Chapter 23
Cass
I've been listening to Ash fall apart for twenty minutes and my self-control has officially filed for divorce.
The sounds are coming through the wall in waves, muffled but unmistakable, the low desperate moaning that Ash does when he's being taken slow, when someone is making him work for it instead of giving him the pace he wants.
I can tell it's my father in there with him because Ash sounds different with each of us.
With me he's loud, surprised sounds punched out of him by force.
With Teague he laughs between the moans.
With Ledger he goes quiet until he can't anymore.
But with my father, Ash sounds like a man being unraveled thread by thread, each sound longer than the last, building toward something enormous.
I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water I haven't touched, staring at the hallway.
Teague left for the south paddock ten minutes ago.
Ledger is somewhere in the barn. The house is empty except for me and whatever is happening in that bedroom, which means there's no one here to remind me why I shouldn't walk down that hall.
The door is cracked. Not open, not quite an invitation, but not locked either. I push it wider with two fingers and step inside.
My brain whites out for about three full seconds.
Ash is in my father's lap, facing him, his thighs spread wide across Boone's hips. His spine is arched in a deep curve that makes every vertebra visible beneath his skin, the muscles along his back flexing as he rolls his hips in a grinding rhythm that's pulling sounds from both of them.
His hands are gripping Dad’s shoulders, his face buried in my father's neck, and the noises pouring out of him are muffled against skin but loud enough to fill the room.
The bruises layered across his back and hips make him look like a canvas someone has been painting for ten days, my handprints overlapping my father's overlapping my brothers', a record of every man who's claimed him written in purple and yellow across his body.
I grip the doorframe because my legs have decided to stop cooperating and every drop of blood I own has relocated south.
Dad’s eyes find me over Ash's shoulder. He doesn't stop or cover Ash, or even slow his pace.
He just holds my gaze for a beat, a silent acknowledgment that I'm here and that it changes nothing, before his attention returns to the man in his arms. Ash doesn't notice me at all.
He's too far gone, his face pressed into Dad’s throat, his moans climbing in pitch as my father thrusts up into him.
I watch Dad pull Ash down hard onto him, holding him there, his jaw tight.
Ash cries out against his neck, his body locking, his spine going rigid before he collapses forward onto Dad’s chest like every bone in his body dissolved at once.
My father follows him over, I can see it in the stutter of his hips and the groan buried against Ash's shoulder.
Then silence, except for the sound of two men breathing hard, Ash's small broken sounds still leaking out of him as he melts against Dad’s chest.
The screech of tires on gravel tears through the window, stealing my attention.
My head snaps toward the sound. Boone's eyes meet mine again, the post-sex haze gone in an instant.
We both know that sound. Whoever just pulled into the drive wasn't slowing down.
An engine cuts, a car door slams, and then there's shouting, a voice I recognize in my bones because I've been hearing it my whole life, getting louder as boots hit the porch steps.
Marcus.
I'm out of the bedroom and down the hallway before the thought finishes forming.
The front door bangs open just as I reach the living room, Marcus filling the frame with his face red and his eyes wild, scanning the house with the frantic energy of a man who drove forty minutes on pure fury and hasn't figured out what he's going to do now that he's here.
He sees me and his mouth opens. Whatever he plans to say dies when the sound carries down the hallway, Ash's muffled voice saying Boone's name, soft, wrecked, and completely unmistakable.
Marcus's face goes white. Then red. Then something beyond red, a color I don't think human faces are supposed to turn, the capillaries in his eyes flooding as his jaw works around words that won't form. He takes a step toward the hallway.
Absolutely, the fuck not.
There's no windup, no warning, no conscious decision involved. My fist connects with his jaw, the impact traveling up my arm into my shoulder. Marcus staggers sideways into the wall, his hand flying to his face, shock cracking through the fury like lightning through glass.
"What the fuck—"
I grab him by the collar of his jacket and drag him toward the door. He's lighter than I expected and smaller than I remember. His legs scramble against the floor while I haul him through the doorway like a bag of feed that didn't make weight.
I throw him off the porch. He lands on the gravel on his hands and knees, his palms scraping against the rocks, blood already running from the corner of his mouth.
"You're fucking insane!" He gets to his feet, gravel embedded in his palms, swaying. "All of you, you're all fucking insane! This is my family! That's my father in there with my boyfriend and you're acting like I'm the problem?"
"He's not your boyfriend." I step off the porch, the distance between us shrinking. Marcus backs up but not fast enough. "He hasn't been your boyfriend since you left him on Meridian in the dark like garbage you couldn't be bothered to throw away properly."
"You don't know what happened—"
"I know exactly what happened." My hands are shaking and it's not from the punch.
It's from everything I can't say without screaming, every flinch I cataloged, every time Ash went white at a slammed door, every bruise that wasn't ours fading on his skin the first week he was here.
"I know he sat on a curb for six hours. I know you drove to a party.
I know you called our father for a lawyer instead of calling the man you were supposed to give a shit about. "
"You don't get to lecture me—"
"He's ours." The words come out so low they barely qualify as speech. Marcus' eyes go wide. "He chose us, Marcus. Every single day for ten days he has walked into our rooms under his own power, asked for what he wanted with his own mouth, and chose to stay. You are never touching him again."
Marcus lunges. It's sloppy, the kind of move a man makes when his pride has been crushed past the point of logic, all momentum and no technique. I catch him by the throat before his fist connects with anything.
Ledger appears from the side of the house like he materialized from the shadows. His hand closes around my wrist, not Marcus' throat, not pulling me off so much as reminding me that my grip exists and that it's tightening past the point of warning.
