#solely by top gun | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yeyinde · 5 days

Text

bos taurus | dogmeat series pt., i

mafia butcher Simon Riley x Reader

You don't question your brother when he sends you to drop off packages to his friends, but when the enforcer for the 141 shows up to teach the small-time dealer selling on their turf a lesson, you realize there are different ways to pay someone back with pounds of flesh.

(OR: your brother owes them, and Ghost is content to let you settle the debt. after all, if you wanted freedom, then you shouldn't have caught the eye of the butcher of the 141, should you?)

18+ SMUT. noncon. objectification. marking. kidnapping. threats of violence. unsafe sex (manipulation into unprotected sex). rough sex. size difference. breathplay. 10k of foreplay. light pussy slapping. overstimulation. mafia au.

SERIES MASTERLIST | AO3

The goal is to be as quick and discreet as possible.

In and out, he says, looping the baggie around his index finger. Inside, a snowfall of white powder settles at the bottom.

Meth this time. Oxytocin the last.

He ties it tight before giving the bag a quick shake, breaking up the clumps. Satisfied with the way it looks, he turns toward you. Levels you with a sombre look, the picture of a concerned older brother.

You almost fall for it. Believe it. But the clouded, flat edge to his gaze undercuts his worry for what it really is. A farce.

“And if it seems sketchy—”

—run.

But your knees are locked, soles glued to the pavement. You can't move even though everything is screaming at you to flee.

The problem, maybe, is that there's nowhere to go. Escape cut off, filled by a body, a man—even though the idea, the mere notion, of thinking this behemoth as human, flesh and bone; blood and tissue, is laughable when he's so clearly a beast. A monster.

He fills up your field of vision. Your line of sight was eclipsed by the thickness of his waist, the broad expanse of his shoulders. Thighs that are as wide as the trunk of a tree. Arms boxing you in. A prison of obsidian. A black shadow.

In the panic that surfaces, surging to the top like an oil spill, you catch a pocket where he doesn't root. A small alcove between the bend of his elbow and the slot of his knee perched against the wall. Enough room for you to—

“Wouldn't do tha’ if I were you.”

His voice seems to shake the earth, rolling out of his broad chest like the low, brassy roar of a lion; a rumbling thunderclap.

You feel sick—

The leather covering his hand is cold when it closes around your arm, grip tight. Bruising. Trapping you with just the slightest effort.

“Go’ a problem, you and I,” he starts, and it's almost conversational. Might be, perhaps, if the clean, sleek outline of his gun inside the unclasped holster around his ungodly thick waist wasn't threatening you more than the grip he has on your arm. “How do you reckon we can fix it?”

You have a meagre twenty dollars in your pocket. Less money for them to take if things go awry. If they decide that the little girl standing in for her older brother was an easier target to rob—money and drugs—than to settle things fairly. Money, goods. Hand over hand.

Just like the movies, he'd said.

Just like the movies, you think when he leans in closer, bulk swallowing you whole.

There is a pockmark in the corner of his crooked, misshapen nose and the crease of his eye. A scar, maybe. It's circular—almost perfectly so; a silver-pink moon on the angular ridge of his nose. Uneven, craggy, like crumpled printer paper.

It looks almost like—

You think of the mark on your arm. Soot-stained. The smell of burning hair, tissue. The searing pain.

“I–I can pay you—” you stammer out, tearing your gaze away from the ugly mark on his skin. A cigarette burn. It makes you shudder.

He cocks his head slowly like a big, dumb dog, but there's something eerie in the ink spill of his eyes. The soft matte of a saltwater crocodile staring at you from beneath the murk. Calculative. Hungry.

“Pay me?” He echoes slowly, dragging the words out mockingly. “D’you know ‘ow much trouble your brother is in? For sellin’ ‘ere of all places?”

“No,” you swallow. It feels like your heart is stuck inside your throat. “I–I just—”

“Run ‘is errands,” he finishes cruelly but you can't deny it. “Ain't you a good little sister? Almost makes me wish I ‘ad somethin’ as sweet as you f’myself growin’ up.”

You don't answer. He doesn't seem to be looking for one, really; just empty words to fill space. To echo in your head, barbed wire around any sense of comfort you might have felt. Punishing cruelty.

He has the upper hand, it says. He's the one who makes derisive jokes while you tremble in his grasp, and try to make yourself as small, as unassuming, as possible. Hiding from the predator in plain sight. Hoping he passes you over for something bigger, more calorie-dense; the effort to catch and consume you expends more energy than the return. Hardly worth it in the long run. The comfort of a risk-reward ratio, right?

But he's opportunistic, it seems. A snacking scavenger.

Could eat, it says, like a basking tiger keeping a mouse trapped between his paws, letting it squirm and squeak as he slowly licks his lips. Not enough to fill its belly but enough to satisfy the gluttonous urge a predator has to eat. Sharpening its teeth on flimsy bones. Child’s play.

It's a fitting image, especially with the way he arches over you, looms; fingers looped around the thick of your arm, holding firm, but not—

Not as tight as he could.

It's a loose-fisted grasp. Lazy, almost. He knows you won't run—or, at the very least, knows you won't get far.

You peel your gaze away from his, dropping it to the curve of his shoulders—the width of them is just as dizzying as his height; broad, muscular. Pulling it further down the length of his arm, covered in a thick jacket. Black corduroy. Ashes stain the cuffs. A bulky watch juts out from his wrist. Gold. Glinting even in the grey-blue gloom of an overcast evenfall.

His muscles tense. Hand tightening around your arm, fingers digging hard. Rubbing muscle painfully against bone.

A warning, maybe. Stop looking—

But something else catches your eye. Blood red. The colour of meat. A fresh kill.

The back of his hand has a blooming rose. Petals spread out, unfurled. In the middle, a milky skull sits. Stencilled in boxy, yellow letters is ONE-FOUR-ONE—

You know what it means even as your mind whirs, gears turning, turning; plummeting into a tailspin, making excuses as it falls, dragging your heart down alongside it. An area code. Some special date. An inside joke.

But you've seen the marking around town before. Heard whispers about them from your brother, his friends. 141, they say, and then: mafia.

The real deal, he said, puffing around a joint his friend rolled. It's too tight. He scoffs, and rips it out from between his lips. Shitty roll, man, make another one—

Mob. Mafia. Gangsters. It seemed so extreme, Hollywood. Fiction, fantasy, all rolled into one. Tony Soprano. Ralph Cifaretto. Michael and Vito Corleone. Tony Montana. Larger-than-life men created on paper.

You think your brother thought so too. Child's play. Grown men selling weed to kids for two hundred an ounce. Buying themselves sleek, black cars—G Wagons, Escalades, Cullinans—on the Xanax they sell at clubs, parties. Cocaine. Heroin.

Nothing to worry about.

Then his friend went missing.

Sent out on a routine delivery to drop off cocaine to well-dressed men in suits outside of a local butcher shop. A normal, nondescript Tuesday.

But he wouldn't answer his phone. Texts were being delivered, read, but no chat bubble appeared. Nothing sent back. Calls went straight to voicemail. He wasn't at home. Wasn't at his mum's. No one saw him. Heard from him.

Your brother didn't call the police. Didn't report him as missing.

It's just not what they do, he said. You don't involve them. Ever.

The most shocking part of it was that no one saw anything. He just vanished. Disappeared—stock an’ all, your brother angrily spits—without a trace, picked up off the streets.

If it was the police, someone would have said something by now. They're hardly discreet. And a rival—

Well.

The biggest problem was that your brother was blindsided by his own small-time success. An accumulation of little wins bolstered his confidence. Overfed his ego. This fallout was tunnel vision. A refusal to see the bigger picture.

Or the storm clouds looming on the horizon.

You'd heard of the 141 in passing. Little quips, anecdotes from the passel of friends that congregated around your brother—often getting high on the couch and watching old cartoons; sharing a joint back and forth between gossip.

Through rheumy eyes, they'd talk about the real gangsters in town—much to the irritation of your brother—and swap tales of run-ins and feats they heard from a friend (of a friend, of a friend). Most of the guys were known already. Soap and Gaz are the biggest names that cropped up on the streets through reputation alone. Both fighters for a gym. MMA, mostly, but whispers of street fighting and extracurricular activities weren't uncommon.

Liked the thrill of it, they said. But the worst was a man simply known as the Ghost. An enforcer for the 141—a fucking butcher, more like, Liam cut in, jaundiced eyes widening—the guy who took care of problems.

“Can't be,” your brother scoffed, lifting off the couch to reach in his back pocket for his wallet. A small anthill of white powder poured into the glass table. “They don't get involved in our shit—”

And for the most part, you're sure that's true. Dealing to the same circle of people—outreach spread through word of mouth—seemed paltry in comparison to the scale of an operation that had a money laundering gym. But the problem was that your brother lacked common sense. His ego often got in the way of foresight. The shadow greed casts blocking out the bigger picture.

Like—

Territory is territory—regardless of what's being pushed.

You wish there was a modicum of surprise when his friend turned up. Barely recognizable. Sent right to the morgue as a John Doe.

Most would see the marks on the man's skin—the distinct lack of blood—as an indicator to abandon ship, find the boss, beg for forgiveness, and maybe even try to strike up a deal. But—

That picture is hidden under his anger. Greed. Selfishness.

He sends you instead.

You're somethin’ they ain't expectin’, he said. Won't mess with you.

Right.

He catches the realisation dripping down your brow—beads of sweat gathering at your hairline; anxiety, fear, churning your stomach—and hums. Cocks his head to the side.

“Was expectin’ ‘im t’show up, though—” he murmurs, hand tightening around your arm. The pressure, the sting, is eclipsed by the gnawing sense of dread biting viciously into you. “Told ‘im if I caught ‘im sellin’ on our streets again, there'd be trouble. Thought we ‘ad an agreement after ‘is friend. But—”

His eyes cut to yours. It feels like a knife to your guts, sinking into soft tissue. A pain you can't breathe around.

Won't mess with you, you think, and then viciously—sadly—he knew. Was warned by them and still sent you out. Let you take his place for whatever comeuppance they decided he deserved.

It should shock you. You almost wish it did. Desperately clinging to the threads of surprise that slip through your oily fingers, grasping onto the nothing but empty air. Numbed to the resignation that trickles in.

Of course he would leave you here to save himself. Letting you fend off whatever they threw at you alone. Leaving you trapped between a brick wall and a wall of a man.

The excuses are there. They pool on the tip of your tongue—it isn't me, don't do this, it's my (stupid, selfish) brother you want, not me—but you swallow them down and try not to wince at how quickly they dissipate when you do. It doesn't matter in the end because whatever you have to say won't negate the drugs in your backpack. The empty house you'll lead them to—your brother probably squirrelled away somewhere until this blows over. Half-hopeful you'd call him and say everything is fine, the deal went smoothly. You're on your way back. Or that the debt he racked up with them is settled by you.

It's half-hearted when it slips out again, caught between resignation and dread. A brittle whisper. A prayer—

“I can pay you. Whatever he owes, I can—”

He's already shaking his head.

“Too late for that, birdie. ‘sides, I don't want your money.”

He moves back, rocking on his heels to put a small measure of distance between your bodies. In that scant space, he drops his gaze, sweeping it over you. His eyes darken.

When he pivots them down, catching yours, you can't stop the shiver that crawls up your spine.

That calculative gleam is back.

“But I think we can work something else out.”

Something else turns out to be ushering you into the backseat of an old Ford pickup.

The door whines when he opens it. Rust flaking off, falling to the ground by your feet. Your mind reels. Spins comparisons to falling snow, dried blood.

He hauls you in with his hand wrapped around the nape of your neck, thick thigh sliding between your own to boost you up. The protest—a mindless, reactionary squeal at being manhandled—only makes him chuff. A brief flex of his fingers around the skin of your neck is the only warning he gives before it pulls away, and wraps tight around your waist. His thigh flexes, muscle drawing taut as he shifts his foot up to the running board, lifting your feet off the ground and seating you fully on his leg like a child.

(In his hands, you feel like one, too.)

The motion makes you slip, back glueing along his broad chest with a shallow thump. You feel the rumble of his laugh trembling up your spine before you hear it.

“Careful,” he drawls, oiled with amusement. “Might slip.”

Anything you could say in response is choked back when he bumps the corded steel of his thigh into the seam of your legs, pushing tight to your clothed cunt. His intention is unmistakable this time. Unignorable. And with the rasp of filtered, balmy air against your crown; the pull of a groan when you rock back into his groin, the noise still slicked with mirth, you feel a knot of dread spool tight in your belly.

Something else is dragged back to the forefront, coiling like wisps of smoke around you.

And you knew. It's shocking, you think, but not necessarily a surprise. To call it a dichotomy would be lying to yourself, and so, you settle against it. This notion that what he wants—wanted—is flesh. Not money. Not retribution.

Not to talk things out like you'd hoped he’d try (grabbing onto the idealistic thread, holding it tight to your chest); bringing you in and forcing you to convince your—stupid selfish greedy—older brother that quitting was the only option. Dangling you—baby sister—over his head in an appeal to his emotions. Familial bonds. Love.

That thread is cut. Snipped.

Probably severed when they first came to him with an offer. No strikes against him and yet—

The idea of using you to make him bend was expunged from the drawing board. It's not even a plan b, or c, or z.

And—

You knew. Have known. Maybe that's why it's so easy to swallow around the panic when it lances through your chest, climbs up your throat. You can think and feel and breathe around this dagger in your back like it was there the whole time and you've only just noticed it now.

Nothing but a small, whispered oh in the roiling polyphony of your emotions.

It sits there as he manuevers you into the passenger seat of his truck, your head spinning around the indescribable sensation of being woefully cognisant despite the paralysing fugue pressing against the bubble of stark awareness that keeps it at bay. It manifests itself as a numbed sort of shock. Or more accurately—

Indifference.

Defeat.

His hand brushes your cheek, the snag of dry leather against humid skin tugs uncomfortably at your flesh, stinging as they dance down to your jaw, the delicate line of your vulnerable throat, skimming over the curve of your breast—

And it's too much. Too present. Too real.

Autopilot. Dissociation. Derealisation. All of these concepts slip past the bubble of hypervigilance, skidding the surface like a pebble thrown over a lake. Out of reach as he unashamedly gropes you, barely making an effort to mask his actions as just buckling you in.

You pretend, though. Curl your fists around the sides of the seat, fingers digging into the worn foam. Head lulling back on the headrest. Eyes fixed out the window as he walked around the front, head and shoulders still visible in the windshield despite the height of the truck. It makes your heart leap, stuttering in your chest as the absurdity of his size is brought back into focus. Too big, you think. Grossly so.

There's a moment when you think about running. Toying with the idea of sliding your hand over the lock, pulling the door open when he's too busy on his side to notice. It'll give you an advantage—a head start. Enough time to slink through the dense forest of concrete buildings lining the industrial zone, and into somewhere safe. Help, a behemoth is chasing me—

But the door clicks. Swings open with a squeal of rusted metal just as your fingers twitch toward the handle. Hope evaporates with each lurch of the cab as he climbs inside, metal creaking under his weight when he settles in the seat.

From the corner of your eye, you can see his head tip. Chin angling toward you. Staring. Assessing.

When he speaks, you feel the words like cold fingers dancing maliciously down your spine.

“‘pected you t’run.”

It's said idly enough. Nonchalant. Tone even, if a little cruel, and you wonder if this is some test. One that you passed—and failed—in equal measure.

He doesn't look away. It takes less effort than you wish it did to peel your lips apart, to breathe in the stale, mulch scent of the cab—something overgrown, rotting, and damp—and mumble:

Where would I go?

It seems to amuse him. He hums around a mouthful of mockery before turning away, pawing at the ignition. Gloved hand curling over the wheel.

“Smart girl.”

You don't feel very smart. In fact, you feel very small. Stupid. Maybe you should have taken a stab at it—running. Tried, at least, to save your own life before the jaws of the beast closed over you like an iron bear trap around your ankle. Fought like hell. Clawed and kicked and screamed.

When most kids read the back of a cereal box, you learned about secondary locations. You know better than this.

But the truck sputters to life in a belly-deep rumble, hacking up soot into the air as he pulls the lever into DRIVE. The fight inside of you—however ephemeral it might have been—dies inside the smoke spilling out of his exhaust. Gone so quickly that you begin to wonder if it was even there at all—

Must be, you think, eyes listing outward. Keen. Mapping the twists and turns—a futile effort in the end: he doesn't bother hiding where he's taking you, and you've been down these old, grim streets more times than you can count.

