Chapter 9 #2
I'd never come like that before. Not from hands or mouths, or anything else. I'd come from being marked. From Diego reading my body like a set of blueprints and following every signal it gave him until I broke.
I opened my eyes. He was still above me, hard in his pants, his cock pressing against my hip.
"Don't," he said when I reached for him. "This was about you."
I stared at him. Something behind my ribs gave way, quiet and permanent, like a lock turning.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I'd spent my whole life learning how to hurt people and how to stop them from hurting me, and nobody had ever covered this.
No training manual, no handler, no dead-eyed instructor in a concrete room like this one had ever said here's what you do when a man takes you apart with his bare hands and then refuses to let you pay him back for it.
He lowered himself beside me on the cot and pulled me against his chest, careful to avoid the worst of the welts.
I could feel his heartbeat thumping against my shoulder blade, steady where mine was still trying to find its rhythm.
He pressed his mouth to the back of my neck and just breathed there, warm and even, while the aftershocks twitched through my muscles and faded.
But the quiet held for only a moment. My nerve endings were stripped raw, every point of contact between skin and air registering at a painful frequency.
My body was sated, but my mind still buzzed, thoughts slipping in and out of focus like a radio caught between stations.
I needed something to ground me, something to narrow the world back down to a single input I could manage.
I needed his weight on my tongue.
I pushed Diego onto his back. He went, unresisting, and I worked his belt open with fingers that fumbled and shook.
This was not about reciprocation. This was not about getting him off.
This was about my nervous system reaching for something to regulate itself, the same way I reached for a cigarette or the hilt of a sword.
"Jasper," Diego said, his voice rough. "You don't have to—"
"Need to," I managed. "Need this. Just... let me."
Something in my voice must have told him what this was, because the want in his expression shifted into something quieter.
He lifted his hips, helping me pull his pants down and off.
I took him into my mouth, soft, and the weight of him on my tongue settled something that had been pulling tight in my chest.
The world contracted. The buzzing in my skull faded. The too-bright, too-sharp edges of every sensation softened into something I could tolerate. There was only this: the weight resting against my tongue, the salt-skin taste, the fullness pressing warm against my palate.
I closed my eyes and stayed there.
I wasn’t really sucking. My mouth was slack around him, jaw loose, lips barely closed.
I was just holding him the way you hold something fragile in your palm.
Every few breaths, my throat would work in a slow, half-conscious swallow, and my tongue would shift against the underside of him, but that was reflex, involuntary, the same absent rhythm as breathing.
Diego understood. I don’t know how, but he did. He rested his hand on my head, fingers threading into my hair, and stroked.
"That's it," he murmured. "I've got you, guapo. You're perfect. Just like that."
I breathed through my nose, slow and deep, and let the rhythm of it pull me down. The stroking in my hair, the weight in my mouth, the warmth of his thigh under my palm. Three points of contact. Three inputs I could track without drowning.
Time went somewhere else. I don’t know how long I stayed like that: his cock resting heavy on my tongue, my cheek pressed against his hip, his hand moving through my hair in that same slow pass.
Long enough that my jaw settled into a dull ache that became just another sensation to register and file away.
Long enough that my shoulders finally dropped.
Long enough that Diego's breathing changed from shallow restraint into something deeper, more even, like he'd found his own version of calm in the giving of this.
He kept talking, not constantly, but in waves. Sometimes a full sentence, sometimes a single word. Sometimes Spanish that blurred at the edges until I couldn’t tell where one language ended and the other began.
"There you go. Just rest. I'm not going anywhere." A long pause, his thumb tracing the shell of my ear. "You're beautiful like this, you know that? All that armor off. Just you." Another pause. "Eso es, carino. Eso es."
I was half gone, drifting in the space between awake and asleep, my mind quiet for the first time in months. Maybe years. Diego's voice threaded through the quiet like smoke, curling around me without demanding anything back.
"I could stay like this all night," he murmured. "Just you and me. Nothing else. You're so fucking perfect, Jasper. I wish you could see yourself."
That word hit me in the sternum. Perfect. Nobody had ever called me that. Effective, yes. Dangerous, competent, useful. But never perfect.
His cock started to thicken in my mouth.
"Easy," he said, more to himself than to me. "Easy. You're fine. We're fine."
I pressed closer against his hip and tightened my grip on his thigh. My whole body leaned into him like gravity had shifted and he was the new down.
Minutes passed, maybe longer. The thickening continued, gradual, his body filling my mouth by degrees while the rest of him stayed still. His breathing grew shallow again, like he was concentrating on keeping himself in check. He trembled once against my scalp and then steadied.
"Jasper." His voice was strained now, that low roughness pulled tight. "I need to tell you something."
I opened my eyes and looked up at him without pulling off.
He swallowed, his throat working. "I need to finish. You don’t have to be part of that if you don’t want, but…"
I held his gaze. Then I closed my eyes, settled deeper against his hip, and gave a slow, deliberate pull with my mouth. The first real one since I'd started.
