3. Vince
Vince
I was not attracted to Bellamy Marchant or any of the four men who frequently took him to bed, but I was very attracted to the way they all loved him.
There was something commendable, noble—almost—about the way they fell over themselves to keep him happy, to make him come.
Sex was a powerful tool in our world, and Bellamy’s four boyfriends knew how to wield it like a fucking longsword.
Sitting in my father’s office, behind his desk, I found myself thinking about the five of them the new Sinclair-North dynasty and what my part in the world was meant to be.
When I brokered a deal with Gideon and Fletcher, I’d never intended to come home afterward and put a bullet through my father’s brain, but his rage at my overstep was insurmountable.
He would have killed me, given the chance, so common sense said I had to take the option off the table .
It was what he’d taught me.
I walked my fingers up the arms of his chair—my chair—impressed at how clean Orion had managed to get it.
He’d called in professionals, and that explained why the entire room smelled of bleach and lemons.
It was borderline sickening, but it would have been too much work to haul decades of my father’s paper records out of the drawers and cabinets to make sense of them elsewhere.
Forever antiquated, and now dead, he’d been meticulous with his record keeping, just not technologically forward with it.
Burning paper was probably easier, if not far more fragrant, than trying to wipe a computer.
“Do you want me to light a fire?”
I glanced toward the door, finding Orion in the doorway. He was dressed the same as he was the day I’d shot my father, in well-tailored black slacks and a white dress shirt, that ridiculously sexy silver chain peeking out from the side of the collar.
“Why would I want a fire?”
We both looked to the ornate fireplace on the far wall of the office. I traced my finger across my eyebrow, chasing after a phantom itch and wondering if he could read my mind.
“It’s cold in here, Sir.”
I was far from cold, heat radiating out of my chest at the sound of the honorific as it fell out of his mouth. The way he groaned and spread his feet in the doorway as if to brace himself, only confirmed the word had been an accident. An oversight. That didn’t change how much I enjoyed hearing it.
“Sir?” I repeated it back to him, cocking my head to the side and testing the feel of it between us. “Do you work for me now, Orion? Am I the one in charge of things now?”
He didn’t need to know I felt like a little boy playing dress up, sitting behind daddy’s desk and pretending to be more important than I was. That was a secret I would take to my grave, whenever I was unlucky enough to find myself there. Hopefully many, many years down the road.
“I serve the good of the family,” he said.
“I don’t appreciate word games.”
“Yes, Sir,” he whispered.
“You don’t sound sure.”
“Do you want me to light a fire?” he asked again, flexing his hands at his sides.
How long had they been balled into fists?
Did he want to hit me? I wouldn’t have blamed him.
He’d been at my father’s side for years and I’d come treacherously close to murdering them both.
A double funeral would have been fitting, considering the nature of their relationship.
I didn’t know yet what I wanted my relationship with Orion to be like. His loyalty to me remained untested, and putting a gun to his head while fucking his throat was far from enough to be certain.
Sex was control, after all.
I remembered Orion tied to my father’s bed, debased and bleeding, covered in his own piss, near delirious from dehydration and malnourishment.
I’d never brought that night up to him or my father, and I wondered sometimes…
how much he remembered. If he recalled the things he’d told me as I gingerly worked to free his wrists and his ankles, his thighs, his balls.
Sex was power.
But power had nothing to do with loyalty and even less to do with trust.
“Light a fire,” I said.
Orion rubbed a finger over his collarbone, then confirmed the instruction with a sharp nod.
I leaned back in the chair molded to a body that wasn’t mine, watching the way his pants stretched across his ass when he sank down into a squat to fuss with the gas knob.
It wasn’t long before a fire sparked to life, casting long and foreboding shadows across the room.
As soon as the heat reached me, I realized Orion had been right.
It was cold.
Fucking fall.
“What would you do if I asked you to put your hand into the fire?” I asked him quietly.
He heard me, shoulders going tense. “Are you asking me to do that?”
“Not yet,” I said.
Orion didn’t look at me when he answered. “I would.”
“Why?”
“Because you told me to,” he answered.
“Blind loyalty doesn’t count for shit.”
He straightened his neck, then stood. His hands were loose at his sides now, fingers long and elegant.
I’d never seen them curled around the handle of a knife, the trigger of a gun.
But everything about Orion was attractive to me, the competence of him most of all.
Even though I didn’t know the depths or the secrets of their professional or their private relationship, it made me angry my father had mistreated him for so many years.
Made me angry that was the first thing I did to him.
There was no way that one encounter I’d walked in on been a once-off, and there was no way consent had been involved, beyond this broad and unsure kind Orion offered me now to placate me.
“Blind loyalty isn’t driven by emotion or need.” He turned toward me and slid one of his hands into the pocket of his slacks. “Emotion muddies motives. It complicates things.”
I thought again of Bellamy Marchant and the legions of men who’d tried to use him and failed, because the muddied emotions of two men who’d never understood the power at their disposal.
“You’re not wrong there,” I murmured.
Orion regarded me warily, and for the first time I wondered just how deadly his blind loyalty to my father would turn out to be for me.