It doesn't surprise you much when he turns down the street leading to the butcher shop. An old relic that still carries the marks of a booming farming town before it fell victim to industrialisation. Concrete skyscrapers in place of lush cornfields. Warehouses over old barns, ranches. Cattle, meat, produce—it all used to be a mainstay here but now hides under layers of steel.

The dark windows of the small shop gleam with hazy smears of neon blue, red, when you pull up, catching on the array of rowdy bars across the street. All clubs that belong to the 141. A playground of drugs, sex. More money than you'd ever see in your lifetime.

It's an uncanny juxtaposition to the quiet, assuming street right across from it. Barber, butcher, accountant firm, antique store. All dark inside and bathed in the smeared stream of glimmering neon as lights flash in the fading glow of twilight.

He pulls up to the curb in front of the shop. A bold move if the streets weren't so empty. Lifeless. The clubs won't be open for four more hours. Everything else follows the same nine to five as the rest of the world. The shops closed an hour ago, and everyone in town seems to know not to linger here after dark.

The air seems to stagnate in your lungs when he cuts the ignition. Slips the key into his pocket.

“Don't get any funny ideas in tha' pretty little ‘ead o’yours.”

“Funny ideas,” you echo, toneless. Flat. It rolls out with your exhale. Words that might have been smarter to swallow down. “Like following a stranger to a butcher shop?”

“Lippy little thing, ain't you?” He scoffs. The truck creaks when he shifts. “Ain't go’ no one t’blame but yourself. Told you what would ‘appen if you kept sellin’ in our territory. You should ‘ave known better.”

“That was my brother.” The words slip out before you can stop them. “Not me—”

“‘ow am I suppose t’know that? You were sellin’ where I told ‘im not to—” he has the gall to shrug. Spit these careless words at you like it wasn't life or death. “That's all there is to it, birdie.”

“That's not fair—”

The truck groans under his weight, shaking from side to side as he leans over to push his door open before turning back to you, rolling his eyes.

“Life ain't very fair, is it?”

The acerbic words are flicked out from between his teeth; an apathetic, droning curl clinging to each syllable. He doesn't care. Won't. What happens to you next is your choice, and yours alone.

And he's just doing his job—

“When I get out of ‘ere, you ain't gonna do anythin’ funny—”

His hand lashes out. Gloved fingers close over the thick of your throat in a blink. Fear lags by a beat, giving him enough time to sink his fingers over your neck, and when it catches up—heart rabbiting in your chest, thudding in your ears; roaring as your pulse thunders beneath the press of his thumb—he’s already got you in his hold. The width forces your chin to lift, stretching up to accommodate the curl of his hand around you.

Trapped like a rabbit. Cattle to the slaughter.

He tilts his head down, keeping his eyes on yours as he forces your crown into the headrest, chin lifted up. It's uncomfortable. The curve of your neck cuts off your airways. Constricts your breathing to shallow gasps. An ache grows in your nape.

The swell of panic, fear, in your eyes makes him hum. But there's nothing echoing back. An absence of light in the deep, placid pits. It looks like still water. A stagnant lake.

It's unnerving how dispassionately expressive his eyes are. Wild, wild. Vats of ink. Pools of obsidian. Ringed in red-lined ivory. Long, ashen lashes dusting over the smears of charcoal under his eyes. Sleepless nights, maybe. Fatigue. The corners are tattooed with coal, leaving behind a thumbprint in the crease.

But empty. Barren. No light.

Like black holes. Eating everything around it. Devouring all that gets too close, but giving nothing in return except a bottomless crater in the bruised-plum nebulous of space around it.

You're not sure you like it. You can't look away.

But in staring back so hard (getting pulled in deeper and deeper), you catch the twitch in his left eye. A shallow spasm. It throws off the symmetry when he blinks, one eye a sliver of a second behind. Desynchronized in a way that seems so—

Unlike him.

Disjointed.

You blink in response. Perfectly synchronous.

His lid twitches again. Just once. Brief. Pale, pink eyelids drop, unveiling a nebula of indigo veins on the smooth, thin surface as they roll down to half-mast over his eyes, now narrowed slightly in contemplation. Thought.

Whatever is happening in his head can't be good. It causes a ripple over the lake. Little rings rebound outwards.

He looks away first. A quick slide of his eyes to the corners, glancing out of the passenger side window. Whatever catches his attention is unknown to you. The anchor on his hand around your throat keeps you still. Immovable.

(Every instinct in your body compels you not to look away from him because nothing outside could ever be scarier, more dangerous, than him.)

A second later, he breathes in through his nose. The fabric of his mask is pulled into his nostrils from the force, forming little black holes under the crooked arch.

You hadn't really given much thought to his appearance outside of big, massive. But there's a strange asymmetry to the slopes and valleys beneath the balaclava. Trying to map his face, fill in the blanks with just black cloth and vague, lopsided outlines, is impossible. There are too many gaps. Too many missing pieces. You can only wonder, then, what he looks like under it.

Monstrous, you hope.

It's just a coincidence that he looks at you the moment the thought passes, but you flinch like a naughty child getting caught doing something you shouldn't when the heavy, dour weight of his impenetrable stare is levelled at you once more. Your heart stutters. It's loud in your ears. In the truck.

You wonder if he can hear it just as loudly as you do—

Another blink, and his gaze flickers down, settling on the gap between your lips, watching the little tremble they make with each shallow hiccup of air you greedily suck in. His head tilts to the side, eyes never leaving your mouth even as he leans down, masked lips brushing over the beading sweat gathering on your hairline.

It's a brief touch. A taste. You tremble when he pulls back, fingers tightening around your flesh.

His eyes are lavascapes.

“Are you, birdie?”

You almost forget what he's asking. The conversation hidden between the scant beats it took for him to measure your worth with the blistering intensity of his stare, and the tumult of your feelings still looping around each other in your belly. Knotting up tight into a ball. There's fear, of course there is.

But the rest—

You'd rather not think about.

The grip on your throat eases just enough for you to shake your head no to whatever he is asking. Doing anything funny, you think, scrambling at the tangle of memories flipping past, trying to connect the pieces to a puzzle you've already forgotten.

It must be the right response. Or maybe it's another question like before, a test where there’s no right answer.

Run, stay.

Smart and stupid.

But it seems to appease him—marginally. His eyes crease. Tightening. His other hand folds over your throat, sliding until his palms kiss the sides of your neck in a near-perfect symmetry.

Something frissons across the blank, placid lake of his expression. Another ripple. A shudder. He leans in for a moment, nose touching the apple of your cheek, and when he breathes in, it’s sharp, reedy. Cold air ghosts over your skin. Long, pale lashes flutter when you swallow.

He hums quietly under his breath before peeling back. The flatness to his gaze is back; a cold, impenetrable distance widening like a chasm as he uncoils around you. You almost fall for this—this indifference. An icy nonchalance. But you've been eating the minuscule quirks of him just as ravenously as he's been devouring yours.

There is something there. A fracture, maybe. A splinter.

But what leaks through from the other side isn't anything close to warmth. It's—

Hunger.

The shift in your throat draws his molten gaze to your neck, still wrapped tight in his firm grip. Your reflection blooms in the vat of black; eyes wide, all white. Pupils narrowed to a pinprick. Mouth slack, corners tugging downward from the pressure of his hand. The tilt of your head. His thumbs press under your chin, pushing you back further until it feels like your neck might break—

He stops. Shifts. You puff out a shallow breath.

What looks back at you is unremarkable in the murk. A sliver of fear. A slip of unease.

Eye of the beholder, you think when his breath chuffs out shallowly through the mask. When that hunger is ground down to a raw, esoteric fissure hairlining the black of his eyes. The widening expanse of his pupil.

You wonder if it's your fear that itches under his skin, dredging up something predatory in his hindbrain. The urge to chase. To bite.

But the nearly indiscernible flicker of his gaze has you brushing that idea aside when it snags on the expanse of his hand coiled around your throat. Easily swallowing it whole with just his palms.

You're not a small thing, but the indomitable size of him makes you feel insignificant.

You think he feels it, too.

His fingers flex over your nape, stretching. Pulling. It pushes the flat of his palm into your throat, ridges crushed against your trachea. But you can still breathe. It's shallow. Hoarse. A touch painful. Dizzying in a way that makes you feel like you're on a rollercoaster. A teacup ride that just spins and spins and spins—

The gap closes. A sliver of air snakes down your throat. Muscles flexing, shifting. Struggling to swallow around the pinch of his hand. A harrowing task when you feel the gloved fingers link to the first, then the second knuckle, tying together in a too-tight, impossible, noose around your neck. Thumbs overlap. Fingers slide into place. It forms a chain of his hands with no gaps between them. Not a single sliver of skin shows from under the leather of his gloves.

He makes a sound when they meet—a nasal groan in the back of his throat, mouth clenched shut so the air has no choice but to tear through his nose. It's raw. Fractured. The devastating moan of a tiger nuzzling at its meal.

Your vision blurs. A black fog presses into the edges, seeping over the arch of your peripherals. Dripping down slowly over the hazy smear of the man. The way the ochre sun peeks over the angular roof of the accountant's office illuminates his back and casts swaths of shadows over his front. Drenching him in murk.

Despite the flickering darkness shuttering over your sight, you don't blink. Even as the tears prickle at your eyes, they stay open. Fixed on him. Black holes, you think, watching as the fever marbling those obsidian pools recedes. Cools.

He makes that noise again. Softer this time. A purr from deep in his chest. A breath. And then he peels back. His hands go slack. His shoulders slumping back into the lax, easy spread from before as you gasp hard, nearly choking on the flood of air that roars down your throat.

Your cheeks feel hot for a moment, and then cold. Icy. You don't have to touch them to know that you're crying. That the deluge clinging to your lashline spilt over, dripping messily to the collar of your shirt.

The placid lake is back. In the stillness, you heave. Mouth hanging open, chin quivering. His thumb lifts, slides over the curve of your chin. You don't feel it. Numbed, maybe, by the brief kiss of hypoxia. But you see it. Watch as he slides it up to the jut of your lower lip, the black, angular tip tickling over your skin. He follows the seam between skin and lip, tracing it to the corner of your mouth. It's slick. Drool pools in the crease, dribbles over the top of his finger. His eyes drop when he mops it up, catching it on the pad.

He makes another noise. An arid rasp bubbling between the soft tissue behind the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue. It's ugly. The shiver you try to fight back slinks through.

His hand peels away from your neck, movements lax. Slow. The unwinding gait of an idling tiger in no real rush, no hurry, because there's nothing in the frigid Arctic that can touch him.

You watch him with flared eyes as he brings his thumb to his clothed mouth, and rubs your spit into the fabric of his mask.

His eyes don't break away from yours once.

Your spit doesn't stand out against the black of balaclava, but the idea of it burns through you. Throwing you headfirst into a dazed stupor. Dizzy. Confused.

Satisfied with whatever it was supposed to mean, he clambers out of the truck before coming around to your side. Distantly, you're sure this is what he meant by funny ideas when he passes the headlight, head straight and eyes gliding around the empty street. An opening to run. You know where you are. It would be easy to flee. Hide in the construction zone just ahead, tucking yourself into the tightest corner you can find until help arrives.

Help, though.

Officer, please. I got caught selling meth in the mob's territory and now they're going to skin me alive. Please hurry—

Right.

They'd rather help bury your body than get in the way of the mafia. Gangland violence isn't their concern unless it tumbles out into the street. Fat wallets keep even the most compassionate person quiet. Willing to turn a blind eye.

You'd be thrown in a cell. Or dropped off at their doorstep.

Either way—

You won't be coming back alive.

There's nothing to steel, harden, when he pulls the door open, your nerves long since ground down to fine powder. Nothing to fight against, either. He hauls you out of the truck, hands firm on your skin. Bursting blood vessels easily between his fingers. Barely any effort at all to crack your bones.

The moment in the car seems miles away when he pulls you in front of him, hand curling over your nape. Any flicker of humanity rendered out when he pinches you tight and shoves you forward. Dragging you back to the butcher shop by the scruff of your neck, leading you down a narrow set of stairs to the basement where pale white carcasses hang from hooks on the ceiling. He laughs when you tense. When your heels dig into the brown-stained linoleum.

Ain't gonna hang you, he mocks, fingers dipping punishingly into the sides of your neck. “Not yet, anyway—”

It brings little comfort when he drags you to a room in the back, kicking open the door with the toe of his boot before pushing you inside with a nudge against your nape.

It's dark. Walls covered in stains; mould, mildew. Something you hope is just rust. A single mattress is shoved into the corner; sheets stained with sweat and grime. Tinged a pale brown. Two pillows sit at the top, lopsided and matted with use. Threadbare. A twisted, black heap of fabric sits at the bottom. Wisps of cotton poke out from the cigarette burns.

A pair of muddy, black boots sit against the wall at the end of the bed. A basket of clothes—jeans, black shirts, black sweaters—is piled on the wall across from the door.

The room smells of stale sweat and old cigarettes.

You don't want to be here. The thought is abrupt. Immediate. Unease prickles along your nape, warmed and damp under his gloved palm. Between the look of the room—the floors stained the same suspicious brown, the rumpled bed in a corner—and the smell, you know this is not a place you want to stay. To be trapped inside with a man cut from Everest; whose hands are more dangerous than the sharp end of a knife.

He must feel the tension brimming beneath your skin; the spark of adrenaline surging through your veins. The clamp of his hand on your nape digs in tighter. Holding firm.

A breath tumbles out, thickening with mockery. “Like I said,” he leans down, pressing the mountainous width of his chest into your spine. The accentuation in your size difference, how big he is in comparison to you, makes you feel like prey. Small. Brittle, thin. He eats you whole. Spares nothing for later. “I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

Another nudge and you're pushed further into the room. He leans away, foot shoving back on the door until it snaps shut with a noise that cuts through the gossamer that spun around you, bifurcating reality from dream. The haze is wafted away, and all that remains is a barren room with a lumpy mattress, the smeared stain of rotten blood coagulating on the floor, and his body boxing you in. No escape.

The rumble of his chest shakes loose the cobwebs spooling across your thoughts. A brush of humid air ghosts along the line of your jaw, dampening the skin below your ear as he leans in close, too close, and purrs:

“Go on now. Strip for me.”

Each scrap of clothing you slowly roll off of your body is exchanged for a slip of information about him—who he is (Simon Riley, the name rumbled through the split between his teeth; a low, brassy purr as his eyes gleam in the dark, drilling into the expanse of skin unveiled to him)—and what he wants—

Nothing, he tells you, lifting one massive shoulder up in a half-hearted shrug. Jus’ what's owed to me, pet. For stickin’ my neck out f’you.

You don't think he did. Not really. But you're harshly reminded of the unsubtle threat. The gun balanced on his massive thigh. So wide, so big, it seems to make it look smaller in comparison. Tiny. A toy.

Child's play.

It's made worse, somehow, as he lounges. Sprawls out on the bed, legs spread, pulling taut on the jeans that stretch around the thickness of his upper thigh, bunching around his calves in a half-tuck inside his black boots. Arms flexing. Folded over his broad chest. He rolled the sleeves of his black shirt up to his elbow, showing off an impressive tapestry of harsh, faded black ink. Crisscrossing lines. All asymmetrical. Guns, barbed wire. A bullet with a wide, toothy grin—

All of it knits together; woven into a tangled mass of muscle. Of man, hidden under scar tissue. Rope burns on his wrists cut so deep that the skin is permanently dented in. More cigarette burns hidden inside the mess of ink. Jagged lines—from a knife, maybe; bullet wounds.

His skin tells stories of a terrible life. Ink spills over the worst of them, but they're visible under the fading charcoal. A series of burns—acid, fire, chemical—and raw, torn skin. He looks like he's been mauled. Pressed into the cold metal of a wood chipper until chunks of flesh were taken out. But even with these deep gouges, craters of missing tissue, he's big. Bulky. Soft—like a tiger. Predatory muscle tucked away under a thick layer of fatty tissue.

The pillowed pouch of his belly, the softness around his biceps—

It belies the danger underneath. The steel.

But as scary as it is, it has nothing on his eyes.

Glinting in the dim room. Dark pools of obsidian that follow each movement with an almost clinical keenness. Sharpened to a razor's edge.

They might be pretty, you think, if they weren't so intense. So liquid. His eyes gleam like wet ink, languidly rolling along his lashline as you clumsily shed your jacket, your blouse. Shoes, socks. Pants. Until you're in nothing but your panties.

Swallowing around the influx of panic that flutters like little birds beating their wings against the soft walls of your throat, you slip your fingers into the hem, now or never, and—

And you hesitate.

There's a difference between undressing willingly and doing so to save your life. It should spurn you on—survive, survive, survive—but you freeze at the apex. The summit is within reach.

