7. First Burn
Chapter seven
First Burn
Lorelei
Nobody told me the mask was mandatory. I find out I’m underdressed for that specifically at the gate, where a woman in a car who lives two houses down from ours takes one look at my bare face and hands me a strip of black lace like she’s used to doing this for lost girls.
“First time?” she asks, not unkind.
“That obvious?”
“You’re glowing like you don’t know what you walked into.” She looks past me at the next car in line. “Keep it on till someone tells you differently.”
She presses a small black token into my palm before waving me through, the same crest from the banner stamped into one side.
The circuit at night doesn’t look like the strip of asphalt I glimpsed from Cassian’s window two weeks ago.
It looks like something out of a fever dream — floodlights turning the whole valley gold, engines idling in a chorus that vibrates up through the ground and into my teeth, a crowd two and three deep along the rail, all of them masked, all of them dressed like this is a wedding and a funeral at once.
Somewhere above the pits, a banner I finally get close enough to read: a crest, a phrase in Latin I don’t know, gold thread on black.
My mother isn’t here. Alistair isn’t visible either, though I get the distinct, prickling sense of being catalogued the second I pass the gate, like the whole event runs on some frequency I can’t hear but my body picks up anyway.
I catch myself checking every tall figure near the pits for the set of Ash’s shoulders before I remember I have no right to be looking.
Rafe finds me first, grinning under a mask that doesn’t hide much of anything. “There she is. Try not to look so much like prey, yeah? Wolves can smell it.”
“Comforting.”
“I try.” He steals a look over my shoulder, and whatever he sees there makes his grin flicker, just slightly, just enough. “I gotta go check in before the first heat. You’ll be fine. Stay near the rail.”
I don’t stay near the rail.
Rafe’s warning follows me for maybe thirty seconds before curiosity wins.
He told me what the masks are for, which is exactly why I should turn around, and I wander the gravel paths behind the garages anyway, past crates and coolers and men who barely glance at me because the mask lets me disappear into everybody else.
The private box is almost unmarked. The same crest stamped into the token in my palm sits beside the frame, easy to miss unless you already know to look for it.
The door’s cracked, low light spilling out gold onto gravel, and something in me — curious and entirely unsupervised — pushes it open before better judgment gets a vote.
He’s already there.
Leaning against a workbench that’s cleaner than any workbench has a right to be, helmet under one arm instead of on his head, black from collar to boot, a mask that covers less than the lace on my own face and somehow reveals nothing at all.
“You shouldn’t be back here,” he says. His voice is pitched low, roughened at the edges in a way I don’t recognize, and for one unsteady second I genuinely don’t know if it’s him.
“Neither should you, probably.”
“I have permission.” He takes a step closer, then his attention drops to my hand.
The token is still caught between my fingers.
His gaze stays there long enough for me to look down too, from the crest in my palm to the one beside the door.
“You do too, apparently,” he says.
Something about that should bother me more than it does.
“Lucky me.”
He laughs — quiet, low, more breath than sound — and it does something to my knees I refuse to examine. “Careful. Some rules exist for a reason.”
“How convenient that the people making the rules never explain what the reason is.”
“Would it matter if I told you?”
“Try me.”
He doesn’t answer with words. He crosses the last of the distance instead, slow enough that I have a hundred separate moments to step back, to say no, to do any of the sensible things I’ve spent twenty years being told a girl in my position should do — and I don’t do a single one of them.
His right hand finds my jaw, careful and deliberate, tilting my face up. Silver catches the gold light, and the plain ring knocks something into place.
Oh. I know that hand.
I keep my eyes on the mask anyway. Knowing and saying it are apparently two different things tonight.
“You feel it too,” he says.
“Feel what?”
“Don’t.” His thumb traces my jaw, feather-light, and my pulse answers it. “Don’t make me spell it out. Not tonight.”
The music from the main crowd is muffled through the walls, leaving only his breath and mine, the gold light, and the mask between us.
“I don’t even know your name,” I say.
We both know that’s bullshit.
“Good,” he says. “Keep it that way. Tonight, you don’t have to.”
His mouth finds the curve of my throat instead of my mouth, unhurried and deliberate, and whatever sound escapes me isn’t one I recognize as mine.
Somewhere outside, an engine screams to life, the crowd roars, the first heat of the night tearing off down the strip.
Inside this small gold room, everything narrows to his hands, his mouth, and the fact that neither of us has said the name we both know.
His mouth works higher along my throat until he stops just short of mine.
He waits.
“Yes,” I whisper.
I close the last inch and take his mouth with mine, one hand clutching the back of his head.
Fuck. He tastes exactly like the kind of mistake I came here hoping to make.
