Chapter Fourteen. Malachi
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Malachi
I step out of the bathroom, rubbing a towel over my head, but my attention focuses on the petite, too-still woman sitting on the far edge of my bed. I drop the damp towel in the hamper, move to the dresser, and remove a clean pair of sweatpants, but my actions are blind, muscle memory motions.
Images of the last hour assault me like one of the rifles I have locked up behind my closet wall.
Eshe damn near sucking the skin off my dick and snatching my goddamn soul with her finger in my ass.
Me taking her down to the shower floor and fucking her like a wild, ravenous thing.
Me demanding she tell me that her pussy belonged to me.
Me nutting so hard and so long inside her, I almost blacked out.
I definitely lost a part of myself back there.
No, I surrendered a part of myself back there. And though she was under me and I covered her, she possessed all the power. She possessed me.
Looking at Eshe Diallo, she appears to be a small, thick, gorgeous woman with hips and ass for days. The average person wouldn’t perceive that her sick body is as dangerous as a loaded weapon. That she’s a chameleon, calculating and brilliant.
And none of those details is why my gut is in a vise grip.
Why that too-tight, pained sensation veers so close to fear.
Why I can’t stop staring.
As if feeling my gaze on her, Eshe slightly turns, peering at me. And it’s a good thing I still have a hand braced against the dresser, because damn, just that small glance is enough to nearly fell me like it’s an axe taken to a tree.
Jesus.
She’s the carnality of Gomer wrapped in the purity of Madonna. The perfect contradiction.
The perfect menace.
A stealthy, quiet voice inside my head whispers that I should put her out now, immediately, before she causes any more damage, inflicts any more harm.
But I shut the thought down. Not because it’s cowardly.
Nah. If I believed for a second that tossing her li’l ass outta here would rectify the problem, I’d forgo the door and head for the fucking window.
But it’s much too late for that shit.
Not since that night decades ago have I been so consumed with emotion.
Eaten alive with it to the point that my brain buzzes, is awash in it.
Then, it was pure rage and grief. Now? It’s every-fucking-thing.
Fury. Lust. Pain. Exhilaration. Confusion.
Hunger. She’s turned me into a fucking Disneyland of emotion, and I both detest and crave her for it.
I so desperately need it to be hate. Because if it’s not, I might end up throwing her through that window anyway.
Better that than suffer the pain of getting attached again and losing another person …
“Downstairs,” I say into the thick, tense silence, pushing off the dresser. “What did you mean by you needed to clean the pan?”
A faint smirk ghosts across her lips as she turns more fully toward me, crossing her legs under her. “All that”—she jerks her head in the direction of the bathroom—“and that’s the first thing you come up with? Me cleaning the pan?”
I shrug. It isn’t. That comment has been nagging me since she made it. Yeah, digging in her perfect pussy became priority number one for me, but the way she worded it, the particular inflection in her tone, hunkered down in the back of my head like a squatter.
She dips her head, staring down at her hands, specifically the one without the pinkie finger.
She flips that hand over, touches it, a gesture I’ve noticed her do several times before.
I can tell she’s self-conscious about the injury, but there’s no need.
Not with me. I’m not fetishizing her or the wound, but it makes my dick hard.
The idea of her suffering doesn’t get me hot; the knowledge that the pain didn’t break her but only carved into the badass woman who stands before me does.
“I can still see the blood,” she murmurs, caressing the spot of her absent finger. “Still smell it, too. It’s funny how I can tell you the exact shade of the red, the dirty metallic scent of it, but the pain of my finger actually being cut off? That’s not as clear to me over the years.”
She lifts her head, and I’m reeled in by that gaze like she’s a big-game fisherman. And I’m helpless on the hook. I cross the room and stop next to the bed, my fists thrust into the pockets of my sweatpants.
“I sat in that chair, shivering, in pain, terrified, and to not pass out, all I could think about was cleaning up the floor. In my sixteen-year-old, delirious-with-hunger-and-agony mind, if I did away with the mess, then the kidnapping and the hell I was going through would go away, too. All I had to do was clean it up.”
She falls silent, as if she’s trapped back in the past. A past that still seems to trigger her. Meanwhile, the word kidnapping ricochets through me like a bullet striking bone. Ice-cold shock slides down my spine and spills over my skin.
