Sevastyan #2
Rei met Sevastyan’s eyes with perfect acceptance. A fear in Sevastyan’s heart released. He let his fingers slide from Rei’s cheek and stepped away, back towards the bedroom.
Lisa was where he had left him on the bed, naked except for the harness and the bandage on his thigh and the wrap around his ankle and foot.
Their eyes met. Sevastyan’s fingers went to the buttons on his shirt.
He stripped efficiently, folding his clothes and setting them aside as he went. Lisa never looked away.
Hours before he’d been in this bed, being taken by Ellisandre, and now he was going to take Lisa.
For different reasons. Under different circumstances.
The room registered in his senses as a separate place, as if his very presence mixing with Lisa’s moved time and space.
His hands didn’t feel like his own. They were moving and doing and he was somewhere behind them, watching.
Lisa deserved better. This wasn’t just a fuck.
This wasn’t a mission for his mother where he went away in his head and used his body to get through the night.
This was . . . a man who was choosing to give up his pride, his body, and his status as a human.
He was willing to gamble that the sacrifice was worth the justice Sevastyan was fighting to bring to life.
That sacrifice deserved to be witnessed.
Honored. Remembered. Sevastyan’s hands trembled as he coiled his belt on top of his folded pants.
Present was the last thing he wanted to be.
Fucking Lisa after watching the man shatter in the small space between the wall and a toilet was far from what he desired to add to his ledger on top of all his other sins.
“You killed him,” Lisa said from behind Sevastyan. His voice was low and dark.
“Dirk, you mean?” Sevastyan said.
“Yes.”
“I killed him.” Sevastyan turned.
Lisa was sitting up, his back to the headboard, one knee drawn up, the other leg extended, favoring his injuries. His thighs were splayed, displaying his sex, unaroused and soft against his inner leg. He gazed at Sevastyan, taking in the full height and breath of him.
“Good,” Lisa said. He lifted his chin. “He made Rei bleed.”
And suddenly the space between Sevastyan and the bed disappeared. He put one knee up on the edge. “He made you bleed as well.”
Lisa tilted his head to the side. “And you. Which is worse?”
“Rei,” Sevastyan answered. He eased both knees onto the bed, moving towards the other man.
Lisa stared straight into Sevastyan’s eyes as Sevastyan drew close.
He wasn’t going to make this easy. Rei’s eyes had always dropped unless ordered not to, giving Sevastyan space to collect himself if needed, draping a mantle of privacy over Sevastyan’s dominance.
Lisa offered no such quarter. Every bit of Sevastyan’s authority was naked.
“I’m not going to get hard,” Lisa said. “You might as well order me to roll over now.”
“No,” Sevastyan said. He straddled Lisa’s outstretched leg, kneeling while sliding a hand over Lisa’s jaw, and cupping the back of his head. His fingers tangling in Lisa’s hair. It was a perfect length for gripping. He drew Lisa’s head back, staring straight back into the slave’s eyes.
Lisa was going to test him in a way Ellisandre and Rei never had. Rei had needed to kneel. Ellisandre had always taken. Lisa was something else entirely.
Alexi had only seen what he had wanted to see.
He’d envisioned the essence of Lisa like a colonizer surveyed foreign land, beholding a wilderness and mistaking it for something that was meant to be collected like the trot of a horse.
He wanted to shape the natural terrain of Lisa’s psyche like it was wild vista being turned into a French garden.
But there was another kind of dominance other than the self-collected, self-satisfied superiority Alexi practiced.
A dominance Sevastyan had knelt for beneath Ellisandre.
Submitting to his goddex was not kneeling.
It was throwing oneself down in tall grass amidst a rainstorm and casting one’s arms and legs wide, letting the rain pelt one from above.
There were things inside of Sevastyan that Alexi had not fostered. A wilderness was never empty. It was only unperceived for what it was. He needed those pieces of Lisa that Alexi could not see to be present now.
Lisa was not a submissive. A self-doubt flickered inside Sevastyan’s chest. He carried in himself more of a desire to bend than the man beneath him. Had bent on this very bed only hours before. Had begged and pleaded for his goddex’s hand.
And yet failure was not an option. It wasn’t enough to believe he could bring Lisa to submission.
It wasn’t enough for Lisa to want to submit.
It had to be real, for them both. Or he might as well not go through with this at all.
Within weeks they would be watched by buzzards looking for their next meal, seeking to take out the newest upstart amongst their ranks.
“You make such a beautiful sword, Lisa,” Sevastyan whispered, fingers flitting over Lisa’s cheek, staring straight back into the other man’s eyes. “Do you know what I saw, when I saw the bodies of the men you killed?”
“What?” Lisa’s gaze darted from one side of Sevastyan’s face to the other, as if each eye could tell a different story.