You know what happens when you climb it. Cross over the invisible threshold.

What you've been trying to ignore this whole time, ever since he shoved you into the room with a huff, taking his perch on the edge of the bed, legs spread wide, but in such a terrifying state of vulnerability, nearly nude, you can't any longer. Can't avert your gaze to the stained linoleum in a thinly veiled effort to keep from glancing at the thickening bulge lying prone against his thigh.

His—

Well.

You knew what he wanted when he grabbed your face in his hand, squeezing your cheeks until your lips pursed, puckered for him to run his finger along the inseam. Prying your teeth apart. Rubbing his finger over your tongue, eyes dark—full; black holes pulling, tugging you in, dragging you closer to the event horizon framed in a ring of arsenic—and locked on to the sight of his gloved knuckle disappearing into your mouth. Wanting. Hungry.

You knew. And now—

Committing to it is legions above what you’re mentally prepared for. Nausea brims, churns your stomach. Unease curdling inside of you like rotten milk.

You don’t want this. But you don’t have a choice, do you?

That notion, the idea, prickles along your nape, raising the fine, peach-fuzz there until it stands on end.

You freeze. Movements still as every muscle in your body tenses. Coils. You can't do it. Can't—

A huff is dragged out of his chest as he sits up, knocking the gun carelessly to the mattress. His eyes daggering, sharpening into needlepoints, as he stares at you.

“Gotta do everything f’myself, do I?”

A grunt and he’s up. Pulling himself to his feet with nothing but the flex of his abdominal muscles.

There's no reprieve. Not a moment graced to gather your bearings before he crosses the distance between you. Once a comfort, a chasm, now conquered in a single stride.

The tips of his gloves are cold when they brush over your skin, sliding down the slope of your waist until they meet the hem of your panties. The last piece of modesty you have—

But he doesn't wait.

You're aware that this isn't a non-consensual thriller where the lead looms over the hapless love interest, eyes blazing with passion and need. That each interaction is drenched in a thick, palpable tension tethering the two together. Urges coalescing. Threads pulling taut, magnetic, dragging them closer and closer to the brink until they tumble over.

This is reality. And he doesn't stare into your eyes with an all-consuming desire as he slowly removes that last scrap of fabric keeping him from devouring you. No.

His skin-warmed fingers push under the elastic band with a rough shove, curling into the fabric until it tightens across your pelvis and thighs, and then he huffs, annoyed, and pulls. Pulls—

Until something gives.

The lace yields to the tension in his flexing bicep, and scrapes over your skin as it rips apart in his hand, threads snapping. Popping.

It hurts. Stings. You hiss, but the noise is ignored when he peels the ruined scrap of fabric from your legs, shoving it into his back pocket with a grunt of satisfaction. He looks back to you, eyes rippling like the dark, ink-black surface of a lake during nightfall, and coos, mocking and mean—

“Not s’hard, was it?”

He leans closer to you, a hand skimming up your spine before his fingers curl around your nape, keeping you still for just a breath before he pulls you into him with too much force. Your hands lift, palms slapping against his thick stomach when the movement nearly topples you over and threatens to break your nose on his chest.

“Makin’ me do all the work when y’supposed t’be payin’ me back? Ain't very nice o’you, is it?”

He touches you like he's taking stock of your worth. Grabbing a heavy, rough palmful of your beast in his hand, squeezing. Testing the weight, the softness, how supple you were between his fingers like he might with a piece of fruit. Meat. Prodding into the flesh, feeling the ripeness there. Gauging whether or not it was a piece he wanted to keep.

It's demeaning. Humiliating. He treats you like cattle; presses into the elasticity of your muscle, examines every inch of your skin for blemishes. Scouring for imperfections. There's no softness in the way he grabs handfuls of your body—squeezing your breasts, pushing them together, rolling your nipples between his thumb and forefinger; pinching your belly, your sides, your waist; curling his fingers under your thigh, lifting it until it hitches over his waist, cunt exposed and pressed tight to the bulge trapped in his jeans. Your ass is handled rougher than the rest. Each cheek sitting in a hand, squeezed and punched and spread embarrassingly wide.

He ruts into you as he does it. Pushes the thick, fat length of him into your belly, rolling his hips against you with a heavy, ragged puff of air.

He feels big.

Everywhere, of course—it’s not so much his height, but the absurd width of him that really digs into your hindbrain, crossing all those intricate wires until they're tangled up, knotted together. Seeing his thigh, the same scale as a tree truck, slotting between yours—a mere branch by comparison—makes your belly flop. Turn over itself.

The muddled wires spark. Heat pools between your hips.

He could crush your head between them like a bear pushing its paw down on a watermelon.

It's fear and heat.

The two work in tandem, forming a seamless cohesion, as they flit down your spine, brimming up the urge to sink to your knees, the need to roll over and show your belly. A paradoxical desire to both run and be chased.

You're not sure if he's tendering your meat to eat later or if this is the usual type of foreplay he engages in, but once satisfied you're softened up enough for him, he shoves his fingers between your thighs with an abrasive hum that reverberates through his belly, tickling your palms.

“Tired o’waitin’,” is what he says when your head jerks up, eyes widening in shock. Terror. Horror. “Don't look so surprised,” he huffs, dryly. Voice a rough scrap over your cheek. “What'd y’think was gonna ‘appen?”

“Wait—” but he doesn't.

His fingers twist, pushing through your folds to graze your clit. It isn't gentle. It's sudden, quick. You gasp more from shock than pleasure; the rough slide of leather feels strange on your flesh, and your head is too muddled to separate fear from bliss.

Despite that, your body heats. Reacts to his touch. Your lower lip wobbles. You bite back another sound that crawls up your throat when his knuckle catches on your clit again, the pressure just shy of too much.

The burn, the fever, melts the unease. Shallow gasps spill out. Your cunt clenches, fluttering around nothing—throbbing, growing sticky, slick; achy and empty—when he starts to glide his digit between your folds. Little sawing motions drag each groove and stitch of his gloves over your pebbled clit, each thrust of his hand between your thighs making heat pool between your hips. It's done so clinically, so detached, like his hand rubbing over your leaking pussy was nothing to him. An action to get done, a task to complete.

It's the shame of that, the embarrassment, that makes you want to weep. Your fingers dig into his chest, nails pulling uncomfortably on the pleated bumps of his jacket as you grip the fabric right between your fists, clinging to him like a newborn fawn—all wet-nosed, teary-eyed; knobbly knees threatening to buck.

“S–stop—” you mewl when the monotonous rhythm melts into something harder, more intense. Heart thudding in your chest, heat burning you up as he turns his hand, palm up, between your sticky, shaking thighs. He rubs his hand back and forth, curling his middle finger up when he passes your hole, tip pushing against your leaking rim.

The friction aches. The stretch stings. The leather feels strange, foreign when it pries your folds apart and dips inside of you.

You don't like it. It's too much—

He makes a sound—a tut—when you pull away from him, standing on the tips of your toes until the blunt curve of his finger slides out of you. He sucks his teeth in a mockery of disappointment before digging his fingers, hard, into the sides of your neck. A warning. You whine. Whimper—

It goes unheeded. And when you press your thighs tight together, shivering at the slip-slide of your skin rubbing against each other, he growls. The noise is inhuman. Animalistic.

Your act of deviance comes with a swift, bruising punishment.

His fingers tighten on your neck once again. A warning squeeze as he reaches down with his other hand, grabbing your hip. It keeps you still, immobile, as he bullies his boot between your feet, kicking your legs apart. You're not expecting it. When you stumble, he huffs in amusement. Can't hold yourself up? Want me that bad, huh? Needy fuckin' thing, ain't you?

You don't get a chance to respond. His palm splays wide over your hip, leather creaking as he flexes, stretching his fingers out, tapping some soundless beat out against your skin. Touching you like he's owed the privilege. The right. And in many ways—

Go’ a problem, you an’ I

—he does.

Brute strength, and an unmatched, almost laughable, dearth in your physicality ensures that he has the upper hand—even without the gun he left on the mattress; darker and flat, a full matte compared to what you were expecting.

(They're always so shiny in movies, aren't they?)

The threat of it—dull as it might be—roots you to the spot as he slides his hand down, thumb brushing over your belly button, dipping in; pressing until your stomach starts to ache—

It peels away when the whine wells up, sloping down, down. Teases your mound with the tips of his fingers, gentle swipes along the sensitive seam of your belly and pelvis, the sensation is an odd tickle that pulls at your navel, pulses at the apex of your thighs. You mewl—a slow, soft thing that barely makes it out from between your teeth—and he lets his hand drop. Palm flat against the soft flesh of your mons, fingers reaching, spreading, until they curl over your folds. Index and ring finger tucked tight into the hollow bend of your pelvis and thigh. The tip of his middle rubs gentle strokes over the skin above your clit. It's a whisper of pleasure. The idea of a touch.

Mindless, your hips flit, following his hand—

“Needy.”

It cows you. Douses you in icy shame. There's barely any mockery in his even, observant tone, but you feel it unfurl over your shoulders all the same.

He doesn't give you a moment to think, to let the ripples of humiliation take over, forcing you to pull away, hide. His fingers trail over your hood, the pebble of your clit. The sensation, the cool undertone in the leather of his glove, is unlike anything you'd felt before. The thick stitches in the fabric catch on your flesh, nerve endings flaring in pleasure. Heat blooms in your belly.

It feels good.

You gasp, head tipping back. His hand winds around your waist when your knees buckle, catching you with a rasping huff—

“Feelin’ good, ain't you?” He pulls you tight to his chest, finger rubbing circles around your throbbing clit. Your cunt clenches, empty, and you whine, needing something more. Something to fill the ache inside of you—

His finger slips. Slides easily between your folds, parting your lips around the thick of him until he reaches your drenched hole. The sounds it makes when he taps his finger against your fluttering core makes your toes curl. Has heat blistering over your cheeks, down the slope of your neck.

It makes him groan. The low growl makes you throb, clenching in needy little pulls, pulses, as his finger dips into the slick dripping out of you.

“Suckin’ me in,” he grunts, and pushes his finger inside, thrusting up to the last knuckle. Palm tapping against your folds as his index and ring finger close to give him more room to sink deeper into you. The messy, slick squelch is loud, rolling over the mewling gasps that tumble from your lips.

Heat floods your belly at the belly-deep groans he lets out when you squeeze around him.

“Stranglin’ my fuckin’ finger, birdie—”

He leans down, knocking his forehead against the side of your face. It's more intimate than you were expecting. Jarring. The proximity plays a twisted game inside your head—the urge to run, to roll over coalescing into a paralyzing tailspin. Rooting you to the ground when the warm, damp knit of his mask grazes your cheek.

The intimacy of his head on yours is eclipsed when you can feel the shape of his mouth through the fabric.

It's softer than you expected. A plush, fleshy give when he presses his lips against your skin. And—

A gap.

On the side of his mouth, there's a gouge. A pockmark. You feel the gap, the absence, of his flesh when he rolls it over your cheekbone. You try to read the asymmetry of his face—mapping all of these misshapen parts; his mauled lips, the crooked nose that digs into your skin and leaves behind a tacky smear of condescension when he breathes out through his nostrils in a heavy puff of air—and convince yourself that you're doing it so you can bring these patchwork pieces to the police later.

Survival, you think, your head tilting back as he noses down your neck, tickling along your skin.

(And when your cunt flutters around the rough, thick drag of his finger petting along your walls, you add: a bodily reaction. That's all it is.)

He takes another lungful of your scent before he rocks back on his heels, pulling away from you. Straightening up. Looming above you once more.

“Now—”

He pulls his finger out of you slowly and you try not to whimper at the empty feeling that brims up. The way your hips rock toward him, seeking and eager. Wanting.

Needy, just like he said.

Just a bodily reaction—

He holds his hand up to the dim light flickering over his head, fingers spreading apart as he takes in the glossy shine of his middle finger.

The gleam of it makes your ears feel hot. Shame pools in your belly as he makes another noise—a groan, deep and low, in the back of his throat. Eyes darkening as his pupils bloom, eclipsing his irises in an endless pool of black. They flicker toward you, listing half-mast in a way to leonine, so predatory, that it shudders through your bones. Run, run—

His hand flexes around your waist when you twitch. A warning. A threat. You tremble when he leans in, masked lips brushing over your cheek once more. Breath ghosting through the fabric, tickling the inside of your ear.

He smells of war. Of fire and brimstone. Napalm and nitroglycerine. You want to close your eyes, look away, but you can't. His proximity alone roots you to the spot. Turns you into a prey animal, frozen on instinct alone as he prowls around, creeping closer. Maw stretching wide, drooling dripping off razor-sharp canines—

“Let's see if y’worth all the trouble.”

—and he bites.

Knocks his palm into your sternum, roughly shoving you down on the mattress.

His hands fall to the button of his jeans. “Ready?” He asks, but doesn't seem to care about your answer. Opts, instead, to fall to his knee beside you. It pulls on his zipper, tugs it all the way down with a sharp, metallic sound that cuts through the stagnant air as each ring of teeth is pried apart.

You can't help it. You look. Dragged there by something primal, magnetic—the morbid curiosity to see the monster for yourself as it tries to take a bite.

And almost immediately, you wish you hadn't.

The spread of pale skin, dark curls jutting out from the split of his jeans, makes everything feel more real, and moving fast. Whiplash quick. Happening in a blink:

The shift of fabric as he pulls the mask up over his lips, letting rest on the crooked bridge of his nose. A flash of his mouth, mangled. Mauled. Full of ugly, pale pink scars. A gap where tissue once knit his upper lip together. The bite of crooked teeth as he brings the sticky, wet tip of his glove to his mouth, sinking in. Pulling. Tugging. The roll of skin—a rose, a gun, a skull—all encased in barbed wire; thick rivers of blue-green veins.

Another pull and it's free. Dangling between his teeth for a moment as he reaches up and shoves the jacket off his shoulders. Rolling and thick. Wide. A broad chest. Soft belly. There's an inch of flesh around the expanse of him—biceps, thighs, calves, chest, stomach, shoulders—but it's a buffer for the corded, streamlined muscle beneath. A layer of fatty tissue.

Like a tiger, hiding its dizzying musculature beneath a thick, loose pelt.

When he moves, it flexes. His shoulders roll; muscles bunching together, pulling taut under soft skin. The jacket slides off. Falls to the ground behind the mattress. Forgotten, discarded. The glove is next to go. Dropping from between his teeth, landing just beside your ankle with a muted thud.

He follows after it. Ink spilling over his lashline as his eyes drop, staring at the roll of his skin tucked on the outside of your thigh. Trailing up to your knee. Your hip. The split of your cunt beneath your other leg; knee tucked to your chest.

A flash of something, a flicker, is the only warning you get before the back of his hand is nudging the glove off of your skin, replacing it with the rough, calloused grip of his palm.

You jerk at his touch, flinching back—

He's intimidating above you like this. Leaning back on his haunches but still as tall as you are standing up. The sheer absurdity of his height—his width—is dizzying. Gives you vertigo when you look up.

His throat shifts when you move. A swallow. Coarse stubble grows down the column of his neck, dusting over his lower jaw, chin. The rest is swallowed by the balaclava bunched around his crooked nose.

He's not—

He's not handsome.

A smattering of crisscrossing scars, burns, skin pocked and gouged out in deep pockets along his flesh—the slide of a knife carving away at him, you think; digging down to his marrow—all take away from any sense of modern attractiveness you might feel for him with his broad, jagged nose and full lips.

But there's something rugged about him. Untamed. Wild. Appealing in a dangerous way.

You don't know if you would have let this happen under different circumstances. If this minacious beauty of his would have worked on you enough to want it outside of this awful, almost unfathomable trade.

He's too big. Wouldn't even fit inside of your house—

The graze of his thumb on your angle knocks the thought loose, and you're dragged back to the heat of his hand. Rough and coarse; palms slightly damp from the glove. It tugs on your flesh as he draws it up, a rubbery sort of pain as it catches on the soft, dry skin of your ankle. Your shin.

He follows behind a second later, pulling himself into the mattress with a huff, knees shuffling forward as he crawls over you. The jostling rocks your body. Makes your breasts shake as he lumbers on the bed, hand still sliding up, up, until his fingers curl over the bend of your knee.

The bed dips under his weight. Your body sagging, rolling into the divot beneath his knees. Tucked under him. Loomed over. He stares down at you through the cutout of his mask, eyes liquid in the gloam. Pools of melting, dripping obsidian. Black holes. Event horizon—

You look away before it drags you in. Submissive. Softened under the harsh burn of his flat, wide stare. He chuffs when your nose brushes over the thin skin of his wrist, mouth sliding over the thick, pulsing vein stretching down from his inner arm and curling into the bend of his hand. Your lips purse, and he makes that noise again.

