Fuck.Her hands have undone it before I can say a word, and she grins as my cock stiffens immediately, long and thick, the head brushing against her lips as it leaps to attention.
She doesn’t even say anything. She just opens her mouth when my dickhead brushes against it, and suddenly I’m enveloped in her, warm and soft and wet, and it feels so fucking good. Her tongue rubs over my piercing as she moans, playing with it, and I’m in goddamn heaven.
I love getting my cock sucked. Sometimes I think I like it more than actual sex. Definitely when there’s no emotion involved, just pleasure. There’s something about that hot suction, the feeling of a tongue caressing up and down my length, the clenching of throat muscles when I push myself down, that gets me off like nothing else. Seeing Pixie’s green eyes look at me as she wraps her lips around my shaft, leaving some of her black lipstick on my skin makes me want to grab a fistful of her hair and shove myself all the way down, face-fucking her until I shoot my cum all over that pretty face of hers.
She’d let me do it. I’m willing to bet she’d let me do just about anything. Her hand is already going to the button of her jeans, sliding down inside her panties, and she moans as she starts to rub her clit, her mouth sliding up and down my cock hard and fast.
Christ.I want to come so fucking bad. My balls feel tight and swollen, my entire body straining with need—but not like this. I don’t want her. Not her, not here, not in this place, the kind of place that I can imagine having had with a girl that I actually wanted, loved, or the one I want now and could love if I let myself give in to it.
Which I can’t. Ever. The consequences could be too dire.
I grab a fistful of her hair, and it takes everything in me to drag her mouth off of my throbbing, aching length instead of shoving myself deeper. “No,” I manage to rasp, and Pixie licks her lips, her eyes glazed with desire.
“You can do anything you want,” she whispers. “Come on my face, fuck my ass. You’re so fucking hot. I just want a night. Not anything serious. Just an all night-marathon.”
I just want a night.
She couldn’t possibly have known it, but those words kill my desire faster than anything else could. Because I remember a different girl, dark-haired and rosy-lipped, looking up at me and whispering that she only wanted a night. A night that turned into another, and another, and another after that, until we were so in love that almost nothing could have torn us apart.
“No,” I repeat, stepping back. I grab the towel, wrapping it around myself again, although it doesn’t do much to conceal my raging boner. “I’m leaving.”
“What the fuck?” Pixie glares at me. “Seriously? What, are you too good for me? For this? Just because you’re a fucking King?”
“Not in the slightest,” I assure her. “I just don’t want to fuck you.”
The look on her face is so startled that it almost makes me laugh as I grab my backpack and get the hell out of there.
It’s a long goddamn walk back to where my bike is parked. I get dressed outside, throwing my boxing shorts into my backpack and starting the long trudge. The pain in my side just intensifies as I walk, the brief high from the weed and dulling of the alcohol fading as I walk. But once I’m back at my bike, I’m still not ready to go home. Not ready to face everything waiting for me there.
I drive through town instead, enjoying the dark quiet of it, all the stores closed for the night, and no one out. There’s not much in the way of bars or clubs in Blackmoor, just the one pub that’s still open—if you want to party, you have to go a couple towns over. It’s tempting to go into the pub for a drink. People there will recognize me, ask questions about my bruised face and split knuckles, gossip about it afterward. I don’t want to deal with any of that. So instead, I just drive slowly through, the growl of my motorcycle filling the night air, and all I can think is how fucking out of place I feel here. I’d feel more at home if I belonged to the Devil’s Sons or one of the other biker gangs instead of one of the founding families.
That aching, itching feeling sweeps over me again, the desperate need to leave, to keep driving. And for a minute, I entertain the thought. Maybe no one would come after me; perhaps I could evade them if I did. But even as I picture myself continuing on, driving past the boundaries of Blackmoor and out onto the freedom of the highway, until I can’t drive anymore, maybe going all the way out to fucking California where there are palm trees and beaches and girls in bikinis, I know I can’t.
She’sholding me here. Both of them. A girl that I couldn’t save and the one that I still can’t, but that maybe I can help protect. If Dean gets too rough with her, if he throws her aside, if he doesn’t treat her right—I can keep an eye out. I’ll be his right hand after all, and I can help Athena in some way.
Leaving now feels like abandoning her.
Fuck.
None of this feels like it should belong to me, and none of it ever will. Nothing will ever belong to me, except the motorcycle I’m riding on and the few possessions I have that I care about, and I wish like hell that I could just take them and go. Take her and go.
I drive for as long as I can until my tank starts getting low and the ache in my ribs is too much to bear, and then I head back towards the manor house.
It, too, is dark and quiet when I walk in, helmet under my arm, unzipping my leather jacket as I go. I brace myself for the sounds of Dean fucking upstairs, the grunts and moaning that I’ve had to listen to just about every night now, but to my relief, there’s none of that when I reach the second floor.
I assume Athena is sleeping in Dean’s room, where he’s kept her for most of the last week, but instead, as I walk past her door, I hear the sound of soft snores when I pause in front of it. She’s in there, I realize, and my heart thumps in my chest as I turn towards it, placing my hand on the door as I tell myself not to do what I’m thinking about doing next.
Athena isn’t allowed to lock her door. It’s in the rules of that fucking contract they made her sign. So when I turn the knob, it gives easily, the door swinging open on well-greased hinges that don’t make a sound.
She’s in bed and fast asleep, curled onto her side with the blanket around her waist, revealing her shoulders and upper arms in the tank top that she sleeps in. I’ve never known what she slept in, I’ve never seen her in bed, and it feels like the sort of intimate knowledge that I shouldn’t be allowed to have.
What would happen if I crawled in bed with her right now? Would she wake up? And what would happen after that if she did? Would she be angry, pissed off that I came into her room and her bed without permission? Or would she turn sleepily into my arms, tilt her chin up for a kiss, arch that soft body against me and hook her leg over mine? I can imagine it so easily, the way I could nudge between her legs, slide into her without a thought, moving together in a slow, lazy motion as I held her in my arms.
Fuck.That’s not the way I should think about her. That’s romantic shit, loving relationship stuff, the kind of shit I used to do with Natalie. Not the way I should think about our pet—Dean’s pet now—a girl that I’m not allowed to love and that I can’t take for myself. Not without sacrificing every principle I have.
Athena is a weakness for all of us, I think, but especially for me. She challenges Dean’s sense of entitlement, she drives Cayde insane, and she makes me want things that I thought I’d stopped wanting, that I thought died a long time ago.
Somehow she’s found a chink in all of our armor, and that’s dangerous. She could bring each of us down in some way if she keeps trying.
I want her sometimes more than I think I want to breathe. But it would be better for all of us if she were gone.
I look down at her soft skin, her full lips slightly parted as she breathes, and I want to touch her so badly that it hurts. My cock is raging again, hard as stone and making my jeans uncomfortably tight. I think of what it would be like to have her suck it again, to feel her playing curiously with my piercing, struggling to take all of me in her mouth. I want to taste her again, hear her soft whimpers, make her come.
Gritting my teeth, I turn away from her, padding silently out of her room and back out into the hall. This isn’t a matter of who should have her anymore. The truth is that none of us should have her.
Athena should never have been the sacrifice.