Chapter 29 Willow
WILLOW
Neither of us moves for a long moment, just lying there catching our breath in the suddenly quiet room. After a bit, Malice’s bulk gets too heavy, so I squirm under him, pushing a little at his chest.
He huffs a breath and pulls out of me, lifting himself up and off.
I roll over in bed as he collapses next to me, pulling me roughly into his arms. He nuzzles at my neck, and I look down at myself.
I’m even more of a mess now than I was when we started. There’s a mixture of blood and cum streaking down my thighs, and sweat cooling on my body.
“That’s the second time I’ve bled during sex with you,” I murmur.
“You like it,” Malice counters, his voice deep and rough. He kisses my neck, leaving an open mouthed trail along my pulse point. His hands start roaming again, groping my chest, tweaking my nipples, sliding down my stomach.
He’s clearly not turned off by the blood at all. If anything, he seems turned on by it. By the primal, caveman like act of making me bleed during sex. Of claiming me that way and marking us both with my blood.
I chuckle breathlessly, rolling my eyes. “You’re such a caveman,” I tease.
Malice rolls me over so I’m facing him and then props himself up on one elbow so he can look down at me. “You already knew that.”
“Yeah. I did.”
There’s a lightness in my chest that wasn’t there before. That hasn’t been there for a long time, if I’m being honest. The slightly sick feeling I had when I was getting ready to go out with Joshua is gone, replaced by something a whole lot better.
I never thought I would be this comfortable with one of the Voronin brothers. And definitely not with Malice, who seemed to make pissing me off into an art form. But it feels… right to be here with him, like this.
“I think you just like making me dirty,” I murmur, glancing down at my blood streaked thighs again.
“A-fucking-men I do.”
He grabs a handful of my hair, tugging just enough to make sensations dance across my scalp as he gives me a hard, deep kiss. When we break apart, he gives me a savage grin.
Then he moves quickly, standing up and scooping me into his arms as I yelp in surprise. He carries me to the bathroom, flipping the light on as he looks around.
“Damn. It’s like you live in a hotel with this fancy ass shower,” he says, smirking as he glances down at me. “But one of the nice ones, not the kind you pay for by the hour.”
I laugh, rolling my eyes a little. “It’s not that fancy,” I counter. “You should see the one at my grandmother’s house. It makes this look like a gym shower or something.”
Malice snorts, leaning in to turn the shower on and allowing the water to heat up.
“Less talk about your grandma when my dick is out,” he says before hauling me into the shower with him.
It only takes a few seconds for the water to get fully hot, and when it does, it feels amazing on my tired, sore body.
I still feel a little wobbly from how hard Malice fucked me, but luckily, he seems to realize that. He takes charge easily, keeping one arm looped around me as he starts to help me get cleaned up.
There’s something possessive in the way he holds me, and in the way he runs his hands between my legs, helping to wash away the blood and cum that’s still oozing out of me.
My pussy throbs weakly when his fingers brush my clit. I’m already sore and oversensitive, but I don’t ask him to stop.
It feels good to just stand with him, half floating in a haze of post-sex afterglow and hot shower water.
For a while, I just let him move his hands over me as he cleans me, but I can’t keep my own hands to myself for long. Not when he’s right there, naked and darkly handsome and so close.
This is the first time Malice has totally let me in. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. He’s not hiding behind his walls or his anger, and I’m not trying to keep him at arm’s length either.
I don’t know if it’s a permanent change, or if something about me almost going out with another man shook his guarded nature loose for the night, but I don’t want to waste this opportunity either way.
I’m always hungry for more of him, to know more about him.
So I clean him up too. I lather up my hands and run them over his muscles, touching his chest, his shoulders, his abs. I trace tattoos and scars, brushing my fingers over the newest wound with barely any pressure.
“Does it still hurt?” I ask him.
He shrugs a shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s healing.”
He told me before that it wasn’t the worst he’s ever been hurt, and I start exploring his body, taking in more of the scars I find. Some of them have healed well, just faint lines on his body now, and some are ugly and puckered, evidence of rushed stitching jobs or bad healing.
I finger one of them that looks like a circle, then glance up at him with a question in my eyes.
Malice doesn’t hesitate. He covers my hand with his.
“Got shot,” he says. “A year or so before I went to prison.”
“You got shot?” I ask, horrified.