Quietly amused, and—

He shuffles forward until the backs of your thighs are pulled over his, spread out on his lap. Bare. Open to him.

And he looks.

And looks.

Hungry, you think. Quietly amused and hungry—

The notion is wrenched out of your head when he shifts his weight. Watches the folds of your pussy open for him as he pulls your knees wider apart, head dropping between his massive shoulders, gaze drilling into the split of your thighs. Gasping at the sting, the sudden stretch, does little to deter him from shoving your leg down until the outside of your knee touches the bed. Muscles straining. Pinching. It hurts; hipbones twinging in agony.

But the embarrassment burning through you singes all the pain.

You're spread open under him. Bare. Legs tangled around his waist, stretched wide around the width of him. Ankles knocking into the hard plains of his lower back each time he shifts.

“Fuckin’ hell—” he grunts. Snarls. The word ripped up from the back of his throat, forced through the twisting channels of his nose. Nasal and ugly when it scrapes out between his teeth. “Gonna ruin this pretty pussy, birdie.”

It's a threat. A promise. You twist, mouthing your protests into the warm skin of his wrist.

There's something about his voice—that airy, brassy tone—that strikes a chord deep inside you. Makes heat pool between your thighs, leaking out in a syrupy mess—

His hand peels away from your knee, sliding down your sticky, damp inner thigh until his knuckles graze the sensitive slip of skin sitting between your outer lip and hip. That ticklish, belly-fluttering sensation blooms in your groin as he rubs his scarred knuckles over the crease, catching the slick gathered there on his thick, meaty thumb.

“Fuckin’ soaked,” he groans, shifting his fingers until they cover the whole of your cunt, cradling you in his hand. He holds you like that for a beat, eyes locked on the way you're swallowed up by the broad stretch of his palm.

The rough drag of his skin over your folds feels good. An all-encompassing heat spreads over your tender flesh from the curve of your ass to the bump of your mons where his middle finger rests, almost touching the strip of skin between your loins and your belly. Held in his grasp. Cradled in his palm.

Your thighs twitch. A shallow jerk as your knees try to bend over his hand, but you can't. With his thumb and pinkie tucking into each crease between your outer lip and leg, it keeps you from closing your legs. Hinged by the wide, flat cup of his palm.

And it shouldn't bludgeon through you the way it does. All heat. All want. Need. A growing ache you can't think around.

(bodily reaction, you think even as the image of his hand—big with thick fingers, scarred knuckles; streaks of faded, ashy ink etched into milky, veined skin—laying over your pussy, swallowing it whole, sears into your mind—)

“Can feel your little cunt,” he grunts, feeling the pulse, the little throbbing pulls of your muscles as they twitch at the sight. The feeling. Clenching down around nothing. “Greedy little thing, ain't you, birdie?”

Anger paints his words as he rasps them out. A teeth gnashing, jaw clenching frustration that needles into the scorn, the fury, forced out between the tight seam of his crooked teeth.

You don't understand it. Can't, maybe.

But it's tucked away as quickly as it appeared, shifting into an ugly, mocking derision. Dry. Acerbic. His teeth flash, lip pulling upward in a sneer—a snarl—before he hums, sliding his hand down. The drag of his damp, rough fingers over your swollen folds has your knees falling open wider around his thick thighs, baring yourself willingly to him.

Want it bad, don't you? He mocks, and the sound of his voice alone has your pussy clenching tight, belly fluttering around the abrasive scrape of his tone. Brassy and full. Gritty. You whine, hips inching up—

His hand peels off of your slit. The rush of cold air drags another whimper out of you, hips pushing up to chase the heady, molten feeling of his skin on yours. And he's amused by it—a laugh echoes out, crackling in the hollow of his throat at your desperation—but you're too achy, too hot, to feel the simmer of humiliation nipping the apples of your cheeks.

He's not even making a real effort to pleasure you, to make you feel good, and yet—

Your hips twitch toward him in needy, mewling cants; please sits on the tip of your tongue, cradled between your teeth. Slips out on a shaky, breathless gasp when he meets you on the next buck of your hips, palm slapping over your wet slit.

The crack echoes through the room. Rough, dry skin on soaked flesh.

And it shocks you more than it hurts. The sting is there, of course, but it's just an afterthought to astonishment. An eye-widening disbelief masking the way your cunt smarts, throbbing from the slap. Nerves muffled behind the burn in your eyes, the searing heat pooling in your sinuses.

Wrenched open, unblinking as you stare up at him, your eyes begin to sting, to water. You blink, and feel something hot trickle down your cheek. A tear. His eyes snap to it. Pupils narrowing to a pinprick as he watches it slide down your face, little droplets clinging to your jaw.

“Poor baby,” he mocks, tilting his head as he tracks the teardrop. “Better behave.”

Behave. Like he's admonishing a child and not an adult.

It morphs; rots. Becomes yet another thing you shouldn't feel feverish over. The slick, sticky feeling grows between your thighs as your cunt flutters at the humiliation of it all.

And deeper—maybe—the bastardized sense of care—

(Punishment is affection in its own, special (awful) way and you've been aching for something just like it, haven't you—)

It's pushed down. Swallowed. And you know in the back of your head that if you keep eating these feelings, you're going to be sick. But you can't stop. Barely breathe around the idea of them sometimes—

“Tha’s’it,” he coos like he knows. Sees them bright and burning behind your irises. Little flickers of need, a smouldering want that you'll never grasp at yourself.

So he gives it to you.

The rough slide of his hand, all scarred and dry and calloused, scrapes over your slit once more. A full, flat stroke upward until your clit bumps into the ridge of his palm. Then down, down—

His fingers spread. Ring and index prying your folds apart as he pushes up once more, opening your seam to slip his middle finger through the slick, sticky mess that drips out of your burning cunt.

“Gonna be good f’me?”

The slide of his fingers drags the tip up to the bump of your clit. You stare down at it, fixed on the jut of his ink-black knuckles threading through your folds. The crease of his nail as he slips his fingers up higher, pad pushing over your pebbled clit. They're dirty. Grey-black under his nails. Congealed with dirt. Blood, maybe.

Your stomach churns even as your hips lift. Eager, searching. Hating yourself each second of it. It's gross. Disgusting.

You want his dirty, thick fingers inside of you—

“When I ask a question—” the tip circles over your clit. A shallow roll that pools heat between your thighs. “I expect an answer.”

“Y–yes,” you stammer out, hips flexing against his hand. Seeking more of that white-hot bloom of pleasure he brings with each pass of his finger.

“Good girl—” and you hate how it burns you up from the inside out. “Wasn't s’hard, was it?”

The retort is bitten back with the slow swipe of his finger drawing tight, small circles around your clit. His fingers are rough, scarred. Too dry. The abrasive drag over your soft sensitive flesh makes you whine—a drawn-out whimper nestled between clenched teeth.

It's too much.

Too harsh. Too sharp.

He rolls your clit under the pads of his fingers in jerking half-circles. Puts too much pressure on the bundle of nerves than you ever would—your touches are always soft, sickeningly sweet; gentling your flesh until you cum—and the sting, the burn, of it makes your toes curl. Body burn.

It's good.

And that's the problem.

It shouldn't be. His touch shouldn't make you so wet, growing slick and sticky between your spread thighs, bare to his hungry, prying gaze. Shouldn't make you moan. Hips twitching with each stroke of his fingers—

And then he peels away from you, but the time to mourn the loss of his touch, the fear of losing this trembling ember pleasure, is snuffed out when he presses his wet, slick fingers against the inside of your knee. The touch is intentional. Insistent. He makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat before pushing it down to the mattress. The twinge of pain swallowed up as quickly as it forms when he drops to his elbows between your thighs, forearms curling under your legs, and tugs you sharply into him.

Heat floods your belly when the backs of your thighs press tight to his broad, muscular shoulders, but it's nothing compared to the sight of him on his knees between your legs. It's so obscene you nearly weep—

And then he leans down and licks a long, broad swipe of his tongue over your cunt.

You hadn't expected it, maybe. His mouth on your pussy, his broken, jagged lips sealing over your pebbled clit. Going down on you seemed too intimate for what he was after. His end goal. It does nothing for him at all—

You realise your mistake when he dips his tongue into your hole and his hips jerk forward. Unconscious. Eager. Seeking. The shifting drags his jeans down his hips, and his cock slips free.

Most of the cocks you've seen—in porn, pictures, art—jut out from the person's groin. standing at attention, the nasty comments used to say. Jokes whispered on the playground. But his falls. Droops down between big, folded thighs. Skin marbled in shades of red, peach. Deep gouges dot his upper thighs, some sinking deep enough to reach bone. More scar tissue than flesh.

—than man.

It looks raw. Fresh. Some injuries not too dissimilar to the Wagyu hanging in the front of the storeroom, on display and oh, so out of place in a town where the richest man must be just a hair above the poverty line.

On paper, anyway.

You swallow, avoiding his gaze as he pauses, dark eyes watching you with his mouth pressed against your seam. Unmoving. Still as a predator between your thighs, cock visible between the bow of his torso, jutting sickeningly from mangled legs as you gawk at this hideous thing that makes several, half-hearted attempts to spring up towards you, spitting clear, milky liquid all over with each jerk. Tugged down by its own weight. Too heavy to fight against gravity like the rest of the cocks you've seen have done—

Normal cocks, you amend. Textbook.

His is anything but.

Ugly, you think again, stomach churning. Roiling. Obscene. An odd thing considering what you're looking at but all too fitting with the way it droops, big, flared head drooling pre-cum all over the bed in long, dangling stands that prickle over your jaws—half nauseous, half hungry, too. Saliva pools in your mouth even though the sight of his cock scares you. Fills your belly with dread. Misery.

It looks like a bruise. Skin smeared with purples, reds. Patches of pink. Long, thick veins run up from the fattened, full base to the divot of his frenulum. Thick. It hangs low. Drips.

He raises slightly and shoves his hand down between his thighs, big hand curling over the fat base of his cock. His grip is tight around himself, and he strokes up, from base to tip. It squeezes more precum from the flushed, fat head, and dribbles between your spread thighs in a thick, pearlescent puddle.

It makes your mouth dry. That twinge in your jaws coming back. Festering. You wonder if he'll make you take that thing in your mouth. Choke you on it. Taste his precum—

“Fuck,” he snarls into your cunt, hand jerking over his cock. “Keep lookin’ at my cock like tha’, birdie—”

You gasp at the rough grunt, the way it seems to tremble through your sensitive flesh. More, though, from the way he sounds. His voice brassy, rough. Unkind, but the words bloom a fresh heat behind your navel.

His voice does things to you. Things you're not allowed to like.

Those thoughts are knocked from your head when he bows down again, eyes still fixed on you, and seals his wicked mouth over your cunt. It's hard to compare it to anything else other than being devoured. Eaten in the truest sense of the word.

His tongue splits down your seam, tip digging into your slick hole. A groan bubbles up at your taste—the soft, fluttering clench of your body trying to drag him in deeper. Needing him deeper. A huff of air ghosts over you, dipped in the same derision as earlier but the harsh slap of skin on skin, his hand working furiously over his cock, makes you acutely aware of how much this affects him.

“Taste good, birdie,” he grunts, and then sucks your fold into his mouth, laving it with his tongue and teeth until the skin is tender, swollen. “S’fuckin’ good—”

Your breath catches when the crooked arch of his nose presses taut to your clit. Pleasure twisting in a dizzying pirouette inside your belly, winding tighter and tighter—

His nose jerks up on your clit. Lips moulded to your seam, you hear him rasp eyes on me, birdie. Don't fuckin’ look away—

The rough snarl trembles through your body, sinking its teeth into the coil until it snaps under its jaw. Your knees snap around his head as your release locks your joints tight. His name, Simon, a hoarse cry on your lips. You barely have time to bask in the ripples of pleasure throbbing through your body before he rips away from you with his teeth bared, and his chin wet.

“Fuck—!” he snarls again, shoving your knees apart as he lifts his massive body up from between your thighs. “Gonna fuck you, birdie. Gotta be inside your tight cunt—”

He towers over you, grinding his cock into the apex of your thighs. The drag of his cock—a little damp from being stuck inside his jeans all day; balmy—against the dry skin of your belly makes you shudder. Shivering beneath him as he huffs through the mask. Head bowing. Dipping to look at the way his cock slaps down on you. Cockhead nudging above your belly button, dribbling a small puddle of pre-cum that gets smeared into your skin when he rocks back on his haunches.

His hand wraps around the thick base of his cock once more, squeezing tight as he grips himself above you. It makes the head swell, engorged with blood. Thickening in his hand as globs of pre-spend leak out onto your belly. That feeling in your jaws comes back—nauseous and wanting.

He leans back with a hum. “Like my cock, eh, birdie?”

The crass words bring a fresh bloom of heat simmering in your veins, creeping up your collar. Like doesn't really cover what you feel when you stare at it—his inked hands running along the long, veined shaft—and the unsettled feeling in the pit of your belly rears when he nudges forward, the weeping head of his cock bumping your mound.

It's humiliating how much want floods through you just looking at it. At him. Disgust, dread, desire.

You don't answer. Not that you really need to—

Your silence is loud enough.

“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, the rasp thick in his throat. “M’gonna give it to you, pet—”

And he does just that. Slips the head of his cock down the slope of your mound, letting it graze your clit until you're panting, whining softly for more, and pulls it over your slit until his pre-cum is smeared over your drenched folds. You know exactly what this is even without glimpsing the ugly burn of his possessive desire smouldering in the back of his eyes—ownership. Greed. Hunger. It revels in the stain on your skin, from belly to slit; his, all his. Outside and soon—

In.

It shocks a creeping sense of worry into you. “Wait, what about a condom—”

He snorts, ugly and caustic. “What about ‘em?” He taunts, and it's flat. Playful.

“You should—”

He drags his gaze away from the pearlescent smear of his spend on your folds, your clit, and the even, placid look in that stagnant lake tells you everything you already knew.

“I've never—” you start, wincing at the kernel of fear lacing your hoarse words. “Not without a condom—”

It's the wrong thing to say. Near cataclysmic. He drops his head back with a groan that rumbles out of the slope of his throat, sounding like the rip of a chainsaw.

“Firsts for everything,” he purrs, and he nudges your entrance with the bare, weeping tip of his cock.

“But—”

His hand lifts, catching your jaw in the too-wide span of his palm. The force makes your teeth clack together.

“Need me to gag you, birdie?”

You swallow. It's not much of a choice. Gagged and fucked raw, or—

Just fucked raw.

No gag. No condom. You fight back a shiver and wish it was all just from fear.

“No,” you murmur, like you have a choice. “No gag.”

“An’?”

“Um. No–no condom, either—”

It's not enough. "What are you gonna let me do to this pussy, birdie?"

You know what he wants. What he's angling for. But there's a line, you think. A delineation between unwilling participant, coercion, and giving into the need that slinks down your spine, and rots inside your belly.

(Being forced to ask for it isn't permission, but what happens when you want it more than your next breath?)

The shame can come later, you think, and feel yourself give in.

"Cum—cum inside me—"

“Good girl, birdie.”

You hate what that does to you. How eagerly your body reacts to the dark possessive curl in his eyes when you do something he likes.

He nudges your entrance again, this time with purpose. Intent. A heavy pressure pushing on your rim. Too tight, you think, and the sting of the first inch he feeds—forces—into you burns, pulsing behind your navel. His tip isn't even in yet, and it's already too much.

You think about telling him so, offering up your mouth instead, but he leans down on his forearms, and catches your lips in a bruising, biting pantomime of a kiss. A blood-soaked parody with more teeth and tongue—sinking into your lips, nipping hard until the skin splits; catching all that spills with his tongue.

With his weight pressed against you like this, there's nowhere to run when he cups your throat in his hand, winding the other up above your head, forearm tight on your crown to cage you in. And then he shifts. Bears his hips down on yours until the fat head of his cock pops inside of you.

Your squeal is chewed up between his teeth, swallowed down with a rumbling groan.

Caught beneath him, trapped, he works himself into you demanding, heavy thrusts. Each inch burns more than the last. A stinging stretch that brings tears to your eyes. It's already too much and it's not even half. Barely even the tip.

“Can't—” you slur into his wet, demanding mouth. “No more. I–I can't—”

The breath rushes out between his teeth. Your watery eyes drop to the divot above his canine. A permanent snarl. A condescending sneer.

“You can,” he says decisively, words ground out from between crooked teeth. He presses them to your cheek, nipping at the skin under your eye. Possessive and wanting—

(Hungry for something you can't name—)

“And you will.”

