Chapter 12
I don’t careabout the wolves.
I know I should care about the wolves, but all I want to do is fuck Artemis up against a tree in the woods. In our private forest, we don’t have to worry about party guests. We don’t have to worry about anyone. What we do is just part of our game, and no one can tell us how to feel about each other or when to stop.
And clearly, if Artemis was willing to shoot an arrow at me and leave a cut on my skin that stings every time I move, then she’s willing to go a lot further.
I want to stay in the dark with her.
But there are wolves howling.
Wolves.
I get her clothes back in place first, then gather our bows and quivers and sling all the straps over me.
Then I take her hand.
“My car’s closer,” she says.
We walk quickly along familiar trails. I don’t want to go so fast that we drown out the wolves and get taken by surprise. I can tell Artemis is steadying her breathing on purpose.
We’ve never heard wolves here before. I’ve never heard wolves. If Artemis has, she’s never mentioned it to me, and I can’t imagine her hearing a sound like that and keeping it to herself.
Can it seriously be wolves?
I suppose it could be some other howling animal. Coyotes, maybe. But I thought coyotes were supposed to be solitary, and there’s definitely more than one of whatever’s howling behind us.
Wolves. They are wolves.
We move faster. Artemis seems focused, but not as concerned as I’d expect about the wolves. We both seem to have arrived at the conclusion that breaking into a sprint might be counterproductive—if the wolves hear us running and sprint after us, or if we can’t hear them, it’s going to be…
Very bad.
Probably.
No. It would be very bad, no matter how much the horny, insatiable parts of me want to stay in the cover of the woods and the safety of our game. Artemis changed the rules tonight. She challenged, and I answered. I don’t know if that will hold when we’re back in the city.
The howling is uncomfortably close when we burst out of the forest and jog across the second gravel parking cutout. Artemis’s SUV waits on the other side.
We’re steps away when Artemis sucks in a breath. “What the hell is that? Did someone give me a parking ticket?”
There’s a manila envelope underneath one of the wipers. The sight of it makes a chill trip down the individual vertebrae of my spine.
“It doesn’t matter. Leave it.”
“No. What if it’s?—”
A distant part of my mind marvels at Artemis leaning across the hood of the SUV, up on tiptoe to reach the envelope like there isn’t a pack of wolves in the woods that could find us at any moment. I know Artemis meant what she said in the woods—that she’s not afraid of anything—but is her nonchalance about the wolves because she’s still high on the feel-good chemicals of her orgasm?
I might still be high on the feel-good chemicals of her orgasm. My adrenaline-fast heart has been at work pumping those chemicals all through my bloodstream with a special focus on my cock. I can’t remember ever being this hard. I can’t remember wanting anything this much.
I don’t hear the rest of what Artemis says, because I’m busy throwing our stuff into the trunk and slamming it shut. I’m busy opening the driver’s side door and starting the SUV. I’m busy putting my arms around Artemis’s waist and pulling her down from the SUV, then around to the other side. I push her into the passenger seat and fasten her seat belt.
Then I’m busy driving.
Destination: my apartment. Her apartment. Any apartment where I can lock the door.
I stop at a T-intersection. If we go right, we’re headed back toward Manhattan. If we go left, we’re headed north. A car trundles by with its brights on.
“Apollo,” Artemis says.
Her voice is so shaky and strange that my heart stops.
Artemis has the contents of the envelope in her hands. Papers. Some photos, based on the shine. She stares at me, then looks down at the photos. Back at me. Down at the photos.
I take the slim stack out of her hands gently, because I don’t want her to get a paper cut. That would be the worst possible outcome. It’s okay if I bleed. It’s okay that I’m still bleeding from the cut Artemis gave me. But I don’t want a single mark on her skin aside from the ones I put there.
The larger photos are aerial shots. My mind latches onto those first, even as I balance the smaller stack in the crook of my thumb. Even as my stomach goes cold from what little I can see in my periphery.
Don’t look, a voice whispers in my head. It sounds like a younger version of me, begging.
So. The aerial shots. There are several, taken from a drone or some other aircraft. A stretch of trees. A fence. A building. Tire tracks worn into the ground.