He just snorts. “Wasn’t the first time. It went clean through, at least.” He turns and guides my hand to another scar on his back, where the bullet exited his body, I guess.
“You’re so…” I search for the right word. “Nonchalant about it.”
“I kinda have to be. If I went to pieces every time I got hurt, I’d never get shit done.”
I guess he has a point. Judging by the collection of scars on his body, he’s been hurt a lot.
I touch more of his marks, asking about each one, and Malice tells me how he got them. A lot of them are from his time in prison. He says things like “fight in the cafeteria” or “kicked a guy’s ass in the yard because he tried to start some shit.”
Some of them are from before that time too, and they have slightly less concerning stories. I trace a small jagged line that runs up the length of his forearm, and he chuckles.
“Fell out of a tree when I was like eleven,” he says. “I didn’t want to worry our mom, so I didn’t say anything for a few days. It got infected by then, and she ended up having to take care of it.”
There’s something warm in his eyes when he talks about her, and I smile softly, dipping my head to press a kiss to that scar.
I ask about his tattoos, and he tells me. Some of them have stories, some don’t. Some are just things he wanted to try when he was learning to be a tattoo artist, and others have a much deeper meaning—like his mom’s name on his arm.
Another scar catches my attention, and I lean up, brushing my fingers over the small mark on the side of his neck.
“I noticed this one before,” I tell him. “One of the first times I met you, when you came to my school to threaten me.”
His mouth quirks in a grin, and he holds me a little tighter. “That was the time you pulled a knife on me.”
“I didn’t know what you were going to do!” I insist.
“Hey, I’m not pissed about it,” he says.
“You had the guts to pull a knife on a guy that threatened to shoot you, who you’d seen kill someone just a few days before.
That was impressive. You didn’t let me push you around, and it made me realize that you seemed meek on the outside, but you were made of something stronger all the way through. ”
“Oh.” I laugh a little at that, my cheeks heating at his clear approval. “How did you get this one?” I rub the scar lightly, looking into Malice’s eyes.
He glances away for a second, but then back to me, a muscle in his jaw working. “I pissed off a gang in prison. It was stupid easy to do—all you had to do was be someone they didn’t like or be on what they considered ‘their turf.’ I didn’t want to play by their rules. So I became a target.”
I wince, because I can already tell this isn’t going anywhere good. “What happened?”
“They cornered me one day. In the fucking library of all places. And they beat the shit out of me. There were a lot of them, and they wanted to teach me a lesson. So they kicked my ass and then held me down while their leader tried to slit my throat.”
My eyes widen, my chest aching. I knew Malice spent time in prison, and judging from how Ransom and Vic talk about it, I assumed it wasn’t great.
But this is even worse than I knew. I can’t imagine anyone getting the jump on Malice like that, when he’s so big and strong and intimidating, but I guess one of the reasons he’s like that now is because of experiences like the ones he had in prison.
I lift up onto my tiptoes, cupping his jaw. “I’m glad you survived,” I whisper.
He smiles, and his eyes soften a little. It’s one of the few times I’ve ever seen him smile like this, warm and almost tender. For Malice, anyway.
“There aren’t a lot of people in the world who would say that,” he admits. “But I’m glad you’re one of them, Solnyshka.”
The ache in my chest intensifies, but it’s a sweet kind of pain this time. Leaning up onto my tiptoes, I press my lips to his.
Our kiss is soft at first, but like most things between us, it heats up fast.
Malice runs his wet hands down my wet body, cupping my ass and hauling me in closer.
I can feel when he starts to get hard against my stomach, his cock growing and thickening, and when our kiss breaks, I take a step back, my heart pounding.
A sudden urge fills me, and I meet his gaze as I sink down to my knees in front of him.
“I’ve been looking at all of your tattoos,” I tell him, my voice breathy. “I want to see this one up close too.”
Malice stares down at me, his eyes full of banked heat. He doesn’t say a word, but his chin dips in a slow nod.
Water pours down over us as I wrap my fist around his cock, taking in the dark lines of the tattoo that swirls its way up his shaft. I can’t imagine how much it must have hurt to get this done, but Malice did say he got it to prove to himself that he could withstand the pain.
My free hand is braced on his thigh, and I feel the thick muscles tense under my palm as I slide my fingertips over the velvety, veiny length of his shaft, taking my time studying him.