—Or maybe you just don't want to. Can't look at the thunderous need draped over his mangled, battered face without thinking of the rumble in your chest that echos back against his thundering call—)

Stupid, foolish thing—

The dark promise of his words isn't a threat until his hand tightens around your neck, nails grazing your skin, and he adds, all of me, birdie as he grinds his hips into yours shallowly. Broad chest expanding with each ragged inhale. Cementing his taunt with a steel edge as you try not to come undone beneath him.

You'll take every fuckin’ inch—

He pulls back until only his glands stretch you open, and you know what's coming when his fingers grip the sides of your neck tight. Holding on. Anchoring you to the bed as he nudges his forearm tighter between your skull and the wall, a protective hold.

Before you can tense up, bracing for it, or even cry out no, please, don't, you can't take it, he huffs, and then slams his hips forward, splitting you open on the fat stretch of his thick, too heavy cock.

Maybe it's hysteria, delirium, but the blunt press of his length against your tender, sore walls balms the ache, the sting. The deeper he pushes, the less it hurts. A paradox that leaves you whimpering under his hand, heels digging into the broad stretch of his waist as you struggle to decide if you want to kick him away or pull him closer.

A war you don't have the power to win when he surges forward, burying himself to the hilt with a growl that shakes the fragile tendons surrounding your heart. Fear, misery. Pleasure, pain. It admixes. Coalescing into a dizzying sense of fullness, unbearable pressure. Catastrophic in its heaviness as your mind reels, struggles to come to terms with the gut-wrenching, heart-aching uncertainty of how you're supposed to go on without having him seated as deep inside of you as he can get. You've never known emptiness before him. Before now. Mere seconds ago.

And now, the thought of it leaves a palpable hollowness itching behind your ribs. Festering. Rotting tissue and bone.

“Simon,” you choke, sobbing his name out under the firm press of his hand. “Simon—”

But he knows.

His arm curls over your head like a crown, and you can easily forget the pinch of each thorn when he holds you tight. Protectively. Possessively. Securing you in his arms before he lifts up, palm sliding over the mattress, touch tender against your cheeks, and then settles it on the indent of your knee. Widening you for him as he spreads his thighs under yours until you're opened up for him.

Those dark eyes are dragged down to the split of your legs where his cock disappears into your slick, swollen cunt. You follow it down, gazing at the impressive width of his stomach bowing over you until they land on the jut of skin pushing out from a messy smatter of damp curls around the base of his cock.

The coarse hair of his groin unfurls as it sticks to your wet lips, and he rolls his head back over his shoulders he heaves through the too tight stretch of your walls over his length. You feel the pulse of him inside of you, thudding like a heartbeat. It blooms molten under the feverish weight of his lidded, dark gaze.

“Fuck, birdie,” he rasps, and it's scorched. Charred. “Look at you—”

As the world is condensed, narrowed down to nothing but the near impossible stretch of his cock seated as deep inside of you as he can get, he leans down, scarred, mangled lips brushing cruelly over your ear, and whispers, see? Told you'd take me.

Every fuckin’ inch.

Your hand jerks to your belly, fingers dancing over your navel as if to feel him there, bulging from under your skin. Nearly hysterical as you try to come to terms with the pulsing, white-hot ache of him inside of you, slowly acclimating to his girth, his length.

He grunts when he sees what you're doing, eyes flaring as your fingers skirt around your navel.

“It's—” you shudder, gasping for air. “It's too much, Simon, I can't take it—”

He rolls his hips with a groan. “m’cock too big for you, birdie?”

His usual cadence is flat, droll, but an unmistakable sense of masculine pride, a deep, egotistic sense of satisfaction, drapes itself over his brassy words. Glueing to the scorching rasp of his voice in a way that makes you unerringly certain that he likes it. Likes that his cock is too big for you. That it hurts.

“Y’can take it,” he prompts, forcing more of himself into you until something snaps. Splits. Makes room. Carves out a space for him to fit.

The brief flash of pain is soothed when he's seated deep. That same paradoxical balm making itself known as he flattens his hips into yours with a noise—half a grunt, or a growl; a lazy, pleasure-soaked snarl. You're not sure what it is, but the sound knocks the air from your lungs, igniting inside of you like a spark inside a tinderbox.

It's only when his balls are flush against you that the same masculine pride brims up again. Primal. Animalistic. The urge to present your soft belly rears up suddenly, and it's only stifled when he grunts again, looking down at you with lidded, black eyes.

“Now, be good and let me fuck your tight cunt.”

He's not looking for assent. Nothing you could say at this moment will sway his mind one way or the other. There's a nasty spool of determination welling up like blood on a pricked finger. Beading up to the surface in a clean, neat droplet as he rolls his broad shoulders, and shuffles into a comfortable position on his haunches between your spread thighs. The motion jostles his cock in a way that makes your breath hitch with each jerk.

It's not painful. Not particularly. But you're overwhelmed by the sensation of utter fullness in a way you've never experienced before. Each grind of his cock against your overly stretched walls deeping that incipient feeling of anxiety brewing in your belly that one wrong move and you'll tear. He's just—

Too big.

And despite his claims—or rather, in spite of them—you don't think you can do it. Don't think you can take him. It's too much. It feels like being turned inside out and then put back into place. An uneasy sense of discomfiture blooms with each too-tight, too-sharp tug of his cock pulling taut on your rim.

Almost deliriously, you think you can feel the pulse of his cock inside your goddamn throat.

“Simon—” you start on a tremulous breath but he cuts you off with a hum.

“Relax.”

You can't. Can't—

“Fuckin’ hell, bird,” he rasps, leaning down suddenly until his face was pushed tight into the curve of your neck, breath shallow on your thudding pulse. “Stop squirmin’ ‘round me like tha’ or I'll cum right fuckin’ now.”

Your heart stutters. Gallops painfully in your chest. His words make you dizzy because for as much as this feeling of him, his cock, inside of you dances on a delicate precipice of being more than you can feasibly handle and somehow the most incredible thing you'd ever experienced before, you hadn't considered how he'd feel.

Inexplicably, it pleases you.

There's something so strange—so extraordinary—about bringing a man like him, like this, to his knees. Pleasuring him by just heaving through the white-hot stretch of his cock inside of you. Making him bury his head in your neck, groaning about how he was gonna fuckin’ bust, pretty thing, fuck—

It was a powerful feeling.

Unwarranted, maybe. But incredible, nevertheless.

“Fuck,” he grunts, and you feel his throat work around a thick swallow. “Gonna fuck you, birdie. Gonna fuck this pretty cunt so fuckin' hard until you beg me stop—”

And he does just that. Rears back from your neck, and settles again between your thighs—quicker this time. With an urgency that makes you whimper when his cock grinds against your walls hard enough to bruise.

When he finally pulls out until only the flared head of his cock remains, you knot a fist into the thin pillow, clinging on, and latch the other onto his hip as if that could somehow stop the vicious promise in his eyes about poundin’ you into the goddamn mattress. There's a flash, a brief flicker of his eyes, and then he thrusts back inside of you with a grunt that makes your belly clench, and your back arch.

True to the promises he gave, it's brutal. Violent.

Any pleasure you feel is leached through osmosis. A tether bound around his own.

His arm is shoved under your back, angling your pelvis up. Thighs dangling over the thick spread of his own, ass seated in his lap. He drives into you, thrusts deep—grinds his hips until your moans break into hoarse screams, whimpers. Makes your eyes roll so far back, all you see is black even when you blink your eyes up at him.

He carves a spot deep inside of you with each delirious piston of his cock, pounding into you with brutal thrusts, and then holding tight when his balls slap against your ass. Digging the head of his cock into the seal of your womb until it aches behind your navel. Each breath feels like glass in your lungs—

“Tha’s it,” he slurs in your ear, mouth damp against your skin. “Take my cock so good, pretty birdie. Little pussy was made for it, weren't you? Tight cunt all mine—”

His gruff words tug on that tether until you're wrapped around him like a bow. Following him down this endless spiral as he slams inside of you over and over again, cooing in your ear about the sounds you made for him, pretty cunt so fuckin’ wet f’me, birdie, hear tha’? all f’me—

“Cum f'me, birdie. Want this pussy cummin’ ‘round my cock—”

“Can't—” you gasp, arching into him, desperate and needy. It rides a line between pain and pleasure; a needlepoint you wobble on. “Need—”

You try to reach down, to touch your clit, but grinds his hips into yours with a snarl. “Cum ‘around my cock, birdie.”

“Touch me—”

“Fuckin’ hell—”

It edges on too much. Pain and pleasure teetering on a knife's edge, split apart by a line the width of a razer. Looping and tangling around each other until you can't differentiate between the two. But it makes sense, you suppose, staring up at him arched above you like a black cloud of smoke. All hunger and fire. Consuming, devouring, everything in its path. A wildfire.

Butcher, you think again when his hand wraps around your throat. A mimicry of what he did in the truck, forcing your eyes on him. Your life tucked neatly against his palm.

These hands take lives. It's what they're made for. All scarred, and thick. Scar tissue and bone. Muscle and cartilage. Meant to render meat of cattle. Slaughterhouse in the shape of a man. Consumption personified.

But where there should be fear, all you feel is an echoing sense of hunger. Leatherbound to each other, maybe—

The look that passes over his eyes as he stares down at you, cupped in his palm, seems to fit perfectly into the fractured gaps inside yourself you try so hard to ignore. And what doesn't—

Well.

He'll make room to fit.

You reach up, curling your fingers around his thick wrist. His eyes flash, but he doesn't slow his thrusts. Doesn't stop. Just watches as you peel his hand away from your neck, bringing it up to your mouth.

On his palm, there's a piece of skin that's unblemished compared to the rest of his worn, burnt hands. A strip just big enough for you to sink your teeth into.

And you do.

“Fuck, Birdie—!” The snarl is ripped from his throat. His thrusts grow harder, sloppier. Each bit of strength in his muscled hips and thighs is used to pound into you until your vision blacks out. It hurts. Aches. Your heels slip down, catching on the broad expanse of his lower back. And you tighten them around his waist, pulling him closer. Deeper. “Fuck, Birdie, fuckin’ cunt was made f'me, wasn’t it? So cum on my cock. Now—”

Whining, you shake your head. “Can't. I can't. I need—”

You don't get to finish. With a huff of anger, he rips his hand off of the mattress, leaning back on his haunches, and shoves his hand between your thighs, scarred fingers stroking over your pebbled clit. It's rough. Sloppy. His anger hums through his body, skewering into you as he glared down, gaze swinging like a pendulum between the split of your thighs where his cock disappears into your swollen cunt, his fingers rubbing over your clit, and back up the hand around your neck, the tears staining your cheeks.

There's an edge to his thrusts. A viciousness in the way he pistons his hips into you. Dark eyes catching every flicker—each wince, gasp, moan, whine all meticulously catalogued and exploited. He finds the spots that make your hips jerk, twitching both toward and away from him. Angling into the ones that have your eyes rolling back into your head, drool dribbling past your slack lips as you gasp his name out into the dank, humid air.

It smells of sweat, sex, and him. Something brutal, bloody, and dark. Rotten leaves. Charred forests after a rain shower. Dangerous. Tinged with a slight acrid, chemical stench—benzene, oxidizing iron. It drips down your throat, and drenches your lungs. Staining you from the inside out.

And he exploits that, too. Leans in, and breathes heavily against your upper lip, your cheek. Drowns you in his scent. His sweat beads along his jaw, droplets raining down over your brow. Soaked in his essence. Unable to see, smell, or touch anything that isn't him.

With his hand over your mouth, teeth sunk into his palm, all you can taste is him, too. Leather. Gun oil. Blood.

The ravenous look in his eye sharpens, turning into deadly points.

“Such a pretty fuckin' bird.” He rasps, the words shattered, mangled in the back of his throat. They carry the scent of blood when you breathe them in, and you wonder if he forced them through glass. Pushed them out with his bloody fists.

You bite down harder in response, keening through the white-hot pain of his cock spearing deeper than before, stretching you past your limits. The taste of blood on your tongue, the rasping snarl pulled from his chest, his fingers toying with your clit, push you over the edge once more. Again and again, and again, and—

His hand peels away from your oversensitive clit, dropping down to the mattress beside your face. He follows quickly after several impossibly deep thrusts that shove you higher up on the mattress, pressing in until his balls sit flush against your ass, cockhead battering against your cervix, and he groans—deep and liquid—when he comes, spilling inside of you. Rooted deep, cock twitching, Simon drops to his elbow beside your head, smothering you under his weight as the tension in his body bleeds out.

Your teeth stick to the divots in his hand, and the sensation of ungluing them from the wounds you gave him makes you shiver. Slowly, you roll your tongue out, chasing the drops of blood, and breathe heavily through your nose as he burrows deeper inside of you, chest shuddering over yours.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he rasps, hips jerking into yours with a slap that echoes through the room. “Little tease, ain't you?”

Even with his cock softening inside of you, it's still thick. Fat. Stretching you open as he yawns out above you, bloodied hand dropping down to cup your neck again, forearm resting heavily between your breasts. He raises slightly on his elbow, black eyes glinting in the shallow dark of the room. Piercing as they drill into your sweat-slicked face.

It aches when he moves. When he presses his hips harder into yours, the muscles in your legs throb as his broad waist splits them apart. Your feet dangle, sliding uselessly down his back, over his ass, before coming to rest curled around his thighs. Melting into the mattress, tender and sore and all chewed up—

You feel like a massive contusion instead of a person. A pestle. His.

The thought makes you shiver, and his eyes flash in triumph like he knows.

The feeling of him pulling out of you draws a whimper from your lips. The drag on your sensitive, bruised walls is a strange mix of tender pleasure and pain. He chuckles at your mewl—dark and low; the sound of nightmares, you think. Crackling sap on charred wood.

You try to pretend it doesn't make you shudder, but the way he hums in response dashes the feigned oblivion before it can form. All you can do is heave on the bed, and watch him through narrowed slits as he leans back on his haunches once again, head cocking to the side. His dark eyes fixed on the split of your legs. The ache in your cunt growing sharp under his molten stare.

“Fuck,” he rasps, the shallow groan pulled out from between clenched teeth. You wonder if the mangled curse was unintentional. Ripped from his throat before he could clamp his jaws around it—a crack in the facade. A hairline splinter in the indomitable mask he wears.

Your heart lurches. None of this makes sense, but your head is too muddled, too syrupy, to think much at all. A quandary for later when he throws you from his bed with a harsh slap on your ass and a and don't think about doing this ever again.

But you don't think you can move. “Give me a minute,” you start on a trembling breath. “And I'll—”

His brows move but his eyes stay fixed on your sore cunt. You can feel him leak out of you, spilling on the mattress in thick globs. The sensation makes you shiver.

“You'll what?”

It looks like he has to forcibly tear his eyes away from you, reluctance forming a cold, angry crater between his brows. The brunt of his ire—white, burning—makes you want to supplicate yourself at his feet, roll over on your belly and show the beast you mean no harm.

(Run, and run far—)

He huffs. “You'll what, birdie?”

It takes a minute to find your voice through all the panic clogging your throat. “I'll leave, um—”

He peels away from you with a loud, rough snort, and drops to his his elbow beside you. Hands curling possessively over your waist, fingers tight. Unyielding.

“Not goin’ anywhere, birdie. Told you, didn't I? You're mine.”

“I'm—”

“Go to sleep.”

He pulls you roughly to his chest until your head is pillowed on his shoulder, and then rolls on his back, keeping you cushioned at his side. You try to move, but his arm wedges under your neck, curling over your shoulder. Trapping you to him.

The panic wants to come now. To rage against the shackle of his embrace, to run home and scrub your skin until it bleeds. But the exhaustion collapses over it all until your eyes feel too heavy to hold open. Too painful.

As you drift, aimless and dreamless, his voice cuts through the fog. “Gotta learn ‘ow to cum with nothin’ but my cock inside of you sooner or later, birdie. Or you won't be coming at all—”

It sounds like a threat. A promise. You fall asleep with the words echoing in your head, his arm an anchor around your waist.

He wakes up hungry.

A gnawing in his belly pulls him from the thin doze he fell into after fucking you three more times—with your face pressed into the mattress, ass in the air for him to rut against like a beast; teetering over his hips, the spread of them too wide for your thighs to split over leaving you precariously unbalanced and shifting your weight above him as neither knee sat comfortably on the mattress; and on your belly with him crushing you to the floor under his bulk. The memory of which makes his spent cock stir, twisting limply against his damp, sticky thigh. Matted down with drying cum, sweat, the slick wetness of being buried inside your messy cunt.

