11. Chapter 11
Chapter 11
Annie
I can’t believe how low I’m capable of stooping.
I mean, who sucks a guy off to make sure he doesn’t kill another, and comes like a succubus while at it?
I’m still mulling over that when the driver opens the door of our limo directly on the runway at the airport to reveal a big black private jet waiting for us.
Next thing I know, we’re flying to God knows where.
Many hours later, I learn that it’s no paradise island.
The estate that I can see from the jet during landing resembles an abandoned castle more than it does a family mansion belonging to one of the most powerful families in the world. I still have no idea where we are, since Carlton refused to say, I just know it looks alarmingly similar to a haunted place. When I ask him to at least tell me how long he plans on keeping me away from campus, from my friends, from Aunt Rita and the sorority house, he says flatly, “a while”, and pours me a drink that he instructs me to down.
“You need to rest,” he argues, and he’s not wrong.
God knows how much later, I wake up to a salty breeze running through the soft fabric I’m wrapped in. I stretch out my exhausted limbs in what turns out to be a bed so large that three people could sleep comfortably in it, even if they spread out in a giant X, but I only realize I’m no longer in the jet when thunder rips through the sky.
I sit up gingerly just as rain starts pattering against stone outside the open French doors to my right.
Stunned and with an open mouth, I take in a palatial bedroom with a domed ceiling.
For minutes, I’m sure this can only be a dream. Such bedrooms only still exist in palaces that get turned into museums. I blame it all on my grogginess at first, thinking that whatever drug he gave me affected my sense of space and size, but the more aware I become of my surroundings, the stronger their impact. Wrapping the silken cover around me, I sling my legs over the bed’s edge and walk out on the large balcony, looking at the sea waves crashing into rocky cliffs in the distance.
If it weren’t for the drizzle on my skin, I’d pinch myself. This is definitely a castle by the ocean, an expanse of wild shrubbery separating it from the cliffs. I seem to be up in a second-floor bedroom, statues sticking out of the walls on each side, their tongues out like demons thirsting for the rain. The walls are withered, and under the canopy of rain I could swear it’s the perfect gothic lair of a mythical creature.
Which is what Carlton is in more than one way.
“Welcome to your new home.”
I suck in a breath before I turn around to look at him, my arms tightening to keep the silken bed cover wrapped around me.
He looks absolutely devastating in a white T-shirt that makes the shape of him look even more mouthwatering, resembling a long-lost prince even in jeans and combat boots. I guess he’ll never not have this knock-back effect on me, but I can’t let it fuck with my head now.
“You really should stop drugging me,” I say, lifting my chin .
“I put the same substance in your drink that I had you swallow after the ritual in my car.” He starts walking toward me, slowly and methodically. “It causes a very light tilt in your body chemicals, putting you to sleep without messing anything up. Very much like your birth control—it tips your hormone levels just a little bit, while making sure you don’t get pregnant.”
I stiffen, ice shooting through me. He lifts an eyebrow.
“You have been taking your birth control, haven’t you?”
“I—” I push my hair behind my ear, keeping the sheet around me with the other hand. “I’m not sure. But I don’t have it here.”
“Hmmm. I can have it delivered to you. But you still need to be sure that you take it regularly.”
I swallow hard.
“I suppose we could be careful. You know, like you not coming inside me. Or us not having sex at all.”
“Oh, I’m going to come inside you, Annie.” He’s too close now, and I press myself against the stone banister. My breathing turns shallow. All Carlton Wilde has to do is exist to fuck with my head. It doesn’t even matter that he basically just fucking kidnapped me.
“If I had my way, I’d come inside you and get you pregnant.” He grips my chin with two fingers, and my breathing hitches. “Now that I think about it, what better way to tether you to me forever?”
“You can’t do this to me,” I whisper.
“What’s going to stop me?” His eyes drop to my lips while his baritone voice caresses my senses. Good God, I could come just from that.
“I—” I don’t want a baby is what I want to say, but the words just won’t leave my mouth. Not when Carlton strokes his fingers down the side of my face, looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world worth looking at.
“We need to go back,” I say instead. “People will be looking for me, and this…this could get you killed.”
The corners of his mouth lift up in a sad smile.
“Would you like that? For me to get killed so you can have your freedom back?”
I flinch, the words stabbing me in the gut .
