Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Mercy
Instead of running, I launch myself at Cisco. He tries to avoid me, but I catch him before he can get off the bed and wrench him back to face me. I fling my arms around his neck, climb onto his lap, and hug him as tightly as I can.
“I’m not leaving,” I say into his neck. Don’t make me leave.
He goes so still at first, so quiet, that I’m not sure if I did the right thing. I wait with bated breath for a sign, a sound, a movement.
But then slowly, I feel his hands descend on my hips. Next, I feel the air rush out of his lips on my hair. His face drops to my neck, and his arms circle me until he’s hugging me back just as tightly.
We stay like this for long moments, listening to the gentle rain, hearts pounding against each other’s chests as we battle our bodies’ needs. I still want him. He still wants me. But I never once loosen my hold.
I wait.
The room narrows to small things first. The bite of Cisco’s fingers at my waist, the wet heat of his ragged breath on my throat, the feel of him still hard beneath me.
Then I start to notice other small things that somehow feel large. Joan of Arc’s wrapped sword on the floor, dull and impotent. The framed photo by the light switch is of a boy and a girl at the beach. It’s Cisco and his little sister. Brotherly affection in his eyes hides behind the annoyance.
That’s how truth comes, I think. A collection of small things growing into big things.
A baby.
An early bloom.
A hand not held.
A father who left while still alive.
A mother’s love turning to poison because it was easier to live with than envy.
I close my eyes and see the fresco of Mars and Venus entwined and trapped in a net. I see Apollo, pointing his sword, judging them with a bitter look on his face. And I see Asmodeus, miserable in the agony of his new soul, when all he ever wanted to be was loved.
Isn’t that what we all want? What we all deserve?
It all feels too much. My heart can barely take it.
The only thing in my life that feels real right now is between Cisco and me.
And I’m not just talking about the sex .
. . although that too. What I mean is the connection we have, the similarities, the compassion, the acceptance.
The want and the need to help each other and to make our lives whole.
None of that other bullshit should matter.
No shadow curse is eating me. I saw it move and I’m still here.
I inhale slowly and then whisper, “Fuck them.”
Cisco tenses. “Who?”
I smile into the gloom. “Them! Fuck every last one of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at that picture by the door.” I pull back and point at it, but he doesn’t lift his head. “Look at the boy in that frame.”
Ragged breaths stutter. “Mercy . . .”
“That boy never had a chance. Your mother looked at your shadows and gave up. She called you a devil and checked out. Even your father did.” I force the words past my tight throat. “Mine did too. We were both left to rot by the people who were supposed to protect us.”
His massive hands slide down from my ribs to my hips. “Mercy, they are my famiglia.”
I take a moment.
Breathe.
My body is on fire. My soul is filled with rage.
“The fact you’re still defending them shows how much better you are. They’re parasites. And Rome uses you, Cisco.” I thread fingers into his sweat-damp hair and force his brown-again-eyes to mine. “They demand your protection, but they’re terrified of your curse.”
“For good reason,” he bites out.
“Fuck them all.” I get in close, right up to his face. “Fuck anyone who calls you a monster. No! You know what? I change my mind. They don’t deserve a single fuck.”
Cisco tries to swallow his rough groan as I wiggle on his cock, sliding my wet core along the length.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” I pant out.
“Sì.”
“Tell me how good.”
“Cazzo,” he growls. “Like I am dying and being reborn in your heat.”
I sag against him, throat tight. “All my life, Cisco, they’ve acted like fuck is filth.” My voice comes out low, thready, but steadier with every word. “Something dirty. Something fallen. Something women like me should be blamed for wanting, and men like you should be praised for resisting.”
“Mercy,” he breathes.
“But it’s not. It’s the reason any of us are here in the first place. Fuck made every last one of us. Every saint. Every sinner.” My laugh comes out sharper. “Every angel. Every devil. How dare they turn the whole reason we exist into a shameful secret?”
I keep rocking against him, teasing him, showing him this is what we’re built for.
“Fuck isn’t bad,” I say. “It’s this. It’s joy. It’s the body telling the truth before the mouth can lie for it. It’s how the world keeps saying yes to itself.”
I know the truth of his reluctance, and it’s not just the shadows. It’s what his hunger does to the shadows. It’s what denying them does. The shame. Bottling them up because it’s not how a good person, an ‘angel’ should behave.
