25. Sage
TWENTY-FIVE
SAGE
His hand cups the back of my skull and his mouth is on mine and the kiss is not gentle.
It’s not rough either. It’s certain. His other hand finds my hip and he turns me, walks me back until my shoulder blades hit the brick, and then he kisses me deeper, his thumb pressing under my jaw to angle my mouth where he wants it.
He tastes like coffee and cherry and sin.
I make a sound. He makes one back, low in his chest, and I feel it everywhere. I’m wet before he’s touched me anywhere that should make me wet. Just from his mouth and the weight of his body.
He pulls back half an inch. Eyes dark. Breathing wrecked.
“Tell me to stop.”
“No.”
“Sage . . .”
“Don’t stop.”
His thumb traces my jaw, my throat. “Then show me what you need.” He’s looking at me like he’s deciding something. Like he’s still trying to give me an out.
I don’t take it.
I find his wrist. His hand is huge and warm and I lift it, slow, deliberate, guiding it down. Past my waist. Under the hem of my uniform. His knuckles drag up the inside of my thigh and I feel his whole-body shudder against me when I press his palm flat against the soaked cotton of my underwear.
“Fuck.” He breathes it into my mouth. “Sage.”
“Touch me.”
He doesn’t make me ask twice.
His fingers slide under the cotton and find me. He swallows the sound I make, pushes one finger inside, and the stretch is so good my knees nearly go.
“Easy.” His other arm moves around my waist, holding me up. “I’ve got you.”
His finger fills me so completely I break the kiss on a gasp.
Jesus.
He’s right there, staring down at me, watching every flicker of my face while he works that one thick finger in and out—slow at first, almost painfully careful, like he’s memorizing how my body takes him.
The pad of his thumb drags over my clit once, light as a warning, and my head knocks back against the brick.
“Knox—”
“I know.” His voice is wrecked gravel. “I know, Fury.”
Fury.
He’s given me a name. Same as the others.
That shouldn’t hit as hard as it does, but it does. Straight between my legs.
He bends and mouths at my throat while his hand keeps moving. The angle changes. His finger curls. A bolt of pleasure snaps through me so hard my nails dig into his shoulders.
“Oh my god.”
A door slams somewhere across the alley, two buildings down. I jolt and try to pull back. His hand stills inside me, but his other hand spreads at my lower back, holding me exactly where I am.
“Eyes on me.”
I look at him.
There are footsteps and a man’s voice. Someone is calling to someone else. They’re not coming this way but they’re close. Knox’s gaze darkens, and he steps closer, shielding me from their view.
“Knox—”
“They can’t see us.” His voice is low and certain. “Stay with me.”
His eyes hold mine while his hand stays buried in my underwear, thick finger lodged inside me, thumb resting just above where I’m throbbing. The choice is mine.
I stay.
“Move. Please.” I rock my hips and a low rumble sounds in his throat.
“Can you take more of me?” he murmurs.
My body clenches around the finger he’s already working inside me.
“Yes.”
The answer comes out breathless. Immediate. No hesitation. Because fuck—yes. I want more. I want all of him. I want him to split me open on this filthy alley wall while traffic hums ten feet away and the diner keeps serving coffee like my world isn’t narrowing to the size of his hand.
He searches my face one last time, making sure I mean it.
Then a second thick finger presses in beside the first.
I gasp so hard it’s almost a scream.
“Fuck,” I whisper, clutching at him. “Knox—”
“Easy.” He mouths the word against my cheek, then my jaw. “Breathe for me.”
I try. God, I try. But he’s so big, his hand so much rougher than Micah’s and somehow just as careful, and the stretch burns for half a second before my body melts around him. His fingers pump once, twice, and I feel the shape of them everywhere. My stomach tightens. My thighs shake.
Those voices at the far end of the alley fade into nothing.
There’s only this.
Only him.
His thumb moves again, slow circles. My body is so tight I’m going to come from this—from the fullness and his eyes on me and the awareness that we are not entirely alone and he doesn’t care. God, I swear he’s turned on by the thought of getting caught.
I am too.
“Look at you.” His voice drops lower. “So fucking pretty when you let yourself want.”
Heat detonates under my skin.
His fingers work me open in a slow, devastating rhythm, and every pass of his thumb sends sparks racing up my spine.
I bite down on my lip to keep from crying out.
It doesn’t help much. The sounds still leak out—small, wrecked noises I would die of embarrassment over if Knox wasn’t looking at me like each one is a gift.
“Someone could hear those sounds you’re making, Fury.”
I moan, and he leans in, nipping my ear.
