“Imitation is flattery, right?” I manage. “He doesn’t seem too interested in flattery. He mocks it with his little pet names. This is more like one-upmanship. He’s trying to improve on your…” I shudder a little even to say it. “…Your technique. Montgomery already had Tuija killed just to piss you off; that’s where we are, that kind of playing field. None of this is beyond the realm of possibility.”
“Huh.” He rubs his nose against my breast. Lingers there, his eyes falling closed in a stolen second of rapture. Or escape. One of the two. “You know, when my journalists come up with bullshit conjecture like this, I fire them.”
“Even if it is bullshit, it’s all we have.”
“We have the FBI thing. Their interest in Ash.” He tugs his shirt up just enough, bucks up to pull his pants and boxers down. The bare flesh of his belly is taut and beautiful. “That doesn’t fit in at all.”
“We should do the test—not that I know what they’re looking for, but…if we run it for a bunch of crap, something could come up.”
He snorts. “He’s really not my son, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I have no idea what I should be worried about anymore. Once, I had a moral compass; now I can’t even follow the stars. I navigate by scars, sneaking my fingers along fractured tissue until I find faults worth their weight in soul.
Aeron locates my ear in the darkness and nips at the soft lobe. “You’re like a naughty little angel, come to fuck my misery away.”
“Who said I was going to fuck you?”
He pushes both hands down my silky panties and cups my buttocks, dragging forcefully toward himself until I almost crush his cock. “Baby.”
I yelp softly at the force of it. Catch myself. “Uh-huh?”
“Precisely.”
He tosses me beneath him, and a hundred sharp corners tear across my naked back—photos, documents, their edges worn to tattered blades. Cold friction on warm skin. His weight pushes me down into the mattress, his fingers ignoring the fact that he’s more or less still fully dressed and pulling my panties down instead. Some vague attempt to readdress the power balance here; have him in control, him atop me, him half-covered while I lie helpless and bare.
It’s working. It always works. I may not be entirely predictable, but God, I’m self-indulgent, whether it’s despair or desire or revenge.
Aeron plants himself firmly between my spread thighs. His first kiss is slow and hard all at once, stirring sparks of arousal in parts of me so swollen that they ache. His cock sits hot on my inner thigh, and the flat plain of his belly presses against my *; he’s lying this way on purpose, just to tease me.
“How do you feel about it?” I whisper as he pulls a sucking kiss down my throat. “What’s it like to inspire a wolf like him?”
“Shut up.”
He reaches my nipples again, squeezes my breasts while he alternates licking one peak, then the other. Always, he grooms me to partake in other methods of worship. To do the things he wants. But then isn’t that what foreplay is, at the best of times…?
“You must’ve really hit a nerve with him,” I go on, nauseous at the words. I’m talking to myself more than him, almost. “Struck a chord.”
“Shut up, Leo.” He shoots me a glare of warning; something about this unsettles him.
Curious.
My heart beat begins to stutter. A few short weeks ago, it was me whose kisses were laced with panic, and him who goaded. But then such is our relationship; we swing from light to dark, power too skittish in either of our hands to rest there for long.
He drags his mouth down between my legs, my clit puckered and sensitive to the probing of his tongue. It’s difficult to keep still, now. My hips follow his every stroke.
“I feel l—like we’re missing something,” I pant.
“Mmm.” The word vibrates around my clit.
I shove my knuckles between my teeth. His kid brother is in the next room, for Christ’s sake.
“The thing that’s missing is that I don’t sit around planning how I’m going to kill people.” He nips at my outer lips, maybe a little too hard. “What a fucking waste of time that is.”
“Unless you actually do it.”
“Which I don’t.”