Filled now with his cum.

He groans low in his throat as he thinks about it. The sloppy way you let him take you over and over again until you couldn't keep your eyes open anymore, passing out before he finished. Letting him fuck his cum inside of you as you whimpered in your sleep—

Perfect little thing, aren't you? So good to him.

Simon can't remember the last time he fucked someone, much less when it was this enjoyable (an understatement, of course; in the back of his head, wheels spin round and round as he tries to come up with a plan to keep his cock buried inside of you at all times while still doing his work—), and the overflow of unquenched lust churns in his belly. A hunger he can now slake on your willing body. In the silence, he purrs—

But the effort, the exertion, dredged up a different need inside him.

Simple hunger. An appetite.

He could eat—

his eyes slant toward the top of your crown in the dark, and he amends it, quickly, to: in more ways than one.

He'll go home in a minute. Make himself a steak from the prime cut he butchered a few days ago, leftovers that no one had any qualms about when he took several pieces home with him.

(and really, why would they argue with the butcher who keeps their wallets fat and their bills paid?)

It was left on the counter earlier before he got the call that your brother was making another move. Now a perfect room temperature as it waits for him to come back. Cook it the way he likes—

Rare.

The perfect grill is a nice char on the outside, but bleeding red on the inside. Basted in duck fat and garlic. A sprig of rosemary in the pan, but not touching the meat. Just enough to give the juice that earthy, sweet flavour. Let it rest for ten minutes under foil with the rest of the fat poured over it from the pan. Served as is with maybe a dash of salt and pepper on the side.

Simple. But incredibly difficult to perfect, he finds.

Everyone tries to make it fancier than what it needs to be, but at the end of the day, meat is meat. And going from picking scraps from the garbage outside of the Italian butcher on the corner to ordering his own pretentious filet mignon still gives him a sense of unease. Whiplash, perhaps. Nothing to something—how about that, Tommy?

Maybe that's why he prefers to raise and butcher his own cattle. A never-ending supply of meat for him to sink his teeth into even if this whole thing goes belly up and he's back to begging for morsels on the corner. Tommy hiding in the shadows with a baseball bat waiting to ambush the richer men who happen to feel altruistic that day.

This practice bled over into his current occupation, too. The basement of that same Italian butcher shop he used to sneak expired sausage from out of the bins is now his home base of sorts. A money laundering front of the 141. Headquarters for them to congregate in secrecy upstairs. And here—

A torture chamber for those who tried to cross them. Strung up on meat hooks like the cattle they eat, the ones he feeds them, until he makes up his mind on what he wants to do to them.

It's where you should have been, he supposes, thumb brushing a spot of dried blood on your shoulder, right below a nasty bite mark on your forearm. The ring nearly black from the clotted blood pooling in the indents. It matches several others on your thighs—top, insides, back—and neck, belly, collarbones, sternum. All chewed up. Marked by the butcher.

In working for the old Italian man who ran the shop when he was eighteen, he learned that most of the butchers preferred to mark their carcasses when they came in. A little x on the fat to signify they'd be the ones carving up the prime meat.

He didn't think you could handle his knife, so he gave you his teeth instead. But the implication is clear.

His.

It's overkill considering his reputation, and the claim he already had on you. Because even before this, back when he saw you through the window of his shop as he was moonlit as a legitimate butcher and businessman instead of the enforcer, the brute, everyone already knew he was, his interest was clear. You were off-limits. His to deal with.

And while Price refers not to get involved in small-time street dealers, the warnings Soap and Gaz impressed onto your brother should have been the end of an irritating situation and not the beginning of a fuckin’ headache. But no. He had to push. And push.

Until Price gave the order to take care of it.

And that he did.

(With the added benefit of killing one bird and keeping the other in a pretty cage.)

Price probably won't like his solution, but Simon racked up enough favours to keep a little pet of his own. Been a good boy for a long, long time now, and he supposes he's owed a bone.

Or a sweet thing tucked tight to his side having passed out some two hours ago after he slaked his dizzying thirst on you over and over again even though it doesn't feel like it's been enough.

It's rare that he has an appetite for people. Even rarer that he lets this meagre hunger consume him like this. But there's something about you that makes his teeth ache in the same way they often do whenever he's hungry for meat.

He wants to devour you. Consume you. Eat you alive and save nothing for anyone else to taste.

(So—

Price will just have to let him keep you, won't he?)

The mattress vibrates under him. His phone buzzing with an incoming text. He reaches over, pulling it close enough to read the notification on his screen. It's from Soap.

All her stuff is on your porch.

He hums, but doesn't reply. Simply opts to drop his phone on his belly, and tug you closer to his broad chest. He'll wake you in an hour, and the stirring in his groin tells him it'll be for another round. Maybe he'll take you in the freezer. Make you cling to the hook hanging down from the ceiling as he fucks you like that. He has a pair of ties for ox, lamb legs, that he can loop around your wrists and heft you up on.

It'll hurt, he's sure. The binds weren't designed with comfort in mind, but he can easily bear your weight as he pounds into you from below, your pretty legs wrapped tight around his waist.

The image, the thought, alone has him thickening against his thigh. He reaches down, gripping the base tight in his hand as he pulls you even closer, burying his nose in your crown.

At the very least, he wouldn't be lying when he told Price he strung you up.

Three rounds—on your back, your hands and knees, perched above him like a pretty goddess he stole away from a temple—and he still isn't satisfied. Fuck. He breathes in your scent and doesn't think he ever will be.

He'll get you out of here, take you home. Make you the steak he likes for a late dinner, rare and simple—the same one he gave your brother weeks ago when he dragged him into the shop, strung him up on a hook, and demanded payment for his disrespect.

Who'd have thought that his payment would be you?

(fitting, though, since he'd had his eye on you for a while now—)

He nudges you when his phone chimes again with another message doubtless from Soap telling him all your things have been tucked away. Matters dealt with.

“C’mon,” he grunts, running his hand down your spine. “We’re leavin’.”

You blink at him slowly. “Leaving?”

He nods. “Get dressed.”

You're quiet as he turns, reaching for his jeans left in a heap beside the mattress, but he hears the hitch in your throat. The click when you swallow. Unbothered by it, he turns, giving you his back as he wedges his feet inside the trousers, pulling them up his legs.

The bed shifts behind him. “I—I can walk back to my brother's—”

The hope in your voice is a delicate thing. Fragile like fine china. A pretty, vulnerable tchotchke meant to be seen, admired, but not touched. Not handled roughly.

Unfortunately for you, he's never had much of a gentle touch.

When he throws a glance over his shoulder, he's not surprised to find your arm folded over your bare breasts as you kneel on the mattress, your palm resting flat between your parted thighs, wrist and forearm covering the slip of heaven between them from his greedy, prying gaze.

It paints a startling picture, he finds. One with you looking thoroughly ravaged. Taken. But presenting it in a soft sort of sensuality meant to make a man feel both hot under the collar and like an unrepentant voyeur.

Pretty bird, he thinks, and feels his cock stir.

He rises swiftly, hiking up his jeans around his thighs as he goes, and then turns to you with a heady desire to crush that gossamer of hope between his greedy hand like a silken cobweb that will stick to his fingers.

“Not goin’ to your brothers,” he says, pushing his tongue against his cheek to stem the ache burning in his muscles.

You shiver, eyes growing wide, frenzied with fear as you stare up at him. The shift of your throat when you swallow makes pre-cum dribble out of his fattened cock. He's never really had much of a taste for it, but he's overcome with the urge to see you cry—

“Where are we going?”

Amid the ache in his loins, the flickering fantasies of your pretty, lachrymal face gazing up at him helpless, hopeless, and needy, he catches the edge of panic when you speak. The razor-sharp tremble of fear.

But buried amongst it, hidden in the bruised look you give him as he towers over you with his cock bulging in his slacks and his eyes burning with want, he finds a keen sense of eagerness amongst the rubble. Agog, almost.

And fuck. If that doesn't do something awful to him.

“What?” He taunts, cocking his head to the side as your breath grows shallow and your eyes wide. “Did you think that was enough to pay your debt, birdie?”

“What? You can't—”

“Don't like it—” he lifts his shoulder up in a cool, indifferent shrug, enjoying the dismayed expression that falls over your brow more than he should. “—go to the police.”

“The ones on your payroll?” You spit, eyes flaring wide like an angry cat. “You—”

Several things might have continued in place of your choked, angry sob, but it's swallowed down as pragmatically as it was the first time he cornered you earlier today. And as beautiful as your ire is, he finds the cornered look on your face to be much more pleasing. Prettier.

“C’mon, bird,” he mocks, holding his hand out toward you with a tick of his lips. “All your stuff is at home. Don't be stupid.”

“Stupid?” You gasp in indignation, but there's a bruised look in your eyes. A wounded thing that makes his breath hitch in his lungs for reasons he can't really ascertain, but just knows that he likes it. Likes it a lot. “This is—insane.”

Again, he shrugs, but the indifference this time isn't the same manufactured callousness meant to inspire fear. The conversation is stale already. Grating on him. He's not used to having his orders ignored or questioned. What he says usually goes—either through association or reputation, or just the fact that no one has ever come close to filling the same measure of space as he does—and questioning him like this makes him feel too much like a boy, and not enough like the living ghost he pretends to be.

“You can't do this. It's not right.”

An appeal to his humanity. Cute. He huffs, reaching down to fasten the button of his jeans. The sound the zipper makes cuts through the room. “You're mine, birdie. Better get used to it.”

Catching your eye as he says it was only meant to reignite the kindling fear you have of him from extinguishing. A scared prey animal was a better pet than an angry one. But the look on your face catches him off-guard.

It reminds him of a flightless little bird shivering in a child's shoebox. Tiny broken thing his mum warned him not to touch or its mother would abandon it to die on its own.

“Until the debt is paid off.”

A statement, not a question. He shrugs, but doesn't respond. Tilts his head toward the door. “Let's go.”

His lack of reassurance doesn't soften the flint in your gaze, but the prospect of recompense seems to spurn you on. Another wishbone of hope to cling to. And despite himself, he lets you keep it. Lets your little finger wrap around the delicate bone for comfort because as much as you might think there's a fifty-fifty chance of getting the bigger piece, he has no intentions of letting something like that get in the way of his appetite even if you do.

(And his hunger has always been particularly voracious, hasn't it?)

“Come, birdie. Gotta get you home, and fed, don't I?”

#simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley x reader #ghost x reader #series: dogmeat #for only being 19k this really took a lot out of me #simon riley x you #ghost x you

2K notes · View notes

godzexperiment · 1 year

Text

nix 100% could fill multiple notebooks with both fully formed and completly not even half formed ideas to kill his maker (especially in verses/moods where it's like 'so help me if that piece of shit goes back on it and returns i'm going to be real furious' *cough* the ones where it was an especially horrific existence up in heaven especially *cough*)

#<< falling apart at the seams i cant deny >> headcanons #(sure it's complicated even if he's just like 'you know what i'm fighting my parent in this empty gas station why the fuck not' commited)#(but it makes me giggle imagine nix like 'ah yes surely this isn't an stupid undertaking unpopular with the masses')#(humor the youngest child attempting to stab you- top tier parenting)#(nix pulling an gun like i know this is also stupid but i'm going to empty this whole clip to try feeling better now)#(-later on- 'oh yeah it was real awkward just firing countless clips of bullets at him while he just was silent')#('god's back')#(nix 'oh yeah guess i buried that because if hasnt left again im going to lose it')#(and of course it can really vastly vary if there's even an apology or its just not addressed etc with nix unclear what would suck less)#(and not the image of how especially easy even rightfully angry words from nix how they could be dismissed with ease)#(how attempts to lash out verbally or physically could easily be not humored and snuffed out)#(this thought can fit so much expanded on aside from the comedy relief of 'just watch me sole handedly make him regret returning')#('if that makes me hated by all of creation so fucking be it i just don't want to see it happen again or go back to how it was for me')

1 note · View note

astrophileous · 1 year

Text

A Well-Kept Secret

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female Reader

Synopsis: While working on a case in D.C., Spencer didn't expect to hear a familiar name being mentioned as the sole surviving witness. Or, in which the team discovers Spencer's well-kept secret.

Warning(s): established secret relationship, mentions and/or depictions of death/physical violence/gun violence/injury/attack, signs of trauma, survivor's guilt, curse words, hurt/comfort, nudity but it's not sexual, allusions to sexy times, mentions/implied alcohol consumption

Word Count: 5900-ish

Author's Note: hiya! I decided to write this lil piece after seeing the fic challenge posted by @imagining-in-the-margins abt the family/found family trope. I had a lotta fun writing this one and I think it's got potential to be something more. So pls comment or message me if you wanna see me exploring with this idea (either turning it into a series of connected one-shots or multi-parters). Don't forget to like/comment/reblog and give me a follow :) I hope you enjoy! 💞

Criminal Minds Masterlist

When Hotch had notified the team to haul their asses up and drove all the way to D.C., Spencer never expected that it would also entail him having to suffer through a mini heart attack.

The series of attacks around D.C. had been dominating the 6 PM news segments in the entire country. What was initially perceived as a suspected sequence of robberies gone wrong--since the first two targets to have been hit were a bank and a prestigious auction house--soon turned into a nationwide panic as people realized that there was a bigger game at play.

After the third attack was found to have occurred in the headquarters of one of the top, up-and-coming renewable energy startups in the states, the D.C. police finally started to entertain the idea that perhaps they hadn't been dealing with their usual petty robbers at all.

And naturally, that was when the BAU had been called in.

As soon as the team entered the Metropolitan PD bullpen, they were struck with the smell of panic and the sight of chaos.

"Agent Hotchner?" A middle-aged man in a gray shirt and blue tie appeared in front of them. "My name is Detective Mills, we spoke on the phone."

"Of course, Detective." Hotch shook the other man's hand. "This is my team. Agent Prentiss, Jareau, and Dr. Reid. I have two others already at the latest crime scene. What can you tell us so far?"

"As you can see--" Detective Mills gestured towards the frenzied scene behind him, "--the entire D.C. area is going haywire after news broke out about yesterday's attack. The public is demanding the city to be put on lockdown, and I'm getting pressure from above as well. We received information that nearly half the city has called in sick today."

"A classic response to mass paranoia," Spencer noted.

"Well, paranoia or not, I just want to start getting some answers." Detective Mills began to lead the team further into the bullpen. "I have every pair of hands I could spare in this. If they aren't out there chasing leads, they're here interviewing the victims, friends, and families."

"Any luck so far?" Emily asked.

"Nothing more than what you've probably seen in the files."

Detective Mills pushed open the door to an office in the corner, away from the havoc in the center of the station.

"Lieutenant Jeffreys retired a couple of weeks ago. The lucky bastard." Detective Mills scoffed jokingly. "It's the most decent space I can spare at the moment. Think you'll be fine in here?"

"It's more than enough, Detective. Thank you," Hotch replied.

"What about the witnesses from yesterday's attack? Have you had the chance to interview them?" JJ asked as the rest of the team started setting up.

"Some of my men are with them right now. But I doubt they'll have anything useful. Just like the other two cases, the attack happened while most of the office was out. The rest left behind were DOA at the latest scene."

"They're rapidly devolving," Spencer pondered out loud as he skimmed over the case files. "They went from killing a non-compliant security guard during the first attack to executing almost every witness in the last one."

JJ raised an eyebrow. "Almost?"

"It says here there is one survivor." Spencer showed the word he had underlined in the case overview to JJ.

"Yes, there is," Detective Mills confirmed. "I had one of my men talk to her. There's not much she could give us. Thing is, she wasn't even supposed to be there."

"What do you mean?" Emily asked.

"She didn't work in that office. She was a consultant who just happened to be visiting. Poor girl's pretty shaken up. She hid in a supply closet the entire time. She was the one who found the bodies and called 911."

"So, the perpetrators never checked the rooms while they were holding the victims hostage?" Hotch questioned.

"Not according to her statement, no. See, I thought it weird myself. Do you have any idea why?"

"Not sure." Hotch hummed, deep in thought. "Perhaps our UnSubs didn't think to check because they didn't know someone was in there. Detective, you said all of the victims were the only employees of the company who didn't attend the event downtown, correct?"

"Yeah, they were the only ones who weren't listed as attendees. Why? Do you think those people were specifically targeted?"

"Unfortunately, we can't rule out anything yet this early in the investigation," Hotch said. "We need to talk to the witnesses to know more. JJ?"

"On it." JJ nodded. "What can you tell us about yesterday's sole survivor, Detective?"

