10. Vale
Vale
The room goes still in the way it does right before violence.
I feel it before I see it, in the pressure that settles in the air, in the way Lena’s breathing changes behind Havoc, in the way my own body locks down around the pain still burning across my back.
The flogging should have steadied me. It should have burned the wanting out of me, skinned it down to something manageable, something I could bury under discipline and prayer and pain.
Instead, every stripe across my back feels raw beneath my shirt, every movement dragging fire across half-healed skin, and none of it has done a damned thing to erase the memory of her against the wall.
Her mouth. Her hands.
The way she looked at me after seeing my face and didn’t recoil.
Then I walk in and find Havoc touching her, Knox watching like he can’t close his eyes.
“We’re having an interrogation,” Havoc says, like that explains anything. “Try to keep up.”
I look past him. Lena is in the chair, flushed and unsteady, her lips swollen, her hair a mess from his hands. One look tells me enough. Whatever this is, he pushed too far.
My stomach turns.
The welts across my back throb under my shirt. Every mark I left on myself wakes up at once, as if my body knows humiliation when it sees it. I wanted pain to strip her out of me. I wanted the sting, the heat, the punishment to leave me emptied out and disciplined again.
“That’s not what it looks like,” I say. The sentence sounds thin even to me.
Havoc glances at Lena, then back at me, and his smile shifts into something meaner. “No? Could’ve fooled me.”
Lena’s eyes flick between us. She says nothing. She doesn’t know what she’s standing in the middle of, and I hate that she has to watch this at all.
I move farther into the room. My back protests immediately. I ignore it.
“Havoc.”
I don’t need volume. He knows what that tone means.
He laughs. “What?” he asks. “You want to do this your way?”
I don’t answer.
That gives him room, and he takes it. “You going to stand there and act holy after having your fingers inside her not even an hour ago?”
For a moment, I forget how to breathe.
Lena makes a small sound behind him. Shock. Embarrassment. I don’t look at her. I can’t.
Havoc watches my face and sees enough. Of course he does.
“I smelled her on you,” he says. “Still can.”
The words land low in my gut. Not because he’s telling me anything I don’t know. Because he says it out loud. Because she hears it. Because I tried to scour that from myself and failed.
I can still feel her in my hands. In my mouth. In the part of me that keeps reaching for her no matter how much I try to beat it back down.
Havoc keeps going, because once he finds the bruise, he never stops pressing. “Come on. Have it your way. Light a candle. Say a prayer. Ask forgiveness after.”
The old reflex in me turns vicious.
He has no idea what it cost me to grow up wanting with guilt already wrapped around it. He doesn’t know what it does to me when I touch someone and hear condemnation before the pleasure even fades. He only knows enough to sneer at the outline of it.
My hand closes once at my side.
“Havoc,” I say again. His name leaves my mouth lower this time, and that ought to be warning enough.
Havoc looks at me for one long second, sees exactly where I’m fraying, and smiles like he’s just found a knife and somewhere soft to put it.
Then he turns to Lena. Deliberate. His hand slides to her chest slowly enough that she sees it coming, slowly enough that she could stop him. His gaze never leaves hers as his palm settles over her breast, heavy and possessive, and his thumb drags once over the shape of her through her shirt.
Her breath catches.
My body answers before my mind does.
“Please don’t,” she begs.
His thumb finds her nipple through the fabric and flicks it once, just enough to make her jolt. A soft sound slips out of her before she can swallow it. Her hand lifts, not to push him away, but to catch at his wrist like she doesn’t know whether she’s trying to steady him or herself.
Havoc’s smile deepens. “There she is,” he murmurs.
His other hand drifts lower, slow, unhurried, gliding over her stomach, dipping to the waistband of her jeans. He pauses there, looks at her. “Still no?”
Lena’s lips part. Her eyes are wide, confused, heated, and far too aware.
“No,” she whispers.
My mouth goes dry.
Havoc slips his hand inside her jeans, and Lena arches into the touch before she can stop herself, a broken little moan catching in her throat.
He strokes her through her panties at first, the heel of his hand pressing into her while his fingers move with obscene patience, and I watch her body melt by inches.
I should leave.
I don’t.
I should stop this.
I can’t.
Every sound she makes lands somewhere low in me and stays there. A breath. A gasp. A soft, helpless mewl when Havoc circles her clit through the thin fabric and she grabs at him with both hands now, no longer trying to pretend she isn’t unraveling.
