Chapter 2
Brom
Rage.
White-hot rage blinds me.
I attempt to fight against Crane. But the bastard is tall and heavy and I’m still trying to breathe after landing flat on my back. The pain in my shoulder returns with a vengeance, making me see spots.
The son of a bitch just laughs and I’m tied on the ground like a fucking animal.
On top of the fact that he fucking shot me.
“You know how this works,” Crane coos at me, a hand ghosting down the middle of my back.
I don’t want him touching me. I don’t want him near me.
I try to buck myself off the ground and knock him off, but his thighs grip me tight and I feel his cock lengthening against the round of my ass and I hate how good that feels.
“You know I like it better when you struggle,” he says. His tone remains light and silky, like this is a game to him. It’s always been a game to him.
“You’re diabolical,” I mumble. The more I thrash against him, the harder his cock grows until it feels like a weapon against me.
“You know I’m not,” he says mildly.
I don’t know anything anymore. The moment he kissed me by the covered bridge, read my mind, and brought my memories back, I was flooded with the images and feelings of us together.
Nights in New York alleys. Mornings in his bed.
Afternoons in the bath. Days in opium dens.
I remember how I felt, how he really made me feel, and it was like seeing a light on in your house when you’ve been wandering in the dark for far too long.
I went straight into his arms because he’d always made me feel safe. A place to hide when you’re so fucking tired from running.
But now, now that I’ve had some time to think, now that I’ve been caught by the very darkness that was hunting me, I don’t know anymore.
He’s with Kat, thinks he has more claim to her than I do.
He’s not a lover anymore—he’s a rival. And if I want to win Kat back after what I did to her, Crane can’t be in the picture. Not with her and not with me.
“What do you want?” I manage to ask Crane, my cheek pressed against the cold floor as I try to get another breath in.
“What do I want?” he repeats. He leans forward and his lips are at my ear and I consider slamming my head back and breaking his nose. It would serve him right for shooting me, collaring me, and tying me up.
But I remember what I am.
Who I am.
Not just me.
I’m me with someone else lurking in the deep.
The devil.
I remember what I did to Kat. The way I rammed her head into her wall. How the darkness flowed over my limbs until I was just a moving shadow. How I lost every part of me that was ever good, even though I was never very good to begin with.
“I want to save you,” Crane whispers against my neck, his lips moving with deliberation, his breath hot and making me shiver. “I want to save you, Brom.”
Fuck.
“And what if you can’t?” I ask. My voice comes out breathless and weak and worried but I don’t care. Because Crane still has a way of wanting to put every part of me into his hands.
“I can’t fail if I have your trust, the way you used to trust me,” he says, his lips now brushing over the rim of my ear as he speaks. “Will you trust me?”
“Is this how you earn it? Tying me up?”
He pulls his face away from my neck, and the air that rushes in there is cold. The absence of his warmth cuts deep. “You know it’s for your own good.”
Then he makes a fist in my hair and yanks my head back. I gasp at the pain, such familiar pain, my eyes watering. My cock hardens underneath me, trapped between my body and the floor. “But while I’ll save you, I also want to make you pay. I want to make you hurt,” he rasps, a rumble to his voice.
Crane has always been rough with me, but I’ve never seen him angry.
I don’t know why I want to provoke him. I want to see that facade crack.
I’ve always been hanging on by a thread, feeling seconds from snapping loose and succumbing to the chaos of my soul, while he’s always been even and in control and I want to know what he’s like when he lets go.
“Hurt me, then,” I manage to say, my words tight in my throat as my head remains pulled back. My shoulder screams with pain. I think I feel the wound starting to bleed again.
“You know you have to ask for it nicely,” he says, his fist growing tighter, making my scalp sing.
“Hurt me, please.” My breath shakes.
“Such a good boy,” he comments, and I hate how my heart blooms at the praise. “But this won’t be a pain you’d enjoy.”
He brings his mouth to my ear again. “If I licked your dick right now, would you taste like her?” Crane asks, and I’m immediately flooded with the image of him on his knees.
Fuck.
“Did you force yourself on her?” he goes on now, and his voice is low, so low, and it trembles with rage and I feel it now. All of this for Kat. All this anger and jealousy over her. “How much of your fucking was you and how much of it was the horseman?”
“I didn’t force myself on her,” I protest, wincing as he pulls my hair so tight I see stars.
