Chapter 17 – Matías
The liquor burns down my throat, settling in my gut like molten lead.
I barely taste it anymore. I’ve been drunk for fucking days.
By now, the bite of alcohol has lost its edge, dulled by the sheer volume I’ve already consumed.
The half-empty bottle on the nightstand taunts me, a damning companion in this wasteland of my own making.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here. Hours, maybe. Long enough for the midday light to shift across the room, golden rays cutting through the sheer curtains, casting distorted patterns against the walls. Long enough for the rage to settle into a quiet, seething fury.
Gulping down another mouthful, I let the whiskey coat my tongue. It helps nothing. I don’t expect it to. All it does is send me hurtling towards welcome oblivion. My head is beleaguered by the melancholia liquor stokes towards transformation.
The burn of betrayal is safer, a familiar refrain, if nothing else.
Ten weeks.
The number rattles around in my skull, a vicious drumbeat that won’t fucking stop.
Ten weeks.
Not eight. Not three.
Ten.
At the worst possible moment, the woman of the fucking hour cracks open the bedroom door, dawdling at the threshold with downcast eyes.
Like that’ll save her. The moment she sees me, she stills.
I don’t move either. I just observe her, my gaze sliding over her form, taking in the trepidation in her stance, her shaky hands, her chest rising and falling in rapid, erratic rhythm. Her mouth shut.
Smart girl.
She doesn’t say anything at first. Just stands there, watching me as I lift the glass again, as I tip my head back and drink like it’s the only thing tethering me to the ground. Like it’s the only thing keeping me from unraveling completely.
“You’re drunk,” she says finally, so softly.
I let out a humorless laugh, swirling the amber liquid in my glass and lift it to her. “What an observant wife I’ve got,” I toast. “Nothing gets past her.”
Her rosebud mouth folds into a thin line as she steps into the room, shutting the door behind herself with a muted click.
I can already see it in her face, the way she’s about to cajole me.
I’ve known it was coming since I left her and sent Gabo to get her from the hospital.
I’d accuse her of predictability if I weren’t so busy gauging how long it would be before there was a visible lump from her pregnancy.
My grip clutches around the emptied glass. “What do you want?”
She pauses. “We need to talk.”
I scoff at that, dismissing. “No, we fucking don’t.”
Her jaw tightens. “Matías—”
I slam the glass down onto the table with a cacophonous splat of crystal against wood. The sound cuts through the room like a gunshot. Noa flinches. Just barely, but I see it. Feel it.
Good.
She should feel this. She should fucking understand the magnitude of what she’s done. The audacity of what she’s not only asking me to accept, but to never question. To be her cuckhold, out of what—the mercy of my good, kind heart? She’s a fucking idiot.
I hoist myself from the chair. The room tilts slightly, the alcohol sloshing through my system, but I steady myself. My eyes burrow into hers, incisive. “You want to talk?” I bid and step closer, watching the coward stiffen, a deer in headlights. “Fine. Let’s talk.”
The whiskey saturates the blood in my veins, my restraint thinning in tandem. Her lips part, and I can’t stand it. I cut her off: “Tell me who you were spreading your legs for with my brother’s ring on your finger. That’s something we can talk about.”
Noa refuses to speak the name.
Again.
She stands before me, chin tilted up, her spine straight despite the storm hanging between us.
She stands there like a statue, unblinking.
Her mouth opens just to close all over again.
She doesn’t say a word—but her eyes brim with pity, like she gets to look down on me.
Even as my hands twitch with the need to shake the truth out of her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she finally exhales. “I am your wife.”
I see red.
“My wife?”
I move before I think. Before I breathe. My hands are on her shoulders, pushing—no, throwing—her onto the mattress. Her body bounces slightly with the force of it, the gasp barely slipping past her lips before my body is bearing down on hers, caging her in, my arms braced on either side of her.
“My wife.” The words feel like poison in my mouth, acidic, rotting. I’m so close to her now, my forehead flattens against hers with a force that could shatter both our skulls. “I knew you liked getting fucked. How foolish of me to think it was just by me.”
Her eyes widen at that. “Don’t be cruel,” she whispers. Pleads.
My laughter scrapes in my throat like shattered glass. “I’m the cruel one?” I question, my face dropping to the crook of her neck, inhaling deeply despite myself. She smells so fucking sweet. It infuriates me. “You are my wife. Yet you lie to me.”
Noa swallows hard. I feel it against my lips. I hate how much I fucking feel her, everywhere, always.
