17. Elle
ELLE
I don’t fight it when Lorcan’s mouth moves over me. I don’t have the energy, and somewhere between Tiernan taking me apart and putting me back together wrong, I lost the will to pretend I’m not affected by any of this.
His tongue is warm, a languid, unhurried heat, and I stare at the ceiling and try to remember who I was two days ago. A woman who worried about bread prices and damp walls and whether the radiator would make it through another winter. That woman feels very far away right now.
Lorcan’s hand slides up my ribs, and I close my eyes.
Tiernan moves to the other side of the bed and lies down beside me. His hand rests against the top of my head. Heavy and present, and it confuses me more than anything else tonight.
“Stop thinking,” he says.
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
Lorcan lifts his head and looks at me with those ice-blue eyes. His hair is slightly dishevelled, which is the most undone I’ve ever seen him look. He moves up my body slowly, pressing his weight against me, letting me know exactly how much he wants me.
He pushes my thighs apart with his knee and settles between them. I feel how hard he is, how ready, and my body responds before my brain catches up. Tiernan’s hand stays on my head, a possessive weight that shouldn’t feel as grounding as it does.
Lorcan looks down at me. The ice in his eyes has thawed into a dark need, if I’m willing to believe that men like him are capable of it.
“Who hurt you, Elle?” he asks again, his voice low.
“You did,” I say. “Tonight. Earlier. Every five minutes since I walked into the wrong room.”
“Before us.”
I look away from him. The ceiling is white and perfect and tells me nothing useful.
His fingers grip my chin and bring my face back to his. “I will find out one way or another. You know that.”
“Then find out,” I say. “Stop asking me.”
Respect moves through his expression, which is somehow worse than anything else, because I don’t want his respect. I don’t want anything from him that I might eventually start to need.
“I will,” he promises, his voice a jagged rasp against the quiet of the room. “I like it when you bite back, Elle. It makes the surrender so much more satisfying.”
He doesn’t wait for a response. He drives into me with a sudden, forceful thrust that knocks the air from my lungs.
Tiernan’s fingers thread through my hair, his thumb stroking my temple in a rhythm that mocks the frantic beating of my heart. I’m trapped between them, yet I want them. Every thrust Lorcan makes pulls a low moan from my throat that I can’t choke back.
“Eyes on me, Elle,” Lorcan says, his pace picking up.
He stares back at me with a hunger that feels like it could swallow me whole. He isn’t just taking my body; he’s hunting for the parts of me I haven’t surrendered yet. He wants the secrets I keep buried under the floorboards of my mind.
“Mine,” he grunts, slamming home.
He isn’t gentle, and I don’t want him to be. I need the friction and the weight to drown out the noise in my head. He grips my hips hard enough that I’ll be counting his fingers in bruises tomorrow.
Tiernan shifts next to me, his hand moving from my hair to my throat, anchoring me to the mattress while Lorcan pounds into me.
The heat of Lorcan’s body bleeds into mine. Tiernan’s weight at my side presses the vast warm room into something smaller and bearable. Lorcan’s pace turns savage, and my hips rise to meet him, and somewhere in the back of my mind the woman I was before watches all of this and says nothing.
I arch up, meeting him stroke for stroke.
“Tell me,” Lorcan groans, his face tight with a pleasure that looks like agony. “Tell me you’re ours.”
“I’m here,” I gasp, unable to say the words he wants.
He doesn’t like that. He pulls back almost entirely before slamming back in, making my vision blur. Tiernan’s grip on my throat tightens.
“Say it, girlie,” Tiernan murmurs in my ear.
“I’m... yours,” I sob, the confession ripped out of me by the sheer force of them.
The air in the room vanishes the moment the words leave my lips. It feels like a brand, hotter and more permanent than the diamonds or the bruises. Lorcan lets out a low, guttural sound as he gives up his control. He uses my admission to fuel a final, brutal assault.
Tiernan’s hand at my throat relaxes, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw with a dark, triumphant possessiveness.
He watches Lorcan claim me, his green eyes dark and fixed on the way my body reacts to every savage, deep thrust. I’m drowning in them, lost in the heat and the violence of these two men.
Lorcan groans, his muscles locking tight as he reaches his peak. He slams into me one last time, pinning me to the silk sheets with his hands on my hips as he unloads inside me. I cry out, my climax hitting me with a force that leaves me shaking and hollow.
He doesn’t move.
“Ours,” he rasps and pulls out.