“Ferocity.” Sevastyan dragged his fingernails up Lisa’s cheek and over his temples into his hair.
“Violence. Focus. And then I saw you. I saw the map of what they left on you.”
He touched bruises across Lisa’s chest and down his ribs.
“How they tore you open, thinking it would be enough to empty the well inside of you.”
Lisa’s chest rose and fell. His eyes never left Sevastyan’s face.
Sevastyan brought up his other hand, dragging the backs of his fingers across Lisa’s jaw and down the column of his neck. “And then you knelt for me in the wreckage. Do you know what I heard in your oath?”
“No.”
“A forest on fire. The crack of embers. The creak of falling trees. I smelled the Yadro burning.”
Lisa’s lips twitched towards a smile.
Sevastyan slid one hand towards Lisa’s waist, drawing him down the bed and laying him back.
He kept one hand in Lisa’s hair, holding him down.
“In myths, there is a theme of weapons. Once unsheathed, some must be used. Some begin to control the spirit of their bearer. Others give warning of danger coming. But all require a hand to carry them into battle, even though they are power and thunder and the bringer of fear.”
Lisa breathed, mouth parting.
Sevastyan caught the man’s bottom lip with his thumb.
“It was satisfying, putting a bullet through Dirk’s head, erasing him. But if I had wielded you to take his head . . .”
Sevastyan let himself smile with just half his face, feeling a dark rage flow through him.
“What you could have done. What a story you could have etched in his final moments.”
Lisa’s eyes fluttered.
“When I walk into that sea of vipers in New York with you behind me at my beck and call, when I drop you to your knees in front of my chair, never forget what you are, a hidden dagger, a blade, my vengeance, my slave to bring them to their knees.”
Lisa arched into Sevastyan’s touch, his eyes fluttering half closed.
Sevastyan caught Lisa’s tongue and stroked it with his thumb, releasing as he reached the end. He caught the harness in his fingers, pulling at it. “Did you know that warriors wrapped the grips of their swords with leather?”
“No,” Lisa said. His voice was hoarse.
Sevastyan reached under the pillow and pulled out a vial of body oil.
He thumbed the stopper out and poured some into his palm.
Palms together, he spread the oil over his hands and warmed it against his skin.
Then he ran his hands over Lisa’s chest.
“A good blade is kept clean, sharp, and oiled. The harness is there to be gripped but everything else . . .”
Sevastyan let his words trail off, gliding his hands over Lisa’s body.
“This must be cared for.” He refilled his palm with more oil.
Lisa was long limbed and broad shouldered.
There was much of him to cover. He didn’t speak for a long while as he worked, massaging the oil into Lisa’s skin from shoulder to calf, careful of his injuries.
Lisa’s eyes fluttered, almost closing again and again.
His chest rose and fell and his fingers worked open and closed at his side, lying against the comforter.
“Turn over,” Sevastyan ordered, rising up to give Lisa the space in which to shift but not moving away.
Lisa almost groaned. He turned slowly, lying down again on his belly, his legs between Sevastyan’s thighs.
Sevastyan started at his shoulders again.
Lisa was melting under him, his muscles unfurling.
He progressed down both of Lisa’s arms and his back, over his buttocks, and onto his legs.
Lisa’s frame lay heavier and heavier against the bed.
Sevastyan left his legs spread as he worked on him.
He traversed his way up and down and back to Lisa’s ass.
Without speaking, or changing his pace, he parted Lisa’s buttocks and rubbed oil across his hole.
His hand was soaked. It was easy to sink a single finger inside.
“A beautiful blade,” Sevastyan whispered, invading Lisa’s body. “Glistening, on your knees, draped in chains. They’ll never see you coming.”
Lisa groaned. His hips pressed against the mattress.
“Tell me how you will fly against my enemies, blade of mine,” Sevastyan murmured. He stroked his finger inside Lisa’s channel and found the bundle of nerves that brought pleasure, then pressed against it. “Tell your master how you will strike his enemies.”
Lisa’s voice caught in his throat. He moved, pressing back against Sevastyan’s invasion. “Hard, master.”
“Hard, fast, silent,” Sevastyan murmured. “That is how you will fly.”
“Yes,” Lisa groaned.
Sevastyan pulled out and sank two fingers inside Lisa’s body, pouring oil over his hole as he entered him again. Lisa gasped, his form tightening. Sevastyan leaned down, brushing his lips to Lisa’s rippling back in a benediction. “Take it, blade of mine. Accept your purpose and your sacrifice.”
Lisa spread his legs wider. Small, aroused sounds tumbled from his mouth.
“Knees,” Sevastyan ordered, moving back between Lisa’s knees.
Lisa stirred, movements uncoordinated and confused.