“Never.” I’d rather die if it keeps him safe. Still, I have to keep a cool head. Carlton may be playing a dangerous game, but I have to be the voice of reason here. “But think about it. Even if the police and all the detectives in the world couldn’t find us, the Elders will sooner or later. And we both know they won’t go easy on you for this betrayal.”
“No one will ever find you, Lolita. No one is coming to save you.”
He sounds so damn sure of that, it’s scary.
Yet when he cups my face and bends down to kiss me, my whole world narrows down to him. He wraps those powerful arms around me, and I give into his kiss completely. I lift my arms to wind them around his neck, the silken cover falling to my feet.
I’m standing naked in the rain, drizzle peppering my skin along with his kisses. He steps away for just a moment to take in the sight of me buck naked before he throws himself into a wild kiss again. It takes my breath away, and I gasp for air when he traps me against the banister and goes down to kiss my tits and my abdomen and finally push his face between my legs .
“Oh, dear God,” I cry out, gripping the stone banister behind me, my fingers slipping into the porose carvings. His tongue runs through my slit with purpose, his dark eyes shooting up at me.
“It’s oh, Carlton ,” he corrects me.
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Really? You’re jealous of God now?”
“And you love how crazy I am about you.” Seduction fills his dark gaze, and I turn to putty in his hands as his mouth connects with my pussy.
I throw my head back, the rain pattering my heated face. Carlton reaches up to grab both my breasts with one hand while keeping both of my buttocks in the other, possessing my whole body at once, reminding me that I’m his prisoner, even as he’s pleasuring me. He forces my legs open with that hard jaw and shoves his tongue up my pussy.
I’m panting hard, gripping the stone as he makes me submit with his tongue, stopping only to run it hard over my clit and then push it in again until I’m shaking everywhere.
“Ride my tongue,” he commands in a voice that’s gruff with desire, and I lose it .
I tear at his white T-shirt that the rain is quickly soaking, making it cling to his muscles, his tattoos visible.
“Take this off,” I pant. “I want to see you naked, completely naked.”
His fingers grip my ass tighter, making me yelp and reminding me who is boss.
“I’m not a pretty sight naked.”
I burst into hysterical laughter. “You have the most beautiful body in the world, Carlton Wilde.”
“A body riddled with the stories of my kills.”
I cup his powerful chin, looking down into his eyes. “If this is about my pleasure, then this is what you’re going to do.”
He stares at me for a few seconds as if to make sure this is what I want, then slowly releases my tits and my ass. He stands to his full height, grabs his T-shirt at the hem and pulls it over his head before he drops it to the wet floor next to the sheet that I used to cover my own body.
Slowly, I run my eyes over his pecs and his arms, his abs and the sinewy V that tapers down into his waistband. Tattoos coil around his arms and shoulders, some like snakes, some tangling like thorny vines, a pair of dark wings opening over the upper part of his chest muscles.
“A fallen angel,” I whisper.
“I’m anything but an angel, Annie,” he says, both a warning and a plea for me not to believe anything good about him.
I trace a thorned vine down his tricep, and realize it’s turning into thorned veins where his tricep meets his torso. I walk behind him, following the pattern, my jaw dropping as I discover the map of tattoos webbing over his back, as intricate as the carvings in the weathered walls of this mansion. He flexes, and the map comes to life. I step back, catching myself against a giant pot that bears the skeleton of a dried-out plant with knotty branches.
“H-holy shit,” I breathe, eyes on the skull tattoo stretching between his shoulder blades, snakes slithering out of its holes. I glimpsed it before, but up close and flexed it takes on a whole new life.
“Is it true?” I whisper, letting go of the pot and walking toward him again, eyes fixed in the terrifying work of art engraved on his back. “That your trainers forced this on you?”
“Not my trainers,” he says, still facing the sea. “My father.”
I swallow back the gasp that lodges in my throat.
His father did this to him.
He’s alive and well as if it’s the most natural thing and, as far as I know, Carlton has a good relationship with him.
“Your father is a King, too?” I say, touching him lightly between his shoulder blades. He flinches at my touch, and I snatch it back, but only for a second before I add the other hand and slowly stroke my fingers down his back. “Like Romano Royales?” But not even that would explain the cruelty. Romano wasn’t Sade or Micah’s real father. He wanted to punish them for ever being born. Marcus Wilde, on the other hand…
“He was.”
“He retired?”
“You can say that.”