And a short distance off from the building, behind a line that looks like a wall: tents.
One of the photos was taken when the sun was low. Because of the angle, most of what I can see of the people in the photos is their shadows. A small shadow next to a larger one, like a mother and child holding hands. Nearby, two small shadows side by side.
I can’t look at the aerial shots forever, as much as I want to. It feels like someone else’s hand that shuffles the smaller photos into the center of the papers, right in front of my eyes.
Two of the photos are thicker, glossy, like they were printed at a shop somewhere. The others are the same size, but lower quality. Whoever printed them did it on a budget.
I can smell the room in the photos. Carpet cleaner and fear. The angle is different from what I remember. A couple of shots are taken from the door, and light coming through the window on the opposite wall washes out the boy sitting on the bed, making his features indistinct.
It doesn’t matter. I know who he is.
Because he’s me.
There’s me, sitting on the bed, waiting to do a favor.
Another photo, taken at night. Dim light from the hall. Other people in the room, their faces half-turned from the camera, blurred with shadows just like the Senator’s was.
And there’s my mother.
My mother.
Only a slim part of her face. Half of one eye, and the downturned corner of her mouth. Her hair. Someone’s hand on her shoulder, but the photo doesn’t show him. It shows part of her, leaving the room, and part of me, the rest hidden by a man bending down to speak to me. It shows me, and it shows my mother, not being able to speak to each other. If she could have turned around and gone to me, she would have. I know that. I know that.
My mother.
You’ll do him a favor, right?
For a moment, I’m back in that room, sitting on that bed, watching her disappear around the corner. I’m breathing in cheap cologne and swearing to myself that if I don’t think about it, if I don’t think at all, it will be over before I can miss her. If I glow at the man, it will be over, and I won’t have to miss her.
These pictures, together, tell a story. About knowing and not knowing. They’re drawing a purposeful line between me on that bed and the people in these tents. If the story about me gets out, then there will be an escalation. It will mean questions that people will want answers for, and it will mean people looking at me. It will mean people looking at Ares. Our whole family will be in the spotlight.
If the story about the people in the tents gets out, there will be another kind of escalation. The kind of foreign conflict that gets other countries involved. People will line up to take sides. What they might discover about me and what happened in Rathbek pales in comparison to what might happen on the ground in Morica when push comes to shove.
It can’t come to that, otherwise the people in those tents will be the ones to pay.
A loud tickticktick brings me back to the present. And Artemis’s hand on my arm.
“Apollo?” she says. It’s probably not the first time she’s said my name.
From outside my body, I turn the photos face down and pull out the last sheet of paper in the stack. Most of the sheet is blank. The typed words and coordinates take up very little space.
“Artemis,” I hear myself say. “I have to go.”
“There’s not a single chance in any version of hell that you’re going alone,” Artemis says. “I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t know where?—”
“Can we drive there?”
I put the papers on the center console and meet Artemis’s eyes. The shake in her voice is gone.
“No. We’d have to fly.”
“Then take us to the airfield.”
We go north.Same direction as the Senator’s airfield, but nothing in the world will get me on that plane. We’ll fly with our own pilot, who can be ready at a moment’s notice.
Private airport. Private airplane. Two suitcases with sets of our most important clothes, just in case. My dad and his siblings are weird about preparedness, although now I’m seeing the advantages. We’re on the plane. An attendant who seems preternaturally calm takes my instructions for the pilot and tells us to prepare for takeoff. And I don’t understand how—I keep jumping around in time, losing minutes, maybe longer, so I miss the part of the flight where we taxi down the runaway and take off—but we’re in the air above the ocean. My heart tick tock tick tock ticks, running out of time.
“I don’t know what to say,” I tell Artemis. “I don’t know how to explain this.”
It’s not right for her to get on a plane with me without knowing where we’re going, but I can see the logic in it. What other choice does she have? I should have fought for her to stay. Even if I had, wouldn’t we arrive at the same impasse? This is why I don’t leave the country. What if I couldn’t get back?
What if neither of us can get back now?
“Then don’t,” Artemis says, and drags me into the plane’s bedroom.