He bites my lip hard enough to make me gasp. Before I recover, his hand is already sliding down my body, stopping at the soaked black lace between my thighs.
He hooks his fingers beneath the edge and looks at me.
“Still yes.”
Only then does he slide them slowly down my legs and tuck them into his back pocket.
I hurriedly shimmy out of my black crop top, leaving me in my matching lace bra and the skirt I wore through the gate.
He traces the edge of one cup, sending a shiver straight through me. I’m already wound too tight, desperate for him to stop taking his time.
He does. He drags the cups down and frees my breasts, rough enough to make me suck in a breath, then pauses. The look he gives me is almost worse than his hands.
Then whatever restraint was holding him snaps.
His tongue traces my jaw to my neck before his teeth close there. He works lower, mouth hot against my chest, until he takes one nipple between his lips.
“Holy fuck.”
I let myself moan. Nobody has ever made me feel this good, and I’m past pretending I care who hears.
He swirls his tongue before biting down and repeating the same treatment on my left nipple. By the time he lifts his head, I’m breathless and desperate to feel him inside me.
Like he read my mind, he lifts me, and I lock my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck.
This time he takes my lips with his, and the kiss turns sloppy almost immediately, all teeth and tongue and no patience left between us.
It’s hot and hungry and loud, neither of us bothering to soften it.
I break our kiss, gasping for breath, and decide it’s my turn to mark him. Leaning down, I drag my mouth along his neck, sucking hard before I bite just enough to pull a sound out of him.
That moan goes straight through me. Before I can do it again, he braces me against the wall and reaches for his pants.
I look down.
Well. That explains the confidence.
He sees my stunned face and chuckles before sliding his cock through the wet heat between my thighs.
“Tell me you want it. Beg for it.”
I hate begging. I hate even more that right now, for him, I want to.
“Please.” I tighten my legs around him. “I need it. My pussy needs your cock.”
Satisfied, he eases inside me.
We groan together, and my arms lock tighter around him as he works deeper.
“Oh my God. Yes!”
Every thrust takes his cock farther until the stretch burns in exactly the way I want.
“Harder. Fuck me like you mean it.”
He stops.
Apparently that was the wrong thing to say if I wanted mercy. Keeping himself buried inside me, he carries me to the nearest workbench and lays me back across it.
He pulls out just long enough to strip off his shirt. His mask slips with it, and he catches it before it can fall, settling it back into place. I open my legs wider for him.
His right hand rises toward my throat.
I lift my chin.
Something in his eyes goes dark with approval before his fingers close around me, controlled pressure settling against my skin while his left hand guides himself back inside.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”
I sound like a broken record, but he fucks me harder anyway. Exactly like I asked him to.
“Take it. Be a good fucking girl and take it. You asked for this.”
I do.
He gives me harder and faster until there’s nothing careful left in either of us.
His groan mixes with the engines and shouting outside while he fucks me with the same vicious lack of restraint I asked for.
He fucks me like he’s claiming something, and the thought that I might be that something sends heat tearing through me.
I come around him hard enough to lose the room for a few seconds.
He fucks me through my orgasm, not letting up.
When my vision clears, he’s above me, shirtless and straining, sweat catching along his chest and shoulders. His hand tightens slightly around my throat, and I know before he says anything that he’s close.
And then I remember what neither of us reached for.
No condom.
For half a second, every warning I’ve ever been given flashes through my head. I should stop him. I know I should.
I tighten my legs around his waist instead.
He grunts and comes inside me.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Dirty little girl. That’s right, take my cum.”
The words hit almost as hard as the pulse of him inside me, and I let myself have the moment before consequences start asking for their turn.
His thrusts slow until he finally stills and releases my throat.
The thought of the mark his hand might leave there sends one last shiver through me, and I clench around him again.
We catch our breaths for a moment, his hands gliding up and down my body like he’s trying to memorize me.
I fix my bra and push myself upright on the workbench. He reaches for a clean work rag, and a car roaring in the distance pulls my attention toward the wall while he cleans between my thighs. The first touch makes me twitch, oversensitive enough that he slows without being asked.
When he tosses the rag aside, I pull my crop top back on and tug my skirt into place, moving too quickly. My mask slips loose and drops beside the workbench.
I don’t pick it up.
When I look up, Cassian hooks a finger beneath the edge of his own mask and pulls it away, setting it on the workbench beside mine, with no ceremony and no pretending it slipped. Just a choice.
The low gold light catches the face I confirmed the second his ring touched my jaw.
Cassian.
I don’t say his name.
He doesn’t say mine.
Outside, the crowd roars again — someone’s won, someone’s lost, the night rolling forward without either of us in it — and I think I should feel shame.
I don’t. I feel found, and that terrifies me more than anything else that happened in this room tonight.