I let out a slow breath. He’s clearly holding back .
All Kings start training at a very young age, so this shouldn’t be surprising. I don’t expect Carlton to just talk freely about his past. Information regarding the Kings’ training is highly classified after all, but he’s suspiciously cagey about his dad.
I look over the art inked on his back, my fingertips feeling the ridges. Whoever did this to him, they did it with a vengeance. The skull is the centerpiece, and it includes snakes with forked tongues flaring in all directions. It resembles a radiating, devilish sun, the twisting snakes leading to the coded story of a different kill: a drawing of a human body riddled with thorny veins; stone plates with runes carved onto them, resembling tombstones.
The tattoos are supposed to describe his kills while also remaining indecipherable for anyone not initiated in their ways, but they’re extremely artfully crafted, and the effect can be staggering. I count twenty-seven drawings.
“Twenty-seven people,” I whisper. “That’s how many lives you’ve taken.”
“Twenty-seven hits. The tattoos don’t count events such as the mayhem. Those can be a life a bullet or a slash of a knife,” he states matter-of-factly, probably thinking this glimpse of who he really is will make me hate him. He turns to face me, and I step back to look up at him. “But when Aragon Kovac dies, you can be sure his death will go on my back.”
I squint against the drizzle, still looking at him.
“Why would you do that? He hasn’t come after me, and now that we’re here—”
“He’s the main reason we’re here. I have information that he activated Hayden Huang on you. I still don’t know what the pretty boy professor’s plans were, but I know that Kovac won’t relent.”
“I imagine you cutting off his brother’s finger didn’t help matters.” I don’t even stop to dwell on the info about Professor Huang. These kinds of things don’t surprise me anymore.
“I could have done much worse, and he knows it. But Rainer is the reason I know all this. He’s working for me now, helping me take down all men who ever threatened you.” His arm goes around my waist and my body gives in to him, craving his skin on mine. His hard cock pushes into my naked belly, and all I want to do is wrap my hand around it, feel its hard thickness, but I can’t, not now that he’s finally opening up to me. Making this sexual would destroy a precious bonding moment between us.
“But Kovac doesn’t forget a provocation. No King ever does. He won’t stop until he tears you apart—or until he’s dead.”
“If no King ever forgets a provocation, then why provoke him?” I whisper, my fingers splaying lovingly over his bulging arms. “You could have just—”
“What? Left it alone?” He scoffs. “That wasn’t an option, Annie. He would have joined his brother in bullying you, and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to sit around and let that happen.” Then, bending down to me, “And what I did was just a taste of what I’m capable of for you.”
Our lips connect, and my eyes roll back in their sockets, but I can’t give in to the dangerous sweetness. I lean my head back, breaking the kiss.
“Still, we can’t hide here forever, Carlton. Where are we, by the way?”
He keeps his eyes on my mouth, looking tortured to be parted from it.
“My family’s estate. ”
It’s not just the tone of his voice, but what I’ve seen of this “estate” doesn’t seem compatible with what I know about the Kings, and especially him. Carlton’s family mansion is situated just outside town. It includes acres of forest, it has state-of-the-art security systems, a perfectly white facade, designer furniture and it employs expensive staff. This looks like a centuries-old abandoned castle.
“Where is this estate exactly?” I ask.
“Isle of Skye.”
Next time the waves crash, they do against my brain instead of the cliffs.
“We’re all the way up in Scotland?” I shriek, pushing myself away from him to look at the landscape for some sort of confirmation, but his arms keep me prisoner. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“It’s the safest place in the world for you right now. No one knows about this estate. The only people who ever did are dead.”
I frown up at him, a sculpture of male beauty with his hair dripping with rain, timeless and tragic. There has always been something heartbreaking about him, and something profoundly disturbing about our attraction, but this…this is frightening.
“But your parents…” I whisper.
He just stares at me.
Understanding sinks in, and dread rises in my stomach.
“They’re dead,” I conclude, my voice so faint the breeze carries it away. “You killed them. You killed your own parents.” Ice rushes through my limbs.
“No. I killed Marcus Wilde. I let Leanna go, but she’s exiled.”
My jaw drops lower with each one of his words. He killed his father and exiled his mother. “But-but why? And how? The Elders must at least suspect—”
“Marcus signed all of his duties, rights, and privileges over to me before he disappeared. He is officially with Leanna, traveling through Asia. There really is a man with her that everyone thinks is Marcus, but it’s actually her younger lover. After years with that bastard, I thought she deserved some happiness.”
