It was his submission.
I walked toward the bed in the corner of the room—some huge thing with sheets rumpled from use. It looked clean, though. Cleaner than anything I’d slept in for years.
With the way Aubrey was clinging to me, I would have fucked him on top of the bodies we’d made together and called it a throne.
I grabbed him by the hips to push him away, and he snarled in response, clawing at me. He fought like some feral thing to keep hold of me, tearing scratches against my skin that added to the blood already soaking us both.
“Mmm fuck, you’d tear me apart to get on my dick right now, wouldn’t you?”
Aubrey pulled back to answer, and I threw him onto the mattress. He bounced, but I didn’t give him a chance to push himself back up. I was on him, pinning him down against the sheets and twisting his hands up above his head.
He surged up, trying to press against me, his body a hot, demanding force that was almost too much to resist. His desperation was clear, painted across his features andtearing from his throat in little growling whines that shot straight to my dick.
I jerked back before he had a chance to make me forget myself. My eyes narrowed, and I looked him over while he panted beneath me, with pupils half blown from need but still glassy with what he was trying to escape. He was a beautiful contradiction, ready and willing to break for me.
When I rolled my hips so he could feel how hard I was, Aubrey shivered, one word pouring from his mouth.
“Yes.”
Fuck, it was tempting to fuck him now and worry about the rest later, but now was when I knew he was desperate enough to give me exactly what I wanted—what we both needed.
“You wanna be mine, Aubrey?”
The question made him pause. I could see his expressions swirling behind his cloudy gaze—pain, desire, loathing… and beneath all of it, a need so strong that it drew his answer up above all the rest. “Damn it, Phoenix. Just… fuck. Fuck me.”
“No.” I leaned down, trailing my lips along his jaw and down to his throat, biting along the way. Aubrey whimpered with each nip, and by the time I came to his shoulder, he was trembling.
“Tell me you want to be mine.”
He squirmed and let out another low sound—he really was desperate. Aubrey needed to be fucked senseless so badly that it seemed like it was going to break him.
Iwantedto break him.
My fingers were rough when they trailed down the length of his body, nails digging against the exposed skin peeking between his waistband and the shirt he wore. He struggled in my hold, though I wondered how much he actually wanted to break free as I reached my hand into his pants and grabbed his cock. I dipped my head as I did it, my teeth greedy to find that same place I’d torn him open before—I wanted him toscar.
Aubrey screamed, and in that scream I could hear the war he’d been fighting with himself end.
“Yes. Fuck, okay. I want to be yours, Phoenix. Just… please?” He was panting, gasping against me. “Please? Please… please…”
I’d never heard anyone say my name the way he did. I’d made people cry, I’d heard people beg, but my name on Aubrey’s tongue was pure desperation, pure need. I wasn’t fool enough to think he neededme. It was my strength, my darkness, the pain I could give him and the way it seemed to fill up all the places inside him that were broken, all the holes his obviously fucked-up past had left behind.
I didn’t have to know much about him to see that he was torn open and the mask he wore was cracking around the edges.
Lucky for him, I didn’t give a fuck about the why—I only cared that he’d said the words.
I dropped my hold on him long enough to shift and unfasten one of the collars I collected from my pants—I hadn’t found anyone worthy of it before. It was black metal, shining brighter than most of the shit this fucked-up world had to offer. I dropped his hands and tangled my fingersin his hair, yanking him up so I could fasten it around his neck before he realized what I was doing.
“Wh—”
My fingers slid beneath the collar and twisted. It jerked him against me, and made the gasp that ripped from his chest cut off in the most delicious little choked sound I’d ever heard.
The leverage gave me a chance to strip him out of the jacket he wore, and greedy fingers found the places his shirt was already torn so I could rip it from his body.
Another little punched-out sound escaped him at the violence, but he was still looking at me with those blazing, demanding eyes. Still pressing closer.
My free hand made quick work of unfastening his pants and shoving them down. I pushed him back against the bed so I could finish stripping him, marveling at the way our blood was already soaking the sheets. Everything I touched ended up tainted. We probably both needed to tend to the wounds we’d got in our fight, but there wasn’t really a point now.
By the time I was finished, I knew there’d be more.
