51. Raphael
Raphael
SHE IS MY GREATEST PRIDE.
Citizen Soldier Playlist
“Victim or Survivor” - Citizen Soldier and Icon For Hire
“Irreplaceable”
My brothers rise from the table, chins lowered in a submissive ‘welcome home’.
Briella does not—and not simply due to the splint.
She’s chasing her breath…while hunting my eyes.
The intensity of her emotions is something I will never feel. But I read them always. Not with empathy. I assess. I judge.
She reads mine. She perceives. Feminine intuition. And the most profound curiosity and emotion.
I tilt my head.
For once, she does not tilt hers. No, she stares me down, throws down, a silent vow to go bare bones with me.
I don’t move toward her yet. Not when her mirage followed me every day I was gone.
She swallows hard, her eyes both glassy and burning. Like a jewel freshly struck by lightning.
Once, I studied her, memorizing every macro and micro expression. All her beautiful gazes. I catalogued her body language like data, as I have with every person I have ever encountered.
Now, it’s instinct. She wears her emotions beautifully, effortlessly. Beauty, pride, passion, and rage. I cut her open, bled her from the inside out.
I drained the poison—shame, bitterness, madness, stubbornness, even strength—whatever I decided didn’t serve her. I left her bare and vulnerable. The rawest core of her heart exposed, the marrow of her soul.
Then…I spit my poison in after I pierced her with my arrow. But this time, she didn’t just swallow it. She tasted it.
No masks. No retreat. No hiding. No running.
The war inside her was great. Mine was greater.
I played God.
Her demons played with her angels until she danced with her shadow self. The Abyss blinked—and she did not look away.
I saw myself in the little monster I made. It was why I hunted for ten days. Because she haunted. In the quiet, dark places where silence tightens like a noose, she haunted me.
I turn my eyes in a cursory gaze across each of my brothers. The silence thickens. They will never break it until I do.
But she…does. “Raphael.”
The gravity of how she speaks in a reverent whisper shivers my core in a way none could ever fathom.
The others dart their eyes between us since she does not likely know this minor transgression of Kinship Law. I always speak first.
“I’m home.”
The tension leaves my brothers’ shoulders, their chests relaxing. Not Briella.
The wilderness whispered her name to me. Did her nightmares echo mine? Her ghost crawled under my skin and left razor blades there. Did mine strangle her chest till I filled the hollow where I stole her heart?
Her face followed me into the woods. Did mine follow her?
When her surface emotions fade—anger, pride, awe, relief—and I read the rawest parts of her, of possession and feminine divine fury, the answer is one of perfect clarity.
YES.
“She woke up on day three,” Jude informs me. “Healing well ever since.”
“I know.”
Briella looks up at me from the table, her lovely, pert nose in the air, brows knitted in suspicion. A wildfire glints in those hazel eyes beneath my cap.
I roll up my sleeve and tap my smart watch. “I see everything.”
She starts to push out of her chair.
Jude is at her side instantly, hands on her waist. My jaw clenches. The urge of possession has never risen in me to the degree that I imagine breaking my brother’s, my partner’s wrist.
She smacks it away instead. “I can do it.”
Gripping the edge of the table, she moves the chairs and hobbles on one leg. Sometimes, she puts pressure on her splinted leg. Subtly. Like a test. Because she wishes to feel: the pain of the scar, the reminder of what happened between us.
We both need pain to feel alive. But I also need blood and death.
And she—fucking—kills—me.
Like a broken queen moving across the chessboard, she finally stands before her king. Never letting her crown fall.
The tension is thicker now. Stifling. Smothering. For fuck’s sake, she makes it hard to breathe. My hands flex with the desire to play with the royal violet brown curls rippling down her cheeks and beyond my cap, her crown—the ones the braid could never hold.
I don’t see her hand until she swings it. Not until it strikes my cheek. I don’t flinch. Unmoving. I let her have it.
“Did she just—” Seth asks in shock.
“Shhh,” Jude hushes everyone, silencing them for me. The corners of his mouth tug upward.
But not her.
Briella bares her teeth but seethes through her nostrils. Beautiful, little monster. When she clenches her hand into a fist and rears it back, I don’t blink. Again, I give her a strike to my jaw, my mouth. I taste the metallic bite of blood, a phantom pain.
This time, I catch her wrist, narrow my eyes, and command, “Stop.”
Her lips part. She freezes from our last memory together. But her body trembles. Good. So does my soul.
Her fingers loosen and curl in my grip, but her eyes are accusatory. As is her tongue. “Where in all fucking hell were you?!”