“Anyone could round that corner.” He watches me a beat. “Gets you off, knowing that.”
I whimper.
“You’d let them look.”
“I—”
“Don’t lie.”
His thumb circles harder. I bite down on a sound.
“You know about the club?”
I nod, and he smiles. Dark.
“Picture something for me.”
I shudder, my hips pumping as he teases my clit and strokes me. “What—?”
“You. On a table. At the club.” His thumb keeps moving, fingers against my G-spot. “Your skirt up like this. My fingers stretching you. Forty people watching. Getting turned the fuck on.”
A sound rips out of me. He covers my mouth with his free hand but doesn’t change his rhythm.
It should scare me. It doesn’t. I press into his palm.
“That’s what does it for you.” His voice is so calm it’s almost cruel. “You want an audience. You want to be seen. Adored.”
My eyes flutter half-shut and I grind helplessly against his hand. His pupils blow wider.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “There’s my bad girl. I know what she wants.”
My muffled cry burns hot against his hand.
Oh god, oh god, oh god!
I come against his hand with his palm over my mouth and his eyes locked on mine, hard enough that my knees stop belonging to me.
It hits fast and ugly—one sharp convulsion, then another, then I’m shaking apart against the brick while his fingers keep working me through it, dragging every last pulse out of me like he knows exactly how much I can take.
“That’s it, Fury. Come all over my fingers. Let me feel you.”
I’m still trembling when he eases his hand out from under my skirt. Holding my eyes, he brings his fingers to his mouth.
He licks them clean.
“Oh my god.”
A small smile touches the corner of his mouth. The first real one I’ve seen on him.
“Fix your skirt,” he says quietly. “Your shift’s not over.”
I go back inside on shaky legs, but he doesn’t follow. I’m disappointed but somehow not surprised.
What the hell did I just do?
Danny is at the grill flipping something. He doesn’t look up. I grab a tray of clean glassware and carry it to the front. Rosa takes one look at me and snorts.
“Well,” she says, stacking saucers. “Some break, huh?”
Heat floods my face so fast I’m amazed I don’t combust on the spot. “You know nothing.”
“I know you walked out looking like a woman on a mission and came back looking like your soul got eaten.” She glances past me toward the front windows. “He still out there?”
I risk a look.
Knox is across the street now, leaning against the hood of his truck like he didn’t just make me come in an alley behind a diner. Like he doesn’t still own the pulse between my thighs.
“Yes,” I mutter.
Rosa hums. “Big one.”
I choke on a laugh. “Rosa—”
“What? I’m observant, not blind.” She flicks her rag over one shoulder. “Just don’t drip on the floor, honey. I already mopped.”
I make a wounded noise and get back to work.
I pour a customer a coffee refill, drop a check to the lady at one of the booths, and I do all of this with Knox’s voice still in my ear.
You want an audience. You want to be seen. Adored.
I don’t know what to do with my body. It’s still humming.
The pulse of him is still between my legs—slow, steady, like the imprint of his thumb hasn’t faded yet.
I can feel the cotton of my underwear sticking and the brush of my skirt against the back of my thighs.
Every part of me is awake and asking why we’re so far from him.
One of the regulars says something. I nod, smiling. I don’t know what I agreed to.
There’s my bad girl. I know what she wants.
I refill the salt shaker at table six as I consider the fantasy he painted for me. When I imagine people watching me, it’s not forty strangers in a sex club, it’s them. All five of the Hangmen watching, wanting, needing.
God, to be surrounded by them, to know with the absolute certainty that none of them would look away.
That every one of them would take turns.
That every one of them would have me, would put their hands on me, their mouths, their bodies, and I would be the person they all want at the same time, and the wanting would be mine—not theirs, not given to me as a favor, not taken from me as a price.
Mine.
The salt shaker spills over.
“Honey, you’re flooding it,” Rosa calls out.
I jolt. The lady at table seven is smiling. I apologize and clean it up with shaking hands before walking back to the counter. I brace my palms against the edge of it like the diner might tilt, sucking in deep breaths as I try to get myself under control.
In an alley behind a diner, a man twice my size put his hand under my skirt because I asked him to. He made me come. Knowing he wanted me didn’t make me smaller or unsafe, no. It made me feel powerful, wanted, desired.
I want to be wanted by all five of them.
I want to be the person they orbit. The person they need.
I want to be in a room with all of them and have it be on my terms—when, how, which one, all of them, none of them.
For far too long, my life hasn’t been mine. But the brief moments I’ve spent with them have shown me what it can be . . . if I’m brave enough.