“They don’t deserve a single fuck from you.
” My voice becomes a breathless snarl. “They all want your protection. They want your violence when it saves them. Your curse when it serves them. Your teeth when there’s something uglier than them in the room.
But the second it asks to be loved? The second it needs compassion? They recoil.”
I cup his jaw between my hands and look deeply into his eyes so he knows I speak the hard truth.
“Your mother feared you, Cisco. Your family managed you. Rome collared you. They all found a different word for ownership, but it was ownership all the same. No one has ever loved you without also trying to survive you.”
His fingers dig deeper into my flesh. He tries to move away again, but I don’t let him.
“I am right here,” I declare, my voice vibrating with frustration. “I am telling you I am going nowhere, and you keep pulling away from me.”
“I am keeping you safe,” he grits out.
The phantom, suffocating memory of my father’s study door closing hits me. The sound of rope creaking . . .
“My dad abandoned me while standing right there in the room,” I whisper. “So don’t you dare think I can’t recognize the look of a man trying to leave before he’s gone.”
I give up.
I scramble off his lap but keep my eyes downcast so I don’t lose the courage to say what’s next—my Hail Mary.
“Save your fucks for a woman who knows exactly what they are worth, Cisco. Choose someone who refuses to flinch from the shadows. Let her revel in your worst.”
“And if it breaks her?” he asks quietly.
“Then she loves him anyway,” I whisper fiercely.
No sound. Not even his breath. I lift my gaze, and he’s right there, staring at me as if I’m not real.
“I love you anyway,” I say. Tears threaten to blur my vision, but I refuse to let them fall. “I know your heart, my love. I see the angel trying to protect us from the devil.”
“Mercy . . .”
“The world can keep its fear, but I claim your joy. I want your fucks. All of them, no matter how bad you think they are.” I get close again and press my palm against his hammering heart. “I will never walk away. I promise.”
His iron control shatters with a guttural, unholy growl. He twists out from beneath me and throws me onto my front. I drop so fast that I feel dizzy. Air punches from my lungs as my cheekbone slams the pillow.
For a moment, I just lay there stunned. Emotion welling, throat tightening, thinking . . . maybe I failed.
Then the wood under our thin mattress groans, and I have half a second to brace before oil pours over my bottom, drenching me and spilling onto the sheets. Cisco lies flat on top of me, fits himself to my ass, and then rams his cock in.
“Fuck!” I cry out. It’s cold at first, then hot, then . . . holy fuck. He thrusts, and the glide is obscene. Lurid. So deep I see stars. Again and again he plunges, hard and fast. “God, yes. Give it to me.”
“Dio—Mercy—” Hot breath just above my spine, ragged and raw.
His palm lands on the back of my head, pushing my face into the pillow as he rears back and ruts, all resistance shredded.
Again and again, he pounds me into the mattress, sweat raining down and mixing with mine.
I whimper at the burn, but it’s so good beneath it.
I have to dig my nails into the pillow just to ride it out.
But I’m not trying to escape. Couldn’t if I tried. His massive hand pins my head down.
If anything, I want more.
It’s been forever since someone fucked me like they mean it, with this kind of feral hunger, the kind of desperate passion that soothes my soul.
And I want him to know it. I want him to hear that I love it.
I push back into him and make some kind of sound I never knew I could make. Half sob, half whimper, half shriek. He falls against me, fist tangling in my hair. His laugh shudders against my spine.
“Piccola, you sound like you’re dying.”
“Kill me,” I rasp, “or fuck me back to life.”
He bites down on my neck and then thrusts in so hard the bed frame slams against the wall.
I am gone. Every cell of me is gone.
“Tell me,” Cisco demands.
“What?”
He drags my head back by the hair. “Tell me you know what you’re doing.”
“Fucking a priest?” I joke.
He thrusts so hard and deep that white dots swim across my vision.
“Again,” I moan.
He snaps his hips, pistoning hard. His control is gone, but his precision isn’t. That’s the frightening part. This is Cisco unleashed but still devastatingly exact. Each stroke hits with purpose. Each one says “mine” in a language older than vows.
“Fuck,” he grunts, and freezes, balls deep.
“What?” For a split second I think the shadows have come.
“I almost forgot two things. Don’t move.”
