27. Conflicted Freedom
27
CONFLICTED FREEDOM
REMIEL
I can’t be certain, but I think Krypt is conflicted.
His over-the-top possessiveness doesn’t know how to mesh with his newly discovered acceptance of feelings, and he can’t decide if he’s fucking me like he owns me or fucking me like he respects me.
His natural inclination is to force me, but his conscience is nagging at him because I’m wounded. He can’t grab my wrists or tether them to anything. He can’t dig his fingers into my skin without opening my stitches. He can’t force my face to the mattress without risking my forehead sutures. He can’t wrap his hands around the healing tattoo on my throat. He can’t even spread my thighs without opening the slices there. He’s stuck, unsure where to put his hands and what to do with my body when he isn’t controlling it. Previously, he wouldn’t care. But now…
He gets frustrated. He pushes on my shoulder, forcing me away. His cock pops free from my ass, and I brace myself against his bed, turning to face him.
“Look what I’ve done to you!” he screams at me, losing his cool for the first time. Well, not for the first time. I’ve seen him snap, but this time, he’s losing it on himself. “I can’t even… fuck!”
I know better than to touch him right now. He’s more volatile than the storm building outside, flashing lightning through the single, uncovered window.
“I’ve fucking ruined you! Look at your body, Remiel!”
I’ve seen it. I don’t need to look. It’s scarred and marred, healing and disgusting. I look like a stitched-together version of Frankenstein’s monster, and Krypt is my Frankenstein . I didn’t ask to be cut open, but I don’t resent him for doing it.
Krypt’s chest heaves, his eyes full of something other than his monsters. Shame. Worry. Fear, maybe. The burn on his chest is red and harsh, panting SICK with each harsh breath. But sickness hurts when it heals as much as it hinders, and that’s what he’s experiencing right now. A new outlook. The result of his behaviour. The consequence.
My mutilated body. He’s seeing it for the first time through a set of eyes not shrouded by demons.
But so am I. I’m looking at my skin and seeing his protection. I’m looking at his worry and seeing how important I am to him. Nothing about us is healthy or even moral, but sometimes, two wrongs do make a right, and together, we’re something close to warped perfection.
Turns out, I do need him.
He needs me.
Nothing else really matters. Because Reeven Matterson is dead. Gregory Malone is trapped in the asylum for at least two years, not haunting me. My brother will be guarded to keep him alive.
And I’m Remiel Sauder, Krypt’s pathetic hero who is going to make it to twenty-seven.
I hold up my wrists, showing him his brand there. “Pain becomes protection.” I trail my fingers over the Xs on my sternum. “Xs cancel out my mistake. To shatter shows you care, but it shows me I’m important enough to break you.” I bare my throat to him. “Scars serve as a reminder, a safety net, a promise that I’ll think next time I do something so suicidal.” I let him look at every set of stitches on my body. “And this.” I pat the word SICK on my chest while looking at the one over his heart. “This connects us, and I don’t want it severed.” Finally, my hands move to his name, the first tattoo he gave me on my collarbone. The significance of our bargain. “Bargain struck, Krypt?”
A new bargain. One where we move forward in life together, no matter where it goes. I don’t kill myself, and he doesn’t lose himself.
His silver eyes meet mine and his dark hair hangs over his face, the back pieces brushing the tops of his shoulders. I don’t want him to regret what he’s done to me. Regret is for our moment of death, and if I get my way, that won’t be for a long time. He wars with himself, trying to align his hopes with his morals and his fears with his failures. But it’s too late for all that because he made me his the night I walked into Vile House, and I became his when I taunted him into fucking me. We’re already weaved together, warped and twisted so all our parts meet, and I don’t want him to free me.
Shifting his eyes over my body one more time, he looks past the scars to see me. I’m not privy to his thoughts on any of it, but the creatures within him surge back to the surface, showing me they accept me. Will Krypt?
Naked, hard, and daunting, he closes the distance between us. With nothing more than his knuckles under my chin, he tilts my head and says, “Bargain met, Remiel.” He inhales, lips against mine without kissing. “You’re going to regret this.”
I spin him and push his back to the bed. Crawling on top of him, I straddle his legs and look down at his harshly handsome face. “I take back what I said.” I put his hands on my thighs, tempting him to touch me without hesitation. My inner thigh stitches tug, cracking open a little.
“Which part?”
I line his lubed cock up with my ass, sinking down slowly. Fuck, the way he fills me is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. All that numbness inside me gets pushed out when he pushes in, and the feeling is torturously comfortable. Bending, pressing my lips to his, I whisper, “Guess I am gay after all.”
“No,” he growls, fingers digging into my nape. “You’re mine.”
About fucking time he came back around. I grin against his mouth. “Prove it.”
