Chapter 21
The sex that followed was not gentle. Seth didn't want gentle. Gentle was for people who hadn't just killed someone on a rain-slicked street. Gentle was for people whose hands weren't still warm from a dead man's gun.
"Harder," Seth said before Zain had barely gotten him through the bedroom door. "I need… don't be careful with me right now."
"Seth -"
"I mean it." He grabbed Zain's shirt and pulled. Buttons scattered. "If you treat me like I'm fragile I will lose my mind. I need you to fuck me like I'm still here."
Something shifted behind Zain's eyes. The careful concern burned away and what replaced it was darker, hotter, the thing Zain kept leashed because he thought Seth couldn't handle it.
Seth could handle it. Seth needed it.
Zain slammed him against the bedroom wall. Seth's shoulder blades hit plaster and the impact knocked the air out of him and the shock of it, the beautiful violence of it, cut through the numbness like a blade through fog.
"Like that," Seth breathed. "Exactly like that."
"Shut up." Zain's mouth was on his neck. Teeth. Not gentle. The scrape of stubble and then the sharp bright pain of a bite that would bruise, and Seth's cock went from half-hard to aching in the space of a heartbeat.
"Make me."
Zain pulled back. Looked at him. Rain on his face, blood on his knuckles, and that expression, the one that said I am going to take you apart and you are going to thank me for it.
"Hands on the wall," Zain said.
"No."
"Seth."
"I said no." Seth grinned. It was feral, sharp, the grin of a man who was using defiance the way other people used breathing exercises. "You want my hands on the wall, you put them there."
Zain put them there.
One hand, both wrists, pinned above Seth's head hard enough that his shoulders strained.
Seth tested the grip. Solid. Immovable. The relief of it flooded through him like a drug, the relief of someone else holding the reins while the thing inside him, the horror, the silence where feeling should be, worked its way through.
Zain's free hand yanked Seth's shirt up. Over his head, bunched around his pinned wrists like a makeshift bind. Seth's bare chest hit the cold wall and he hissed.
"You wanted rough," Zain said against his ear. His voice had dropped into the register that made Seth's knees unreliable. Low. Controlled. Dangerous. "You're getting rough."
"Promises, promises."
Zain bit the junction of his neck and shoulder. Hard. Hard enough that Seth's vision whited at the edges and the sound that came out of him was not a word but something more honest than language.
"Still mouthy?" Zain's hand slid down Seth's chest. Nails dragging. Not enough to break skin. Enough to leave lines that would be visible tomorrow.
"Always," Seth managed. His voice was already wrecked and Zain had barely touched him. "You knew that when you - fuck -"
Zain's hand had found his cock through his pants. Palmed him. Squeezed. Not stroking. Just holding, the possessive weight of a hand that said this is mine and I decide when it gets what it wants.
"When I what?" Zain asked. Conversational. Like he wasn't grinding the heel of his palm against Seth's cock while Seth tried to remember how lungs worked.
"When you pulled me out of that cage. You knew - Christ, Zain - you knew I was going to be a problem."
"The worst problem I've ever had." Zain released his wrists. Spun him around. Seth barely had time to register the shift before Zain dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor and yanked Seth's pants down with both hands.
Seth looked down at him. Zain on his knees was a sight that short-circuited something fundamental in Seth's brain every single time. This man, this controlled, compressed, lethal man, on the floor, looking up at Seth with dark eyes that held zero apology and absolute intent.
"You don't have to -"
"I know I don't have to." Zain's hands gripped Seth's hips. Thumbs pressing into the hollows beside his hip bones hard enough to bruise. "I want to. I want you in my mouth. I want to hear what you sound like when you can't think."
"I can always th-"
Zain swallowed him to the root.
Seth's head cracked back against the wall. His hands flew to Zain's hair, gripping, pulling, holding on because his legs had stopped being structural and the only thing keeping him vertical was the wall behind him and the man in front of him.
Zain worked him like a mission. Methodical, devastating, relentless. He knew Seth's body now, knew the spots, the rhythms, the difference between the sounds Seth made when he was close and the sounds he made when he was desperate. He played every one of them.
"Zain … Zain, I'm going to -"
Off. Zain pulled off with a wet sound that Seth felt in his spine. Looked up at him with a mouth that was red and slick and the most obscene thing Seth had ever seen.
