63. Briella #2
Finally, he rubs his member, slick with my saliva, along my cheek.
“I was seventeen years old. Vincent had aged out, but he was still fighting, still providing. But one night, while the bastard was fucking me, I took one of the priest’s arrowheads I kept in my shoe and stabbed the bastard.
Not to kill him. Just wound him. And I dragged his rotten ass all the way up the stairs and to the commons area. ”
He pounds again, and I see the veins throbbing in his neck, his breath leaving in quick bursts as he tries to control himself. I take it all. My throat burns. My jaw aches. But I am here for him. His sharp but tortured eyes imprison mine. Chains to keep me, not to cage me.
“I forced him to face all the children he’d abused,” he continues.
“Not one was free of his trauma. Vincent was there, back from a recent provision trip. We were all there. Rory had been learning to cook and how to use a knife. Seth was a prodigy lumberjack by then, chopping the most wood for the fireplaces there.”
He pulls out. And cups my chin, thumbing away more tears.
“We woke the children. Quietly. Not alerting the staff who turned a blind eye to all his abuses. I had Seth take the little ones outside. They didn’t need to see what we were about to do.
Not all of us are built for blood. But the older ones…
” he trails off, dragging his thumb down my throat.
“They watched. I wanted them to remember that monsters can die. That we can end them.”
He grips my throat again. I open my mouth, struggling for air. The endorphins rage inside me.
He jerks his chin to the others. And I feel their shadows falling upon us. Raphael loosens his grip, and then…they are all there.
A desperate sob escapes my mouth when Vincent locks my wrists behind my back and yanks the straps down my shoulders, freeing my breasts. He cups one.
“Vincent broke his jaw with one punch,” Raphael says.
Oh, God! Jude gets on the floor between Raphael and I, peels back my thong, and puts his hot tongue to my clit, hypnotizing me, paralyzing.
“Jude dropped him with a needle—paralysis.”
I gasp at the familiar sensation of Rory parting my cheeks to lick my anus.
“Rory whipped him like he whipped so many. And then opened him up like a butcher.”
My blood catches fire. Too much all at once, wreaking havoc on my senses but surging adrenaline in my veins and liquid heat in my center. Jude’s fingers dip inside me, pumping them in and out.
Raphael thrusts back in, ramming down my throat. “I put a blade through his heart. And Seth…”
My Timber takes my other breast in his hand, closes his warm mouth around one erect nipple, and sucks hard, circling the bud with the tip of his tongue.
“Oh, Gods!” I cry out.
“Seth dismembered him like rotten wood. And not one of those kids looked away.”
He pauses, letting the tension coil tighter while coiling his hand tighter around my throat, the thrusts quicker now. My pussy clenches harder, hungrier, hotter around Jude’s fingers, wanting more, needing more.
“Then, we lit the match. The first and last time I let Rory play with fire. He lit the whole fucking place up like a funeral pyre.”
I picture the flames licking the sky, justice scorching the rot from that house as he fucks my mouth, balls slapping against my chin.
“Some staff made it out. Most didn’t. We didn’t look back.”
I love the sounds coming from his throat, animalistic growls as he gives me everything—as they give me everything. Vincent tweaks my nipple with his other hand, kneading my breast while Seth keeps licking and suckling the other.
Sweat beads on my skin.
“Foster families took the little ones. The rest of us scattered. Jude enlisted, but stayed with me the year before. Rory slipped into the gangs. Seth stuck by me. We survived in the shadows.”
Jude drags the flat of his tongue along my clit before circling it devilishly, then flicking the side of the wet, pink nub.
One last breath.
“And you?”
“I became the thing they could fear more than monsters. The memory.” He thrusts, presses in, burrowing, fucking, hunting his release. I work hard to control mine, knowing he hasn’t freed me yet.
“The shadow on the stairs. The face burned into the backs of their eyelids. Not the victim. Not the survivor.” Tremors rack his body. He’s rattling my bones.
Oh, hell, Rory flicking his tongue against my anal ring, Jude tonguing my clit, and fucking my pussy with his fingers. Vincent and Seth both taking my nipples in their mouths, suckling hard. Heat unfurls low within me. The pressure grows.
And Raphael… “I was the reckoning. The nightmare they’d never outrun. Fucking come, Briella.”
Three rapid-fire thrusts and then his hips plow forward, flooding my throat and mouth with his cum. I swallow desperately, needing air. The great rush of air leaving his throat is what sends me over the edge.
I scream around his cock as the orgasm powers through me, sending me soaring and blazing, then crashing and burning with him, with all of them. My body is still shaking when he pulls out and tucks himself back into his pants.
Vincent releases my wrists, stroking my breast along with Seth. Jude kisses my thigh. Rory takes an ample grip of my ass.
They don’t speak a word as Raphael presses his forehead to mine. “I was born in blood, Briella. But when you look at me, from the first moment you looked up at me…maybe I don’t have to die in it.”
I rise from my knees and fall into his arms, sobbing. It’s more than what just happened. It’s that soul tether. That unshakable bond.
He wasn’t just the reckoning for those kids.
He was the shadow in my dreams.
The darkest one ever to find me there.
A nightmare—but he was my nightmare.
In my own twisted way, I sought him.
Those green eyes. That silhouette against my bedroom wall. The one I curled my little child self around.
Not because I felt safe—but because I felt alive.
In the white, sterile hollow of Easthaven, I crept into the abyss of my mind, knowing he would always be waiting for me.
Hunting me.
Keeping me.
With the tension relieved from his shoulders, Raphael touches the crest of my messy braid, ensuring the arrowhead pin is secure, concealed.
“And the cap?” I finally ask in a fractured voice. He’s wearing the old one. I’m wearing the new.
“It was his.” He taps it. “Always wore it when he fucked me. After I stabbed him with the arrow, I took it right off his head and wore it while we ended the monster. Two years of my clothes getting filthy from the basement, two years of being his animal, this…” He traces a finger down his vest. “This is what I need.”
I nod, my fingers straying to the ends of his ponytail. “Was your hair always long?”
He shakes his head, the shadows brewing around him. “I shaved it. He could fuck me without gripping my hair to do it.”
No wonder he keeps it long. Long and beautiful.
We sit in silence for a few minutes. He makes space for me, letting me cry here. I hear the heavy breaths of the others. I know how much they are waiting.
Because the time has come.
It’s my turn.