26. This is a Piece of String
This is a Piece of String
SNOW
His mouth is still on mine when I drive him up the last rungs of the fire escape.
Four curses into the kiss, one hand catching the ladder, the other clamping hard around my waist.
Good.
I need both hands busy.
"Snow," he growls against my mouth.
"Keep moving."
The arched window above us is cracked open a few inches. Old wood. Warped frame. Perfect.
I hook one boot on the railing, grab the front of his shirt, and kiss him harder as I shove him toward it.
He goes through backward with a muffled curse, catching the sill just enough to keep from crashing.
I scramble in after him.
We're in what's left of a choir loft. Broken pews stacked along one wall, an organ with its pipes stripped out for scrap, and a long blue bar of moonlight laid across the dust from the arched window we came through.
Two stories down, through old wood and older prayers, the meeting drones on, the microphone reduced to a hum with the words rubbed off.
The loft has been holding the day's heat for hours. August lives up here, the air thick with old varnish and dust, and then there's Four, crowding me back against the organ case, raising the temperature another ten degrees just by wanting me in it.
His mouth finds my ear. "So I'm your boyfriend?"
"Not every guy would murder for a girl he stalks the city nightly with. I can’t help but think it means something." I try to sound nonchalant about both the boyfriend thing and the murder, which isn't easy when he's nibbling on that spot on my neck that legit makes me go blind.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the murdering of Jimi Dirt-Face, but I've been in situations before where it came down to me or him, and Two believed it had.
"Oh, it means something," he assures me.
He hauls his hoodie and tee off in one yank, both layers together, and the moonlight lands on all that bare skin already shining with sweat, the air above his shoulders going wavy.
He unties my leather top with fingers that have stopped pretending to be careful and gets his hot, hungry mouth on me, and my eyes roll back as my fingers claw into his hair.
Sweat slides down my spine and pools at the small of my back. Between August and a fire mage, this loft is going to cook us both, and I cannot find one single part of me that cares.
"You know what it does to me?" he says into my breast, voice gone rough. "Waiting my turn. Knowing our body got to be near you all week and it wasn't me in it. I count the days, Snow. I count the hours."
Heat that has nothing to do with his magic rolls through my belly. Of all of them, Four wants the most unabashedly.
He drops to his knees in the dust and peels my leather shorts down. They cling, sweat-stuck, fighting him the whole way over my hips, and he growls at them, low in his chest, a sound I feel in the backs of my knees. The shorts hit my boots. He looks at my fishnets.
I expect him to drag them down too.
He doesn't. He hooks two fingers into the weave at the crotch and tears, one short brutal rip, nylon snapping in a line of tiny sharp stings against my inner thighs. He leaves the rest of them on me.
"Those were eighteen dollars," I breathe.
"I'll buy you a hundred pairs." Then he goes still.
Under the ruined net there's my thong, a thin black string of almost nothing, soaked through and hiding zero of what he's done to me.
He exhales like a man in church for entirely the wrong reasons.
"You even bothered wearing this? This tiny nothing little scrap? "
"Protection is protection," I quip.
"It won't protect you from me." He hooks the string aside with one finger, pulls my knee over his shoulder, heeled boot and all, and his breath lands hot on bare skin. "Look at you. Dripping for me already. I haven't even licked that cute little clit yet."
"Four," I breathe in sharply.
"I know, baby, but keep quiet. The window's open."
He is not quiet. He puts his mouth on me through the torn-open net and groans like it’s the meal of his life, and I stop having opinions about anything.
His mouth is hot, like the first second of bathwater you should have tested, and every nerve I own crowds down to meet it.
The ripped edges of nylon drag against my skin with every pass of his tongue, and the thong string keeps sliding in his way.
By the third time, he pinches it between two fingertips and there's a tiny breath of smoke and the string just isn't there anymore, burned clean through, gone, and the fact that he didn't even pause should not do to me what it does.
"Now you owe me a new pair of panties," I gasp.
He leans back an inch, lips shining, eyes hooded. "Snow. If this is how I die, smothered in this perfect pussy, you let it happen," he says, ignoring my complaint. "You let me go happy. Don't you dare pull me off."
My thighs clench in response as I moan.
"And how dare you call that piece of string panties," he says.
My standing leg starts to shake.
The heel of my boot scrapes the floorboard and I lock my hip to stop it, thigh muscle burning, jaw aching from how hard I'm biting down on every sound, slick running down the inside of my thigh where the fishnets are torn.
My whole body is strung tight on the choice between staying silent and staying upright, and he hums against me, taking his time, collecting every tremor.
"Four." It comes out strangled. "Up. Now."
He climbs my body, mouth slick. His jeans hit the floor and then he turns me, walking me two steps and bending me over the back of a pew. The old wood takes my weight with a groan while the microphone hums on stories below us.
His hands brace on the pew, either side of mine. Smoke threads from under his palms.
"Say it again," he whispers against the nape of my neck.
"Say what?"
"You know what."
My face goes hot in a way that has nothing to do with him. "You're my boyfriend."
He drives into me on the word.
My breath punches out, and his hand is there to catch it, palm sealing over my mouth before the cry clears my throat.
There's nothing slow about his rhythm. There's nothing careful about it. He's greedy, fast, deep, pulling me onto him with a grip that will leave prints, and the pressure of every swallowed sound builds up behind my sternum until my ribs ache from the holding.
"You feel that, baby?" His voice scrapes against my ear. "I've wanted you so bad I've almost burned us all from the inside out. I'd watch you pour drinks and think about exactly this, you bent over, soaked, taking all of me."
