CHAPTER 20
DAMON
I was fucking vibrating.
I was lying flat on this dusty piece of shit tarp in the hold of an abandoned freighter, the smell of old salt and leaked diesel fuel thick enough to choke on.
The sharp, clean agony of the fishing line Margarita had just dragged through my flesh had mutated.
It wasn't localized pain anymore. It was a bone-deep, rattling chill that hijacked my entire nervous system.
My teeth clacked together. I couldn't stop them.
I hated this. I fucking hated it. I was a man who owned the streets, who dictated who lived and who caught a bullet in the teeth, and right now my own body was treating me like a hijacked passenger.
I stared up at the rusted ceiling, trying to focus on a slow, rhythmic drip of water hitting a pipe somewhere in the dark.
One, two, three. I tried to count the drops to force my jaw to lock, to stop my teeth from chattering.
"Christ, it’s freezing in here," I gritted out, the words vibrating against my own tongue.
Margarita was sitting a few feet away, her knees pulled to her chest, watching me with those massive, haunted eyes. She looked like a ghost in that oversized jacket, swallowed up by the grim reality of my world.
"Don't look at me like that, Margarita," I snapped, but it lacked my usual venom. It just sounded weak.
And then the cold snapped. It didn't fade out; it just vanished, replaced by a sudden, violent inferno.
A high fever hit me like a goddamn freight train.
The ambient temperature of the room ceased to exist. I was boiling from the inside out.
The emergency lights overhead started to strobe in my vision, slicing the hold into jagged, disconnected frames of reality.
The room was expanding, breathing, contracting around me.
I clawed frantically at the collar of my shirt, my fingers clumsy and numb.
The fabric felt like a fucking noose cutting off my oxygen.
"The lights... turn them off," I choked out, thrashing my head side to side.
Through the strobing red glare, Margarita’s silhouette shifted. She was getting up. Panic, hot and completely irrational, spiked in my chest.
"Where are you going?"
She didn't answer right away. Her shadow stretched long and distorted across the bulkhead as she closed the distance between us.
She dropped to her knees beside the tarp.
The air displaced by her movement smelled like stale sweat and dried copper.
She reached out and pressed the back of her hand flush against my forehead.
The coolness of her skin was a miracle. It was a violent shock to my overheating system that dragged a ragged groan directly from the bottom of my lungs. I wanted to crack open my own ribcage and pull her freezing hand right against my hammering heart.
"You’re burning up, Damon," she said, her voice tight with professional alarm.
My right hand had locked into a death grip on the edge of the plastic tarp. I didn't even realize I was doing it until her other hand moved down, her small fingers gently but firmly prying my white-knuckled grip off the plastic.
"Stay still, bastard. Just for once," she muttered, forcing my hand flat against my side.
She pulled back to grab a grimy rag from her medical kit, dousing it from a water bottle before dragging the damp cloth over my face and down the thick muscles of my neck.
I couldn't understand the medical jargon she was whispering under her breath.
All I could track was the way the moisture clung to her pale fingertips, the focused, dead-serious line of her jaw.
Every time she touched me, it felt like she was branding another square inch of my skin, claiming territory right out from under me.
A heavy drop of lukewarm water squeezed out of the rag and fell directly onto my lower lip. I didn't blink. My eyes stayed locked on hers as my tongue darted out, licking the dirty water off my skin.
"I can’t see the infection yet..." she trailed off, her brows pulling together.
I shoved myself up on my elbows. Paranoia ripped through the fever haze.
We were sitting ducks in this metal coffin.
If Cole’s men breached that door right now, I was dead weight.
I needed my weapon. I tried to push higher, but my equilibrium was entirely gone.
Gravity yanked me down. I collapsed backward, the back of my skull cracking against the metal floor with a dull thud that echoed into the rafters.