"Not much. I didn't interview her personally, one of my men did. She works at a consulting engineering firm in town," Detective Mills replied. "I believe her name is... what is it called?"

When Detective Mills mentioned the name, Spencer's heart instantly crashed inside of its cage.

"What?" His hand had stopped scribbling on the board. In a matter of miliseconds, Spencer had crossed the room towards the doorway where Detective Mills was standing. "What did you say her name was?"

Dumbfounded, the detective stared at a dread-stricken Spencer before spelling out the name once more.

"Why? What's wrong?" Detective Mills asked in confusion.

JJ touched Spencer's shoulder. "Hey, you okay?"

But Spencer, either too alarmed or merely choosing not to acknowledge both questions, asked instead, "Where is she? I need to see her."

"In the waiting room by the pantry--"

Spencer didn't even wait for Detective Mills to form his complete thought before dashing out. JJ exchanged a glance with Emily following Spencer's sudden exit, perplexed by his odd turn of behavior.

"I'll go get him," JJ announced before leaving the room, chasing after a flurry of wavy hair and a wool-knitted purple vest sprinting across the bullpen.

The roaring commotion inside the station was almost loud enough to rival the intensity of your racing thoughts.

Almost.

At this point, you didn't think there was anything you could do anymore. The vivid images from yesterday's attack were playing continuously in your head. There was nothing you could do to stop them.

Rubbing your eyes from exhaustion, you mourned the loss of sleep that you failed to get the previous night. As if the waking nightmares weren't torment enough, the images had somehow translated even more cruelly into your subconscious. You could barely close your eyes for three seconds without feeling like you had been brought back to that place.

Cold, cramped, and alone. Fearing for your life in the tiny supply closet that smelled more like death than bleach.

At the sound of the door opening, you quickly turned around in your seat to hide your face away from prying eyes. The last thing you needed at that moment was having a complete stranger seeing you fall apart in the middle of a police station.

But when the voice came carrying the sound of your name, it wasn't the voice of a complete stranger you had heard. It was a voice you knew more than you probably knew your own. A voice you loved and a voice you had longed to hear for the past gruesome twenty-four hours.

"Spencer?" You turned back towards the door, seeing the face you adored most in the whole world staring back at you.

"Sweetheart."

At the speed of a lightning, Spencer dropped to his knees in front of you and gathered your broken little pieces into his arms.

Spencer's touch was everywhere. Your hair, your neck, your shoulders. As if he was checking whether you were real. That you were actually there inside his arms, and you were not a simple imagination that his mind had conjured up.

Surrounded by the safety of his embrace, you could feel the shattered pieces of yourself beginning to mend once more.

"Spencer," you uttered his name again as you pulled away, still in disbelief that he was physically there with you.

"I'm here," he promised you as he cupped your face gently.

"Spencer, what are you... How..."

"My team is working your case. We arrived half an hour ago," he explained simply. "Sunshine, why didn't you tell me? I thought you were still in Alaska?"

You had previously apprised Spencer that you would be hard to reach during your trip since you would be spending most of your time at the power plant site where cellphone receptions were scarce. So when an entire day went by without him ever hearing from you, Spencer didn't have any reason to be worried.

Never in a million years would he have ever predicted that you'd be caught in the middle of a hostage situation.

That thought alone caused Spencer to squeeze your hand a little tighter than usual.

"I'm sorry, Spence," you said sincerely. "My trip ended earlier than planned. I arrived back yesterday morning. I actually wanted to surprise you last night. After yesterday's... incident, I wanted to call you, but my phone was shot--"

"Wait, what? You were shot?"

"No! No, baby. Not me. Just my phone," you assured him. "But that's why I couldn't call. I did attempt you once using this station's phone, but it went straight to voicemail."

At the new piece of information, the colors immediately drained from Spencer's face.

"That was you? Fuck. I didn't--I didn't know. I rejected the call because I didn't know it was you."

"Hey." You stopped his guilty rambling with a hand to his cheek. "It's okay. I'm okay. I'm just glad you're here."

And then, because Spencer needed to make sure that you really were okay, he pulled you back into his arms and held you even tighter this time.

"Uh, Spence?"

The sound in the doorway snapped you both out of your mutual reverie. You looked up to see a blonde woman there, staring in an equal mixture of shock and confusion at the sight in front of her.

Spencer begrudgingly untangled himself from your arms before getting up to approach her.

"JJ, do you mind if I do the cognitive for this one?" Spencer asked.

The woman--JJ-- shifted her eyes a few times between you and Spencer. "Um, of course. I'll just go and inform Hotch. Tell us if you need anything."

After JJ's departure, Spencer closed the door again to award you both a much needed privacy.

He grabbed a wooden chair from the corner and dragged it before sitting down right in front of you.

"I need to start the interview now, sweetheart. Think you're up for it?"

Your whole body went rigid for a matter of seconds before you forced it to restart again. It was gone as soon as it came, but Spencer noticed it just the same.

"Look at me," Spencer ordered softly, using his delicate finger to nudge your face up until he was looking straight into your eyes. "I know it's scary. I don't want you to have to relive yesterday either, but it will help us catch whoever did this."

"I've told the police everything I knew yesterday. I was hiding the entire time." Like a coward. "I didn't see anything. I don't have anything else that could help you."

"I know that, sunshine. But as I've told you before, our method is slightly different. We won't be just focusing on what you saw, but also what you smelled, or maybe even heard." Spencer took your hands then, squeezing affectionately. "I'll be here with you the entire time."

The nod you gave him was hesitant, but it was a start nonetheless. You listened intently to Spencer's words and closed your eyes just as he had instructed.

"We'll start at the beginning," you heard him say. "Why don't you tell me why you went there yesterday?"

"I, uh, received a call from my friend, Nick, after my plane landed. We had been communicating back and forth since his company seeked my consultation for one of their upcoming projects," you began. "I wasn't even supposed to work because I had requested the day off. But Nick said it didn't have to be a formal meeting, so I agreed to meet him."

"Tell me what you remember after arriving at the office."

Your mind traveled back to that specific time one day prior. You remembered walking into the place and seeing its unusual state of vacancy even though there was still a good half an hour left before lunchtime.

"I just assumed everyone had gone to lunch earlier and shrugged it off," you recalled.

Spencer nodded his head. "Did anything else strike you as out of the ordinary?"

"No? I don't... I don't know. It was only my second time being there, I'm not sure what was normal and what wasn't."

"Okay. That's okay. You're doing good so far, sweetheart," Spencer quickly interjected, trying to get you to calm down before your distress could turn into a full-blown panic. "Now, what did you do next?"

"I followed Nick into his office."

Nick was keeping his promise true. It hadn't felt like a formal meeting, just two old college buddies reminiscing about the past and discussing possibilities of the future that, of course, included the company's upcoming project which you would be working on with him.

"I excused myself to the bathroom at some point," you added. "When I first heard the commotion, I thought nothing of it. It's like the idea that a group full of armed men had taken over the building didn't even cross my mind. I mean, why would it? I was on my way back to Nick's office when I saw them."

You recalled turning a corner after exiting the bathroom only to see those figures carrying machine guns and shouting at everyone to get on their knees or put their hands above their heads. You remembered sprinting the way you had come from and opening the first door you could reach that just happened to be the supply closet.

"Let's go back to the moment you saw them," Spencer urged gently. "How many people were there? Do you remember any conspicuous detail? Maybe one of them had tattoos or spoke with an accent. Anything that distinguished them."

Taking a deep breath, you tried replaying those crucial seconds slowly in your head.

"There were four of them. I couldn't see much. They were all wearing identical black clothes."

Suddenly, an unexpected piece of memory rushed to the front of your mind. You opened your eyes in shock, meeting Spencer's curious gaze that had been kept intently on you the entire time.

"I think at least one of them is a woman," you told him.

Spencer's eyebrows rose in surprise. "Are you sure?"

"One of the guys said something about... fucking this place up. And then she laughed. I heard her. It was definitely a female laugh."

"Good. That's good."

"Yeah? Do you think it'll help?"

Spencer nodded assuredly, bringing his hand to leave calming strokes on your head. "I know it will. You've done a great job, sweetheart. I'm proud of you."

The praise Spencer gave eased the tension in your shoulders. As if having been granted fresh air after decades of confinement, you were finally able to let yourself breathe again.

Spencer continued his loving strokes on your head. Little by little, the weight of his touch melted the resolve you had built into a pathetic puddle on the floor. Without its mental shield protecting you, your tears sped forward, gathering in your eyes until they spilled on the vast path down your cheeks.

"Hey, hey." Spencer's voice was laden with panic after seeing you start to cry. "Sunshine, what is it? What's wrong? Talk to me."

"I-I just... God." You struggled to get the words out in between sobs. "I'm a coward, Spencer."

"What?"

"All of those people... They died because I was a fucking coward."

Your admission tore into the air before stabbing Spencer right through his chest.

"Sweetheart, you know that's not true."

"But it is!" you cried out, pulling away from Spencer's grounding hold around your shaking body in favor of your own arms. "I was a coward. I ran and hid because I was too scared to die. Too scared to fight. If I had just tried a little harder, I could've called for help. That way, maybe all of those people wouldn't... And Nick wouldn't..."

A haunting image flashed behind your eyes. The image of Nick's limp and lifeless body on the floor, among those of the others. You remembered crying next to him, punching his chest, body, and arm despite having seen the gunshot wound on his forehead. It took you another five minutes before you eventually managed to gather yourself together, found a phone, and dialed 911.

Not that it made any difference. They were all already dead.

Spencer could hear his heart breaking at the sight of you curling into yourself, recoiling from his touch because you somehow believed you didn't deserve his affection at that moment. If Spencer could just transfer all of your pain towards him, he would. Seeing you beat yourself up that way over something that happened and was done to you was the worst kind of torture he ever had to endure in life.

And Spencer had been through more kinds of torture than the general population in the world.

Deciding that he had seen enough of your self-deprecating torment, he reclaimed your hands inside of his palms and urged you to look at him.

"Are you hearing yourself right now?" Spencer asked incredulously. "How can you even think that way? Sweetheart, what happened to those people, to Nick, it is not your fault."

"B-but, if I hadn't run away--"

"Then you would've died, too," he cut you off. "Sunshine, there were four of them with machine guns. No one stood a single chance against them. Those people were there to kill. There was nothing you could've done."

It was a hard pill to swallow, but Spencer needed you to hear it.

He needed you to know the truth no matter how unacceptable it was.

"If you hadn't hid from them, we would've found seven bodies there instead of six. And I--" Spencer took a shuddering breath, "--I would've lost you."

Your shoulders deflated at his revelation. "Spence--"

"So please--" he searched your eyes then, using his thumb to sweep away the remaining tears under your eyes, "--stop holding yourself accountable. I promise I will do everything I can to find those people and make them pay for what they did."

Spencer's vow triggered a new wave of tears that compelled you to sink into his awaiting arms. He let you stay there until you had cried your tears dry. It was something he also secretly needed for himself after suffering through the short-lived horror over the mention of your name in relation to the heinous case. He just needed to make sure that you were okay.

A few minutes passed by with you in his arms. Eventually, Spencer had to tear himself away to finish his job. He asked you to wait as he wrapped up the transcript of your cognitive interview, along with his professional report over it.

"I need to run somewhere real quick. I promise to be back in a couple of hours," he notified JJ as he handed her the interview report. "Tell Hotch for me? Thanks."

Without waiting for his friend's reply, Spencer rushed back to the waiting room before leading you out to take you home.

Back at your apartment, Spencer guided you towards the direction of your bathroom as soon as you had stepped into the threshold.

"Are you trying to get me naked, Spencer?" you remarked playfully after he refused to let you take your clothes off yourself.

"Yes." The gleaming mischief in your eyes caused him to flick your nose lightly. "Just to get you ready for your bath. Get your head straight, will you?"

You scoffed at his back as he turned around to check the water temperature in the tub.

Once you were submerged safely inside, Spencer left the bathroom to give you some privacy. Meanwhile, he began rummaging through your drawers to pull out a change of clothes, a towel, and a clean sheet for your bed.

By the time you exited, Spencer had changed your bedsheets and lit one of your favorite candles on the bedside table. He asked you to sit down on the bed as he kneeled before you, helping you put on the pajamas he had picked out with little prints of sunflowers on them.

None of Spencer's touches were sexual. They swept over your skin with the care of an artist handling their most precious work. When his eyes found yours, you swore you could almost cry from the intense adoration that seemed to shine so brightly out of them.

As he guided you to lie on the bed, you were surprised to see him following suit. He got under the covers with you, pulling you close to tangle every inch of your limbs with his.

"I love you, Spencer," you admitted to his chest, heart heavy with the deep appreciation and overwhelming affection for the man beside you.

Spencer looked down at your confession, finding his favorite pair of eyes already looking earnestly at him. Instinctively, he reached for your chin with his fingers, tugging your face upward until he could capture your lips with his.

The kiss was slow. Careful. Filled with silent promises and discreet reassurances. When you both parted, Spencer didn't pull himself away. Instead, he let his forehead touch yours while his eyes stayed closed.

"Will you be here when I wake up?" you asked quietly.

"Yes, sweetheart. Now go to sleep."

Although the two of you knew his answer was a lie, you both chose to pretend otherwise. You knew Spencer still had responsibilities to fulfill, along with a promise to you that he intended to keep. You knew that when you woke up later that evening, Spencer would already be long gone, and you would be forced to bask in the traces of himself that he had left behind.

But for now, Spencer was still there, in the comfort of your bedroom, lying on the bed next to you. And that knowledge alone was good enough for you to finally drift further into the land of sleep, surrounded by the warmth of Spencer's loving embrace.

"I'm telling you," JJ insisted, looking at her entire team minus Spencer and Hotch. "There was definitely something going on between them. Why else would he request to take over the cognitive for me?"

"Maybe he was feeling generous," Rossi deadpanned, earning an unimpressed glare from JJ.

It had been a full week since the BAU team had arrived in D.C. to investigate the series of gun attacks in the city. Just the day prior, they had successfully made their fourth arrest, bringing this case to yet another satisfying conclusion in the eye of justice.

If nothing else was amiss, they should have been on their way back to Quantico in less than an hour. In the meantime, though, JJ felt obliged to gather her team members in the middle of the bullpen to share her suspicion about a certain scene she had accidentally caught on their first day working the case.

"Pretty boy did seem more emotionally involved in this case than he usually does, though," Derek pointed out.

"Right? Right?" JJ replied almost too enthusiastically. "Come on, aren't you guys at least half as curious as I am about who this mystery girl might be? Don't you wanna try finding out who she is while we're still here?"

They all stared at each other in hesitation.

"Or, we could just ask Spencer directly and let him explain?" Emily suggested, receiving incredulous looks from the other three in response. "Yeah, you're right. What did you say her name was again?"

"I don't remember," JJ answered.

"It must be listed in the files somewhere, right?" Derek immediately sprung into action, reaching towards the scattered case files that might contain the name they were looking for.

"Just to be clear, I am not taking any part in this." Rossi sighed.

"Got it!" Derek waved the offending file in hand, giving it to JJ, who instantly began skimming over it.

"Alright. Says here that her name is..."

JJ read the name aloud when unexpectedly, an answering sound sprouted from behind them.

"Yes?"

Every single one of them turned in shock at your voice. You smiled at their wide-eyed expressions, waving your hand a little awkwardly in the air.

"You!" JJ exclaimed.

"Me?"

Emily nudged JJ in the ribs, making the blonde woman wince.

"Y-you're the witness from the startup case, right?" JJ said, trying to rectify the situation.

"That's me."

"What can we do for you, Miss?" Rossi asked, stepping forward and away from the rest of the group.

"I'm actually looking for Spencer. Do you know where he might be?"

"Spencer Reid? You know Reid?" Emily asked.

Before you had the chance to reply, the man in question came strolling into the bullpen, rambling animatedly to Hotch who was walking beside him. The moment Spencer caught sight of you, though, he immediately abandoned Hotch's side and rushed towards where you were standing.

"Hey, what are you doing here?"

"Looking for you, of course," you told him, fitting yourself easily into Spencer's side as his arm went around your waist. "Hi, Hotch."

The older man called your name in greeting. "I got your message. You wanted to talk to me?"

"I wanted to ask you--well, all of you, actually--" you glanced around at the other team members, "--if maybe you all would let me treat you to lunch? As a thank you for your hard work on the case."

Hotch nodded in response. "It's fine with me. We don't have to be back until tonight, anyway. Everyone?"

Instead of replying to your offer, Emily voiced aloud the question that was circling everyone's mind.

"You know her?" Emily looked at Hotch before dragging her eyes away towards you. "And you know him? You know each other? How?"