And it is quite a lot. I'm amazed how one dick can feel so different depending on who's in charge. But his near scalding hot girth has me quaking and drenched.
Sweat drips off him onto my spine, hot enough that I flinch and arch into it at the same time. The pew creaks. His hands sear down into the wood with the smell of struck matches and scorched varnish.
He's not trying to be gentle. He's trying to break me.
I don't think I can be broken but fae damn if I don't want him to try.
I plant my hands, arch, and shove back into him beat for beat, matching his rhythm down to the breath, his own greed returned with interest, and Four chokes on air, his pace stumbling, one hand leaving the pew to clamp my hip, five glorious, searing points where he touches me.
"Snow," he warns.
I look over my shoulder at him.
His eyes are glowing red. Actually glowing, lit from inside, sweat cutting lines down his chest, and the sight of what I do to him hits harder than anything his body is doing.
"Harder," I tell the fire. "I can take it."
The sound he makes should never be allowed in a church as he gives me everything.
My arms shake. My boots slide on the boards. His arm wraps my waist and hauls me up, my spine flush to his scalding chest, his mouth at my shoulder, the burn in me building coil over coil until I am one held breath from breaking and screaming this dead church down.
A door bangs, and voices come pouring out onto the street right under our open window. I hear snippets about the casserole dishes and goodnights and somebody's car alarm chirping.
Four goes still inside me, buried deep, and claps one hot hand over my mouth.
"Shh," he breathes into my ear, and then, because he is a menace, he keeps moving.
Slow now. Silent. Grinding deep while forty voices fill the street, his palm smelling of smoke, his voice barely air.
"That's a lot of people down there, baby.
They all hate a bad mage like me. If they found us, they'd string me up for what I'm doing to you. An innocent little human."
Those assholes hardly think I'm an innocent little human, but that's beside the point. He's making what we're doing even more dirty, more wrong, and my inner muscles clench and squeeze with intense need in response. I whimper.
"Don't make a sound." Then he lets loose and pounds into me, and I can't breathe.
I could kill him. I could marry him.
The scream sits trapped behind my sternum, pressing up into my held breath, my thighs trembling, every muscle in me clenched around silence and him, and the voices drift and scatter, engines turning over one by one, all those nice clean concerned citizens heading home to sleep well.
Not one of them has the faintest idea that the white-haired menace from the magic bar is the only reason their church is still standing. That I saved every last ungrateful one of their lives tonight by seducing an overprotective fire mage who was fully prepared to kill for me.
Technically, again.
You're welcome, I think at them, and come apart against his hand.
He follows me over with his face buried in my neck, a sound like a struck match crushed silent into my skin, and the red of his eyes flares once through my closed lids and dims.
For a while, there's just breathing. We're both drenched, dust sticking to sweat everywhere, the loft ticking around us as he cools.
Four lifts his head, hair a tousled mess, and looks down at me with that goofy smile, the one that shows up before he decides anything.
"For the record," he says, "stakeouts are my new favorite."
"You said this sounded boring," I shoot back.
"I was so wrong." He kisses my shoulder, then my mouth, and then notices the pew.
Two perfect black handprints scorched into the back rail, fingers and all.
Past them, scorch marks track everywhere he touched tonight, palm-smears down the organ case, a charred crescent where his hand gripped the sill.
He makes a small, guilty noise and rubs at one with his thumb, which does nothing.
"Amen," I say because it feels both wildly appropriate and inappropriate.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking toward Poison Apple on wobbly jelly legs. I can’t help but sneak glances at The Seven walking along with me.
Specifically, One. And he’s...
Holding
My
Hand.
After our tryst, Four kissed me sweetly and said he needed to rest. In a blink, his eyes turned pale, and I was looking at One.
One studied me with such intensity before leaning over and kissing me gently, though I felt so much behind it that he was holding back. As if he were afraid of breaking the moment.
"I take it you were around for some of that," I said when he broke away.
He laughed and shook his head. "Yeah."
For a moment, their personalities all seemed closer together. The Seven didn’t feel quite as separate as I’d thought.
"You’re staring," One says, not looking at me even as he gives my hand a squeeze.
"I just didn’t think you were a hand holding kind of guy," I chuckle, swinging his hand a bit before moving closer to him.
He took so long to warm up and I know aside from Seven, he probably had the most reservations about me, but it felt like all of that had melted away. And what was left in the place of mistrust, cold tall walls, and the super speed at which he ran away was kind of...domestic.
My boyfriend was walking me home after our date.
Granted, our date had been spying on a bunch of bigoted jackasses who had formal meetings, and then to distract my boyfriend from burning the whole place down I had to let him rail me within an inch of my life until I nearly went blind with the strength of my orgasm...
But yeah. This moment feels domestic. In a way that exactly suits me.
The sound of a cat hissing draws my attention, and I turn my head to see Lucifer with his hackles up even as he slinks into the shadows.
The sound of a van door sliding shut before the peeling of tires screeches through the air.
Still, I watch the shadows where Lucifer disappeared. That’s weird. We’re closer to Poison Apple than my apartment building, but the little asshole does get around.
One yanks me to a halt, causing me to nearly trip and eat pavement.
"What are you—"
The words die off. Half a block ahead, underneath the flickering neon sign of the Poison Apple, there is a distinctly female figure splayed on the ground.
A van speeds by with alarming speed, causing sandy pebbles to flick up, hitting my arm in a hot blast.
My heart rockets into my throat as adrenaline explodes like Pop Rocks through my veins. Because even from here, I see lying there, unmoving, is a woman’s form.