31. Make Me Unafraid
31
MAKE ME UNAFRAID
RIOT
This time, I’m the one lurking in the shadows. Soren is listening to Axel tell him the details about his mom and Gregory Malone being high school sweethearts or something, and I’m busy concocting my own plan for him tonight. My energy level is better after an easy day, and I’m up for this task.
“That’s… she killed my fucking dad?!” Soren shouts.
“If she did, the curse would have broken,” Axel reminds him, pretending to buy into the curse. “She pushed him to take his own life.”
Soren scowls. “To get him out of the way so she could be with Malone? That’s why that nasty fuck always stalked my brothers? They were offing my family for their second shot at love?” He paces the hallway between the new room his mom is being kept in and Axel’s lab, steam brewing and his dark side coming out. “I’m gonna fucking kill that bitch.”
“That bitch is your mumsie,” Kyd says when he bounces into the lab, making Axel sigh in frustration. “Which just means I’ll help.” He smiles wide. “I’ve been building a guillotine in arts and crafts. Wanna try it out?”
I barely hold back my chuckle. Kyd is technically a patient at the asylum. He has a file here, even though he’s never read it, and he’s part of a lot of patient clubs. He’s in the asylum orchestra, joins, and sometimes leads, the arts and crafts class, and he’s been practicing to audition for a stage play they’re putting on next year. He goes on field trips with the other patients, sits in on family visits, and has a bunch of friends who are also patients. The guy takes joy in everything, even being a live-in patient, and honestly, if it weren’t for him, the rest of us would forget to have fun so often.
“Would you please sit down and stop talking?” Axel says to Kyd, eye only fluttering a little. Kyd complies, for now, and Axel turns back to Soren. “Yes, she pushed him to suicide. It’s why I picked her as one of my test subjects. If she didn’t make it, well, I figured I’d be doing you a favour.”
“Don’t act like you give a fuck about me,” Soren snaps at the doctor. Axel doesn’t deny it. “I want her dead, but you can’t tell my brother and sister.”
“I’m not murdering your mother.”
“I got you the fucking file you asked for. You owe me.”
“Not the whole file,” Axel grumbles.
“I’ll do it!” Kyd shoots to his feet again, pink hair flopping into his eyes. Axel pushes him back down, and Kyd pouts while secretly loving being touched, leaning into it like a purring cat.
“Sleep on it. She’s contained here, and you can make that choice tomorrow. Or another day. We have a lot more pressing matters at the moment.”
Soren just grunts and leaves the lab. I don’t have more than a second to react to him stepping into the hallway, so as soon as he does, I step in front of him and smile.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
“The fuck do you want?” he barks, trying to push by me.
“Everything,” I whisper, holding up the calling card he left me. Then I slam his head off the wall and catch him as he falls. “Got him! He’s ready!” I shout to Axel.
Kyd wheels out a gurney, and the three of us get him on it.
“He’s going to kill me for this,” Axel reminds me.
“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you for taking my brother. Call us even if you do this.”
“And if he comes for me?” Axel asks as we wheel Soren down the hall to an imaging room.
“I’ll be your knight in pink armor.” Kyd flashes his teeth.
“Don’t worry, doc. I’ll take the brunt of his fury.” I grin, anticipating it.
“We’ll put him under for now, but he’s going to have to be awake for some of it. He’ll need to undergo emotional trigger tests and stress tests so we can watch the connectivity signals.”
I nod, promising I’ll stay here for all of it so Soren doesn’t kill anyone.
He puts Soren under general anesthetic, injects a dye into him, and for an hour, I watch screens and monitors and things I don’t understand while Dr. Graves does the brain mapping thing Soren refused to get. Remi has been so much better since starting his medication, and even if Soren won’t take meds, I want to know what we’re working with. I’ll help him chase death forever, but only if it’s to slam the door in her face. When I saw him walk into my torture room, I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Buried under his murder high was a scared, dark idea, hinting at his shift in need. He was closer to the curse than he’d ever been before, and I’m no longer taking the risk.
Because I’ve decided I don’t want to live without him.
I think I can, but I don’t want to. He suits my needs, and my needs are most important.
Before Axel wakes him up for the next portion of testing, I press my lips to his forehead, giving him a small kiss. “Just in case,” I say to his unconscious mind.
* * *
I duck when a glass bottle flies by my head and smashes against the brick wall outside the asylum. I don’t even care that he almost took off my head. To see him so alive and pissed off… fuck yeah, he’s making my cock hard. I love him like this, pissed off and unremorseful about it.
“How fucking dare you!” he screams, stalking closer to me with menacing steps and a blue fire in his eyes that guarantees to burn. “It’s my fucking head! My brain!”
