His hand slides beneath me and finds the cage. His fingers trace the shape of it, and I feel a soft exhale against my wet skin that might be satisfaction. Then his other hand is reaching under too, and there’s a small click, a shift of metal, and the cage comes away.
The relief is so intense it’s almost painful. After a full day locked in that thing, the sudden freedom makes me gasp, every nerve ending screaming awake. His fingers brush my cock, barely a tease, and I jerk forward because the sensitivity is blinding.
Then his hands are on my shoulders, turning me, flipping me onto my back in the dark. I can’t see him, but I can feel him, the heat of his body, the shift of the mattress under his weight, his knees on either side of my hips.
The sound of his hand on himself is fast, an urgent rhythm that tells me he’s close. His breathing fractures. And then the warm spill hits my face—across my cheek, my mouth, the bridge of my nose—and I gasp at the shock of it, the degradation, the intimacy so raw it feels like being skinned alive.
I lie there, breathing hard. My cock is throbbing, untouched, desperate…
I reach for it.
His hand catches my wrist. “No,” he says. The first word either of us has spoken. His voice is utterly without mercy.
He holds my wrist until I stop fighting. Then he releases me, and I hear fabric rustling—his t-shirt, pulled over his head. A moment later the cotton drags gently across my face, wiping me clean with a care that contradicts everything that came before it. I keep still and let him do it.
And then he lies down.
Right here. In my childhood bed, in the basement he built to destroy me, in the dark that sometimes terrifies me. He lies down beside me and the mattress dips under his weight, his shoulder touching mine, his body radiating warmth.
I should move to the far edge. Turn my back. But I just lie there with my body aching and the taste of him still on my lips, and I listen to his breathing slow and deepen.
I’m still hard. Still furious. Still confused by the tenderness of that shirt on my face after the debasement of what came before it.
He unlocked the cage. He set me free. But he won’t let me use that freedom.
He’s so warm. And I’m covered in the smell of him, and Ilikeit. And in the dark, with Nonna Mellie’s coverlet pulled up to my chin and the bulk of him solid and present beside me, I feel something I haven’t felt for a very long time.
Safe.
I think I hate him for that most of all.
I curl toward the warmth, and I sleep.
I wake pressed against him: my face against his shoulder, my arm draped across his chest, my cock hard against his thigh. At some point in the night I attached myself to him like a barnacle, and he let me. Or he was asleep and didn’t notice. Either way, I’m mortified.
And I don’t move.
The basement is still dark. But I can feel him breathing, the steady rise and fall beneath my arm, and I know from a subtle shift in his body that he’s awake, too.
I press my lips to his shoulder. A test. A question.
He shrugs me off. “What were you doing down here all day yesterday?”
So that’s how this morning is going to go. I don’t answer, because I can hardly tell him I was searching his basement for my Family’s ring. Instead I slide my hand up his side, feeling the ridged landscape of muscle and scar tissue.
He throws off the covers and sits up on the edge of the bed.
“Don’t go yet,” I say, and I hate how it sounds. Not commanding. Not strategic. Just…needy.
“Is that an order?” he scoffs. “You’ll have Rosa killed if I don’t stay here and let yousnuggle?” He turns on the lights with the controls on his phone. I’m left blinking at his back—the broad expanse of it, the tattoos, the cut on his shoulder blade still healing.
I should let him go. Instead, I move with him, wrapping my arms around his waist from behind, pressing my face between his shoulder blades. I feel his heartbeat through his back, steady and slow. Mine is hammering.
“Get off me,” he says. “I need a shower.”
Slowly, I unwind my arms and let him go. He stands and heads for the shower.
And I follow, incapable of dignity this morning. “You need someone to wash your back,” I say. “That cut’s still healing.”