I shake my head, trying to wrap it around this .
“You. Killed. Your. Father.” I expected bad things from Carlton Wilde, jungle snake of the Heathen Kings, but patricide is a whole new level of evil. Even if his father had every one of his kills tattooed into his skin. I shudder in his arms like an army of ants is crawling all over me.
That million dollar smile appears on his face, and I can finally understand the mystique of it—the tragedy and the violence that imbue it.
“Marcus Wilde never had children, Annie. He was shooting blanks.”
It takes a few seconds for me to make sense of what he just said.
“This—” Carlton motions at the castle, “this is the estate of my true family. The one Marcus massacred before he took me away.”
If it weren’t for his steadying hold, my legs would give in. I open and close my mouth a few times, but words fail me. Carlton spins around with me still in his arms, backing me up against the banister, the rain pattering down on our faces as we emerge from under the overhang. Keeping me against him with one arm, he lowers his other hand between my legs as he tells me the truth.
“Cameron McKenzie, my real father, trained with Marcus Wilde to become a Heathen King ever since he was a child. He was initiated as a Heathen King, too, once his training was completed, but he refused to go through with the initiation at the last moment. He was one of the few people who could do that, having the money and influence to oppose the Elders. The McKenzies were a rich and old family, with wealth to rival the Queen’s at the time.”
And this place stands proof of it. What I’ve seen is worthy of royalty.
“I was the main reason why he did it. His marriage to my mother had been arranged for him by the Elders, but it wasn’t supposed to be a love match. They weren’t supposed to get intimate before the wedding, and now I understand why—I happened ahead of time. I altered Cameron’s decisions. With a baby at home, he wasn’t as ready to commit to a life of crime as he was before. If the babies come after you’re already committed, things are different. You’re already in the raging ocean, it’s swim or else. ”
He runs his fingers through my slit, and I tighten my naked thighs on him. He grins, slipping a finger inside while the heel of his hand presses against my clit, rubbing gently through my wetness. I sigh, grabbing onto his arms and throwing my head back, my hair hanging over the banister.
“It’s why the Elders arrange marriages for us,” he explains, making it impossible for me to resist the pleasure he drives into me while sharing his past. “We’re not supposed to fall in love. Falling in love is what sealed the fates of my real father, and some others before him. If the Elders had known Cameron and Lisa had feelings for each other, they would have never arranged that marriage.”
The heel of his palm rubs deliciously against my clit, and the sound of the word “love” from his mouth amps up the sensation. It’s scary to think that his tragedy has anything to do with the irresistible build-up like he just hit a fetish with it.
“The result? They both choked on their own blood, sprawled on the grand stairs, while Marcus stared down at them with me in his arms. ”
“God, Carlton,” I cry out, my fingers crushing against his powerful biceps. He eases his fingers out of me only to push in three, forcing pleasure on me while the poison of his past seeps into my mind.
I open up to it, letting it cut deep. I want to feel his story in my flesh, in my bones, I want it to become part of my substance.
“Marcus held me in his arms and made me look down at them. He made them look at me. I still remember him hunkering down and stroking my mother’s blood-caked hair, telling her he’d take good care of me. Telling her that my watching them die like that, at only four years old, would help shape me into what I needed to become. Into what my father should have been.”
He pumps me harder, causing me to rise on my tiptoes, my hands holding on to him for dear life while my hair blows in the wind, the rain against my face. I want him to fill me up completely, but all I do is bite hard into my lower lip to keep the plea back, giving him space to tell me more.
“Adopting me was the punishment for their transgression, and Marcus let me feel it from the very beginning. Even if, by some absurd chance, I could have forgotten that night, he wouldn’t have let me. He started training me the next day. Six months later, at four and a half years old, I already knew what blood tasted like.”
My heart crumbles while the build-up in my core swells. Carlton’s arm tightens, crushing my breasts against his chest. It’s a full take-over. I come undone, my toes curling, his powerful arm sustaining my weight while pressing me against the stone banister.
“Jesus Christ, Carlton,” I cry out, sensation blasting all through my body. Those dark eyes flare with intensity before his mouth closes on mine. His need floods my senses, and I respond to that need by surrendering my body to him completely. I come with all my life force, waves of pleasure crashing through me.