I snort at his delusions. What part of himself does he still think he owns? The prick is mine, and the sooner he comes to terms with that, the easier it will be. Though he’s never been one to take the easy path, and I do love a challenge, so he can resist it all he wants. He’ll know eventually, and when he figures it out, it’ll be a battle to go down in history.
The weather isn’t on my side tonight. It’s stormy and windy, adding strength to Soren’s anger and amplifying his power. I don’t care, though, because the calling card he left me caused me emotional discomfort all day, and I didn’t appreciate that.
Last night, he told me I scared him. This morning, on the back of the card, he told me he’s still scared.
Make me unafraid. Show me you’re still you.
I will gladly remind him who I am, and I’ll do it ruthlessly like I always do. I don’t give a single fuck that he’s pissed about the brain mapping, and I care even less that he’s butthurt over being knocked out and studied against his will. What I do care about is keeping him on the living side of his curse, and if he’s afraid, he’s the wrong kind of unstable. We can’t be having that.
Simply to entice another angry outburst out of him, I give him my charming smile, the one I use on everyone but him. His face goes red, and to be honest, I kind of like red on him now. When the pressure inside him gets to a boiling point, he whips another abandoned bottle at me, and I barely shift in time to avoid it. As it’s shattering, he kicks over more bottles on his way to me.
Come here, sweetheart!
I laugh aloud as his body slams into mine, wincing a second later when we make contact with the brick wall. My burned back screams, but not as loud as he does. Right in my damn face, loud and unhinged.
“You had no fucking right, Riot!”
Riot. Back to having his shields up then—or maybe he sees that I’m back to donning my masks. He slams me harder, hands coming up to wrap around my throat, but he doesn’t squeeze. He holds me right where he wants me, wedged between him and the asylum, stepping on broken bottles left by teens who snuck out here to get wasted. His eyes glare into mine, so much fury coming at me through his gaze, but there’s something else hiding behind it. Something unsure, like he wants to know what the scans showed but he can’t make himself ask.
“What makes you think I give a damn about rights?” I open my mouth to ease the tension on my teeth implants. He looks at my parted lips for a second, tempted by whatever he sees there. A memory? Blood? I don’t know. “I’ve never asked your permission for anything before, why should I start now?”
A bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, immediately followed by a crack of thunder. The storm is right on top of us, maybe fuelled by Soren’s mood. As he snarls at me, body coiled and holding me at his mercy, he opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. The venom he wants to spew disintegrates on his tongue, and against his will, he asks, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you do it?”
Because I want to know how to protect him from himself, but I don’t know how to say that without making it seem like I care about him more than he cares about me. Because I understand what Krypt felt when he found out about Remi’s mind, and those scars all over his body make a lot of sense now. Soren isn’t the type to cut or take a pill, but he’ll find his way to death eventually, and I’ve never felt so pathetic because I can’t predict how. I can’t protect him from what I don’t understand, so I’ll protect him from himself. I’ll manipulate him for my own benefit, and maybe someday, it’ll benefit him, too.
“The Sauder Curse isn’t such a curse, is it? Just a fucked-up signal in the brain.” I watch him listen, rapt attention warring with his desire to shut me up. Desire. Despair. Death. It’s such a circular pattern for him. “I wanted to know how fucked up you are, sweetheart.”
He snaps his teeth at me, and I see self-loathing etch into his features. “And?”
“What’s it matter? You don’t fear the curse anyway, right?”
“Riot.”
“Hmm?” I tilt my head in his grip.
“Killian,” he amends, the storm taking a recess as his anger pauses to let curiosity win out. “Tell me. I have a right to know since it’s my fucking brain.”
Sure he does, but I told him before that rights mean nothing to me. Breaking his hold on my throat, I spin us until his back hits the wall. Bracing him between my arms, I get right in his face.
“Want me to kill your cousin? End the curse with a murder and stop the suicide train?” I lean down, listening to him suck in a breath as I run my nose along the side of his neck. “We could do it together. If we murder a Sauder male, we’ll protect your brother, which protects my brother. It’s a win-win, and we’re selfish enough to do it.”
His hands grip my shoulders, fingers digging into my flesh to stop the shakes. “It won’t help if it’s all lies anyway.”
I grin, refraining from shaking my head. Moros does crazy things to a person’s perspective of the world if it’s powerful enough to make people believe that suicide curses are real. I know Soren doesn’t actually believe in it, but he’s tempted by the idea because so many of his family members have yielded to it. He’s intrigued by outrunning it just to be better than them, which means he doesn’t really want to know what his scans showed. Because he can’t outrun his own mind.
“Do you trust me?”
“Fuck no,” he scoffs.
