he pulled back, he still gripped my jaw, holding me in place. "You done feeling guilty, or do I need to fuck it out of you?"
My heart hammered so hard I was sure he could sense it.
A small, satisfied smile curved his mouth, pulling at the split in his lip. "That's what I thought."
He grabbed my shirt and yanked. I landed on my back on the cot, Diego following me down, his weight pressing me into the thin mattress. The concrete wall bit cold against my bare shoulders.
He knelt over me, one knee on either side of my hips, looming in the flickering light. The hunger in his expression made my breath catch.
"Been thinking about this since the day we met," Diego said, his voice low. "Since you kicked in my door with that fucking sword and told me to get down."
We'd been on opposite sides then. He'd been transporting something for the Pantheon. I'd been sent to intercept it.
I'd let him go. That had been my first mistake.
Diego pressed his lips to my throat, teeth scraping over my pulse point. He bit down, hard enough to bruise, and I arched under him. He worked his way across my collarbone, biting, sucking, each spot he touched turning into a mark.
Then he set his nails against my chest.
He dragged them down slowly, from collarbone to the bottom of my ribs. Not hard enough to break the skin. Just enough to leave white lines that flushed pink in his wake.
My cock jerked against my stomach.
I sucked in a breath so fast it hurt. Diego stopped, his hand flat against my ribs, and looked at my face. Then he looked down at my cock. Then back at my face.
"Oh," he said softly. Recognition moved behind his eyes, like a tumbler falling into place. "Yeah?"
I couldn’t answer. My brain was still trying to catch up with what my body had just done.
Diego set his nails against my skin again, just below my left collarbone. This time he pressed harder. The sting sharpened into something brighter, something that lit up every nerve between the point of contact and my groin. He dragged down slowly, and I could sense the welts rising in his wake.
My hips bucked off the cot.
"Fuck," I managed.
"There it is." Diego's voice had dropped into something low and rough, the same focus he brought to engines and locks and things he was taking apart to understand. He stared at the welts like he couldn’t quite believe what he'd just found.
"All this time, guapo. All this time, and you just needed someone to leave a mark. "
He did it again, harder, four parallel lines from my shoulder down across my pec. The welts rose immediately, angry and red, and the sting rolled through me in a wave that made my toes curl. I groaned before I could stop myself.
"That's it. Let me hear you." He repositioned himself, settling his weight lower, so he straddled my thighs, and set both hands on my ribcage, fingers spread, and dragged all ten nails down my sides in one long pull.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t human. My spine arched off the cot. The lines burned, and I wanted more.
"Harder," I whispered. "Diego. Harder."
He looked at me like I'd just handed him something precious and breakable and told him to squeeze. "You sure?"
"I'm sure."
He set his nails at the top of my chest and dragged down with real pressure. Skin broke. The sting sharpened into a bright, clean pain that sang through every nerve in my body, and the first thin lines of blood rose in the tracks of his nails.
"Jesus Christ, Jasper." His voice was hoarse. "You should see yourself right now."
He bent and dragged his tongue along one of the welts, and the wet heat against the raw, sensitized skin sent a full-body shudder through me.
I grabbed the back of his head and held him there.
He did it again, tracing the line with his tongue from my ribs to my collarbone, tasting the blood and the salt of my skin.
"More," I said against the top of his head. "Don't stop."
Diego shifted and straddled my hips. The rough fabric of his pants dragged against my bare cock and I hissed, grinding up into the friction without meaning to. He pressed his weight down, pinning me.
He set his nails against the inside of my thigh, close to the crease where leg met hip, and scored four slow lines into the tender skin.
I moaned and grabbed his shoulders, nails digging in, and he hissed but kept going.
He did the other thigh, same pressure, same pace, and The cot rattled against the wall every time I moved.
My knee caught the metal frame, and the pain was nothing, just another signal lost in the flood.
I'd been cut before, stabbed, sliced open in training and in the field, and none of it had ever done this.
But Diego's nails on my skin weren’t violence.
They were something else entirely, something I had no word for yet.
"You gonna come from this?" Diego pressed both palms flat against my chest, over the marks, over the welts, and the broad pressure against all that raw skin made me cry out.
"Two months of you flinching every time I touched your shoulder in that kitchen, and this is what you actually wanted.
" His voice dropped. "Dios mío, Jasper. If I'd known, I'd have scratched my name into you that first week. "
I dug my fingers into his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
He leaned down and set his teeth against the curve of my neck, right over the mark he'd already left. Then he reached between us and dragged his nails down the length of my cock. The bright, stinging drag of his nails along the shaft sent every nerve in my body into freefall.
My whole body locked up, every muscle seizing at once.
I came hard, pulsing against his hand, come streaking across the welts and scratches he'd left on my skin, mixing with the thin lines of blood. The sound I made echoed off the concrete walls, loud and raw, and I couldn’t muffle it because I had both hands locked on his shoulders and couldn’t let go.
Diego held me through it, his weight pressing me into the cot, his mouth still on my throat, his hands flat and warm against the marks he'd made. He ground down against me through each wave, giving me pressure, giving me something to push against.
When the aftershocks finally stopped and my muscles unlocked, I lay there wrecked, staring at the ceiling, lungs heaving. Diego pushed himself up on his arms and looked down at me.
"Mierda," he breathed. He traced one of the raised lines on my chest with a fingertip, so gently it almost tickled. "Jasper. That was..."
I couldn’t speak yet. My throat was raw and my brain had gone offline.
He pressed his forehead to mine. "You're incredible. You know that?"
I closed my eyes and breathed him in: sweat, copper, garlic from whatever he'd cooked this morning, the sharp tang of cum. The marks on my chest and ribs and stomach throbbed in time with my pulse.