Chapter 7
The door bangs open at my back, Flint hardly even twitching as it does, but a slow smirk begins to crawl across his face. His glacial eyes roving over the top of my head, I focus on the day beyond the window at his back.
Low, grey clouds hanging heavy with rain, the barely-there sunlight peeking in through the broken slats of the blinds hanging limp.
“Phoenix,” Flint purrs, and heat blooms in my cheeks, the way he curls the name with something like longing off of his pierced tongue, the metal bar clacking over his teeth. “You’ve come to join me or relieve me?” I can hear his smile as he says it, something that, in the last few hours of his company, I have witnessed more than I think I’ve ever seen anyone smile.
This one sounds different though, real.
The ones he’s shown me…
They’re not nice smiles.
They’re something else entirely.
The type of smile a monster would give a frightened child in the dead of night as he creeps out from beneath their bed. Talons scratching along the floor boards as he slithers out on his belly, eyes glowing red in the dark, lips curling up almost comically high at the corners, revealing all of his razor point teeth. Something sharp that could carve effortlessly through bone and slice through souls, all with nothing more than that eerie, false smile.
Like the tattoo across his throat.
There are only demons here.
“Oh, Sugar,” Flint drawls, drawing my eye. “Looks like playtime’s over,” he pouts as he says it, effortlessly pushing to his feet, his long legs seeming to bend and fold and stretch and straighten, all elegance and ease.
I could never make my movements look anything less than awkward, but the way he stands, it’s fluid, like he owns himself with a confidence that can’t ever be taught.
Clutching my legs tighter, sliced thighs stinging, the blood probably dry and flaky. I wonder if there are slivers of glass in there, the broken piece I used to carve myself up was the most jagged I could have picked. The wounds stick to the rough denim of my jeans, and I squeeze my arms harder around my shins as I frown up at Flint, a dent between my brows expressing my confusion.
“I’ve got shit to do, and apparently, so do you,” he tilts his chin in the direction of Phoenix, but I don’t look because I suspect he was there too.
Tormenting me.
I hear more footsteps enter the room.
Deliberate.
I’m certain when Blaze wants to go unnoticed, it’s impossible to hear his approach at all. It’s almost like a courtesy, his arrival, a warning. The heavier footsteps travelling down the very short hall to my right from the front door. Stepping into the space, Flint and Phoenix disappearing, the door closing. My eyes remain glued to the bare concrete floor between the toes of my boots and his black trainers.
For a moment, his scent filling my nose, this smoky caramel spice flooding my senses, overpowering the dying smell of my own sweat and blood.
I think of it on his dick.
Feel him moving inside me only hours ago. The way he kissed me, told me all of these beautiful, beautiful fucking lies.
“They’ll come for me,” I whisper, and I don’t mean it as a threat, more like a fact that makes me want to vomit.
I don’t even know if I want them to.
My family.
I’ve been gone not even quite twenty-four hours, and yet, it feels as though I can breathe easier.
Maybe he’ll just let me go and I can run away, start over somewhere new.
Away from them all.
But I know I never could.
I’m terrified of the world and everything in it.
All of the muscles in my stomach clench and roll and tighten and my arms ache as I squeeze them even harder around myself.
I wonder if he washed me off.
If it meant something to him.
Anything.
Like it did to me.
Was it only a game?
What did I ever do to you?
Suddenly, I want to scream it in his face.
He is so silent, it makes rage boil my blood, pulsing in the front of my head. My heart thundering in my chest. If he doesn’t say something soon, I think little pieces of my brain matter are going to violently splatter all across the walls of this concrete cell.
“I don’t think they will, Pretty Girl.”
My head snaps up at his confidence, nonchalance. Nostrils flaring, my eyes meet his, and instantly, the tornado of anger inside of me dies and withers and dissolves like it was plunged into a vat of acid. Leaving me with nothing but a vile twisting sickness of self-loathing and fear.
Blaze’s deep brown eyes are nothing but obsidian, boring into me like he’s hammering railroad spikes into my skull. Seeping beneath my skin like smoke but travelling through my veins like thick sludge and tar.
Unable to look away, I clamp my teeth down on my bottom lip, dragging it into my mouth and biting down until iron covers my tongue, skin tearing between my teeth.
Blaze watches me like he’s already inside my head, his strong fingers peeling back layers of my insides, scraping out the gunk of my brain cavity.
“Get up,” he orders, big, vein ridged hands sliding into his pockets.
Three feet separates us, but his presence consumes the whole room. It could contain one hundred other people and I know he’s still the only one I’d see. Feel.
He’s wearing the same clothes as last night. Mud and blood, and only the devil knows what else, caked into his black joggers, black t-shirt. But his bare forearms are exposed now, his hoodie gone, giving me a chance to study the dark ink etched into his skin.