"Get... get the gun," I slurred, frustration making me blind. I tried to make a fist to punch the floor, to feel something other than the fever, but my fingers just twitched uselessly against the tarp. I was completely impotent. I was wide open. She could take my gun and blow my brains out right now and I wouldn’t even be able to lift a finger to stop her.
"Lie down before you tear the stitches again!" Margarita ordered, her hands slamming against my good shoulder to pin me.
I drifted. The edges of my vision went black, leaving only Margarita in the center of the frame.
Her voice downshifted into a low, steady hum, a frequency vibrating straight into my marrow.
The medical shit she was saying didn't matter.
All that mattered was the way her lips moved, the way she was leaning over me, trapping me beneath her.
I reached out, my heavy arm fighting the air to catch a strand of her messy dark hair, but my coordination was shot.
My hand fell short, my knuckles brushing hard against the rough denim of her knee.
"Just breathe, Damon. Just breathe," she coaxed.
"You sound like... a goddamn angel," I rasped.
The delirium pivoted. The fear burned off, leaving behind a raw, territorial hunger that hit me so hard my vision swam.
I looked at her and the doctor disappeared.
I saw mine. My property. My obsession. The only living thing on this godforsaken planet that made the fire in my blood feel justified.
My breathing hitched, tearing out of my throat in a low, predatory growl.
"Come here."
"Damon, you’re delirious, you need to sleep," she said, trying to pull back.
My arm shot out like a fucking snake. It wasn't a clean grab—my fingers were clumsy as shit—but I caught her wrist. I locked my hand around her narrow bones and exerted every single ounce of strength I had left to anchor her to me.
I jerked her arm toward my face, pressing my sweaty forehead directly against her erratic pulse point.
The cold metal of her watch bit right into my palm.
I could feel her life hammering under her skin.
"Don't move. Don't you fucking move."
"You're hurting me, Damon. Let go," she demanded, twisting her arm.
I didn't let go. I yanked. I used my dead weight and the sheer momentum of my obsession, pulling her completely off her center of gravity.
She stumbled forward with a sharp gasp, her knees hitting the tarp hard on either side of my waist. Her heavy combat boots scuffed the metal floor.
Her medical bag got caught in the crossfire, kicked completely aside, rolls of white gauze spilling out and unspooling uselessly across the dirt.
She slapped both hands flat against my chest to stop herself from crushing me, trying to push back up.
"Damon, stop! You’ll bleed out!" she yelled, her clinical detachment finally fracturing.
"Let it burn. I don't care," I snarled back.
I rolled my hips upward, a weak but brutally clear suggestion. The friction of her thighs framing my waist sent an electric shock straight to my groin. I stared up at her, my eyes glassy, my blood entirely rerouted.
"Straddle me. Now," I commanded, my voice sounding like crushed gravel.
"This is insane. You’re dying, Damon."
I didn't argue. I just lifted a trembling hand, hooked my thumb violently into the waistband of her jeans, and yanked her flush against my groin.
Margarita let out a shaky breath and gave up the fight.
She settled her full weight onto me. I let out a sound that was half a sob and half a feral growl.
Both my hands clamped onto her hips, my fingers digging into the rigid denim of her jeans with bruising, desperate force.
I gripped her so hard a seam near her pocket popped with a sharp tear.
I needed her anchored. I needed the weight of her to prove I was still in my own body.
"Stay right there," I ordered blindly.
"You’re so hot... like you’re on fire too," she whispered, her hands sliding up to my shoulders.
I started to move beneath her. It wasn't the dominant, piston-like thrusting I was used to.
It was a slow, torturous, agonizing grind of my hips upward into hers.
I tilted my head all the way back, my neck muscles straining like steel cables as I groaned at the rusted ceiling.
The heavy friction of denim on denim was a lifeline.
"Don't stop."
"I’ve got you, Damon. I’ve got you," she said, her voice cracking as she rocked her hips back against mine.
The fever stripped away the last of my filters.
Every violent, possessive thought I’d buried since she dragged my bleeding ass into her clinic came vomiting out of me.
