Chapter Fourteen #2
I scrub a hand over my face, wiping away the smile she keeps forcing out of me. “Appreciate the mercy.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then she surprises the hell out of me. She rises up, taking my dick in her hand and guiding it back home as she slides onto it.
I let out a low, ragged groan, my fingers tightening on her hips, but I don’t move.
The way she exhales and just collapses against my chest tells me everything I need to know.
She’s not looking for a fuck. She’s looking for an anchor.
She’s looking for somewhere safe to put herself while she says the rest of it.
“Better,” she murmurs, pressing a lingering kiss to the pulse point in my neck before pulling back to look at me.
Her lip trembles, but her eyes are steel.
“Now, where was I? Right. It didn’t take me long to understand there was no humanity left inside Damon.
Honestly, I don’t believe there ever was any. ”
“Marigold, who exactly is Damon?”
"You know I'm from Greece. My family wasn't famous, but they had standing in the art world. They owned one of the more prestigious galleries." Something dims behind her eyes. “Anemoria. It’s fitting, really. The name refers to a place that exists only in memory or dreams. That’s all it is now.”
“What happened?”
“Damon did.” She tries to crawl closer, seeking more of my heat, so I tighten my hold and give her a shallow, rhythmic tilt of my hips.
She hums, a tiny sound of gratitude, and nods.
“Mama and Papa picked up on the abuse early. They begged me to leave him. But it wasn’t that easy. Damon was just... too powerful.”
“Who is he, little shadow?” I repeat, the hair on the back of my neck starting to stand up.
“Bad. He’s a bad, bad man. Damon Katzis,” she whispers. She says it like a prayer to a devil, like saying it too loud will summon him right into the red light of this room.
The name ricochets through my mind, bouncing off old intel and club briefings until it finally clicks into place. My blood turns to slush.
“Minos,” I murmur, the name I know him by.
The scent of pure, unadulterated fear wafts off her as she stills on top of me.
“Yes. They called him that because he’s a master of the labyrinth.
He plays mind games until you’re lost, then he moves in for the kill.
” She lifts her eyes to mine, searching for a reaction.
“Is that how you know him? Does your club do business with his gang?”
“No. Not our chapter. Don’t think any of the others have either.
But the name is a legend in the underground.
” I pause, the gears turning. “Actually, the last I heard about Minos was five years ago. Word was he’d been murdered.
” I peer at her, brushing a strand of gold behind her ear, my heart hammering against the name she carved over it. “That was you?”
She nods once. “I didn't have a choice.”
“Tell me.”
“They tried so hard to get me to leave, you know. They watched me losing pieces of myself, one by one, and there was nothing they could do about it. I was a prisoner in the gilded cage he built.” Her voice is steady but the steadiness costs her something.
"There were so many days I thought about just ending it because I couldn’t find a reason to wake up anymore.
There was nothing to smile about. I only spoke to the people he chose.
If I was allowed to see my parents, he was right there, a shadow at my shoulder, ready to punish me if I so much as breathed a word of the truth.
” The sad smile she gives me is one of the most devastating things I've ever seen on a human face.
“I was never brave enough to end it, though. Because the truth is, Tomcat... I really do like living.”
I take her face in both hands and pull her mouth to mine. The kiss is a claiming and a thank you and a relief I don't have words for. It’s brutal and real and every bit of gratitude I have for the fact that she chose to stay in the world long enough to find her way to me.
I pull back just enough to run my thumb over her puffy, bruised lips. “Thank fuck for that,” I rasp.
Her eyes flicker with a complicated mess of emotions, the corner of her mouth twitching before she pulls the thread of the story again.
“That day,” she says, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat.
“Damon was being gentle. Those were the worst days because they caught me off guard. After so much agony, you start to crave the softness, even when you know it’s a lie.
He’s the master of the long game. There is no greater manipulator, no better gaslighter, than Damon Katzis.
” She shifts on my lap, a low moan escaping her as she leans forward to press a kiss to the tip of my nose.
