Chapter 8
HOLLOW COMMANDER OVERLORDS BE DAMNED
Brown eyes—unending.
And if you should ever forget.
Words spinning on a loop.
Heaviness on my chest.
Lungs restricted.
Waking with a start, I gasp, nails digging into my breast, sucking in lungfuls of air. Another nightmare. Running water alerts me to the fact that I’m alone in the bedroom. I didn’t have to look to know that. His presence is characteristically on point, devouring.
This nightmare was no different from all the others over the last twelve years.
I have procured a running loop of lovely soul-churning dreams that inevitably cause me distress.
Nix on the X, his flesh fastened against his bones.
His head downcast, sparing any passers-by any pity.
Steadfast to the end, protecting others when it would cost him his life.
Then there’s Mam. Fathoming what happened to her after Nix and I left is beyond measure.
I can’t go there. I can barely touch Nix.
I always wake in cold sweats, and this morning is no different.
Grief, I have learnt, is not something you overcome, nor does it get better over time.
Quite the opposite. It festers, always surfacing at the most inconvenient of times.
And it always shows itself in the smallest of ways—a smell, a touch, a colour that triggers the whirring of my mind into hyperdrive.
It’s the not knowing that does me in. But I also don’t want to know because they both suffered.
Everyone in the factories suffers, and I have to take comfort in neither of them suffering any longer.
An aura falls over me, followed by a large dip in the mattress.
After our first round last night, Melek took me to the shower for rounds two and three, and then he finally brought me to bed when I could barely keep my eyes open.
I seriously don’t know where he gets the stamina, but he’s also not pregnant.
“Alora.” His voice wraps me up in a sizzling heat I don’t feel like letting go of this morning.
My muscles are sore from overuse. Rest is all I want.
I need my dreams to cease for one night.
Just one. I think I’m owed that much. My eyelids flutter closed, and I sink further into my pillow, hoping that this might be the time…
“Alora, wake up, or I’ll wake you up.”
“Argh,” I grumble, thrashing in the blankets electrocuted by his brash demeanour.
This man truly sees a side of me no one has ever been privy to.
It’s scary that he chose to keep me around.
“Chill out, old man,” I say into the side of the pillow, so it’s muffled.
He still picks up on my insolence and pulls back the covers, giving my naked bottom a loud whack.
Thoroughly awake, I flop around to face the dressed pain in my ass, and seethe. “What do you need, Lord Commander?”
With my whole body on show for him, Melek takes his fill as he adjusts his cock, shaking his head.
“You missed your period this month. Take the pregnancy test.” Right.
The control freak would know when my period is.
Before Sunny, it was highly irregular. After, it started coming monthly like clockwork.
Pushing up to a seated position, I swipe the pregnancy test from his fingers.
He likes to keep some on hand to surprise me. It’s about as romantic as he gets.
“Fine.” There I go again, acting like a hormone-controlled teenager when I’m in his presence, instead of the thirty-one-year-old woman I am.
I shuffle my naked ass into the black marble bathroom, with his and hers vanity, spa tub and double-headed shower.
Melek’s towering form follows behind. At this moment, I’m thankful for the internal climate control we have at home, which means my tits aren’t freezing off as I plonk myself unceremoniously on the toilet and place the stick under me.
This would’ve never happened if I was back at the factory. No climate control. No pregnancy sticks. No fucking toilets.
I hate to admit it, but part of the reason I’ve stayed so long within these four walls, surrounded by my enemies, is because I never understood what I was missing until I had it.
And boy, did Melek give me everything. He introduced me to a world I could only ever imagine as a nineteen-year-old.
As stubborn as I was, I revelled in the new clothing on my back, the cold drinking water, three square meals a day and showering whenever I wanted.
And climate control.
Sighing, I sink my chin into my free hand. I’ve truly experienced the best and the worst life has to offer.
Melek stoically watches on, his forearms crossed, hair wet and dripping on his dress shirt, ready for another day of ruling the scum of the earth. I’ve given up on asking him to leave. It’s been over a decade of this. He has to watch me pee on the stick. It’s the only way for him to be sure.