I let go of her hip, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and pulled her face down until her ear was flush against my mouth.
I didn't care if I was hurting her. I just needed her to hear the filth.
"You’re my fucking surgeon, my queen," I whispered, my hot breath washing over her skin. "I’m never letting another man touch you."
Margarita didn't pull away. The resistance melted out of her, replaced by the same frantic, doomed energy I was drowning in.
She braced her hands flat on my chest, her palms sliding over the jagged, raised lines of my burn scars.
She rode the slow, heavy rhythm I was setting.
Her short fingernails dug in, leaving perfect red half-moon crescents in the skin of my collarbone.
"Look at me, Damon. Look at me," she demanded, her breathing turning shallow.
"I’m looking... you’re all I see," I panted, my eyes locked on hers.
I fumbled blindly for her belt buckle. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn't grip the metal. I kept slipping. I got my thumb caught awkwardly in her belt loop and ripped it free with a curse.
"Fuck this belt."
"Let me help you, let me..." she offered, her hands dropping to her waist.
"No." I shoved her hands away, finally popping the button and dragging the heavy zipper down.
I shoved my hand inside her jeans. My rough knuckles grazed her stomach before diving down, past the damp silk of her underwear, finding the slick, hot heat of her.
The contact was so devastatingly intense my vision completely whited out.
My eyes rolled back in my head. My breathing shattered into jagged, desperate hitches.
"You’re so wet for a ghost..." I rasped.
"I’m real, Damon. I’m right here."
I used my free hand to grab the collar of my own shirt, ripping it open so my bare chest was exposed to the freezing air and her body heat.
I shoved two fingers inside her, my thumb finding her clit, and I started working her with a rough, delirious insistence.
There was no finesse. No technique. Just raw, unbridled, desperate friction.
Margarita’s head fell back, her throat fully exposed as she let out a broken cry, riding my hand hard.
"Cry for me. Let me hear you."
"Damon... please..."
"You’re mine," I chanted, the fever turning my brain into a broken record of absolute dominance. I pulled her down by the back of her neck and bit down on her shoulder, my teeth sinking in hard enough to bruise the muscle, leaving a permanent claim in the dark. "My blood, my concrete."
"Damon—"
"You're not leaving this ship. Never."
She snapped. The doctor died right there on the tarp and the captive took over. She ground her weight down on my hand with feral aggression, matching the chaotic upward thrusts of my hips. She grabbed my biceps, her knuckles turning bone-white as she squeezed my muscles.
"Don't stop, Boss. Don't you dare stop," she begged, her voice high and panicked as she rode the edge.
"I’ve got you... I’m right here..." I answered, working my fingers faster, my thumb pressing ruthlessly into her nerves.
The climax leveled us both simultaneously.
Margarita shattered with a violent convulsion, crying out as her walls clamped down tight around my fingers.
She collapsed forward, her face burying into my sweaty neck.
The sheer force of her release triggered my own.
I came in my pants with a messy, agonizing groan, my legs shaking uncontrollably.
My heavy combat boots drummed a chaotic rhythm against the metal floor as the orgasm ripped through my exhausted nervous system.
"Margarita... Margarita..." I gasped out, my hand slipping out of her jeans to drop dead against the tarp.
"I’m here. I’m here."
The aftermath was dead silent. The fever had burned through every single drop of adrenaline I had left.
My muscles turned to lead. I laid flat on my back, my eyes fluttering closed.
My heavy hand rested limply, possessively, on the curve of her lower back.
A single bead of sweat—or maybe a tear of sheer physical exhaustion—rolled out of the corner of my eye and soaked into my hair.
"Don't... don't move," I managed to whisper.
"I'm not going anywhere, Damon. Sleep," she answered softly.
She shifted her weight just enough to pull the heavy, diesel-scented blanket over both of us.
She didn't try to leave. She just reached up, tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and rested her head heavily against my uninjured shoulder.
I stopped fighting the dark, letting it drag me under completely.