Monochrome, realism portraits flow from the backs of his pocketed hands, up and over both of his forearms, shading and imagery covering every millimetre of olive-tanned skin. But like he knows I’m studying him, he moves towards me, smoothly dropping into a crouch at my feet, his chin almost brushing my bent knees.
“I thought we talked about this,” he breathes, reaching out to tuck a lock of blonde, curly hair behind my pierced ear.
The pad of his index finger catching the back post of my jewellery as he curls his finger beneath my lobe, tracing it along the edge of my jaw.
It sets me on fucking fire.
His attention.
His touch.
Like he’s mine.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
“I tell you what to do…” he drops his hand from my face to my knee, his big palm smothering it with heat, and I want to look, but I can’t tear my gaze away from him as he licks his lips, flicking his tongue over his black lip ring.
“I do it,” I swallow, whispering the end of his statement, and finally, finally dropping my gaze to his fingers as they pinch tighter around my knee cap.
“There she is,” he coos, the same words from earlier, like he likes me better when I am this way.
Submissive.
I’ve never been anything else.
Is it bad to want someone else to take over?
Just so I don’t have to think all the time.
Worry.
All. The. Fucking. Time.
His soft chuckle is haunting. The way he huffs a breath, fanning my face with it and making me blush at the same time his grip on my knee makes me wince.
Only hours ago, he was whispering in my ear, touching me, kissing me, holding onto me with something like reverence, asking me to stay the night with him.
What would have happened if I had never woken up in that bed? What would they have done had I just turned over and gone back to sleep? Dragged me out? Thrown me out of the first floor fucking window?
But clearly, Blaze McCoy knows me better than I know myself.
He knew I could never, would never, do that. He knew I would seek him out, or at the very least, not stay there without him. He lured me away from the crowd, isolated me, manipulated me by playing the boy I once knew. I’m the same girl, just more… fractured, maybe.
A tear squeezes free from the corner of my eye. Sliding down the side of my bruised nose as I realise just how hard he’s grinding the bones together with his grip on my knee.
Slowly, dragging my eyes back to his, his full, dark blush lips kicked up into a half smirk, I don’t see my old friend anymore.
My Protector.
Blaze McCoy is nothing but the devil.
I don’t know what my face does, but his endless orbs of black seem to flare in time with his nostrils as he sniffs hard, pushing to stand, releasing my knee.
Blaze glares down at me, re-pocketing his hands, “Get up,” he repeats, cold, hard, unfeeling.
I just stare up at him, a riot of questions firing in my brain.
What happened to you?
Where did you go?
I have so desperately missed you.
Did you ever think of me?
I have thought of you always.
Suddenly, Blaze wrenches me up, his fingers tight around my elbow as he drags me to my feet.
“I will beat obedience into you if I have to, Ember,” he snarls under his breath.
My mouth drops open, but I don’t even have time to choke on my unspoken words before he’s dragging me across the room, toes of my boots scuffing over the cracked concrete floor as I scrabble to get them under me. Blaze pauses to wrench open an internal door, allowing me to do just that, tightening his hold on me further. And then he’s dragging me down a short hallway, no light fixtures in here either, nothing but chipped walls, but there are two more doors. Bare wood, never been painted, no door handles, but holes for them in each.
Blaze kicks the first one open, a bare bathroom beyond. A small rectangular window at the very top of the wall, a yellow-cream coloured toilet without a seat, matching washbasin and an old avocado coloured tub, showerhead above it, and a curved bar set around the top meant for a curtain.
My bladder seems to switch itself back on, as though fear shut it down for a while, and now I am suddenly desperate to pee.
Blaze releases my arm, reaches across the tub, fiddling with the old taps and then the shower is sputtering to life. Water spitting out in a punishing pressure, hammering against the bottom of the bath.
I blink at him as he turns to me. A single dark brow lifting on his forehead, I keep staring at him, my own face wrinkling with confusion, my nose aching where I bashed it into a hard chest, back at the house.
A fourth man.
“Strip,” Blaze orders me, in a way so casual it shouldn”t feel like an order at all, but that’s exactly what it is.
“What?” I take a step back from him, the shower at his back, the door at mine. “No.”
His broad chest inflating, slowly filling, filling, filling, he holds it, dropping his head back, and then just as slowly, facing the ceiling, he pinches his eyes closed and breathes out through his mouth.
Head snapping up on his neck, he looks at me, crossing the room with his long gait, stepping into me at a rapid pace. I’m hurrying backwards and he’s slamming his big body into mine, the back of my skull cracking against the door as he tackles me into it.