Grinning, I lift my head to look at him. I know my face is a mess, eyes barely visible through all the swelling and bruising, but he doesn’t look at me any differently than he has before. We had a tender moment last night in my bed, and we’re both a bit messed up about it, so I know tenderness isn’t what he wants right now. He needs something volatile to justify the softness that’ll come after.
“Are you sure?”
His lips press together, and he forces a breath out of his nose. Shifting his gaze to my mouth again, he speaks to it rather than to my eyes. “I can’t. I can’t trust you.”
Above us, a patient screams bloody murder from a window high up, and when we both look, lightning illuminates the sky. Soren’s breath shifts into something shaky and laboured, and then he grabs the back of my neck, forcing me to look at him again.
“I have so many questions about fucking everything,” he says in frustration. Looking into my eyes, he adds, “Choke them out of me.” It’s a plea, and I’m finally hearing him beg. It’s not how I imagined it, but I can give him this one thing without sacrificing anything in return.
Nothing else needs to be said as adrenaline swells within me, amplifying my power over him and turning it into something I won’t disrespect. I press on his shoulders, Soren only fighting me for a second before he lowers to his knees, breathing even harder. He won’t undo my pants, but that’s okay because I like capturing his attention. He watches my broken and busted fingers undo my button, lower the zipper, and palm my cock through the opening. His nostrils flare as I rub myself in front of him, the barrier of my boxers doing the trick to agitate him into action. With the wall at his back and the storm all around us, the patient screams again, and Soren’s hands lift to bat mine away.
The glossy blue of his eyes flicks up to me once, and I’m so entirely enraptured by it that I miss his hand moving. He grips my cock hard and firm, squeezing the base to show dominance from his knees. I’m already hard, hardening impossibly further, my mind whirling with filthy, insane thoughts about what I want to do to him, but when the rain starts, he lets his own fantasies run rampant.
Soren’s tongue swipes at the tip, dragging a hiss from between my new teeth. I brace my hand on the wall and look down, watching him tease me in a new way. There’s nothing dangerous about this, but it still feels dangerous. There’s nothing diabolical or unhinged about a blowjob, but he makes it intense because of what it means to him. A need, a want, a way to choke back questions he feels entitled to know the answers to, a mingling of what he desires and how much it despairs him, and a submissive act warped by delusional dominance. It’s perfect because it’s so simple and so complicated. It’s my undoing, because seeing him like this has changed yet another fundamental part of me.
So, while he’s not looking, I drop the first layer of disguises I’m wearing to let me, as mostly myself, enjoy Soren Sauder willingly on his knees for me.
The rain picks up when he runs his tongue down the side of my dick, familiarizing himself with the desires he has. It only takes him a few seconds before he gives in to temptation and sucks me into his mouth. My eyes close and my head hangs between my shoulders as his wet, warm mouth envelopes me, bringing to life everything that’s been dead inside me since I started wearing so many masks. I feel him. His hesitation, but mostly his needs, and that’s not something I’m familiar with feeling.
I’m never attuned to the needs of others. Never. Until him.
He wants the questions choked out of him, and I want to give it to him—to comply with his command. In one more minute…
My ass clenches in restraint when he takes me down as far as he can, gagging around the head of my cock. He coughs, but he doesn’t stop, and the spasm of his throat one second and the caressing of his tongue the next are the most potent things I’ve ever felt. Pleasure shivers through me, scorching the raindrops into nothing as they meet the back of my neck. I sink into it, let myself experience it, and breathe through what it means. How it feels. How it changes me.
Then I take him at his word and shift the power dynamic.
I thrust my hips, and Soren’s head smacks off the bricks. He tries to lean forward, but I fuck his mouth hard enough to keep him pinned to the wall. His ass hits his heels, and his eyes look up at me in a slight panic that doesn’t last long. They turn wicked, and it makes me smirk to see him so beautifully defiant while at my complete mercy. He opens his throat, taking a few tries to get it right, building off the weather and letting it build off him. Then I give him what he wants.
I choke every fucking question from his throat.
His teeth scrape my cock, but it only adds wreckage to my ruin. Fisting a hand in his wet hair, I hold him where I want him and don’t stop thrusting until his tears mix with the rain and his gagging turns to actual gasping for air. When I pull out, he inhales harshly, but his hands land on my ass and he tugs me forward, gulping all of me down in one slobbery swallow.
“Fuck,” I whisper to the skies, unsure if I’m fucking him or his mouth is fucking me. All I know is that I feel him everywhere, and I’m not familiar with someone consuming me so wholly. Sex acts are usually just that. Acts. This is something more.
Soren takes charge while I pretend I’m still in control. Every part of me comes rushing to the surface, and for the moment, I just enjoy it. Enjoy him. Him and whatever game we’re playing but not admitting to. I have control, but I don’t try to take more, letting him strangle himself on my dick because he fucking needs it. He needs me.
