Chapter 18 #2
Tears spring to my eyes as he brings his wet fingers from my clit to my back hole, slowly entering my tight bundle of nerves with his thumb.
I moan out in pain, my ass stinging from the blow.
My toes curl at the feeling of his thumb in my ass, so hot and full, and such a more profound feeling of pleasure in comparison to his quick gift of pain.
Unexpectedly, he enters my pussy with a hard thrust, making me cry out, my breathy moan loud and full of surprise.
With a pound that makes me lose my breath and my teeth chatter, he drives into me relentlessly. I try to gulp in air, but his hand at my throat that’s shoving me down into the plush mattress is restricting my airways more and more with each thrust.
I feel it building.
I can’t make it stop.
My legs begin shaking, his thrusts pick up. Just as I am about to reach the apex of my orgasm, I feel him bottom out inside of me and cum with a growl.
His hot, thick, pulsing cock fills me with cum. I feel ribbons of it shooting up inside of me, and I moan loudly from the feeling.
Understanding what this means, I cry out a sob, so close to my orgasm, and so let down.
“Noo, noo, pplease,” I cry out, trying to grind back onto him, loving the feel of his hot cum deep inside of me, and trying like a desperate creature to find my own release.
“You were a bad girl, darling. Only good girls who follow directions get to enjoy themselves.”
I realize, as I grind back onto his cock, in my confusion of being edged, his palm still hasn't left my throat. In fact, it's squeezing harder and harder.
He leans forward and takes a deep breath of my skin, trailing his nose from my jaw to my hairline. The room is starting to fade, and I gasp for breath, unable to speak.
He kisses my temple tenderly as I pass out from lack of oxygen.
Hayden Herron
We’re wheels-up in twenty, and since Archibald’s not the one running point, of course, he’s taking his sweet time arriving. I stand by the plane, coat open, wind kicking up off the tarmac. The sky’s dull. The kind of gray that makes everything feel dead, even the jet engines humming behind me.
A black SUV pulls in slowly, with tinted windows of anonymity. The door opens, and Archibald steps out, as if he’s arriving at a gala, not a classified op. Sunglasses, cigarette already lit. Smells like leather, smoke, and too much money. Always the same routine.
“You’re late,” I say.
He exhales, all drama. “Traffic.”
“We’re at Langley. There is no traffic.”
“Then I’m just fashionably delayed.”
I look at him. “You want to be fashionably buried?”
He grins. “If you’re offering.”
We walk to the stairs. The jet’s prepped. Cabin pressurized. Vodka stocked. I don’t plan on talking for most of the flight, but Archibald always finds a way to fill the silence with noise.
Inside, he drops into the seat across from me and pulls out a flask. Silver and engraved. Overkill, like everything he owns.
I wait until we’re in the air before I decide to beat him to his usually insufferable chatter.
“I married Martine.”
He doesn’t flinch.
I repeat it, this time more slowly. “She’s my wife now.”
He leans his head back, then laughs once. His tone is dry, not mocking, just quietly amused. Like I told him I bought a yacht, or a vineyard, or a giraffe.
“You’re serious?”
“Dead.”
“You, married,” he rubs his jaw, still grinning.
I don’t answer.
He shakes his head. “Martine. The woman practically promised to me at birth. Married to you?”
“I know she was promised to you.”
“Obviously,” he says with a snort. Not necessarily upset, but amused. “And what about your Chosen? Ford’s not around to pass her off to, like I’m sure he would have preferred.”
I remain silent, letting him work out whatever the hell this is, because it’s not a discussion I’m willing to engage in.
Archie is a playboy, but he’s a meticulous perfectionist when it comes to assignments from the Brotherhood, even if he is often late.
“I won't apologize.”
Archie shrugs. “Alright. You want to play house with a brat, be my guest.”
I glare at him.
“Does it seem like I really care, Hayden?” He raises an eyebrow. “I was just doing what was instructed.”
“She’s my wife,” I say again, more to end the conversation than convince him. “That’s it.”
“And she’s like a sister to me, so don’t fuck this up,” he says with a bit more emotion.
He pours himself a drink, still watching me like I’ve grown a second head, and I bristle at his reaction.
“Man, I really thought I’d die before you got sentimental.”
“It’s not sentiment. It's structure.”
He snorts. “Okay, structure. What, you think marrying her will stop her from trying to kill you in your sleep?”
“She won’t.”
“Because you trust her?”
“Because I trained her.”
Archie nods, as if that makes sense, because it does. After a beat, he shifts and becomes quiet. Real quiet. Which means something’s off. I didn’t expect him to be upset about my marriage. We’re not the most sentimental pair. But something’s been up with him.