I choke on my own laugh, helpless to do otherwise. He slips his arm around my front and rolls me back with him. My vision blurs. Maybe I even black out for a heartbeat because the next thing I know, his hand is wrapping around my throat, hitching under my jaw as he holds my face toward the mirror.
He growls low in my ear, “Look how beautiful you are when I fuck you.”
I barely recognize the thoroughly debased woman lying on the bed, staring back at me.
Even in the low light, I can see her cheeks are flushed, eyes feverish, and her hair is a snarl of copper sticking to her skin.
Oil shimmers over her heavy breasts, curvy belly, one leg lifted and tangled back over his.
His head is lifted enough to see over my shoulder. Sandy colored hair sticks up in tufts from where I’ve grabbed him. His eyes are dark, unflinching, and wild. I can’t tell if they’re wholly black or brown. Not sure if I care.
“Look how good you take me,” he says, gently nipping my shoulder.
“You deserve this, Mercy. You deserve everything. And I promised you three. Forgive me for this next part.” A pained sound slips out of him, as if he’s already regretting something.
But he mumbles fuck it to my back, digs his lower arm under my shoulder, and covers my mouth.
At first, I don’t get it. Then he catches my eyes in the mirror. Wild desperation stares back at me.
“I need you to come now,” he pants out.
And then he thrusts up.
I cry out. His hand muffles the sound as he grips my mouth tighter.
His other hand slides down, fingers plunging into my pussy, matching the rhythm of his cock in my ass.
He fucks me like this, heel of his palm hitting my clit.
Harder and faster. I’m a sobbing mess of pleasure and pain, holding on to his neck now with two hands.
“Oh God,” I moan.
“No.” He bites my shoulder. “Me.”
Again, he thrusts. Again. Again. The bed knocks the wall. My vision blurs at the edges. The pressure inside me is huge now, a bright, unbearable thing heating and tightening until I think I might die. He uses the heel of his palm to grind against my clit.
“Come for me, Mercy. Adesso.”
All at once there’s too much sound, too much light behind my eyes, and too much pleasure streaking through every raw nerve. My climax hits, muscles fluttering and quivering around him as he fucks me through it.
Then his forehead drops, landing between my shoulder blades.
He lets go of my mouth, grips the sheets.
The rhythm of his hips stutters. His breath goes rough and frantic.
He whimpers out my name, gasps, and pulls out, cock slipping free with a wet pop.
Over my body, he grabs his shaft and pumps fast, the muscles in his forearm flexing.
“See what you do to me.”
His breath hitches, and then releases with a strangled groan into my neck. Thick jets of cum splash across my front and his fist.
“Madonna—Mercy—Dio—”
Each broken word comes with another pulse of his release.
“You—I—cazzo.”
When it’s done, Cisco tucks me against his body and smashes his face into the crook of my neck, breathing wet and heavy into my hair. Rain drifts in with the billowing curtains and cools our skin. For a long moment, all we can do is lie there.
The aftermath is usually where my shame shows up, or at the very least, there’s some kind of misery after the endorphin crash. The ache of knowing another high is over, and soon I’ll have to find another when my body demands it.
Instead, there is this.
The smell of sex, olive oil, and a humid Italian summer.
His lips press once to the corner of my shoulder. His hand splays tenderly over my stomach, thumb tracing idle circles.
There’s this old room, the rain. Peace.
Me, a Sinner. Him, a priest.
A broken laugh slips out of me.
Cisco lifts his head. “What?”
I turn enough to see his eyes are dark, wrecked, and so openly vulnerable it hurts.
“Nothing.” My lips curve into a goofy, bliss-drunk smile. “Just thinking that for people who are supposedly damned to Hell, we’re very good at living like we’re in Heaven.”
I roll over and embrace him, sighing at his heady scent.
His hand glides down to grip my bottom and squeeze. “You feel good, piccola?”
“I feel fucked.” I kiss his throat. “So yes.”
He groans. “Dio, save me.”
“Nope. Just me.”
This time he chuckles and kisses me sweetly back.
As his breathing settles, my thoughts wander, trying to catalog the sensations so I can find words for this moment. My skin sings. My heart thunders. Every muscle aches, every nerve ending is raw, but I feel so good I could cry.
I dimly remember that once I thought love was a con job. A thing men say to get you on your knees, or a thing women say to convince themselves the pain is worth it. But this—right here, right now—this is sweet annihilation.
This is ruinous life.