“You were kidnapped?”
Cocking her head, she blinks and studies me. “Yeah. You didn’t know that?”
“Before my time.” Yet the rage rippling through me belies the nine years that have passed since the event. It roars in my veins, my head, demanding blood. “What happened?”
“Me being young and impatient and a mistake in communication with my security created an opportunity for a gang to kidnap and hold me for ransom. At some point they must’ve rethought who they were demanding money from and making an enemy of, because two weeks after I was snatched, they released me without getting the ransom. But the damage had been done.”
“Did they ever catch them?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says, and huffs out a dry, short chuckle. “Not for a lack of trying. When my mother died, she was in the middle of going scorched earth locating them. No one was safe. Including Abena.”
My chin jerks back toward my neck. “What the hell did Abena have to do with it?”
“She was in charge of all security at the time, including arranging my detail. It was her fuckup that’s partly to blame for me being taken. Or at least that’s what my mother believed.”
“Is that why she had Aisha murdered?”
“Only Abena can answer that,” Eshe says, cold steel in her voice.
“But to answer your original question, I came away from that … event without a finger but with a new hang-up. I need shit to be in its place. Neat. Hell, it’s saying something about that dick that I left all that food on the floor last night before fucking you.
” She smiles, and the strained tint to it has me fighting to keep my feet rooted right there beside the bed and not round the end of it.
Not scoop her up off the mattress and lower her on my cock so I can fuck those shadows from her eyes and from that fake smile.
“Right now, I’m battling the urge to go in that bathroom and make sure the shower is wiped down, the sink is spotless, and the floor is free of our DNA and water.
Oh, and that you put the toilet seat down. ”
I give a low snort and lift one knee onto the bed, then the other.
I crawl across the wide expanse until I crouch behind her and bury my face into the space between her neck and shoulder—a space that seems created for me.
I breathe her in, that earthen scent mixed with the fresh smell of my soap, and even now, after having her, after nutting in her mouth and pussy, I find arousal winds through me in a hot, sinuous slide.
Her hand rubs over my head, back and forth, back and forth. Maybe she can’t help but touch me like I can’t stay away from her. This is like some Deeper Magic, like in Narnia. Except instead of that power being etched into a Stone Table, she’s carved some spell, some curse into my skin, bone … soul.
I’ve been alone for so long, it feels somehow wrong to allow this … intimacy. But there’s this tiny deprived part of me that longs for this. Though I’ve never experienced it, that same part recognizes it and hungers for it.
“We’re all fucked up in our own way and out here doing the best we can to cope. To make it in this goddamn zoo we call a world,” I say, words muffled by her throat.
“What’s your coping mechanism?”
I pause, my heartbeat a thunderous echo in my head, against her back. “You already know.”
She softly chuckles, but it’s not amused. More self-deprecating. “Your books. Movies. Apples. They’re your comfort and connection.”
I lift my head and stare at the window covered by the blackout curtains.
How does she…? Shit, you’d think I would’ve stopped asking that pointless question days ago.
But her damn uncanny insight into me when I’ve made a career of being invisible is at the very least uncomfortable, at the most dangerous.
No one knows me … I made sure no one could possibly know my identity, my secrets.
I buried that shit so deep, an archeological dig would come up with only dirt and stones.
And now, in this moment, I’m grateful to be sitting behind her in the dark.
It doesn’t erase this crawling, vulnerable sensation of being so terribly exposed, but Eshe can’t see my weakness.
And thank fuck, neither can I.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” To my own ears, my voice sounds as if it’s traveled over miles and miles of unpaved, pockmarked road, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Nothing I can do about the desperation, the need I can’t hide.
Eshe turns, twisting her body fully toward me, so even the shadows are no longer my barrier.
I’ve never had an issue copping the flat, blank mask that camouflages my thoughts and nonexistent emotions.
It’s the face of the assassin that has become more than a persona for me over the years.
It’s who I am. But looking into her jeweled eyes …
There’s desolation.
Longing.
Need.
Grief.
Everything that claws at my chest, attempting to gnaw its way free. A glimpse into her eyes is like staring into my own damned soul, and it’s as liberating as it is terrifying.