I work him with my mouth—fast, sloppy, no finesse, because I'm not Atlas. I'm not going to worship him on my knees like it's fucking communion. I'm going to take him apart. I hollow my cheeks and suck hard enough to make him yelp, then drag my teeth—just barely, just the threat of them—along the underside and he keens. High and broken and so desperate it makes my cock leak inside my sweats.
That sound.
I want to bottle that sound. I want to play it on a loop every night for the rest of my life. I want to carve it into my chest so I can feel it vibrating in my bones long after he's gone to sleep.
I've been thinking about this for months.
Not the polite version—not the tasteful fantasy bullshit. The real thing. Max on his stomach in my bed. Max on his knees. Max looking up at me with those dark eyes while I feed him my cock and watch his jaw stretch around it. Max crying—not from pain, from the relief of finally letting someone see the thinginside him that he's been ashamed of since he was thirteen years old.
The thing that wants to beowned.
I know it's there. I read it in his notebooks. Felt it in the basement when he came so hard on my cock that he sobbed. He can lie to Atlas and Bane. Can play the grateful, healing omega who just needs tenderness and soft hands. But I know the truth. I know there's a part of Max Carter that wants to be grabbed by the throat and fucked until he forgets his own name, and the shame of wanting that is the thing that's been eating him alive for years.
I'm going to burn that shame to the ground.
I pull off his cock. He whines—actually whines, high and frantic—and his hips chase my mouth and I pin them to the mattress with one hand. My fingers dig into the bone.
He'll bruise. Good.
"Patience."
"Zero—"
"I saidpatience." I drag my tongue up his cock. One slow stripe. Base to tip. Circle the head. Watch his whole body shudder like a live wire. "I've been waiting for this since the night I sat outside your door listening to you breathe for the first time. You can wait thirty more seconds."
His cock twitches against his belly. Flushed dark. Leaking. I wrap my hand around him—loose, barely a grip—and stroke once. Twice. Watch his eyes roll back.
"Look at you." I squeeze. His mouth drops open. "Dripping for me. You walked onto that balcony knowing exactly what was going to happen and you're already this wrecked?" I lean down. Breathe against the head. "I haven't even started, Max."
"Then start—"
I flip him. He goes—rolls onto his stomach, face in the pillow, ass up. His back is a pale canvas. The welts are gone. Healed into smooth skin. But I know where they were. I mapped them through one-way glass while I imagined tearing apart a restaurant to reach him.
Every hand that put those marks on him has been dealt with. Personally. First the guards, then the asshole behind the glass. I didn’t follow the rules with that one. He’s six feet under–put him there with my own hands. The same hands that are spreading Max open right now.
He's wet. I can see it—slick gathering, his body doing what it does when he wants something badly enough that biology takes over. My cock throbs so hard my vision narrows.
Mine.
This is mine. This body. This slick. These sounds. The boy who hid what he was for eleven years is face-down in my sheets dripping for me and the possessiveness that floods through me isn't human—it's something older, something from the back of the brain where evolution stored the things that kept us alive.
I press my thumb against his hole. Just pressure. He gasps into the pillow—a wet, broken sound—and pushes back against my hand.
"Greedy," I murmur. Press harder. Watch him open around my thumb, the muscle fluttering, his whole body trembling. "The boy who flinched when I looked at him is pushing his ass back on my hand. What would Linda say?"
He tenses. For one second—one razor-sharp second—and I feel the flinch and then the anger and then the heat that floods through him like a backdraft. Because I said the unsayable thing. The thing no one else would dare.
"Fuck you," he breathes. But his hips don't stop moving.
"That's the spirit." I pull my thumb out. Replace it with two slicked fingers and bury them to the knuckle.
He cries out. Muffled by the pillow, but I hear it—the sharp edge of pain dissolving into pleasure so fast it's practically chemical. I curl my fingers. Find the spot. Press.
Max's whole body jolts like he's been electrocuted. His hands fist in the sheets so hard his knuckles go white. His back arches—deep, obscene—and the sound that comes out of him is something I want to hear every day until I die.
"There it is." I press again. Watch him shake. "There's my boy."
I work him open with two fingers, then three, because I'm not small and despite the slick he's tight—clenching around my fingers in rhythmic pulses, his body trying to pull me deeper. I fuck him with my hand and watch him come apart—the hitching breaths, the way his thighs tremble, the soft desperate sounds he buries in the pillow because he's still ashamed. Still hiding. And too loud—even muffled, those sounds are going to carry through walls, and Margot's bound to hear him.