Blaze’s hands slam against the bare wood on either side of my head, his breath an angry huff over my throat as he smothers me with his body. Bowing his head in towards mine. I turn away from him, my cheek flush with the door, rough and splintery.
“I don’t give a fuck what sort of lifestyle you’re used to in that big protective castle of yours, Emberleigh,” he snarls, spitting out my full name like it’s an insult. “But here, under my fucking roof, you do as you’re fucking told.”
I breathe in deep, not looking at him, but he presses his mouth to my jaw, letting his lips part against my skin. He exhales heavily, his breath coating my throat.
“Look at me,” he rasps, deep and thick with something I can’t read.
I shut my eyes tighter, a short sound of something like amusement huffs through his nose and then he bites into the bone so hard a scream tears through my teeth.
My fists hammer against him, nails clawing at him, but my bent elbows are pinned between our chests, and I’ve got no strength to shove him off of me.
Tears slip down my cheeks, and I squeeze my eyes shut as I choke on my words, “Okay, okay, please, please, stop.”
There’re seconds where neither of us moves, Blaze’s teeth locked in my flesh, my eyes squeezed shut so tight they feel like they’re going to pop. Slowly, he releases his teeth, lapping the flat of his tongue over the tender skin, before dropping his forehead to my temple.
“I love seeing my mark on you, Pretty Girl,” he breathes against my mouth.
Licking his lips, my own trembling, he kisses my cheek, softly nuzzling his nose over my closed eye. One of his hands moves from the door to the top of my head, tenderly smoothing over my curls, sliding down the other side of my face, separating me from the wood. Cupping the side of my head reverently, he pulls me against him, into his chest, his other hand curling around my waist.
“Ember,” he whispers, his breath blowing across the top of my head. “Whilst you’re here,” he exhales harder, “I need you to do as I say, even if you don’t understand it.” He grips me tighter, my hands curled up between us, and he holds me like I’m precious, too tight to be glass, but perhaps like I’m his favourite childhood teddy bear. “So, just, do as you’re told.”
“I don’t understand why I’m here,” is what I reply, still letting him hold me even as my face throbs and I think there might be blood on my jaw. “I don’t understand why you-” I cut myself off with a sob catching in my throat, making my chest jump as I choke it off. “Why would you do that to me?”
There are so many things that question could be about, last night, today, ten years ago. But as though Blaze is, in fact, very much inside my brain cavity, he knows exactly what I mean.
“Do you regret it?” he asks, his deep voice an unreadable rumble that emanates through his chest into the side of my head, vibrating down the column of spine.
I think of last night, his big hands on my bare skin, rough fingers smoothing over all of my scars. Hidden in the darkness but exposed all the same. He said nothing about them. His touch didn’t linger there either. But I know he felt them, there’s no way he couldn’t have.
“No.” It’s the truth, no matter how much I hate it.
“Have I ever given you reason not to trust me?” I feel myself melting into him, like if I just relax enough, he’ll suck me right inside of him, melding us together for all eternity.
I don’t hate it.
I think of the man, of the stairs, of the knife, the glass, the gun, the thudding splat.
But then I remember last night, the fear.
You kidnapped me and locked me in the boot of a car.
Still, I answer with, “No.”
Then we just stand there, and Blaze sort of sways with me in his arms, like he’s moving to a melody only he can hear. And as his heart beats against my ear, filling my head with its own tune, my eyes closed, I feel myself relax. All of the tension in my aching muscles seems to just drop out, like I’m liquid.
“There she is,” he breathes against the top of my head, and I can hear his smile, like relief, some sort of sick joy at my submissiveness, and I feel… better, like I’ve done something good.
For him.
“You’re going to take these clothes off now,” he coos and everything inside of me recoils and tightens and I’m trying to pull away from him, but he doesn’t let me. Crushing me to him, pressure on my skull, my spine, he snarls, “You will take these clothes off now, or I will do it for you.”
Like a deer caught in headlights, I am so still, but my chest heaves and my heart flies in my chest and I think about my pills. How I don’t have any to control my blood pressure. It makes everything swim, and I’m resting back into Blaze, letting him keep me up, and I just… stop.
The fight leaves me, and he feels it, because he’s pulling back from me, lifting my blood stained, white t-shirt over my head, my arms lifting willingly, his rough fingers unlatch my bra, threading it down my arms. Peeling my jeans down my legs, my boots thudding as he crouches before me, tugging them from my feet and letting them drop heavily to the naked floor.
I stare ahead, watching the rush of water flood from the showerhead, drumming against the base of the bath, the pressure looking as though it’ll attack my sore skin like it’s giving me a beating.
I don’t want to get in there, but I know I’m going to.
Blaze tuts, pulling my jeans sans missing underwear down my legs, over my ankles, off of my feet.
