Seventy-Five
Him
I can’t breathe.
My heart is beating too fucking fast to stay in its lane. It’s blitzing all over the place, ramming into my lungs, going off the rails, causing the air bags to fucking explode in my face.
I claw at my chest, then clutch at my head as the horrors I have been trying so hard to keep down explode out of me just like my magic.
The smoke billows, filling Stormie’s bubble, and I can see Dayne’s husk fighting Antonio, guided by magic I can’t yet control. A desperate attempt to save my wife. Or perhaps it was him. His soul. His last need to protect the woman he loved.
I try to grab on to him. To use him as an anchor.
But he’s shoved aside as the three female werewolves I was forced to fuck grab hold of me, their claws digging into my skin, their teeth sinking into my neck. I fought back as well as I could, but with my arms nailed down, my legs and neck strapped to chains, and the sickness flush inside my veins, I failed. Every day I fucking failed. Every hour. Every godsdamn minute. When Antonio wasn’t torturing me, they were.
And if they weren’t, then Eduardo was.
Shoving things into me down there.
And not into my ass.
Needles, pens, catheters. I had to throw out all the metal pens in my office. And then I practically destroyed it, taking out all my rage and pain on objects that couldn’t fight back. On things that couldn’t stop me.
The smell of tobacco and cedar fills my nose, suffocating me with its poison as Stormie traps me in her bubble and in my nightmares.
“I fucked your wife this way,”
Eduardo says as he holds up a needle. He pushes the end, and dark-blue liquid shoots out, smelling like blackberry and oak. A different Rick that increases the intensity of an orgasm. Heightens the shame.
A pleasure I don’t want to feel.
But I keep wanting to chase.
I struggle futilely. He laughs before grabbing my dick. He sucks it into his mouth, swirls it around with his tongue to get me hard – not because he’s gay but because it’s a play for power. Power when I am helpless. Strapped down like a dog in a cage. Fish in a fucking barrel.
But I don’t get hard, and he gets annoyed.
So he jams the needle into my urethra.
I get hard before he even injects me, the feeling new and foreign and good even though I don’t want it to be.
He takes his time fucking me. The women have already had their turn, but one comes back to fuck my feet. She knows better than to sit on my face. I tore off one of their lips a couple days ago. Wanted to feed and drain her dry, but I wanted Micha to be the first person I sank my fangs into more.
“Are you fucking sure? Look at him!”
Stormie’s words brush against the edges of my brain, against the nightmare as it twists and turns into more memories I want to keep buried and forgotten or limited to just my dreams.
“Do it.”
My heart jerks at that voice. That calm control. That safe space.
I can’t get my breathing under control or my magic. Or my fucking thoughts.
But I hear that voice, and I turn to it.
“Find my hand,”
he says. “It’s on the outside of Stormie’s bubble.”
I look, but all I can see is the black smoke and shadows filling every gap in the air, plunging me into darkness. Into all that pain suffered on that ship.
One of the wolves is riding me again. I can feel her pussy sliding up and down my dick. Can feel the shame and urge to cut the damn thing off.
To remove it so my body might feel like mine again.
So this control becomes mine again.
“Come on, Vay Vay, find my hand.”
I tremble as I hear his words. Hear the love in it, the old stupid nickname. I see Rudy signing it at me for the first time and laughing, and my heart twists in my chest.
Beats back a bit of the nightmares with its own misery.
Even my rape can’t withstand the agony of losing my boy.
Tears run down both my cheeks as I see him struggling to breathe. Strapped to a chair in front of me, filled with a disease so much stronger than the one I was infected with, and yet, he still manages to smile. To let the last thing I see of him not be a face of pain and fear. He fucking smiled at me as he was dying.
Dropping to my knees, I start to cry.
“Find my hand,”
Maddox says.
I don’t want to move.
I don’t want to fight this anymore.
I stop even trying to breathe.
I’m giving in. Letting it kill me as I’m sure it will. No heart can withstand beating this fast.
But Maddox is insistent, and just to get the little shit to shut up, I crawl to him along a curved surface, the bottom of Stormie’s bubble. I can see a bit more here, a few flickers of light as the smoke weaves and spins around me.
“You see it?”
I catch sight of a calloused hand pressed up against the pink.
“Can you see it tapping?”