She’s trembling now. Not shaking, not crumbling, but just enough.
Just enough to remind me that she knows who she belongs to.
Just enough for me to feel it under my fingertips when I drag my hand up her thigh, slipping beneath the hem of the loose emerald sheaf of a dress she’s wearing. I squeeze her flesh in my hold.
Her breath hitches. “Matías, I—”
I don’t let her finish.
My mouth ghosts over her ear, my voice a whisper of venom. “You are my wife. Do you think I will tolerate secrets between us?”
She shivers.
Not just in fear. And I fucking know it.
I smirk, dragging my lips down the column of her throat, over the fluttering pulse that betrays her.
“I can fuck those out of you,” I posit, my free hand skating down to her knee, parting her legs forcefully.
I lift my head, capturing her gaze, reveling in the war behind those dark eyes. “I think you want that too.”
Her teeth grit, her hands clutching at the sheets beneath her. “You’re insane.”
I chuckle, dark and amused, my fingers creeping higher still, my teeth catching her earlobe. “Yet I’d bet you’re already fucking soaked for me.”
She’s got no opportunity to argue before I’ve already flipped her onto her stomach in a single, fluid motion, a rough grip on the back of her neck keeping her in place. Noa gasps, her hands fisting in the sheets, her body tensing beneath me. But her hips press back, no matter how involuntarily.
“Matías,” she keens, and it isn’t a denial.
My hand moves with purpose, sliding up the curve of her hip, shoving her skirt up to bunch around her waist. The sight of her beneath me like this sends a vicious thrill through my system.
The lacy scrap of her panties is pale pink, delicate against the golden warmth of her skin. So pretty, so innocent.
As if she could ever be innocent.
I palm her between her limber legs, coasting my fingers against the damp fabric barely covering her. Damp. Just like I fucking knew she would be. Through all of my fury, a groan still vibrates through my chest. "Already soaked for me, mi esposa," I breathe into her shoulder.
Noa shudders, her thighs trying to press together—but there is no hiding from me. She can squirm all she fucking wants, but where can she go? She’s pinned in place while I stroke over the ruined fabric, teasing her, feeling her writhe uselessly beneath me.
"Don’t—" she starts, but her body betrays her.
I mouth at her skin where the thick strap gives way to her shoulder blade. Kiss the spot, almost gentle… Until I sink my teeth, until I suck at the skin till blood pools beneath the surface, as vividly altered as the cock I rut against her ass.
She whines over it like a filthy little slut. I can feel the arch of her back, the subtle push of her hips into my hand, and there’s no pause before my fingers shove aside the inconsequential fabric to find her bare and slick for me.
“There you are,” I praise, dragging my teeth along the mark I just left on her skin.
Her erratic breaths remain rife with whatever pleasure she attempts to suppress, an exercise in futility. She doesn’t struggle when my hand seizes the hinge of her hip and props her ass up.
We both already know the truth:
This has never been a fair fight.
I undo my belt with a single, swift motion, the leather hissing through the loops as I pull it free.
My other hand stays firm against the back of her neck, holding her down while I spit into my palm, stroking my cock harder in my own fist, knowing it won’t be enough to be gentle—not that I want to be.
I drip remnant saliva right onto her already glistening cunt, rubbing her swollen folds until the damp heat against my knuckles has me sighing.
Noa shivers. “Matías…” she says my name, and I’m torn between shoving her face into the sheets to punish her and making her say it over and over, until I’ve turned her precious whimpers to mindless screams.
I don’t bother with an interlude when she’s ready for the two digits seamlessly inside of her, curling deeply, stealing gasped cries from her lying mouth.
She gasps, even as her body arches instinctively, pushing needily into the pressure.
I grind between her thighs, settling into the crease of her ass while I stretch her pussy out as much as I fucking care to.
“There you are,” I rasp, dragging my mouth up her neck, feeling the tremor run through her. She stills, as if willing herself to resist. It’s pointless. She should fucking know it, I think, and unfurl fingers from her soaked slit just to push them into her mouth, shutting her the fuck up.
What a hold the warm, wet inside of her mouth makes as I line myself up at her center, parting her for the head of my cock. Her body can resist all it wants, but it makes room for me, inch by inch until I’m buried inside her. Against her ear, I growl, “I own you, Noa. Every part of you.”
She lets out a moan, and it just isn’t close enough to surrender. “I’m not—” she tries.