Showing up late. Sometimes, he is nowhere to be found, and I cover for him silently. I’m not the type to report my partner. I get in and get out; if I happen to see him while I’m doing it, so be it.
“What?” I ask.
He downs the rest of his drink and doesn’t look at me. “Fuck it.”
He fills his glass again and just spits the words out like he can’t hold them in anymore, “My mother’s dying.”
I expected something like this. It’s an exchange we do before long, high-stakes jobs like a fucked up confessional for luck. Clearly, this is something he needs to say before we drop into whatever hellhole this op leads to.
“Liver failure,” he says. “My father’s pretending it’s not happening. My sister, Gwenyth, vanished three months ago. Morocco, maybe. Or Monaco. Either way, she’s dodging responsibility. Which leaves me.”
I don’t say sorry. He wouldn’t say it to me.
“You going to see them?” I ask.
“Too busy with the Brotherhood.”
He leans forward, presses his knuckles into his temple, and then looks up at me with a half-smile and a huff.
“So, no offense, Hayden, but your marriage? Not exactly top of my list.”
“Didn’t ask for a toast,” I say.
“Good, ‘cause I didn’t bring champagne.”
We both sit back while the plane hums to life. Outside, clouds blur past the window. Inside, there’s the slow, familiar shift, the one that happens before we do something that ends with dead people and cleanup crews.
We’ve done this a hundred times. Different cities. Different targets. Same ending.
“We have our meeting next week, you won't be late, right?” I ask, not totally understanding why I care. I’ve never cared before.
“I’ll be there. But I think I should be asking you that. I’m quite positive you’re supposed to be one more Huntington-Russell short at the meeting.”
I nod. I still have a lot of shit to clean up.
I look over at Archie, not ready to get into it.
“You ready?”
He lights another cigarette, passing me one, which I gratefully take. “Always.”
The plane rolls to a stop. Engines still humming. Outside, the Rover doesn’t move.
Archie glances out the window. “Well. That looks friendly.”
I don’t answer. I’m not thinking about the Rover. I’m thinking about the letter.
It showed up three nights ago. No stamp. No return address. Hand-delivered to the estate’s side gate by someone my staff didn’t recognize and didn’t stop long enough to be questioned. When I opened it, the paper was thick and folded with care. Neat handwriting. Ink, not pen.
And one line at the bottom, no signature:
I'll make sure the pretty lie joins her mother soon.
While it wasn’t signed, it didn’t need to be. I’m sure it was Douglass Huntington-Russell.
Martine never saw it. I disposed of it before she could.
It’s not that I don’t trust her, it’s that I know how she’d react. She’d beg me for answers, and pester me uncontrollably until I’d have to gag her and leave her tied to my bed.
I can’t let her do either. So here I am.
I open the cabin door and head down the stairs toward the car. Archie follows.
Snow’s falling lightly, not sticking yet. The kind of cold that gets under your skin but doesn’t freeze you outright.
I walk straight up to the driver’s side. Tap twice on the glass.
It rolls down an inch: a man’s face, slim, glasses, Eastern European. Civilian-looking, but that’s the problem. The ones who look harmless usually aren’t.
“You Herron?” he asks.
I nod. “You have something for me.”
He stares at me for a beat too long, then passes me an envelope with a location and unlocks the door.
We climb in. Archibald still has his hand near his jacket, just in case.
The driver doesn’t introduce himself—just drives.
Ten minutes later, we pull off into a crumbling compound that used to be a boarding school or a prison, hard to tell which. It’s all gray stone and rusted gates, with a bad energy.
We step inside a room set up with a portable heater, a plastic table, and a laptop that appears to have been stolen from a NATO bunker.
The man plugs in a drive and pulls up a map.
“I’ve been tracking movement,” he says. “Properties under Huntington-Russell foundations. They’ve been quiet for twenty years internationally, then suddenly three months ago, activity started here.” He taps a small town on the border. “Supply shipments. Private security movement. It’s clean work.”
“And you’re sure it’s Douglass?” I ask.
He nods. “The paperwork trails back to a fund only one man accesses. And I traced that fund through an old embassy project, found this.” He pulls up a scan of a declassified report, with most of the properties now claimed to belong to Martine since the inheritance.
“How the hell is she involved in this?” Archie asks.
I answer before the guy can. “It’s complicated.”
Archie turns to me. “Explain.”
I take a breath. The first one that feels like it burns.
“Her father killed her mother, and I was there,” I say. Flat. No sugar.
Archie blinks. “What?”