There’s a feeling of movement, but I can’t quite see, so I push the smoke aside with my magic. Just enough for his hand to be clear. It taps against the bubble.
“How many fingers do you see?”
I instantly think five, only to be caught off guard when I count them.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Six.
That’s not right.
Why is my brother so fucking weird?
That thought jars me. My thoughts.
A bit more of the smoke clears.
“Can you hear what it’s saying?” he says.
Most people might think hands don’t speak, but I learned sign language just so I could teach Rudy. I know all the words they can say, the laughter and joy and happiness they can shout from the rooftops.
My heart beat skitters to a stop as I hear it.
He’s saying my name in the tap Rudy used to give at my door.
“Varius!”
Rudy calls for me on my wedding night just as I am about to make love to my wife. I yank open the door to our room in annoyance as Micha locks herself in the ensuite and moans louder than she usually does, making sure I can hear her. I want to throttle him.
I don’t. I don’t. I just want him back.
“You can’t just marry me off! Maddox said you were marrying me off? To Lou! I demand an explanation. Post haste! Look how much you’re making me panic! I’m talking like an idiot! I –”
“You knew you would have to marry one day,” I cut in.
“But she doesn’t even know sign language!”
“You have six years before you wed. She can learn in that time.”
“What would we even talk about? I’m almost double her age.”
“Twenty-six to her sixteen is hardly double –”
“Fucking close enough.”
“– and by the time she’s of age, you’ll be thirty-two. Half plus seven. You’re fine.”
“Well, what if I’m gay?”
A half-sob, half-laugh breaks out past my lips. He said that as if he really thought I didn’t know. Everyone in the family knows. We knew since he was five. Though, in truth, he knew we knew, but whenever he got annoyed, whatever he thought, he signed.
“Would you rather marry Vlad?”
I ask in exasperation, wanting to get back to my wife.
I wish I spent more time with him. I never even asked about him and Vlad. I didn’t care then. I didn’t know if his feelings were serious. I should’ve asked. I should’ve taken the fucking time to ask.
And now I can’t.
Because he’s gone.
And I’m never going to hear his hands again.
Strong arms wrap around me as I sit on the ground and shake. The smoke is gone. The bubble is gone. I feel so damn exhausted.
So empty and hollow.
“That’s it. Just breathe. Feel the ground. Smell the air.”
I feel him. Notice the sickly smell of my sweat.
Ground myself in his arms around me.
Ground myself and remember why I lost control in the first place.
“I hit her,”
I rasp. “Where is she?”
I need to find her. To apologize and explain.
“Just take a moment. You’ve had a panic attack.”
I shove him off me.
“Good rest,”
he says dryly as I pull on the blood bond to find her. She’s heading back to the fucking warehouse.
I slip my phone out of my pocket and dial the manager there. He’s to let her in, then lock her in the office after he takes out all the V.
She’s pissed as all hel when I arrive, but at least she isn’t high. I open the door, then dodge the book she throws at my face.
“I’m surprised there’s a book in here,”
I say. Ezriel isn’t big on reading physical copies.
The words take her off guard, just like Maddox’s fingers did to me, but instead of being annoyed I distracted her from her rage, her face twists in pain, and she sits down heavily in Ezriel’s chair. My throat tightens as I turn to the book on the floor. Squatting down, I pick it up and fix its crumbled pages. Talon might have turned traitor and set up my girl to take the blame, but he was still my brother.
I walk slowly over to her, collecting my thoughts, then place the book on the desk.
I start to tell her I’m sorry before I recall how she reacted to that phrase. The panic in her eyes, the self-disgust. I want to ask her to exchange more blood for the blood bond so I can feel what she’s feeling and better navigate this difficult conversation, but I don’t want to push her.
If she doesn’t want to be tied to me… If she doesn’t want to bond with me anymore… I want that to be her choice.
And besides, my emotions are so fucking crazy right now that combining them with hers and making us both feel everything would be relationship suicide.
So I look her in the eyes and do my best to read her despite the impassable walls she has up.
The first step to reaching her, though, is bringing my own walls down.
So I take a moment to figure out what to say, and when I finally speak, I don’t say sorry. “You were right, Micha. I’ve been avoiding facing what happened on that yacht, and it was wrong of me to think that what I was doing was better than what you were.”
I purse my lips. As much as I believe that though, the only thing that matters is – “It is not on me to judge how you cope.”