His hips lift, and his cock hits deep enough to steal my breath. I plant my palms beside his head, bracing myself while my wrists burn. I dip my head to peer between our bodies, watching his cock drive into me. It’s surreal, honestly. This man. Me. Sex that mingles cravings with fear and pain, started with rape, and somehow awoke a part of me that’d been slumbering under my blanket of indifference. I know these desires are wrong, but fuck, they feel right.
“Look at me,” Krypt rasps, his voice back to being abrasive and jittery.
I snap my gaze to his, lost in the swirling silver and chains that rattle within. Our bodies rock together, knowing what to do even though this is new for both of us, but our eyes never disconnect.
“How can you do it?” he asks.
“Do what?”
“Hold my eyes.”
I never could before. As Keegan growing up, I couldn’t look into his eyes without shying away. I misunderstood him and saw his monsters instead of the chains they rattled. I saw his intensity and didn’t know how to handle it. But since meeting him as Krypt, something changed in the way I perceive him.
He’s still intense. He still has monsters. I still don’t fully understand him. So maybe I’m what changed. I turned dire, and the lenses that direness forced me to look through saw things differently. Instead of his insanity intimidating me, it intrigued me, like Ophelia’s moment of death. I stare because I see the beauty in his confliction, the pain in his misunderstanding, and the struggle he lives by not understanding himself. Krypt is as much of a mystery as Vile House is, but now I can see him.
“Because mine are finally open,” I tell him.
Krypt trembles for a moment, as if that declaration has forced feelings upon him he isn’t ready to feel. I wondered why he wasn’t obsessed with me all my life if he’s this obsessed with me now, but I think I have my answer. I never looked at him like this before. He never felt seen by me. He didn’t care about me because I didn’t care about him. Once seen, eye contact comfortable, he latched onto one of the only people brave enough to look into his eyes. Me.
He closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and when they open again, every single one of his inner beasts blink back at me.
Oh, there he is.
He flips us, slamming me onto my back hard enough to rattle my teeth. His cock slips free, but he hikes up my legs and slams back in, drawing a ragged moan straight from the depths of my soul.
“Finally,” I groan, digging my fingers into his forearms. “I’m not the hero.”
Krypt grabs my wrists and pins them beside my head, no longer caring about my burns. “You’re fucking nothing, Remiel.” He slams into me, but his movements take on a rocking motion that doesn’t match the complete obliteration he has planned. He wants me to be nothing, yet he always gives me that inch… a tiny fraction of a chance to take the power back and become something . It might be minuscule and ass-backwards, but he’s the only one who has ever given me a hazardous shot.
I rip my wrists free, feeling my skin peel against his hold. I don’t care, because this is more important. Weaving my fingers into his shaggy, dark hair, I hold firm and force him to look at me. My legs wrap around his hips, stretching my stitches, burning brilliantly.
“I’m not nothing,” I seethe at him, letting some warped version of love and admiration filter into my voice. I speak better with a cello, but the notes of my vocalization will be enough—Krypt knows my music. I snug up my legs until his cock is as deep as it will go inside me, my blue eyes on his thrashing silvers. “I’m whatever you turned me into. You woke up all my hidden parts, and this is what you get. I’m yours, Krypt. Keegan. I’m fucking yours.”
His eyes pulse and his body stills. The room takes a breath. The purple neon light flickers. My heartbeat drowns my hearing and his thumps hard in his chest.
Please, accept me.
Please, want me.
Please, show me I’m important to you.
His nostrils flare and he reaches up, taking one of my hands from his hair. A fragment of fear splinters through me, but when he puts my palm over the word burned into his chest, it leaves me. His hand lands on my chest. Our sicknesses joined.
“Would you still be mine if I freed you?” he asks.
I don’t think he wants the answer. He slams his mouth to mine, gyrates his hips, and turns off my brain by coating it in pleasure. Sick pleasure. Exhausting, draining, extended pleasure that turns into too much but is never enough.
I bleed through my bandages and sweat out my family curse. I hold on to him hard enough that he won’t forget to drag me into his future, and I cry out in bliss with every orgasm he forces on me throughout the night.
I sob because I’m happy and scared about it.
I laugh because I’m crazy and pleased about it.
I love because I’m sick and twisted about it.
Broken yet whole, I settle under the blankets of his bed with him at my back. He hasn’t cuddled me before, but for some reason, this time is different. His predatory grip on me is physically softer than usual, but more emotionally desperate. I can tell he’s thinking hard about something, but the pull of sleep is too great for me to resist.
I wish I had resisted, looked at him one more time, admired everything about him. Because when I wake to the sun already up, it spotlights a calling card.
A torso, ribs, a spine, a pelvic bone. Purple splashes.
I flip it. And touch my throat as I shatter. Would you still be mine if I freed you? he had asked…
I free you, Remiel.