As soon as she closes the door behind us, the primitive part of my brain that wants to tell the pilot to run, to hide, to land anywhere but Mociar latches onto the dim lighting and the relative privacy and how little time we have, in the scheme of things. It seizes those facts with a ferocity that I can see reflected back at me in Artemis’s eyes.
She reaches out and squeezes my biceps just below the still-smarting cut, jolting the pain back into me again. It clears my head. If I only have hours with her, if I’m making a foolish, dangerous decision because someone—the Senator? How many other people?—if someone has a copy of the photos that have been folded twice and shoved into my bag, then that’s it. The photos are worse than the Rathbek deal. The photos are physical evidence of the rot. Artemis has seen them, but the light wasn’t good in the SUV. There’s plenty the photos don’t show. I can still keep it from her.
I can still have her now, before it’s too late.
I start with my mouth on her skin, tasting the night air that still clings to her and her sweet, warm mouth and the fluttering pulse at the side of her neck. It’s imperative that I get her naked, but I can’t rush it. I have to stop and kiss every inch of skin that’s revealed to me. The spot above her belly button. The curve of her hip. The perfect line of her thigh. All places I’ve seen before, because I’ve seen Artemis in a bikini more times than I can count, but all places I couldn’t touch, couldn’t let myself linger on. If I let myself stare, I’d have lost control and begged to be able to?—
Anything. I’d have begged for anything.
I don’t beg to lick her pussy. Artemis spreads her legs for me and pushes my head down with a needy whine that almost makes me come on the plane’s bed. She’s twice as slick as she was before and slightly salty and warm from the rush, and she’s the best thing I’ve ever had the honor of licking. Her thighs flex and flex and flex, working to angle her hips up to my mouth. I lose count of how many times she comes on my tongue. It’s impossible to hold the number in my head, just like it’s impossible to keep track of the turbulence when I’m doing this.
When I have her.
I can’t say why I leave her pussy and climb up to kiss her, filthy and deep, while I keep the heel of my hand centered over her clit. Artemis shakes and shudders and the sounds she makes into my mouth are either questions or demands. I can’t tell which.
And then she lifts her hips, and two of my fingers slip inside her.
I come up from the kiss like I was drowning. “I want to fuck you. So bad. You don’t know how long I’ve wanted this.”
“Yes,” she says, her eyes huge and dark. “I do.”
Artemis takes my head in her hands and pulls so I’m down in a kiss that feels like every hunting game we’ve ever played all condensed into a fiery heat. I don’t know which of us counts as the winner in this one, but Artemis pulls until I’m over her, until I’m all lined up, until I’m pushing in inch by blinding inch.
I bend and kiss her neck, her mouth, the side of her chin. Her hands tighten on my shoulders and then she gasps, rolling her hips in this perfect clench that could wipe out every bad memory, every terrible favor I ever did. I fuck into her deep. Artemis makes this sound—I wish this plane could fly forever, so I could hear it forever—and then she pushes, and I’m on my back, up against the headboard somehow.
Artemis braces herself and rides like her life depends on it. Like this is her only chance to drive her hips down into mine and rock herself over my cock and let me put my hands on her hips and add extra force and pull so that the two of us are colliding with every stroke, so hard it should hurt, but it doesn’t.
It’s so good.
Too good.
Her hands are at my neck and her face is very close, her hips doing this—I don’t know how to describe, I’ve never had someone move like this over me—she’s doing this thing, this perfect torturous grind.
“Do it,” she says. “Come on, Apollo. Do it.”
That’s when I realize she felt my orgasm coming before I did. She hunted it down and caught it between her legs, and she chases it with her hips, and she’s going to get it.
I’m going to give it to her.
Too loud for the plane, but I can’t stop making this sound or I’ll die. The pleasure is one thing, but spilling it into Artemis is something else entirely. Midway through, we’re moving, and it’s because of me. I get her on her back and pump the rest of my orgasm into her while she clenches and makes these high little keening sounds and fucking crickets, she’s coming again.
It takes a while to come down.
When I do, I’m leaning my forehead against hers, and Artemis is whispering Apollo. Apollo. Apollo. with her hands in my hair.
“Yeah?” I manage, along with half of a kiss.
“Do that again.”