Tingles between my legs don’t stop when he pushes his fingers out of me with a loud, wet sound. I think I can feel another hard slap on my ass, and heat blooms in my cheeks with renewed intensity, the color searing across them like sunlight that refuses mercy.
“Shhh,” he coos, palms gliding against my sore skin. A sudden chill eases the pain, sending a flicker of confusion through me. I turn my head, my eyes settling on the unscrewed bottle of aloe vera soothing cream resting on the bed beside us. “You did so good. Now you need to let me take care of you.”
Those words cut clean through the haze of pleasure clouding my mind, coaxing fresh tears to the surface. My lip quivers, and when I swallow, the thick lump lodged in my throat rises, insistent and impossible to ignore.
I am no stranger to pain. Life has etched its lessons into me, each scar a reminder of endurance. Yet this feels different. There is no humiliation here, no bitter aftertaste, no sharp sting.
His tender voice drifts into my ears, soothing the soreness clinging to my body. His hands glide over me, fingers tracing the curve of my ass, the aloe vera cream spreading under his touch, tiny shivers spiraling down my spine. I bite back a sob, hoping he won’t notice, because he will think it springs from dislike, and it does not.
I like it. Deeply, undeniably.
Far more than I should.
I cannot explain the why, not with words. The reasons hover at the tip of my tongue, teasing me, but they will never escape my mouth. I do not speak of my feelings, my memories—I never have. All I can do is fix my gaze on a single point, like an idiot lost in the storm of sensations and emotions thrashing within me.
I turn my head, shielding my face from him, yet his hands continue their careful work, gliding over me with steady precision. The aloe cream spreads beneath his touch, and praise slips from his lips, a soft current I can barely follow.
It merges into a quiet, gentle chaos, a lullaby for the senses. I close my eyes, let the lingering weight of what has passed press into my shoulders, and surrender fully to sleep.
North Carolina, USA
Astrange, serene hush settles over my mind, lingering after the most chaotic trip of my life. Emotions spin in a tangled cyclone, frantic and slippery, impossible to grasp fully, each feeling bleeding into the next. And yet, through the swirl, one thread slices clean and clear, sharper and more vivid than all the rest.
“And you couldn’t get anything out of him?” Jason’s voice comes like a distant current against the storm in my head.
I force my attention back to him, a question burning behind my eyes. I really need to work on paying the smallest amount offucking attention. It takes a heartbeat to drag myself back to the thread we’d been on before I drifted.
Mymission. The assassination of Ezra.
“Unfortunately. I didn’t get to him before they did,” I lie. The words fall out of my mouth with no tremor, no guilt, no hesitation at all.
Maybe that’s for the best. My team doesn’t need the real details, since they’d only twist them into something worse. I can already picture Jason’s eyes when I tell him I shot Owen because he annoyed me, that I killed Ezra without a second thought, and that Estella and I ran over Emmett because we simply didn’t like him.
Spoken aloud, it would sound like I’m already a lunatic making reckless calls.
And there’s a grain of truth to that.
Because nothing in me can explain what happened in that hotel room. No logic. No reason. Just instinct, raw and magnetic and impossible to fight. Estella and I moved like two forces colliding, drawn together by something that burned too hot to ignore.
And the worst part? I loved it. Every fucking second.
So did she.
For the first time, it seemed like we truly felt alive. We weren’t merely surviving, weren’t pretending, weren’t just moving through the motions of existence. We were experiencing something real, sensitive, and aching, something that had been absent for far too long. We found in each other a rhythm that matched our own, a darkness reflected back, a hunger mirrored and magnified, fierce and unrelenting.
So, I don’t regret it.
Not the lies to my team, not the heat of that room, not the choices I made. Whatever guilt should have followed, it’s gone, ifit ever existed. All that’s left is me, my thoughts, and this warped sense of right and wrong that no longer fits anyone else’s rules.
“Fuck, that’s bad,” Jason mutters, hands on his hips, before one drags over his face in frustration.
“I can only imagine what his family is going through,” Lucia says softly, her teeth worrying the edge of her fingernail—a nervous habit she never breaks.
That’s how I always know she’s lying when she says she’s fine. Even when she just fidgets with her fingers, there’s something clawing under her skin. Anxiety, guilt, fear—it’s never something small.
Jason paces again, boots whispering against the floor. He’s an open book as well, his pages spread out for anyone to read. When he’s tense, he can’t stay still, always moving, always chewing on the inside of his cheek like it’ll keep his thoughts from spilling out.
The sight strikes me with more force than I expect, a sudden pang slicing through my chest, sharp and insistent, demanding I feel it fully.
