Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
JEX
Ireach down and grab the anchor. With one violent, wet yank, I rip the cold steel out of her. Hallow lets out a shattered cry, her body sagging against the ceiling tethers as the sudden absence of the machine leaves her raw and empty.
I don’t give her a second to breathe. I shove my jeans down, my cock spring-loaded and thrumming with a heat that outshines the fire outside. I grab her thighs, hauling her body forward until she’s skewered on me, burying myself to the root in one heavy, unforgiving thrust.
She gasps, her eyes rolling back, her internal muscles clamping around me like a vice.
“There,” I growl, my voice a jagged wreck of a sound. “No more toys. Just me.”
With my free hand, I reach into my pocket and pull out the Zippo. I flick it. The flame is a tiny, mocking dancer in the dark. I don’t look at it. I look at her—at the smeared kohl, the sweat, and the absolute, terrifying beauty of her ruin.
“Tick-tock, sweetheart,” I rasp, leaning in to bite the shell of her ear as I begin to move inside her, my pace slow, deep, and agonising. “Better cum before we both burn.”
I drop the lighter.
The flame hits the gasoline circle with a soft, hungry whoosh.
A ring of blue and orange fire sprints around us, walling us off from the rest of the world.
The heat is instantaneous, a wall of blistering air that makes the sweat on our skin sizzle.
The smell of burning wood and chemical fumes starts to choke the room.
“Jex!” she screams, her hands clawing at my shoulders, her eyes wide with the reflection of the rising flames.
“Don’t look at the fire,” I command, slamming my hips into her, forcing her to focus on the friction, on the way I’m stretching her, on the way we’re both dancing on the head of a pin. “Look at me. Cum for me, Hallow. Give me everything before the floor gives way.”
I’m moving like a man possessed, each stroke a desperate gamble against the clock. The fire is climbing the velvet curtains of the vanity, the glass of the mirrors starting to crack and pop from the heat. The air is thinning, turning into a heavy, golden haze.
She’s frantic, her body bucking against mine, her pussy pulsing around me in a frantic, rhythmic squeeze. She’s caught in the perfect intersection of terror and ecstasy, her breath coming in short, high-pitched hitches.
“I’m… I’m almost… Jex, the fire!”
“Ignore it!” I roar, my hands bruising her hips as I drive into her one last time, my own climax hitting me like a freight train. “Give it to me! Now!”
The rafters above us groan. A piece of the ceiling, wreathed in flames, crashes down just feet away, sending a spray of sparks over our tangled bodies.
The floor is screaming. The wood is curling under the heat, the ancient varnish bubbling into black blisters as the ring of fire licks toward our feet.
I reach up, my muscles corded and straining, and I slice through the leather binds with a flick of my knife. Hallow drops—not to the floor, but onto me. I catch her weight, my cock still buried to the hilt, her legs finally snapping around my waist like a trap.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she hisses into my ear, her voice a mix of smoke and pure filth. She’s not afraid of the fire anymore; she’s part of it.
I back up, slamming her spine against the one support beam that isn’t yet a torch. The flames are roaring now, a wall of orange and gold encircling us, the heat so intense I can feel the hair on my arms singeing.
“Ride it, then,” I growl, my hands gripping her ass, lifting her and dropping her back down onto me. “Ride it until the roof comes down on our heads.”
She takes over. She’s a frantic, beautiful animal, her hips pumping in a blur of motion, her head thrown back as she gulps down the scorched air. Every time she slides down, I feel the wet, scalding heat of her clenching around me, dragging the soul right out of my chest.
The world is a tunnel of fire. There’s the roar of the blaze, the crash of falling timber, and the wet, rhythmic slap of our skin colliding.
I can see the sweat boiling off her skin, the black kohl on her face running in jagged streaks down her neck.
She looks like a war goddess born from the ashes.
“Jex… fuck… it’s so hot… I’m going to—”
“Do it!” I roar, my voice lost in the thunder of a collapsing rafter.
I can feel her shattering. Her internal muscles go into a violent, rhythmic seizure, milking me with a desperation that makes my vision go white.
She’s screaming, her voice raw and shredded, her fingers digging deep into the meat of my shoulders as she hits a peak that matches the intensity of the inferno surrounding us.
I don’t hold back. I let go, my own release hitting me like a shotgun blast, my blood turning to liquid lead as I spill into her.
The floorboards under my boots give a final, terminal groan. The heat is unbearable, the oxygen vanishing. I wrap my arms around her, shielding her body with mine, and I don’t look for the door. I look for the weakness in the wall.
“Hold on,” I rasp, my lungs burning.
I turn and throw us both through the rotted, flaming siding of the funhouse, plunging out of the fire and into the cold, salt-stained air of the night, falling toward the black water of the harbour below.
The cold doesn’t kill the heat. It just makes the fire in my blood feel like a goddamn riot.
We hit the harbour like a bullet, the black, oily water swallowing the screams and the roar of the flames.
For a second, it’s silence. A crushing, freezing weight that tries to pull us into the silt.