Tiernan lets me go, and they both climb off the bed, leaving me a cum-filled mess on the sheets. They dress in silence and then leave without a single look back. No kiss, no comfort, no care. Just a cold silence that travels through my bones and sits like a heavy lump in the back of my throat.
I turn on my side and lie there, curled up, trying not to cry, when the door opens again.
It’s Fintan.
I glance over and scowl. “Come for your turn?” I spit out.
“No,” he says. “This isn’t our time.”
“Then why are you here?”
He doesn’t answer me. He goes to the en-suite, and I hear water running. He returns with a sponge and a towel and parts my legs so he can clean me up.
“Really?” I growl. “You clean up your brother’s mess?”
“No. I’m cleaning up the woman who has affected me in ways I cannot even begin to understand. Know the difference. Understand the difference. This isn’t about them. It’s about you.”
That startles me to the point where my anger vanishes, and I feel an emotion too close to gratitude to have any right to be.
He doesn’t look up from his task, but I see the smile anyway. He is gloating, and I hate him.
Fintan works in silence. The warm water on the sponge is a mercy I didn’t ask for, yet needed, but I can’t bring myself to thank him.
He is meticulous. He doesn’t look at me with the predatory hunger Lorcan and Tiernan just used to take me apart.
His touch is different—slower, almost reverent, as if he’s trying to erase the evidence of what they did while staking a claim of his own.
The shame of my gratitude sits heavy in my stomach. I’m naked, exposed, and being washed by a man who broke into my home, yet I’m leaning into the small comfort of the heat.
“You think this makes you the good one?” I whisper, my voice raw.
Fintan stops. He looks up at me, his dark hair falling over his forehead, those blue eyes searching mine. “There are no good ones in this room, Elle.”
He drops the sponge on the bedside cabinet and picks up the dry towel. He pats my skin dry with a gentleness that feels like another kind of trap.
“They want to break you,” he murmurs, his thumb grazing my hip. “I just want to see if you can survive them.”
He doesn’t let me respond. He gets up and rinses the sponge under the tap before he closes the bathroom door and leaves without a glance back.
I want to scream. I want to follow him and hit him with my bare hands, but then I remember Tiernan demanding to be hit with my shoe, and that thought vanishes as quickly as it came.
I crawl under the silk duvet and pull it to my chin, but the bed still feels like a battlefield.
The scent of them is everywhere. It’s on the sheets, on my skin, and in the air I breathe.
I stare at the wardrobe where the expensive clothes hang like silent witnesses.
I’m a well-kept secret in a gilded cage.
Sleep eventually drags me under, but it’s fitful and thin. I dream of blue eyes and silver ratchets.
When the sun bleeds through the heavy curtains, I know I’m alone in the room but not the penthouse. I grimace at the curtains and turn over, closing my eyes again as I try to blot out the world.
It doesn’t happen.
Instead, the bedroom door opens, and Lorcan waltzes in with a mug of steaming coffee, which he places down on the bedside cabinet. He bends down and picks the necklace up from the floor where it must’ve fallen in the night.
“You’re probably the only woman to leave a necklace like this on the floor all night.”
“I don’t care about it. Throw it out if you want.”
“Ungrateful little girl,” he murmurs, leaning down to clasp it on me. “For that you will wear it always and never take it off.”
My eyes meet his. “You can’t be serious?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?” His eyes are hard, his expression definitely not joking.
I want to rip it off and throw it at his head, but the memory of last night stops me. My body aches in places I didn’t know could hurt. “Drink your coffee, Elle. Fintan is downstairs making breakfast.”
“And then what? I eat like a good girl and then come back to my room and wait for one of you to fuck me?”
“Problem?” he asks.
Again, he’s not joking.
“You can’t lock me up in here. That’s illegal.”
“Which part of all this makes you think I care about legalities?” he asks.
It’s blunt. It’s final. It’s accurate.
“Right,” I mutter.
He sits on the bed and grips the back of my neck. “You are locked in here for your own safety. You might get a leash if you tell me what I want to know.”
“Bribery? That’s also illegal.”
“Bribery is just business,” Lorcan says.
His thumb strokes the pulse in my throat, right above the million-pound stones.
He doesn’t move his hand. The heat from his palm seeps into my skin, anchoring me to the bed.
“And it works. Tell me who did it, Elle. Give me the name of the man who made you look at the world like it’s waiting to strike you. ”
I look at the coffee. Steam rises in a thin, swirling line. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you, and you will keep me locked up anyway.”
“True. But at least you’re learning that I don’t bluff.”