She glances away, her eyes wet.
“But I would like for you to talk to me. We’ve struggled with that a bit, huh?”
I say, trying to add a bit of humor.
“I talked to you,”
she says, rounding on me in anger. “I told you I was innocent, and you didn’t believe me.”
“You’re right. I’ve struggled with that. Sor– I shouldn’t have blamed you.”
Her lips tremble, but she clenches her jaw.
“I shouldn’t have hit you either.”
She looks at me, her eyes so full of pain. Of knowledge of what she did. “You told me to stop. I should’ve stopped.”
It’s my turn to look away. Take a deep breath and gather myself. “Even still, I should have been discussing this with Maddox. Therapy doesn’t really work if you don’t talk about your issues.”
“Don’t blame yourself,”
she snaps. “Blame –”
“I’m not going to blame you –”
“You should.”
“Perhaps,”
I concede. “But I’m not going to.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll just use it as another way to tell yourself you’re a monster.”
She flinches, and I thank the gods I talked to Maddox about her, trying to understand what she is going through. He’s kept all her secrets to himself, but he’s just helped me see what her new walls mean.
“So you see, you’re not the only one making mistakes. But that’s what they are, little monster. Mistakes. Those do not define us. How we deal with them is what does.”
She swallows, but she doesn’t look at me.
“I haven’t touched you,”
I say, recalling our argument from yesterday before she cut me off, “because I don’t think you’re ready –”
“I am –”
I shake my head. “You want a poor man’s version of V, and I want to be more than that to you.”
“If that’s all I wanted, I could sleep with anyone here.”
I growl, a primitive noise I can’t stop. “Good luck fucking trying.”
Marching over to the door, I yank it open. The men and women lingering around in curiosity scramble to look busy, but I want them to hear this, so I raise my voice. “If anyone here even fucking looks at my wife like they want to fuck her, I will kill them and every friend and family they have.”
She hurries over to me and slams the door shut before rounding on me, forcing me back. “You’re such a fucking neanderthal!”
she shouts, her cheeks flushed.
I grin as I look down at her, my jealousy settling a little as we feel, almost, like we did before. “Only ever with you,”
I say softly.
She glances away, and my smile drops. But we still feel better than we did before, so I’ll take it.
“There’s another reason I haven’t touched you too,”
I say, getting us back on track even though I’d much rather be on said track, tied down as a train barrels towards my face.
I look up towards the ceiling, only to focus quickly back on my wife, using her presence to ground me. To keep the nightmares from rising too brutally.
“They used me as… a thing.”
I swallow. “I don’t want to feel like that ever again, and I especially… don’t want to feel like that with my wife.”
She bows forward on a sob, and I move to gather her in my arms, but she darts to the side, away from the wall and back towards the desk.
“How can you love me?”
she cries as she stumbles back, putting distance between us with more than just her feet.
I step forward, determined to close it. “Because you’re my little monster.”
“I’m just a monster.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You don’t know what I did!”
“No, but Khalid does.”
She flinches. Her eyes widen. Panic carves deep into her face. Shame. Guilt. Self-disgust.
“He never once thought you were worth leaving. And he’s a very good judge of character on that front because that was his job for a very long time. Deciding who to kill because they became too much of a monster. And knowing who was still worth saving.”
She’s backed up against the desk, and I take that final step towards her. I lift my hand to her face and brush away her tears as she cries.
“I love you, Micha Shadow, because you are worth loving and because I am in love with every part of you. The fire. The courage. The ability to do things that are bad for the greater good. I love Rudy for his ability to stay good despite all the bad, to never waver in his damn annoying morals, but I love you for knowing that sometimes, you cannot win by playing by the rules.”
I tilt her chin up and look her in the eyes. The redness bothers me, knowing she lost them because of me – even if I didn’t choose them, and I miss the color they were. The defiant brown. The honeyed laughter.
But they are her, and that is enough.
I press a kiss to her forehead, feel her shudder against me. “I love you for being you.”
Lowering my head, my heart pounding in every vein and artery inside me, making me feel like I’m about to burst out of my skin, I press my lips to hers.
She trembles, and so do I.
She doesn’t move, and neither do I.
We just stand here, our lips touching and nothing else. Tears streak down our cheeks.
But the gap between us has been closed.
Now we can finally start to heal.