Caleb released me reluctantly, his hands sliding down my arms like he couldn't bear to let go, his fingers trailing along my skin until the last possible moment. I pressed a kiss to his cheek — tasting salt, tasting tears, tasting grief, before turning to face Ethan.
He was already sitting in the chair, his posture perfect, his spine ramrod straight, his expression controlled and clinical. But I could see the cracks in his composure, the slight tremor in his hands where they rested on his thighs, the tightness around his mouth that betrayed the emotion he was fighting to suppress, the way his gray eyes burned with something thatlooked like barely contained fury behind his slightly fogged glasses.
I positioned myself over his lap, wincing as my already-tender flesh pressed against his thighs, the pain sharp and immediate. His hand came to rest on my lower back, clinical and precise, his fingers spread in a pattern that felt almost medical in its deliberateness. But I felt the way his fingers flexed against my skin, the tension he was holding in every line of his body, the slight tremor that betrayed his emotional state.
"This is for running," he said, his voice tight and controlled, each word carefully measured, and his hand connected with my ass in a sharp, precise strike that made me cry out. The blow was clinical, calculated, landing exactly where it would cause the most impact.
"One," I gasped, my body jerking against his hold.
"This is for making me fear I'd never see you alive again." Another strike, harder this time, landing exactly where the last one had, building the pain into something unbearable. His voice cracked almost imperceptibly on the word "fear," the only sign of the emotion churning beneath his composed exterior.
"Two."
"This is for the hours I spent monitoring your vitals, watching your heart skip, wondering if the next beat would be your last." His voice cracked on the last word, his control slipping for just a moment before he pulled it back into place with visible effort. His hand shook slightly as he drew it back for the next strike, and I heard him take a steadying breath.
"Three."
He continued like that, each strike accompanied by a reason, a justification, a piece of his fear and his anger laid bare for me to understand. The clinical precision of his words couldn't hide the raw emotion beneath them, the terror he'd felt watching my vitals fluctuate, the helplessness of a man who prided himself onknowledge and control faced with something he couldn't fix with research or data.
"This is for making me calculate the probability of your survival." Strike. "This is for the moment your heart stopped for three seconds." Strike. "This is for every minute I spent not knowing if you would wake up." By the time he reached ten, my ass was on fire, my face was soaked with tears, and I could hear the tremor in his voice despite his best efforts to hide it. His hand lingered on my burning skin after the final strike, his palm pressing flat against the heat, and I felt him take a shuddering breath.
When he helped me up, his hands were gentle, his touch careful and precise as he steadied me on my shaking legs. He cupped my face in his palms, his gray eyes searching mine with an intensity that made my breath catch, his thumbs brushing away my tears with clinical precision that was somehow achingly tender.
"I forgive you," he said quietly, his voice soft in a way I'd rarely heard from him, the words measured but genuine. His gray eyes held mine, and I saw the wall he usually kept so firmly in place crack just slightly, revealing the fear and love beneath. "But you needed to learn. You needed to understand what you did to us. You were dying, and we couldn't stop it. Do you understand how that felt? To have all the knowledge in the world and still be helpless?"
"I understand," I whispered, leaning into his touch, letting his hands support the weight of my head. "I do, Ethan. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He pressed a kiss to my forehead, soft, brief, but impossibly meaningful, his lips lingering for just a moment longer than necessary, before releasing me and stepping back, his composure settling back into place like armor.
Leo was last.
He hadn't moved from his spot on the arm of the couch, but his expression had changed. The sharp, brittle anger was still there, etched into the lines around his mouth and the tension in his jaw. Yet beneath the facade there was something else, something vulnerable and afraid, that he was trying desperately to keep hiden beneath his usual mask of sardonic detachment. His pale eyes were bright with unshed tears, his hands clenched into fists on his thighs, his whole body vibrating with emotion he couldn't contain.
He took his place in the chair, moving with none of his usual lazy grace, his movements sharp and jerky with tension. I went to him, my legs shaking beneath me, my ass already throbbing with pain that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. When I lowered myself over his lap, I felt the tension in his body, the coiled energy that vibrated through every muscle, the way he held himself like he was about to shatter.
"Red," he said, and his voice was thick with tears he hadn't let fall yet, rough with emotion he was fighting to contain. The nickname came out broken, nothing like his usual teasing drawl. His hand came to rest on my burning skin, trembling slightly, his fingers splaying across my ass with a gentleness that contradicted everything I knew was coming. "You could have died."
"I know," I whispered, my voice small and broken. "I'm sorry."
"You could have left me." His voice cracked, shattered into something raw and wounded that made my heart clench in my chest. I felt his other hand grip my hip, his fingers digging in like he was trying to anchor himself, trying to hold onto something solid in a world that had threatened to fall apart. "You could have left us all, and I would have had to live with that for the rest of my life. Do you have any idea what that would have done to me? To all of us?"
"Leo—" The first strike cut off my words, and I cried out, the pain sharp and immediate on my already-tender flesh. Building on the punishment that had come before until I couldn't tell where one agony ended and another began.
"One," I sobbed, my fingers scrabbling against the floor. He didn't speak after that. Couldn't speak, maybe, because by the third strike, he was crying openly, tears streaming down his cheeks in silver tracks that caught the firelight. His hand connected with my ass again and again, each blow accompanied by a sound, a gasp, a sob, a wounded noise that seemed to be torn from somewhere deep in his chest. The sounds that escaped his throat were that of a wounded, broken, animal in their grief. It was then I realized, this was hurting him as much as it was hurting me. Maybe more.
"Four," I choked out through my tears. "Five….Six." His hand shook violently with each strike, his aim becoming less precise as his control crumbled. I could feel his tears falling onto my back, hot drops that tracked down my spine like rain.
By the time I counted "Ten," my voice barely a whisper, we were both sobbing, me from the pain and the guilt, him from the fear and the grief that had been building since he'd felt me dying through the bond. Leo pulled me up and into his arms, holding me so tight I could barely breathe, his face buried in my neck, his tears hot against my skin. His whole body shook with the force of his sobs, his arms wrapped around me like he was trying to absorb me into himself, like he could keep me safe by sheer force of will.
"Don't ever leave me again," he whispered, his voice wrecked, destroyed, nothing like the sharp-tongued poet I'd come to know. His fingers tangled in my hair, his lips pressed against my neck, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "I can't…I couldn't survive it, Red. I need you. We all need you. You're the only thing that makes any of this make sense."
"I won't," I promised, holding him back just as fiercely, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, crying into his neck. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm yours. I'm all of yours. Forever."
We stayed like that for long minutes, wrapped around each other, crying together, our tears mingling on our skin. Eventually, the others joined us. A pack pile of grief and love and desperate, terrible relief, all of us tangled together on the living room floor, the fire crackling in the hearth, the world narrowed down to just this — just us, just this moment, just the healing that came from being together.
When we finally separated, I could barely stand. My ass was on fire, throbbing with a heat that pulsed with every heartbeat, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly keep my feet beneath me, and my face was swollen from crying, my eyes puffy and raw. Beneath the pain, beneath the exhaustion that pulled at my limbs and clouded my thoughts, I felt something else.
Clean. Like the punishment had burned away some of the guilt, left me lighter somehow, scraped away a layer of shame and self-recrimination that I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying.
