4. ~Riot~ #2
I do what I always do with a thing I can’t get rid of.
I take it apart.
Piece by piece, the way she took mine apart at my feet—the bright top of the strawberry, the powdered middle, the dark baked heart of it, the faint chemical ghost of the suppressants they keep her dosed on, fighting a losing war against a scent that clearly refuses to be told what to do.
I break her down into her parts and lay them out in my head like a man unloading a weapon to understand it.
It does not help. It is, in fact, the precise opposite of help.
Each piece I name only makes the whole of her bloom larger in the dark behind my eyes.
Scent is supposed to be information.
That’s the whole brutal economy of what we are—designation reading designation, threat measuring threat, the body’s oldest language spoken under all the newer noise.
I’ve used mine like a blade my entire life, watched a room go pale and compliant the instant my anger soured the air.
Scent has only ever told me who to fear and who to break.
Hers told me something my body has no filing system for.
It reached past every wall I’ve mortared up over the years and rang a bell in a room I thought I’d bricked over for good, and now the room won’t stop ringing, and the cold can’t drown it, and I’m kneeling here learning the humbling fact that the most dangerous man in the building can be undone by the memory of birthday cake.
A man shouldn’t jerk off during punishment.
There’s a principle in it somewhere, some last shred of dignity the chamber is meant to strip from me.
But dignity’s a luxury too, and I told you what I think of those, and I genuinely don’t know how I’m supposed to kneel here aching and frozen and haunted by the vivid, taunting, defiant image of her, that bright lunatic grin, that flat deadly whisper, and not do something about it.
And then there’s the tick.
The one I don’t think anyone else in that hall caught—anyone but Doc, who catches everything, the smug bastard.
The moment I needled her about her made-up alter-ego and she stopped.
The sugar drained out of her like a plug pulled from a sink.
And she gave me a name in a voice that didn’t belong to the woman who’d been performing the whole hour—lower, older, real.
Violet.
Not Jezebel.
She made that crystal clear, didn’t she. Jezebel was the decoy, the toy name tossed out to be laughed at. Violet was the truth that slipped its leash, and the second it left her mouth she knew it, and so did I, and so did the man in the expensive glasses watching from the far wall.
For one suspended heartbeat I wasn’t looking at the goddess on the plinth. I was looking at whatever lives underneath her, the thing that does the actual hunting, and it looked right back at me and recognized its own kind.
That was a turn-on I never saw coming.
The eye contact alone made my heart do something it has no business doing—skip, stutter, lose its footing for a single beat like a man missing a stair in the dark. Nothing has ever made me feel that particular voltage.
Nothing except the moments that meant death.
And I’ve always been a little too fond of those.
Transferring me here was a mistake. Whatever board these people think they’re playing on, whatever neat little experiment the suits upstairs cooked up when they shipped the prison’s worst problem to the asylum’s most secure wing—they miscalculated. Badly. They put me in reach of her.
They’ll come to understand the size of that error. They always do. It’s usually the last thing they understand.
I huff out a breath that fogs even in this dripping dark, and I make my decision the way I make all of them—fast, and without the burden of a second opinion.
Self-love, then.
I spit that word in my head with a mean little curl, because it’s a joke, isn’t it? Never been in love with myself, not even enough to buy that snake oil.
Even so, I wrap my own hand around the ache, the one problem in this cell that I can solve without an audience, and resolve to see the thing through quick.
Nobody’s coming to see a show.
Nobody’s listening.
I jerk myself in that numb way a man does when he’s chasing down a ghost, not really seeing his own hand moving, just wanting the pressure to break, needing the ache to yield for a second so he can gather himself and shut it all down again.
The skin’s cold but the heat inside isn’t, and I work myself hard and mean, knuckles white, body shivering under the sheet of freezing water that Blackthorn’s finest think will shrink me down to something manageable.
My jaw’s locked. I grit my teeth so the sound doesn’t escape, but even then, a groan grates up my windpipe, loud enough I’m sure it echoes down the stone. Shame is a concept for people with a reputation left to lose.
If the guards are watching the feed, let them look.
I think about her, only her, and it’s not a gentle fantasy.
No soft focus, no romantic slow-motion. I picture her crouched at my feet, the world’s tiniest devil in her pink jumpsuit, glass between her fingers and that razor smile curving her lips.