“That day was his masterpiece. I was drugged just enough to make me compliant and taken to my parents house. He tied me to a chair in the living room. He’d clearly gotten to them earlier because they were slurring, their bodies barely cooperating.
They tried to tell me to run, but they couldn't even stand. Then Damon walked in and...”
She stops. A horrifying, broken sound of distress spills out of her.
Her eyes go wild, darting around the red-lit room as if the shadows are turning into that living room in Greece.
She starts moving over me, her hips rising and falling in a frantic, desperate rhythm.
I grit my teeth, my hands anchoring her hips like iron clamps.
I drop my head back against the cushion, fighting every instinct to take control.
I let her use me. I let her use my body to anchor her soul before she floats away into the dark.
“I can’t,” she cries, her voice high and thin. “I can’t remember. It hurts. Make it stop. I don’t want to be there.” She fists her hands in my hair, her nails digging into my scalp. “Fuck me. Please. Just fuck me.”
So, I do. I flip her around, pinning her into the cushions, and I fuck her with a heavy, grounding force until she’s gripping my dick so hard that a roar of pure, primal release is torn from my throat.
When the world stops spinning, I cover her face in gentle, lingering kisses until she sighs and maneuvers out from under me.
The silence in the room is deafening now.
She finds her underwear and slides them on, then tosses me my jeans.
She retreats to one end of the couch, pulling her knees to her chest, curling into herself in the way people do when they’re trying to hold their own edges together.
I stay on the other end, watching her like a hawk, waiting to see what she needs.
“I’ll tell you the rest, but I can’t go into the details,” she says, her voice hollow. “It puts me in a headspace I might not come back from. There's already enough wrong up there without me feeding what he built in my head."
“Whatever is easiest for you, little shadow,” I promise.
“He killed them in front of me. It was my fault because I loved them too much. They had a piece of my heart he knew he’d never own, and he couldn't live with that.
In his sick, warped mind, erasing them was an act of love.
He thought he was removing the last obstacle.
But all he did was give oxygen to the one spark he hadn't managed to stomp out.”
She rubs her throat, her fingers ghosting over a memory of a scream.
“I screamed until my throat was raw. Until I couldn't speak for days. But it was enough. The rage burned through the drugs. I knew he kept a knife in his suit jacket, but I had to wait. I had to let him believe he’d finally broken me. That I’d finally learned to love the monster.
So, I acted. Part of me did break that day, so the act wasn't even that hard.”
Marigold lets out a dry, jagged chuckle.
“When he pulled me into his arms, thinking he’d won, I swiped the blade.
It was almost funny. This legendary nightmare, and little old me just reached in and took his favorite toy.
” She shakes her head. “He let me go so he could pace, ranting about how this was all for my own good. I turned away. I wanted to see them one last time. Mama and Papa... they were the only reason I never gave up.” She looks up at me, and the red light catches the tears hanging from her lashes like sparkling diamonds.
“That monster took them from me, Tomcat. He took everything.”
I reach out, grabbing her feet and hauling them into my lap.
I need the contact. Her pain is physically in the room now, thick enough to choke the air out of my lungs.
My fingers dig into the arch of her foot, applying a heavy, grounding pressure to try and ease the tension coiled in her like a spring.
Marigold lets out a small breath, leaning into the touch for a few minutes before the story starts to pour out of her again.
“I was so empty inside by that point,” she says, her voice drifting.
“When I heard him coming up behind me, I flicked open the blade. It caught us both off guard when I shoved it into his chest.” She lifts a hand, her fingers curling around an invisible hilt, mimicking the motion.
Once. Twice. She stops, staring at her palm as if the blood is still wet there.
“There was a lot of it. I was sure I hit something vital.”
Marigold peers back at me with a smile that should be all kinds of wrong considering the subject matter. She wags a finger at me like she’s giving me a tip on the weather. “You should always make sure the person you’re killing is actually dead before setting the place on fire and running.”
I stare at her, my mind racing through the logistics of a burned-out crime scene in Greece. “You didn’t call the cops? What about your parents?”