We enter a religious meeting of minds. His grey gaze, hard and impenetrable. Me, a constantly enraged furnace waiting to burst anytime he’s near. Eyeing him down reminds me of the first time…
“I told you I’m not going to touch you unless you ask for it.” The tendons in his neck throb. He observes me down the long dining table, regarding his target. Three tapered candles separate us, flickering in our dissonance.
Our dinners together have become more and more tense since he decided to walk around naked within our bedroom—only our bedroom. Mary would have a heart attack if she knew what he was packing under those pants. My heart is already damaged beyond repair, so the challenge intrigues me.
At the beginning, he was indifferent to my presence. Melek stayed on his side of the bed. He only dressed in the bathroom, and he gave me space—so much space that we barely exchanged two words with each other until he found me sobbing on the floor of the shower one evening.
It was those moments of soul-eclipsing sadness over my mam and Nix that brought him physically closer to me.
He would hear my despair from rooms away, and he would come, scooping me up without a word and cradling me in his arms, returning to his chair in his home office, leaving me straddled on his lap as he worked.
The thought that he cared enough to want to comfort me, even though we never spoke of it, snapped some wayward string within me, and soon, my depression was replaced with a need to be consumed by him—my enemy.
And I never thought of the consequences. I wanted to stop feeling like I was free-falling. I wanted to stop being Storm and, to my utmost abhorrence, decided being Alora was my way out.
So, with a little fight, I gave in to my husband.
I am still stubborn. Nothing has changed that, and I definitely am not asking him for it.
Removing my hand from underneath my dress, I hold my wet fingers up to him. “Is that enough of an invitation?”
The man practically vibrates, eyes dark with hunger, for more than his dinner.
Melek’s nostrils flare as he pushes his chair back, a screech scuffing at the floorboards.
He wants this. There is a giddy thrill that radiates through me at affecting the commander that can’t be touched.
It is intoxicating. Terrifying. Standing, both his broad hands grip the ends of the table, eyeing me.
Cutlery crashes as he clenches the table, a tremor creaking the wood, a relic of forgone times.
“NO.” The flash of longing is unmistakable. He needs this. And I know he is not fucking anyone else because he beats his cock each night in the shower with the door open for me to hear. He’s also started spending more and more time at the house instead of going into the city proper.
I knew it. Melek is desperate. He has to be.
And finally, I am giving in, and he says no.
I don’t fucking think so.
Taking the butter knife from the side plate, I stride towards my husband.
Gaining proximity, the skirts of my dress abruptly fall back into place.
The piercing of his gaze consumes me whole.
I am damned seeing him dishevelled, my pussy soaked and needy, his dark brunette hair messy from his hands constantly working through it as he watched me sink my fingers into my heat at the dining room table.
I hold up the blunt knife before him. It won’t do any damage, but it will get the point across.
“Alora,” he growls under his breath.
I place the tip of the knife at his groin, trailing it up his stomach, stopping at his ribs. If only he weren’t wearing his work clothes. The hard muscles underneath are a much more alluring sight. “What if I don’t want to say it? What if I want you to take it?”
“NO.” The table cracks. I flinch at the sound. Never one to back down, I push my body into his side.
The door opens, and a gasp punctuates through the room.
“Sir?” Mary asks.
Unwilling to turn from Melek, I don’t see our housekeeper’s face as the butter knife pushes at the centre of his chest, under his heart.
The ball in the commander’s throat bobs up and down. “We’re just about finished here, Mary.” He dismisses her.
“Oh. I—Okay.” The door swings shut as her footsteps retreat.
“I’ll never admit that I want you.” I push the knife further, ripping his shirt.
He doesn’t bat an eye at the foreign object digging into black material.
“I would like to see what it takes for the lord commander of the Halo Army to snap.” He’s made me feel like a foreigner in my own skin.
Making him feel the same way is the least I can do.
His jaw unlodges at that, air escaping his nostrils. “Wife, you have no idea who I am.” A shiver works its way through my core, Melek’s hand clasped over mine—the one holding the knife—and he digs it into his flesh so hard I feel it give.
The bastard stabbed himself with my butter knife!
My gaze flickers from his face to our joined hands, and my breathing becomes erratic.