Shit, I think I need him, too.
His drool mixes with the rain, coating my dick and making every slide of his mouth euphoric. More of my facades fall away as pleasure takes over and I’m unable to put in any effort to keep them in place. I stare at the sky as he sucks me down, wondering if it’s looking at me and seeing me for the first time since I was young. But when Soren’s hand joins his mouth, my head snaps forward and I take in an even better view.
Him, ragged and breathless, using my body without a lick of shame for it. He’s sexy when he takes what he wants, and I hope he never stops. This is trust. Even if he says he can’t trust me, he’s showing me that he’s trying. Despite how ferociously I hope he doesn’t look up at me, I’m also desperate for him to look at my face so I can gauge who I am by the expression on his.
Soren’s free hand pushes on my hip so he can move me back enough to inhale. Saliva stretches between his lips and my cock, and he stares at it, transfixed by the strings that attach us. Or maybe by something else because when he looks up at me, I barely have time to feel self-conscious when he says, “Come here.”
My healing jaw clenches.
“Killian.”
I can’t. I want to, but I can’t go to my knees. I don’t know why.
“Fucking pathetic.” He bangs his fist on the back of my knee, making me buckle. When I fall forward, he catches me, and I try to fight him off, but then he grabs the sides of my face and pulls my mouth to his.
Oh.
Oh fuck.
His tongue pushes into my mouth, meeting mine, and even though I’d been so turned on before, it’s amplified now. Because kissing, making out, is something more than everything else. I felt pleasure in my whole body before, but I feel it in my soul now. I taste my precum on his tongue, and it pulls a moan from my throat. My eyes close and my body feels his inability to stay still beneath me. He lifts his ass, straightening his legs out between mine and pulling me down to straddle him. My bare cock rubs against his shirt, grinding into his abs through the damp material, and I kiss him harder, devouring him because he tastes like smoke and salt—something hellish and refined.
“Why do you make me crazy?” he asks against my mouth, pushing and pulling my body until he gets his pants undone. “Who the fuck are you to do this to me?”
My forehead rolls against his when his cock ruts against mine, his hand fisting us together. Mmm. I can’t tell if this moment is ignited by challenge or vulnerability. Maybe it’s all mixed together and feels irregular because of it.
I love it.
I love it so much that I barely wince when his fingers scrape down my burned back. We’re not chasing death anymore. We’re chasing rapture, and holy fuck, the journey is even more unhinged.
“Fuck, keep going.” I bite his lip as his hand jacks us off, my hips thrusting to fuck through his fist. He grips us harder, rolling us together in a way that lights sparks behind my eyes and makes my dick leak. “Holy shit.”
He hums into my mouth, hips rising to meet my thrusts, hand never leaving. The thunder becomes nothing alongside his moans, and the lightning show doesn’t hold a candle to how gorgeous he looks in pleasure.
“Killian,” he rasps, forehead against mine. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
“Fuck.” It’s my ruin. I brace my hand against the wall and the other on his neck as my body writhes against his and my lower stomach clenches so hard I can’t breathe. I’m the one choking now. Choking on an orgasm so intense my eyes roll back. My cum coats his fists, making him groan, and when his cock throbs against mine, I cry out in bliss.
“Fuck,” Soren groans, coming all over my dick. His legs bend beneath my ass as he squirms, but he grabs my hair and forces our open mouths together for a kiss that tastes like something I’m getting addicted to.
I’m still panting when we part, eyes closed, trying not to slip into my masks again. I keep my eyes closed and listen to his heart thunder louder than the rain and the screaming patient. As I focus, I realize I can feel it again. His heartbeat in my chest, pounding in my ribs like a war drum that means we’re on the same side—the same team.
I brace for the moment to shatter, for him to push me away and pretend this never happened. I’m half tempted to ruin it myself just so he can’t, but I’m glad I don’t. Because Soren’s lips twitch against mine, lifting into a half-smile.
“You don’t have to tell me what the scans said. This proves my brain is fucked up.” He nips my lip before pushing me back and holding out a hand for me to help him to his feet. He squeezes my sore fingers together, and we stare at each other as we do up our pants without cleaning up.
“Trust me, sweetheart, you’ve been fucked up since way before tonight.”
He laughs, and it’s almost camaraderie as he wipes his mouth and shakes his head at me. Looking up at the asylum tower, he says, “I’m gonna go make sure my mom is locked up.”
I grab his wrist when he starts to leave, gently tugging him back. My lips meet his for the briefest of moments, and I hum my contentment against them. “Just in case,” I whisper.
He rolls his eyes at me as he pulls back, but he’s blushing, too.