He slides his hands up my calves, tears pricking my eyes, because last night we were in the dark.
He couldn’t see.
And now, even without a light on in this little room, the grey day illuminates the bathroom from its small ceiling high window, and I cannot hide. I have nowhere to go.
Exposed.
All of me.
Everything bared.
“Such a messy girl,” Blaze whispers, almost in awe at whatever he sees.
Unable to help myself, I drop my gaze. Peer down at his loose brown curls, so satin soft between my fingers only hours ago. Though, it feels like it’s been years. Those endless orbs of black laser focus on the bloody mess swept across my thighs. Flicking his tongue ring, he licks his lips, his fingers tight as they curl around the backs of my shaky knees.
Leaning into me, he dips his face between my trembling legs, lapping up my inner thigh, his breath a hot rush that has me trembling so hard, black spots dance across my vision.
The door thuds as my head drops back against it, my hands both automatically reaching for Blaze’s head. My fingers bite into his scalp at the same time his teeth pluck at the jagged cuts in my flesh. A hiss spearing through my teeth as he nibbles and sucks, working his way up my inner thigh, his nose brushing against my pussy.
A groan falls from my lips as he nibbles and sucks harder, my heart thumping so hard in my chest, it’s all I can hear inside my head. Pain simmers on the surface, his teeth digging into my flesh, but there’s something else, bone deep, that has my insides sparking with heat.
“Blaze,” his name falls from my tongue like a curse and a prayer as he bites into me harder, sucking the freshly bleeding wounds into his mouth.
Relentlessly, he pulls and sucks, pulls and sucks, pressure and relief. His nose runs up the length of my slit, his teeth leaving my wounds. Big hands smoothing up my outer thighs, curling around the front of them when he reaches the top. Using his thumbs he pulls me open, chilled air of the room kissing my exposed clit. Groaning as he looks at me, my gaze on him down the length of my body, as though it’s the most delectable thing he’s ever seen.
His hot breath fans over my wet flesh, his lips opening wide, jaw clicking, he suctions his entire mouth over me. Tongue shoving all the way inside of me, his lips almost mauling at me. I’m vibrating, so wet, so needy, so at his mercy. That an orgasm wrenches through me like it’s a tearing of my soul.
Sharp pricks of his teeth clamp down over my clit, grazing the swollen nerves, fingers digging into the hollow backs of my knees. Painful and kneading, he runs his tongue all over me, a single finger effortlessly sliding into my wet heat and I’m trembling harder, another rolling wave of heat unfurling in my lower belly. Walls squeezing tightly around his slowly thrusting digit, I become nothing more than putty in his hand.
His mouth moves down, his thumbs still pinning me open, pinching my clit with pressure. It pulses, aftershocks heating my insides, a slick sheen of sweat dotting the back of my neck even in the cold temperatures of the room.
Long, wet licks clean up my other thigh, the same movements as before. His hot mouth, plucking and sucking at my skin, teeth biting. Every time his teeth clamp down on me, I stifle a moan of pleasure, but he knows, I’m sure he knows, can feel it. Goosebumps raze across my flesh like wildfire, my body trembling, legs shaking. He says nothing, continuing to feast on my skin, ravage me.
My blood.
A sharp pinch has me hissing, gripping his hair tighter, almost trying to pull him off of me and hold him to me all at once. An orgasm is cresting, and he’s not doing anything sexual to me, nothing except giving me all of his attention. A filthy groan finally rumbles its way up my vocal cords. Stubbled cheeks graze my thighs, nuzzling between my legs as Blaze bites harder, my body flushing hot, then very, very cold as I come again.
Embarrassment floods my cheeks, colour crawling down my neck, my breasts, down the flat plane of my scarred belly, but in this moment, I seem to be the only one who cares.
Blaze bites harder at the sound I make, marking me, my jaw echoing the pain in my thigh with a throb of its own. He sucks, his breath huffing through his nose, his teeth latching beneath my torn skin. I think my fingers are going to break. Snap off at the tips where they bend so far back. Nails gouging at his scalp, his blood filling the underside of them.
I think I’m going to cry out, I feel overwhelmed, overstimulated, as he pushes his thumbs closer together, pinching my clit again and again, like a speeding pulse and I’m flying over the metaphorical edge as his teeth disengage with my skin.
I slump forward, his hands gliding up the backs of my thighs, petting the globes of my arse, one moving to my lower belly, pressing against my pelvis, forcing me gently to lean back, flattening my spine against the door.
Absentmindedly, I find myself carding my fingers through his thick brown hair. Chest heaving, heart thundering, I gaze down at him, on his knees and for just a moment, one single moment, I wonder if he could ever really be mine.