“Hunting.”
Something in her snaps.
Claws scraping, teeth biting, with the bloodthirsty madness in her eyes, she attacks with all her vengeance.
It takes all of a second for me to catch her, to cage those violent hands at the center of her spine, bending her back onto the table.
My brothers stand, bearing witness, not interfering. They want to. But they know: if they tried, I’d shed their blood, break their bones.
Briella bucks and thrashes.
“You motherfuckingsoneofabastardchickenshit! You coward! How dare you? You goddamnheartlessspineless—ahhh!”
Cries and snarls and screams, and all manner of unholy, feminine sounds leave her throat as she lunges for me, snapping her teeth, sinking them with merciless power into my neck. Like a little beast making her claim.
Pain burns like a venom.
“Fuck!” I growl, knowing blood is dripping—because it coats her lips.
I remove one hand from her back. The feeling of her writhing and squirming gets me hard as I grab her throat and hold her against the table. Steady head tilted. Predatory eyes pinned to her, watching, waiting as she exhausts herself.
I let her. I don’t interfere.
I give her the screaming, spitting, cursing my name with the ice in her bone marrow and the fire in her blood.
I give her what she wants, what she needs. To be heard. To be seen. To know she is safe to be unsafe with us, with me.
Ruled by a violent possession and not by fear, my Queen is knocking every damn piece off the board to get to me.
And still, her crown does not fall.
Then, finally…she breaks. In those eyes, she finds the strength to kneel. Gasping, panting, crying vulnerable tears. Fuck, this is what I need.
I drink it all in: the shuddering sobs, the way her weakness shines brighter than any strength. She is most beautiful when broken, when bare, when bleeding the truth of her heart. I feast on it like a starving god.
From her stumbling, broken and bruised and bleeding into the cave where I waited, to the night I scarred her with my arrow, my poison running through her veins…
And now, she is just as exquisite. It surges heat in my chest and blood to my length to know she’s tried to piece herself back together without me. But she couldn’t.
“I thought-I thought you—” she whimpers between ragged gasps, “—were dead or injured or you’d just…left. Left me. Forgot about me. Because of…” she trails off, and I don’t need to read her soul, mind, or face to know. Because of me.
Fuck her and forget her? Breaking all my bones and sawing off my limbs would be simpler, a mercy compared to ever forgetting her, leaving her.
And never because of her.
I shake my head. I give her my fullest attention, lower my head, and brush my mouth along her cheek to murmur, “I’m home.”
She blinks.
Now, I attack, claiming her mouth, tasting my blood on her lips, opening her up, and giving her my poison again. Reminding her. Everything belongs to me.
Every word. Every emotion. Every broken piece.
I’d be a goddamn fool to let that go, to leave it behind for the sake of hollow pride.
She is my greatest pride.
I tilt my jaw, giving her more, suffocating her as I taste her. Her tongue tangles with mine. She arches her neck, wanting more. Tilting my jaw, I deepen and harden the kiss until I’m feasting and mauling her with my mouth and teeth.
She tastes like my blood. And she smells like her sweat, her musk like an entrapping rose.
My chains on her hold stronger than ever. But she’s sunk her teeth into me. Buried an arrow in my soul, just as I buried one in her flesh. A promise: if I ever tried to leave, she would tear me apart from the inside out.
She’s not binding me.
She’s wounding me, haunting me, hunting me.
When I leave her mouth, she inhales, coming up for air. Blood droplets splatter upon her upper chest, a tiny stream running down her exposed breast. Some disappear beneath the ropes binding her.
I see the forceps knocked to the floor along with all the dishes. Broken glass and ceramic everywhere. Now, I smirk and chuff a laugh.
“Thank you, Briella. Good girl, saving so much for my return.” All the suppressed energy she held just for me.
She frowns and spits. “Psychotic parasite.”
“Yes, I’m living inside you. How does it feel, my Queen?”
There is that wicked, feminine grin. “Probably the same way it makes you feel.”
Seth whistles low while Jude begins a slow clap.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Vincent leaning against the far side of the counter with his hands stuffed in his hoodie. Rory is the closest, getting off on the display, but his body language is not the same. The way he looks at her…
“Hmm…quite a few things happened while I was gone.” I slowly loosen my hold so Briella can rise. A lovely handprint bruise upon her throat.
“And didn’t.” She sniffs and glares at me, eyes flicking lower.
Without another moment wasted, I rip the slip of a robe off her body, take myself out, and impale her.
“Ah, God!” she screams as I ambush her. “Fucking finally!”