But I don’t let go. My arms are locked around her like iron bands, and my cock is still buried deep inside her, held there by the vacuum of the water and the sheer, desperate grip of her thighs.
We break the surface, gasping, the salt air stinging our scorched lungs. Fifty feet away, the funhouse is a towering pyre, the orange light dancing on the black ripples of the waves.
Hallow is shivering, her teeth chattering, but her eyes are wild—feral and dark with a hunger that the ocean couldn’t drown. She wipes the salt from her eyes and looks at me, her hands tangling in my wet hair.
“Don’t… don’t you dare… pull out,” she wheezes, her voice a shredded rasp.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I growl.
I swim us toward the underside of the pier, where the massive, barnacle-encrusted pilings disappear into the depths.
I find a crossbeam, slick with moss and salt, and I haul us up just enough so our chests are out of the water.
I pin her against the wood, the rough surface scraping her back, while the freezing tide surges around our waists.
I start to move.
It’s different in the water. It’s heavy.
Every thrust is a struggle against the current, a slow, deep friction that feels like velvet and ice.
The cold water acting as a lubricant makes every slide in and out feel impossibly smooth, yet the heat where we’re connected is a searing, concentrated point of light in the dark.
“Fuck, Jex,” she moans, her head thumping back against the timber. “It’s so… it’s so deep… I can feel you in my spine.”
I grab her by the throat—not to hurt, just to anchor her—and I drive into her with a rhythmic, splashing violence.
The water churns around us, white foam mixing with the dark shadows of the pier.
I’m watching the way the orange firelight from above reflects in the wet curves of her breasts, the way her nipples are peaked and hard from the cold and the lust.
“You’re mine, Hallow,” I hiss, my mouth finding hers, tasting the salt and the lingering smoke. “In the fire, in the water. There isn’t a place on this fucking earth where you don’t belong to me.”
She lets out a high, fractured cry, her hips jerking upward, trying to meet every one of my lunges.
She’s clenching around me so hard it’s an ache, her internal muscles pulsing in a frantic, underwater rhythm.
The contrast is breaking my brain—the freezing harbour water against our skin and the boiling, wet friction where we’re joined.
I pull her legs higher, draping them over my shoulders so I can get deeper, so I can hit the very back of her. She’s sobbing now, her hands splashing the water as she reaches for the peak.
“Jex… oh god… I’m going… I’m going under…”
“Let go,” I command, my own breath coming in ragged, freezing hitches. “Drown in it, sweetheart.”
She shatters. I feel the tremors start deep in her core, a series of violent, rhythmic pulses that milk me of everything I have.
She’s shaking so hard I have to hold her against the piling to keep her from slipping back into the deep.
I follow her a second later, a white-hot explosion of release that makes the cold water feel like it’s boiling.
We hang there, tangled together under the rotting wood of the pier, the only sound the lapping of the waves and the distant, dying crackle of the fire above.
The salt water is stinging the fresh scratches on my back, but I don’t give a damn. We’re breathing like we just ran a marathon through hell, our forehead pressed together, the only two living things in a graveyard of sunken timber and old secrets.
“Hear that?” I whisper, my voice barely a thread over the rhythmic slap-slap of the tide against the pilings.
Blue and red lights are strobing through the gaps in the floorboards above us, cutting through the thick, oily smoke. The sirens are a discordant wail, a funeral march for the Mayor’s career and the funhouse both.
“They’re looking for bodies, Jex,” Hallow breathes, her fingers digging into the wet leather of my jacket. She’s shivering violently now, the adrenaline dump leaving her cold, but the fire in her eyes hasn’t gone out. “They’re looking for us.”
“Let ‘em look,” I rasp. I shift my weight, the water swirling around my waist as I reach into the hidden cavity of the piling. I pull out a dry, vacuum-sealed bag I stashed here two nights ago.
I rip it open with my teeth. Inside isn’t just clothes. It’s two heavy-duty diving rebreathers and a waterproof GPS.
Hallow stares at the gear, then at the black, churning mouth of the harbour. “We’re going under?”
“The police boats have thermals, but they aren’t looking at the drainage pipes three miles out in the salt-marshes,” I say, a slow, jagged smirk cutting through the soot on my face.
“There’s a duo of Ducatis waiting in the tall grass.
By the time they finish counting the teeth in that funhouse, we’ll be across the state line. ”
I press a rebreather into her hand. I don’t just want her to survive; I want her to be the ghost that haunts every dream our father has left.
“You ready to be dead to the world, sweetheart?”
She doesn’t hesitate. She bites down on the mouthpiece, her eyes locking onto mine with a terrifying, beautiful clarity. She reaches out, her hand sliding over my wet chest one last time before we submerge.
“I’ve been dead a long time, Jex,” she mumbles through the silicone. “This is the first time I’ve felt like a haunting.”
I pull my mask on, grab her waist, and we slip silently beneath the black surface. No splash. No trace. Just two shadows moving through the deep, leaving the burning city to scream at the sky.