Diego's breath shuddered out of him. "Fuck. Okay." He tightened his grip in my hair. "Okay. God, you feel good. You feel so good, guapo."
I kept the pace barely there. A slow pull, a release, another pull.
Less like sucking and more like breathing with my mouth full of him, a rhythm that belonged to sleep and tide pools and things that moved without thinking.
I curled my hand around his thigh, thumb tracing the muscle, and let the weight of him on my tongue do most of the work.
"That's it," Diego murmured, thrusting gently against my tongue. "Just like that. You're perfect. You're so—fuck, Jasper." His breathing went ragged. "I'm—Jasper, I'm gonna—"
Then a low groan pressed through his teeth, and my mouth flooded with the salty, bitter taste of his cum. I swallowed around him, unhurried, and kept him in my mouth as he pulsed and softened.
And then I stayed.
Even after he'd finished, even as he softened fully on my tongue, I kept him there. I pressed my face against his hip and breathed through my nose and held on.
Diego resumed stroking my hair. He just stroked and let me stay.
"Take your time," he said, quietly, steadily. "All the time you need."
I believed him. That was the most dangerous thing that had happened all night.
No one had ever offered me that before.
Eventually, jaw aching in a way I'd carry into tomorrow, I let him slip from my mouth.
The loss was immediate, a sudden emptiness that threatened to send me spiraling.
But Diego was already there, pulling me up, arranging us on the narrow cot.
We barely fit, both of us too big for the army surplus frame, but neither of us suggested moving.
He wrapped his arm around my waist and held me against him, his chest warm against my back.
"You did so good," he murmured against the back of my neck. "So good, guapo."
The world reassembled slowly: the concrete room, the flickering light, the sounds of the house above us.
Reality crept back in, but it brought none of the usual tension.
Diego's arm was around me, his breath was steady against my neck, and that word still sat behind my ribs like a coal that would not go out.
We lay like that for a while, his thumb tracing small circles against my hip, neither of us talking. The house above us had gone quiet.
"What happens tomorrow?" I asked, my voice rough.
Diego tightened his arm around me. "Tomorrow I finish what I started with Danior."
"He's good," I said.
"I know." Diego's voice was calm, matter-of-fact. "He's been fighting dirty since we were kids."
I turned in his arms, needing to see his face. "You need to win."
A smile curved his mouth, pulling at the split in his lip. "Planning on it, guapo."
"I mean it," I insisted. "If you lose—"
"I won't." His voice was firm and confident. "But if I did, would you run?"
The question caught me off guard. "What?"
"Would you run?" he repeated. "Take Eight and Lorenzo and get out while you could?"
I thought about it. About the easy escape routes, about how quickly I could move if I had to. About how many people I would need to kill to get us clear.
"No," I said finally. "I wouldn't run."
"That's what I thought." He traced a finger along my jaw. "That's why I need to win. Because you're too stubborn to save yourself."
I couldn’t argue with that assessment. Self-preservation had never been my strong suit.
"Stay," Diego said quietly. "After this, after tomorrow, whatever happens. Stay with me."
Every trained instinct in my body snapped to attention.
Stay. The word was a tripwire. Stay meant roots, meant a fixed position, meant someone always knowing where to find you.
Staying meant giving Achilles a permanent address.
Staying meant Eight growing up in one place long enough to learn that places could be taken away.
"I ruin things," I protested.
"Yeah, so do I." Diego's voice was steady. "I burn bridges, I get people killed, I dragged my whole family into a war they never asked for. You want to compare body counts? We'll be here all night."
"That's different."
"You think I'm asking because I don't know the cost? I know exactly what it costs. I just decided you're worth the price." He held my gaze. "So. Are you in or not?"
I stared at him. The split lip, the bruised jaw, the scraped knuckles. The man who'd punched his own cousin in the face for me and would do it again tomorrow and the day after that, and who was lying here asking me to let him.
"Yeah," I said. The word tore loose from somewhere deep and left a mark on its way out. "Okay. I'm in."
Diego smiled and leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine, a kiss that was gentle in a way that contradicted every mark we'd left on each other's bodies.
When he pulled back, he reached for my cigarettes on the floor. He lit one, took a drag, and passed it to me. We shared it in silence, the smoke curling between us in the flickering light.
"Get some sleep," I said after a while. "You need to be sharp tomorrow."
Diego's eyes were already heavy. "You'll sleep too?" he asked, though he knew the answer.
"Later," I lied.
He knew it was a lie, but he let it pass. Instead, he pressed his face into my neck, his breath evening out as sleep claimed him.
I stayed awake, the cigarette burning down between my fingers, the shadows dancing on the concrete walls. The katana lay on the floor beside me. The sword and I had an understanding: it asked for blood, and I gave it.
Diego shifted in his sleep, tightening his arm around my waist. The welts on my chest pulled with the movement, a sting that had no business being tender but was. I pressed my hand flat over the worst of the marks, the ones where he'd drawn blood, and held it there.
I’d given Diego my blood too when he asked. I’d give him a lot more.
I stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and settled in for my watch.