"Not yet."
"You absolute bastard."
"Get on the bed."
"Or what?"
Zain stood. The movement was fluid, predatory, and suddenly Seth was reminded that this man had killed people tonight too, had broken Levi's wrist and struck his throat with the efficiency of a machine, and those same hands were now steering Seth backward toward the mattress with a grip that didn't ask.
Seth's knees hit the bed. He sat. Looked up. Zain was stripping, finally, pulling his shirt over his head, and the sight of him, the scars and the muscle and the tattoo script in Arabic along his ribs that Seth still hadn't asked about, made Seth's mouth go dry.
"On your stomach," Zain said.
"Say please."
Zain leaned down. Put his mouth against Seth's ear. "Get on your stomach before I put you there. And if you say one more bratty thing, I'm going to edge you until you cry."
"That's not the threat you think it is."
"Seth."
"Fine." Seth flipped over. Pressed his face into the pillow. His cock was trapped against the mattress and every shift of his hips sent a jolt through him that made his toes curl. "Happy?"
"Getting there."
The mattress dipped. Zain's weight settled over him, the full press of a larger body covering his, and the sheer animal reality of it, being pinned, being covered, being held down by someone who wanted him and wouldn't hurt him, did the thing that all the numbness couldn't. It reached the frozen place inside his chest and cracked it.
Zain's mouth moved down his spine. Kissing. Biting. Marking. Each point of contact a brand that said here, you're here, this is now. When he reached the base of Seth's spine, he bit the curve of his ass and Seth yelped into the pillow.
"Did you just -"
"Shut up." Zain spread him open with both hands.
"Oh God -"
Zain's mouth found him and Seth stopped being a person with opinions and became a body with nerve endings.
He buried his face in the pillow and made sounds that he'd deny later, sounds that were begging and cursing and Zain's name repeated like a mantra, while Zain took him apart with his tongue with the same patient, ruthless focus he brought to everything.
Seth was shaking. His hands twisted in the sheets.
His hips tried to grind against the mattress and Zain's hands held them still, denying even that, and the helplessness of it, the complete surrender of control to someone he trusted with the ugliest parts of himself, was the thing that finally reached through the nothing and made him feel.
"Zain, please - please - I need -"
"Tell me what you need." Zain's voice was rough. Wrecked. Not controlled anymore.
"You. Inside me. Now. I can't… I need to feel you -"
"Turn over. I want to see your face."
Seth turned. He was a mess. He knew it. Hard and leaking and flushed and shaking and his eyes were bright with something that wasn't quite tears but was close enough to scare him.
Zain looked at him the way he'd looked at him on the gym mat the first time. Like he was seeing something he hadn't expected. Something that changed the math.
"You're so fucking beautiful," Zain said. The words sounded like they'd been dragged out of him against his will.
"Don't go soft on me now."
"Never." Zain reached for the nightstand. Lube. His hands were shaking, Seth noticed. Cataloged it. Held it like evidence. Zain's hands shook for him.
Prep was fast. Seth was already open, already desperate, and when Zain pressed two slicked fingers inside him he bore down immediately, greedy, impatient, chasing the fullness.
"More."
"Patience."
"I have never in my life been patient and you know that."
Zain laughed. Actually laughed. The sound was startled and real and it transformed his face, and Seth almost forgot what they were doing because Zain laughing was rarer than a lunar eclipse and twice as disorienting.
"Don't stop," Seth said. "Don't stop whatever you were - yes, there, right there -"
Three fingers now. Seth's back arched off the bed.
His hand found Zain's wrist, not to stop him but to feel him, the tendons working, the strength in the forearm, the physical reality of the man who was opening him up with surgical patience despite the desperate, filthy sounds Seth was making.
He reached for the drawer to pull out a condom but Seth grabbed his wrist, a plea in his eyes.
"I'm clean, I swear. The agency tested us and luckily no one got any ideas in the workhouse." He left the description unsaid. Zain knew plenty of people were used for more than just their manual labor on those places.
"I am too. Haven't…" Zain's voice caught. "I haven't been with anyone in over a year." Seth gave him an almost angelic grin and swayed his peachy ass, asking for what he wanted and Zain was happy to oblige.
"Ready?" Zain asked.
"I was ready five minutes ago. I was ready on the street. Will you please just -"
Zain pushed inside him.
The world stopped.