“Havoc,” she whispers, and even hearing his name from her mouth cuts through me.
He glances at me over his shoulder, still moving his hand inside her jeans, still rubbing her exactly where she’s hottest, and there’s mockery in his expression, yes, but something else too. A challenge.
Lena’s head tips back against the wall. Her fingers tangle in his shirt. She’s trying to stay upright and failing beautifully, and I hate that I know the sound of her pleasure already. I hate that I know how wet she gets, how her breath changes when she’s close, how her voice thins around my name.
Now she makes that same sound for him. A soft, wrecked mewl.
And I can’t look away.
My cock hardens painfully against my fly. The welts across my back sting under my shirt. Everything in me pulls in too many directions at once—disgust, hunger, guilt, jealousy—and none of them win.
Havoc squeezes her breast harder, thumb rolling over her nipple again while his hand works between her legs. “You like that?” he asks her.
She shakes her head, then moans when he presses more firmly.
“Use your words, sweetheart.”
“Yes,” she breathes. “I mean no, I—” Her voice breaks when his fingers move faster.
I close my hand into a fist at my side. The room feels too small. Her sounds fill it too easily. Every one of them drags over my nerves like a hand.
Havoc watches her for another moment, then looks at me again. And the bastard knows. He knows I’m hard. He knows I’m listening to every breath. He knows exactly what he’s doing to me by touching her like this in front of me.
Lena reaches for him blindly, pulling at his shirt, chasing more.
I take one step forward before I even realize I’m moving. One second, I’m watching Havoc’s hand inside her jeans, listening to the sounds she can’t hold back, and the next I’m on him, grabbing his shoulder and shoving him away from her hard enough that he stumbles back a step.
“Havoc.” My voice comes out breathless.
He laughs under his breath like this is exactly what he wanted. “Yeah,” he says, straightening.
I don’t answer him.
I look at her.
Lena is still pressed to the wall, chest rising and falling too fast, lips parted, face flushed, eyes glassy with pleasure and confusion and too much of everything.
Her shirt sits twisted, one breast still half-cradled in his touch, her jeans open, her body trembling from what he just did to her.
She looks at me like she doesn’t know whether to brace or reach.
That decides it.
I grab her face and kiss her. There’s nothing careful in it this time.
No restraint. No attempt to make this anything but what it is—hunger, jealousy, possession, guilt, all of it colliding the second my mouth meets hers.
She gasps and I take full advantage of it, kissing her deep, rough, desperate enough that I feel it in my teeth.
Her hands catch at me immediately.
Not pushing me off. Holding on.
That only makes it worse.
I push her harder into the wall and kiss down her jaw, her throat, the line of her collarbone, my hands already at her blouse, already angry with the barrier of it. The fabric strains once under my grip. Then tears.
Buttons pop and scatter. The blouse parts under my hands, and I drag it open enough to bare her chest to me. I lower my head and take one breast into my mouth, sucking hard enough to pull a moan out of her that goes straight through me.
“Vale—”
My name sounds like surrender on her tongue.
I groan against her skin and bite lightly at her nipple before soothing it with my tongue. She arches into me, shaking, clearly too worked up to hide any of it, and I lose what little discipline I had left.
Behind me, Havoc moves. I feel his hands at her waist, feel her body jolt when he drops to work on the fastening of her jeans.
He drags them down her hips while I keep my mouth on her, kissing and sucking and tasting every inch I can reach.
She gasps when cooler air hits her skin, one hand in my hair, the other grabbing blindly for purchase.
Her jeans slide down her thighs and then lower. Havoc peels them away completely. By the time I lift my head, her underwear is gone too. She’s naked beneath our hands.
The sight almost undoes me.
She stands there against the wall, chest flushed, nipples tight, thighs trembling, skin bared to the morning light and to us, and for one terrible, perfect second all I can do is stare.
Havoc lets out a low whistle behind me. “Fuck,” he mutters. “Worth the wait.”
I shoot him a look that should warn him off. He only grins.
Lena’s breathing turns even more uneven under the attention, under the fact of being exposed, under the way we’re both looking at her now. Her face burns, but she doesn’t cover herself. She doesn’t tell us to stop.
My hand slides down her stomach, slower this time, almost reverent despite the roughness of everything else. She shivers when my fingertips brush the inside of her thigh.