"Cass." One word. That's all Ledger ever needs.
I let go. Marcus stumbles back, coughing, his hand clawing at his neck. His eyes are streaming, his carefully constructed composure scattered across our gravel driveway in pieces.
Teague rounds the corner from the paddock, his expression flat in a way that looks wrong on a face built for grinning. He takes in the scene, Marcus hunched over spitting blood, me breathing hard with Ledger's hand still on my wrist, and positions himself between us and the house.
"We got this," Teague says to me, his eyes never leaving Marcus. "Go inside."
"I'm not finished with him."
"Yeah, you are. Go check on Ash."
I hold Marcus' gaze for three more seconds because I need him to see what lives behind my eyes.
I need him to understand that the only reason he's still standing is because my brother's hand is on my arm.
There's a man inside this house who doesn't need to hear his ex-boyfriend choking on his own blood.
"You're all sick," Marcus spits, red on his teeth. "Every single one of you. When people find out what you're doing to him—"
"Nobody's doing anything to him." Ledger's voice is cold. "Everything that's happened in this house, Ash chose. You should leave. Don't come back."
"Or what? You'll assault me again? I'll have every cop in the county—"
Ledger just looks at him as I stalk back into the house with my knuckles throbbing, the skin split clean across my middle and ring fingers.
Blood drips onto the hallway floor as I move toward the sound of running water.
The bathroom door is cracked open, steam curling through the gap.
My father is leaning against the wall beside it, arms crossed, jeans buttoned but his chest still bare.
"I'm sorry." The words come out rough, scraping against the anger still living in my throat. "I should have been on the porch. I should have stopped him before he got through the door."
"You didn’t know he would rush up here. I antagonized him, which was not a smart move but I needed him to truly understand what he lost. However, you stopped him before he reached the hallway. That's what mattered."
"I almost killed him, Dad." I look down at the blood on my knuckles, the skin peeled back across the bone. It had felt like hitting something hollow. "He's not allowed to see Ash like that. He doesn't get to stand in this house and look at him. He can't have him."
Boone studies my face the way he studies everything, reading beneath the surface to what lives underneath.
"If I hadn't been inside Ash when I heard that car, I would have done worse.
Marcus was on the phone with me earlier, when Ash made a sound.
I knew Marcus was stupid, but I didn't think he was stupid enough to show up at my house. "
"He's going to come back."
A grin spreads across my father's face, slow and sharp, the expression of a man who's already thought three moves past the problem. "Then make sure he doesn't." The grin holds for a beat before the warmth drains from it. "But don't make me bail you out of jail, Cassian. I won't do it."
Something close to delight runs through me despite the circumstances and I glance at the cracked bathroom door, the faint sound of water moving against porcelain. "How is he?"
"He says he's fine." My father pushes off the wall and grips my shoulder once. "But he just watched his ex get dragged out of the house by a man twice his size, so play nice. He's probably a little spooked even if he won't say it."
I push the bathroom door open with my unbloodied hand.
The tub is full, steam rising, and Ash is submerged to his chin with his knees drawn up, his dark eyes tracking me the second I appear.
He looks small in the water, the bruises on his shoulders vivid against the white porcelain.
His gaze drops to my split knuckles and stays there.
I strip off my shirt, kick my boots across the tile, shove my jeans down, and step into the water behind him. It's almost too hot, the way he always runs them when he's given the choice. I settle against the back of the tub and pull him against my chest.
He comes without resistance, his back flush against me, his head tipping onto my shoulder.
His body holds tension in his shoulders and along his spine, the lingering vibration of adrenaline still humming through his muscles.
The heat works on him first and my arms work on him second.
He softens by degrees, his breathing slowing, his weight settling fully into me.
"I've never seen him that angry," Ash says quietly. His fingers find my forearm under the water, tracing along the muscles. "But I can't blame him."
Something hot surges through my chest and I open my mouth to argue, to tell him that Marcus deserves every ounce of what he got today. Ash turns his head before I get the first word out, pressing his lips to my jaw, soft, dreamy, still half-lost in whatever headspace the morning put him in.
"I'm fucking my ex's dad and his brothers, Cass." He pauses, the sentence settling over both of us in the steam. His face goes crimson, the blush spreading down his neck and across his chest, visible even through the flushed pink of the hot water. "It sounds so much worse saying it aloud."
I tilt his chin up with my finger, turning his face toward mine. His eyes are wet, a little wild, embarrassed in a way that has nothing to do with shame. He's not ashamed of us. He's overwhelmed by the size of what he chose, the impossibility of it, the fact that any of this happened at all.
"We're doing a little more than fucking, gorgeous."
Something shifts behind his eyes. The embarrassment cracks and underneath it is the same thing I saw last night when he fell asleep on my chest, the same thing I feel pressing against my own ribs every time he walks into a room and looks for me first.
He hums against my shoulder, his body going loose in the water.
"He won't get to you," I tell him, my mouth finding the wet skin behind his ear. "I promise you that, Ash."
I turn his face toward mine, slow, giving him every chance to pull back.
His lips find mine and the kiss is nothing like the ones we've shared before.
There's no urgency, no hunger, no competition with the clock or the other men in this house.
Just his mouth against mine in the warm water, his hand curling around the back of my neck, my thumb tracing the line of his jaw, the quiet sound of him sighing against my tongue.
Marcus can come back a hundred times. He can bring cops, lawyers, the whole goddamn county.
He's not getting through me.