It’s her voice—flat, cold, a threat dressed up in a dare—that plays in the echo chamber of my head.
The precise way she said “Violet,” like naming the color of the violence she had coiled behind her teeth.
I imagine her mouth on me, and it’s not even the lips or the tongue, it’s the shape of her fucking teeth, the way she’d bite, the way she’d laugh if she drew blood.
I see her climbing me like a ladder, hands, knees, and hips, see her pinning me down instead of the other way around, see her riding the power the way she rides the air in those tightropes she walks upon in this space she clearly owns without stating it to the world.
I picture her with my hand on her throat and her hand on mine, both of us unwilling to blink first.
The cut on my neck is stinging worse, and I want her to do it again.
I want her to go further.
To feel her jaw work under my palm as I haul her mouth to mine.
For her to ruin me, if only so I have the excuse to do the same.
She said she was “dangerous,” and I think she was underselling by half.
The hand I’m using is too harsh but I don’t care. I want it to hurt. I want it to be as rough as the memory, as sweet as the threat. The water comes down ice cold and I let it, let it numb all the places that aren’t on fire, let it baptize me as the worst kind of sinner.
My other hand claws at the floor, scraping red lines in the pale slab, and I wonder if she’d lick the blood. I wonder what she tastes like when she’s wet and wild and unafraid.
And then there’s that last image—the way she looked at me when she said “wide enough,” the way she meant it, not joking at all, just stating a fact she already knew.
My hand works me harder, desperation taking over, the ache in my cock now a nuclear-grade crisis that nothing short of violence is going to solve.
I’m using my own fingers like a cudgel, grip so tight it’s a miracle I don’t snap something, veins standing out on my knuckles and shaft alike, my whole body a pulsing wire rigged for detonation.
The thought of her—the way she’d surely cut her own skin to win the moment, the dare in her voice when she named the thing that lived under her skin—feeds my pulse, too fast, too bright, ricocheting off the walls of this cement coffin like a ballistic round.
I can’t stop thinking about the curve of her grin, the murder in her eyes, the sound she might make if I shoved her hard up against the wall and made her take every inch of me, whether or not she begged for it.
The memory of her scent isn’t a memory.
It’s live, viral, gone systemic. It’s the only warmth in the room, and even as the water needles my shoulders and back and nuts to the point of numbness my cock doesn’t care.
It’s all her, every inch of her, and she’s so fucking vivid in my head I swear I could draw her from memory, every freckle on her face, every split end of her pink-and-violet disaster hair.
I imagine her as she could have been: covered in someone else’s blood, mouth open in a scream that was half-laugh, glass in one hand, promise in the other.
I picture her with that split lip pressed around my dick, tongue as sharp as her wit, taking me to the hilt and not even blinking, just locking eyes and waiting to see if I’m going to look away first.
I imagine her biting me, hard, leaving a mark, daring me to mark her back, to bruise her up inside and out and pin her down in a way nobody’s ever managed.
I want her to be the first to try, and the last to succeed.
And now I’m moving way too fast, can’t slow it, not that I want to.
The edge is a cliff and I’m running straight at it, her voice in my ear, her teeth in my skin, her scent melting every synapse. My hand is raw, too rough, but I need it that way—I want it to hurt, want to feel it the way she’d make me feel it, like a threat and a promise all at once.
My balls draw up tight and I groan, this time not bothering to bite it back, let the fucked-up acoustics of this vault carry it wherever. I hope she hears me, wherever she is.
The climax rips through me, full-body, like a cord yanked out of a wall.
For a second I blank out—just pure white burn behind my eyelids, no sound but my own ragged breath and the thunder in my chest—and then I’m hunched over, wet and shaking, shots of my release mixing with the cold water pooling at my knees. It’s not satisfying. It’s not enough.
It doesn’t even come close to clearing her out of my head.
If anything, it just sets the hook deeper.
I lean against the wall, panting, forehead pressed to the damp stone, hand still sticky and numb. I can feel the cut on my neck throb, the raw skin, the bruises up and down my arms from a dozen encounters with security and discipline teams who never stood a chance.
I think about her, and I know: I’ll crawl through whatever hell they want to throw at me for another shot in the ring with her.