“I didn’t. She wanted it. She wanted it, she wanted me”—that cloudy darkness starts to rise within me—“and I fucked her so good, Crane, better than you ever could, but I didn’t force myself. I just made her forget who you were.”
He stills at that, a sharp inhale, and the room seems to pause with him.
Then he takes my head and slams it into the floor.
White suns explode behind my eyes and the world spins and before I can cry out his large hand slips under my face and over my mouth, holding back my garbled scream. My eyes water mercilessly.
“Shut up,” he grunts, giving my mouth a painful squeeze, and then he’s getting up, the pressure lifting from my back but I can’t talk, I can’t think. I feel darkness coming for me. Is it a concussion? Is it the horseman? Should I warn him if it is?
I decide to not.
Let the horseman fight him back.
But that doesn’t matter because the darkness fades as Crane hauls me to my feet, and my vision rights itself just as he’s pushing me back against the wall, his forearm against my windpipe.
Blood trickles down my face from the corner of my hairline and with the deepest remorse I realize he did to me exactly what I did to Kat.
I deserve it.
I deserve so much more than this.
“Were you inside her when you did this to her?” he growls at me, nodding at the wound, this violence that vibrates through his whole body flowing onto me.
I feel like he’s transferring his rage onto me and he doesn’t even realize it.
“Was your cock inside her when you switched, when you caused her pain?”
“She likes the pain,” I manage to say against his arm.
I watch as his eyes flash, the gray turning black. “I am torn, pretty boy. So very torn between wanting to fuck you and wanting to kill you, and I fear if I do one I’ll end up doing the other.”
“I’d rather you kill me first,” I say, my throat throbbing as I try to speak. “You wouldn’t even know the difference between fucking me and a corpse, would you?”
He laughs at that, a smile that shows his perfect white teeth, and I hate how my heart thumps anxiously at the sound of it.
But his eyes are still cold, the coldest fire, and they stare at me with stark intensity that seems to rummage inside me.
“That’s a fair observation,” he muses, his gaze dropping to my lips for a moment.
“But I do love it when you fight back. Such a big strong man like you reduced to a writhing mess when I have you under my control. Is that what you do with Kat? Do you take it out on her, the things you wish you could do to me but can’t because you’re not man enough? ”
“Fuck you,” I say, and manage to get enough leverage against his arm to work my saliva up my throat and spit on him.
The spit lands on his cheek but the bastard doesn’t even flinch.
“Spitting?” he questions, slowly reaching up and wiping it off with his long fingers. “That’s a new one for you.” He rubs my spit between his fingertips, indulgent. “Seems like a waste, doesn’t it?”
Then he takes that hand and slides it down under the waist of my trousers until I feel my own spit meet the thick head of my erect cock.
I gasp but the sound is strangled with his arm on my throat and I didn’t even realize how painfully hard I was until he touched me, my eyes rolling back in my head.
“That’s the noise I’ve missed, sweet boy,” he murmurs, his hand continuing down my length, pressing my shaft against my skin, the spit mixing with the beads of arousal from my crown. His hand is slick, hot, burning, or maybe it’s me, and my hips buck involuntarily against his palm.
I shouldn’t have done that. It brings out another laugh from him and he pulls his hand out.
“I told you I was going to punish you,” he says. “Just wanted to make sure I could still make your cock weep.”
Then he takes his arm off my throat and I cough, wheeze, suck in gulps of air that burn as they go down.
He eyes my neck and raises his brows. “That’s going to leave a bruise,” he remarks, the corner of his mouth lifting maliciously.
While I’m coughing, he reaches up and undoes the black tie at his collar and before I can question it, he’s shoving the tie between my teeth, gagging me.
I make a move to ram my forehead against his, but he ducks his head and slams me back against the wall again. Pain erupts at the back of my skull.
Fight him.
Fuck him.
Kill him.
I feel that darkness coming again. The more he hurts me, the more the horseman wants to take over, almost as if the spirit is looking out for me.
“I told you I liked the struggle,” he says, fastening the tie behind my head. “I just don’t like being spit on.” He licks his lips and a familiar heat lowers his lids halfway as he brings his hands down over my bare chest, my shirt already torn from his emergency surgery earlier.
“You can tell me to stop,” he goes on, his voice thick, “but I’m not sure I’ll listen.”
Cruel bastard.
I bare my teeth at him through the tie.
But I’m not about to tell him to stop.