49. Sage
FORTY-NINE
SAGE
The crack fills the room. My body jolts, a yelp tearing out of me, and Knox absorbs it—his thumbs sweep my cheekbones, steady, unhurried, while the sting blooms across my skin.
“That’s for the motel,” Eli says.
Another. Harder. My eyes squeeze shut and Knox’s grip firms.
“Eyes open,” he says. “Stay with me.”
I force them open. Knox fills my vision while the paddle lands again.
“That’s for stealing Knox’s file and going after his target alone.”
The next one jolts me forward and a sob breaks loose. Knox catches it with his thumb on my lower lip, pressing gently, grounding me.
“You’re doing so good, Fury,” Knox murmurs. “Take what he gives you.”
A fifth. The hardest yet. My hips slam into the bench and I cry out against Knox’s hand.
“That’s for making us think we’d lost you again,” Eli says.
Then silence. His palm rests on the skin he’s just punished, warm and unmoving. I feel him lean closer, his chest almost touching my back, his mouth near my ear.
“I made you a promise, Sage.” His voice is low.
Rough. Nothing like the measured control from before.
“I told you I wouldn’t try to stop you. That when you were safe again, I’d fucking help you.
Make sure it was done right.” His hand tightens on my hip.
“Then you went after him while someone is still hunting you. You decided my promise wasn’t worth waiting for and took on a man who could have killed you. ”
My throat closes. He offered me a future where I wouldn’t have to hide this part of myself. I wanted it. I just couldn’t wait for it. The screams in my chest got louder, and instead of telling him, I ran.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. For the first time tonight, the apology isn’t performance or appeasement. It’s real.
“I know you are.” His lips brush the shell of my ear. “But this is the part you remember: you don’t have to do it alone anymore. You have five people who understand the hunger.” A pause. “I understand it. I’ve always understood it.”
Knox’s forehead presses to mine. His breath is warm on my wet face. “Still here,” he says. “Still got you.”
My skin is on fire. My nipples are somewhere between screaming and numb.
My wrists ache inside the cuffs. My ass cheeks burn.
But inside I’ve gone quiet—the noise, the static, the constant hum of run, fight, scream that’s been the soundtrack of my life since the first time a man put his hand over my mouth and told me not to scream.
Eli’s palm smooths over the skin he’s just reddened. Gentle now. Tracing the heat. His fingers slide lower, trailing through my soaked center, and the sound he makes—low, rough, almost pained—tells me everything about what this is costing him too.
“Fuck, little savage,” he breathes.
Knox pulls back enough to look at me. His thumb traces my jawline, my mouth, the tear tracks on my cheeks. He doesn’t wipe them away. He just maps them, like he’s memorizing what I look like when every wall is down.
“There she is,” he says softly. “There’s my Fury.”
Eli withdraws his hand. I hear the clink of his belt. The slide of leather through loops. The zip. Every sound is a sentence in a language my body has learned to read fluently—and every sentence says I’m not done with you.
Knox stands. Even wrecked, with my hands bound and my face a mess of tears and want, the sheer size of him makes my mouth go dry.
He brings over a stool, sets it in front of the bench, and guides my head onto his lap, his thigh a pillow. He reaches down and removes the clamps from my nipples, and the pain of the blood rushing back is worse than the clamps ever were.
I scream into his thigh. Both points ignite at once, a white-hot flare that steals everything—thought, breath, the room itself.
Knox shifts me like I’m a rag doll, his mouth closing over one nipple, warm and wet, tongue moving in slow circles while the nerves shriek and then, gradually, impossibly, begin to sing a different note.
His hand cups the other breast, thumb gentle, and the agony alchemizes into something that makes my hips roll helplessly against nothing.
“There you go,” he murmurs against my skin. “Come back to me.”
Behind me, Eli’s hands grip my hips, and then he’s inside me in one deep thrust, and the sound I make isn’t human.
“That’s it,” Eli growls. His pace is punishing, every stroke driving home everything he said—the promise, the recklessness, the five people who understand the hunger. “You feel that, little savage? This is what you almost threw away tonight. Us. This.”
“I’m sorry,” I gasp against Knox. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“I know.” Eli’s hand slides up my spine and fists in my hair, pulling me upright, arching me back against his chest. The new angle drives him deeper and I sob with it.
His other arm bands across my collarbones, holding me to him, and his mouth finds the shell of my ear.
“You want to kill? Fine. But you do it with us. You do it where we can watch you come home safe.”
“Yes. God, yes.”
Knox lifts my torso, his hands framing my face before he kisses me—deep, slow, filthy—while Eli fucks me like he’s trying to leave fingerprints on my soul.
Between the two of them there’s nowhere to go, nothing to hold on to, nothing to be except theirs.
The collar sits snug at my throat. The cuffs bite my wrists.
Even my heels pinch at my toes. Every mark on my body is a signature, and I’ve never felt more like myself.
“Come for us, Fury,” Knox says against my mouth. “Give it to him.”
Knox’s hand drops between my legs, and that’s it—that’s the end of me.
The orgasm tears through like the knife tore through Stine, like every swallowed scream finally finding its exit, and I come sobbing, shaking, held together only by their hands and the collar and the chain of us that no amount of running could ever break.
Eli follows with my name ground out against my neck, his whole body wrapped around mine, and for a long moment the three of us just breathe.
The static is gone.
We stay like that. Three bodies, wrecked, breathing.
Knox undoes the cuffs first. Careful, patient, his big fingers working the buckles while the blood rushes back into my hands with a tingling burn. Then the leash, unhooked from the collar, coiled and set aside. The collar stays. Nobody reaches for it.
Eli pulls out slowly and I make a sound I’d be embarrassed about if I had any dignity remaining. Heat spills between my legs, dripping onto the padded bench.
Knox disappears and returns with a warm cloth, water, and a blanket. Eli takes the cloth from him and cleans me, wiping away the mess and telling me how well I did.
When he’s finished, he fixes my dress and gathers me into his lap. I curl into him, face pressed into his neck, hands fisted in his open shirt. He smells like sweat, sex, and the clean bite of his cologne, and I breathe him in until my pulse begins to settle.
Knox wraps the blanket around my shoulders, removes my heels, and sets them beside the bench. Then he holds the water to my lips until I drink before sitting on the floor beside us, his back against the bench and one hand resting on my bare foot.
Nobody speaks for a long time. The sounds of the club are a distant murmur beyond the walls—bass and breath and the faint, rhythmic evidence of other people’s pleasure.
In here, it’s just us. Heartbeats and silence and the particular kind of peace that only exists after everything has been stripped away and what’s left is still standing.
“I’m keeping the collar,” I say eventually. My voice is raw. Destroyed.
Eli’s chest vibrates under my cheek. Almost a laugh. “It suits you.”
“And next time there’s a kill, I’m there. Not as backup. Not because somebody drew the short straw. I’m part of the plan, and we do it together. Like you said.”
Knox squeezes my foot. “We know, Fury.”
“And I want my own locker at this club. With my name on it. And a hook for the leash.”
“Don’t push it,” Eli says, but his arms tighten around me.
“I need to be a Hangman,” I whisper.
Eli presses a lingering kiss against my forehead. “You already are.”