You gazed up at Spencer's eyes, seeing them shining with the same mirth as the one you felt dancing in your stomach.

"I guess this is supposed to be the part where I introduce myself, isn't it?" You chuckled.

Extending your palm, you shook each of their hands while telling them your name, them responding back with theirs even though you already knew who was who long before you had even met them.

"I still don't understand," JJ admitted after you finished shaking her hand. "How did you know Spencer and Hotch?"

Once again, you looked into Spencer's eyes, a question bouncing around in yours. Spencer's nod of affirmation was the only go-ahead you needed.

It's time.

"I'm Spencer's girlfriend."

"She's my wife."

You turned your head towards Spencer in shock.

In front of you, Spencer's teammates were causing an uproar.

"Wait, what?" Emily stared dumbfoundedly.

"You have a girlfriend?" Derek asked in disbelief.

"You're married?!" JJ shrieked.

"Hold on a second," Rossi interjected, holding his palms out as if to tell everyone to stand down and calm themselves. "So which one is it? Girlfriend or wife?"

And that was how you found yourself sitting in the private VIP room of your favorite restaurant in the city with some of Spencer's closest people on earth.

"That's the craziest story I've ever heard," Emily pondered in astonishment.

Rossi, Derek, and JJ were all wearing an identical look on each of their faces after hearing the story of how you and Spencer met: by drunkenly getting married in Vegas after only knowing each other for barely one night when you both weren't even twenty-two yet.

"If someone were to tell me yesterday that there's another member of this team who also went to get married while drunk in Vegas, I would have never even thought of mentioning Spencer's name," JJ mused.

At your curious expression, Spencer explained, "Rossi also got drunkenly married in Vegas to his third ex-wife,"

"Why didn't you two get a divorce?" Emily suddenly asked.

It was something that everyone who knew about your situation with Spencer had questioned at one point or another. The real answer was because you and Spencer had both been reluctant to go through the nasty and lengthy legal process of getting a divorce. Therefore, you decided to part ways without doing anything about it, vowing to only track each other down if one of you ever needed to end the bond because of another impending marriage or any other urgent matter.

But that reason alone was usually not enough to appease people's curiosity. And over the years, you and Spencer had poked fun over that particular fact by coming up with the most outrageous lie you could muster up.

"She wanted to get a divorce," Spencer fabricated smoothly. "I persuaded her otherwise because I had this inkling that someday we were gonna fall in love."

Usually, any other people would coo sweetly at Spencer's statememt.

But these weren't any other people. These people were Spencer's family in more ways except flesh and blood, and even without their profiling skills, you knew they could see right through Spencer's little deception.

"That sounds like bullshit to me. Doesn't that sound like bullshit to you?" Emily asked, turning to JJ for support.

"Yeah, that was bullshit, alright," JJ claimed vehemently, prompting an innocent-looking grin from Spencer and a series of chuckles from everyone else.

"When did you two start dating, then?" Rossi spoke up from one end of the table.

"About two years after Vegas, right?" you estimated, to which Spencer nodded in confirmation. "He strolled into my place of work while he was on a case, and then he asked me out."

Derek sat up on his seat after hearing the new information. "Wait, when was this? Why didn't I know about this?"

"The beginning of my second year in the BAU," Spencer offered. "Elle knew."

"Elle? Elle Greenway? You told Elle but not me?" Derek looked offended.

Spender shrugged nonchalantly. "Elle was assigned with me that day."

"Unbelievable." Derek slumped back down in his chair. "Penelope is gonna freak when she finds out what she missed today."

"Penelope? Oh, she already knows," you told him.

That revelation earned a collective disbelief look across the entire table.

"Yeah... I, uh," you cleared your throat, "I actually just went shopping with her two weeks ago."

"You've got to be kidding me," Emily muttered.

"You told Penelope but not me?" Derek sounded hurt as he pointed his accusatory stare at Spencer. "You even told Hotch!"

"I didn't tell Garcia. She dug through my history and found it out herself. Had to bribe her with candies and chocolates for a whole month to keep her quiet," Spencer grumbled. "And I had to tell Hotch. We needed to add her number to my emergency contact list."

Despite Spencer's concise explanation, Derek still seemed unsatisfied by the whole ordeal.

"How long have you known?" he finally decided to ask Hotch.

"A while," the man answered from his seat at the opposite end of the table from Rossi. "They even babysat Jack a few times for me."

"I don't believe this," Derek scowled. "Pretty boy's got himself a girl for the last six years, and I never knew? Outrageous."

"Technically, we've been married even longer than that," Spencer responded, as if he was unaware of the imminent glower that Derek was sending his way. "Eight years since Vegas."

"That's longer than any of my marriage," Rossi remarked before sipping his drink.

The laugh that resonated upon Rossi's little comment elicited an affectionate smile on your lips.

"So, you live in D.C., then?" JJ asked, at last stirring the conversation away from the topic of your and Spencer's secret marriage-slash-relationship.

"I do, yeah. But most of the time, I live out of my suitcase," you answered. "My firm has clients all over the country. A few overseas, as well. I'm lucky if I even get to have an entire week to sleep uninterrupted in my own bed."

Even then, you truthfully quite enjoyed the work you had to do. You didn't mind having to travel some place new every other week. In fact, you somehow believed that your constant need to travel for your job, and Spencer for his, was one of the reasons why the two of you worked so well together.

Although people might think that two adults who had to travel for a living were a recipe for a disastrous relationship, you and Spencer had so far proven otherwise. Because of your respective schedules, you could sympathize more with the other anytime they had to go somewhere urgent for work. It only made you savor every single second you spent together because of how much precious each one of them became.

The rest of lunch unraveled with the same bucket of smiles, jokes, and laughter. It felt good to finally tell the few people who meant the world in Spencer's life the truth about your relationship. It was also a huge relief to see them opening their arms and welcoming you into the family without an ounce of hesitation.

"Hotch?" Spencer called out after everyone exited the restaurant. "Will it be okay if I stay in the city for one more night?"

"As long as you promise to be back for tomorrow's briefing," Hotch reminded sternly, but the meaningful look he passed over you before he entered his vehicle spoke of a thousand things left unsaid.

"It was so nice meeting you," JJ said as she took you in her arms. "And I'm sorry again about your friend."

"Thank you. And thanks for all of your hard work in catching those guys."

"Of course, it's what we do." JJ smiled as she pulled away. "Invite me and Emily the next time you and Penelope hang out, okay?"

"Will do," you promised.

You watched as every single one of them scrambled into the two black SUVs, waving your goodbye until the cars drove out of your sight.

"I think that went well," you commented before looking up at Spencer. "Do you?"

"I think it went as well as it could."

"So--" you began, circling your arms around Spencer's neck, "--we have more than twelve hours until you're expected back at Quantico. What do you wanna do?"

Spencer nudged your nose with his. "I can think of a few activities we can partake in."

"Really?"

"Really."

Just as he was a hairbreadth away from pressing his lips to yours, you suddenly tore yourself out of Spencer's arms.

"Like getting some frozen yogurts?" you asked giddily, smirking at the dumbfounded look that you managed to put on Spencer's face.

"Fine. Let's go get some frozen yogurts."

Spencer had to hide his amused grin at your elated squeals. He was more than content at that moment to let you produce those addictive sounds at the mere prospect of frozen yogurts.

But later that night, he had a whole different set of activities lined up to pull those same sounds out of you once more.

And it might or might not potentially involve an entirely different yet creative use of frozen yogurts as well.

Spencer simply just hadn't decided yet.

8K notes · View notes

wandaromanoffroses · 8 months

Text

"Isn't she gorgeous?"

Natasha Romanoff x Reader

Requested

Warnings: 18+ content, breast sucking, fingering (R receiving), orgasm denial, strap-on use (R receiving), cock-sucking, vaginal sex, degrading, praising, profanity

Summary: Your husband, Steve Rogers, has been romantically and sexually starving you ever since he became an Avenger. After borrowing money from notorious crime leader, Natasha Romanoff, she breaks into your house to get what she's owed. However, when she finds you, his gorgeous wife innocently asleep next to him, you catch her interest and her plans change instantly.

Pairings: top dom!Natasha Romanoff x bottom sub!reader, Steve Rogers x Reader (nothing romantic or sexual happens)

Trigger Warnings: blood, gun wound, reference to implied SA (blink and you'll miss it).

“Y/n?” you nearly sent the plate in your hand flying to the floor, dropping it into the washing bowl before spinning around to see your husband in the doorway. You shook your head, sure that your eyes were deceiving you. He was never here even when he promised, never mind three weeks early.

“Steve,” you said, drying your hands and rushing over to him but before you could pull him into a hug, he caught a hold of your shoulders to stop you. His touch sent a stab of pain into your chest and you were snapped back to reality, falling away from the lingers of a past moment you had momentarily forgotten wasn’t your present. You straightened your figure and took a step back, looking up at the man that had once been the light of your life, a guide in the darkness, someone special to share all the good with but now, he could’ve been a stranger.

You had been married for three years, together for five and the first few years would be the most treasured moments of your life. But ever since he had become an Avenger, it had consumed his sole purpose.

Steve was always out fighting, carving his mark, making the world proud of his heroism while you stayed at home doing chores and completing mindless activities to pass the time. There was once a time where you could’ve sworn you saw Universes in his eyes. Now, his skin had been drained of colour and his eyes were rimmed with red as if he were a ghost that was forever cursed to haunt his loved ones. “What are you doing here?” you quizzed.

“I’m sorry," he said, bowing his head, “I’ve got into a bit of trouble, I wanted to make sure you were safe.” You frowned.

“What trouble?” you questioned, “is there a villain after you? Can’t the Avengers help you?” You didn’t even bother hiding the bitterness in my voice. They were clearly everything he ever needed, what use were you to him? He sighed.

“Not exactly,” he said, “we should probably sit down.” You followed him into the dining room with caution in your steps, not taking your eyes off him. The walls were a fading, off-white, elaborate flowers twisted between leaves and detailed patterns, wooden panelling running along across the bottom. The light fixture in the centre was brass with three upturned light bulbs, the dining tables and chairs a polished rosewood. Steve had wanted the room like this because it reminded him of his Grandmother. It was awkward to clean and there was always a build of dust in here. You took a seat opposite him.

“What’s going on?” you said. He scratched the back of his neck.

“I know what you’re going to think but… alright I’ll just tell you. I took out a loan from someone a bit dodgy and I haven’t quite paid them back.” You raised an eyebrow.

“What’s ‘haven’t quite’ supposed to mean?” you said, raising your voice.

“I haven’t paid them back, okay?” he exclaimed, “look, all I wanted to do was buy you a new house, I wanted to make you happy since you hate this one so much. I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to spoil my girl.” Generosity – the easiest attainable remedy for guilt.

“Well, I see something wrong with borrowing money you can’t pay back, especially from somebody that can put you and other people in danger,” you said, pushing yourself onto your feet, “what were you thinking Steve?” He slammed his fists onto the table and you jumped, your heart thumping against your ribcage.

“Listen, I thought I would have the money by now. It’s not my fault I can’t see into the future, you know I wouldn’t have even thought about it if I knew.” You closed your eyes, exhaling a long breath, trying to keep your composure. There were a hundred things you wanted to say to him right now but it wasn’t worth it. You either lived in peace or chaos; either way, nothing changed.

“I thought I knew a lot of things about you but they turned out to all be wrong,” you said, “so I don’t know anymore. Nothing you do surprises me.” You stormed back into the kitchen, not wanting him to waste anymore of your time. You had dishes to do and by now, the water would’ve gone cold.

“Y/n, come on. You haven’t seen me in three months and this is how you’re going to treat me?”

“I have dishes to do,” you said, picking up the plate you had dropped before, polishing it until it shone in the dim light peeking through the curtains, “someone has to keep the house clean.” And clearly, it wasn’t going to him. You felt a firm hand on my shoulder and all the muscles in your body tensed.

“I know you’re mad at me.” You scoffed. Mad wasn’t the right word – it was an array of messy emotions tangled together that had been fraying for years. There was more than just anger here, that was just an old friend that had withered and grown back into something much more cruel now. “Just please… let me make it up to you. I could die on a mission one day you know, you never know when one of these moments could be our last.” He had tried guilt tripping you before – it was a simple yet effective way of shifting blame onto the other person to ease your conscience. These games were getting so predictable.

“And I’d be the last one to know,” you said, “maybe if I was lucky, I’d see it on the news.” You placed the last plate on the drying rack, emptying the washing-up bowl before walking away to leave him standing in the kitchen, alone.

..........................................................................

You had avoided Steve as if he were the plague for the rest of the evening, only tolerating him in the same room as you when you went to give him his dinner. If you were nothing but his little housewife, you may as well play the part and poke it in his face. While you were getting ready for bed, you had paused by his chest of drawers, remembering the divorce papers you had hidden beneath the shirts he had outgrown or didn’t like anymore. Most of them had been bought by you and you could recall a memory with your husband in every single one. Maybe another day.

You couldn’t sleep but you kept your eyes tight shut when you heard him enter and move around the bedroom. Why didn’t you just sleep in the living room?, you thought as he slipped under the covers beside you. You figured he’d probably leave before you were awake so in his mind, you wouldn't even know. Dickhead. You didn’t know how much time had passed but you must’ve fallen asleep because the next thing you see is blinding white.

“Steve, turn the lights off…” You let out a scream when a gunshot sounded through the room, colliding with your husband’s cry of pain. Your eyes flew open and immediately fell on the figure standing at the end of your bed, her ravishing, blood-soaked hair curled onto her shoulder, her eyes glittering with shattered pieces of jade. Your heart seemed to freeze in your chest. Natasha Romanoff – the most notorious leader of crime in the world. And she was here, in your bedroom.

You turned to Steve and let out a strangled sob, the sight of scarlet soaking into the bed sheets making you dizzy. You heard the click of heels behind you and Natasha took a fistful of your nightgown before you could even process what was happening, pulling you away from him as if you were a mere feather. You screamed again and if it wasn’t for her strong grip on you, you would’ve collapsed to the ground.

She waited until you were steady enough to stand on your own two feet, gripping your hips and pulling you flush against her body. She was wearing a dress that emphasised all her curves and showcased most of her skin, your body flooding with dread. This woman was able to shoot Captain America without any protective clothing like it was nothing. There was no way out of this situation. We were doomed. I felt something hard in her crotch area, confused as to why she was carrying such a bulky item in her pockets.

“Leave her alone,” Steve whispered, his voice faint and overshadowed by anguish.

“Get on the floor and don’t say another word unless I ask you a question or she’ll have to watch you die,” she snapped, “neither of us want that to happen, do we?” With resentment, he hobbled away from the bed, stumbling over to the wall and sliding himself down it, his hand clutched to the gun wound in his stomach. “Good.” She ran a finger down your cheek before beginning to trace your features, her head tilted to the side. “You didn’t tell anyone you had a wife, Rogers. Isn’t she gorgeous?” You shivered in her hold, her voice low and seductive. “What’s your name, pretty?”

“Y-Y/n,” you trembled, wishing you could strangle the butterflies in your stomach that her touch had provoked. This was insanity – she had just shot your husband and she was threatening to murder him yet she was making you nervous, in a romantic way. God, if only Natasha wasn’t so beautiful, this would be a whole lot easier.

“Y/n Rogers?” she said, giving you a fake pout, “that doesn’t sound very nice, does it? Y/n Romanoff has a much nicer ring to it.” A crease formed between your eyebrows. What the hell was she implying? “Rogers, I’m willing to strike up a deal with you. But first, I’m going to fuck your wife until the only name she’ll remember is mine.” His eyes widened in horror and you let out a cry.

“Natasha, that’s assault. You can’t,” Steve said. She smirked.

“Oh there won’t be any need for that,” she said, “it won’t take much for her to beg me for more.” She pushed you down onto the bed and straddled your lap, a pool of wetness already forming between your legs. This was so fucked up. “Give me consent and I’ll make you feel so good baby, better than you’ve ever felt. All you have to do is say the word.”

You considered all your options but it didn’t take you long to decide since you only had two. You either let Natasha fuck you or you watched Steve die. You could treat it like a one night stand, you thought. You had never experienced one yourself but you’d read it in books so surely you would be able to do it.

Though you knew deep down, part of you wanted this. You were desperately touch starved and the thought of Natasha fucking you made you groan, heat rushing to your cheeks as the sound escape your mouth. You nodded and she gripped your jaw.

“Words bitch.”

“Yes,” you said, looking away from her in shame but she forced you to look back at her.

“Good girl,” Natasha said, lowering herself onto you and colliding her lips with yours, setting all your nerves alight. Her lips felt like velvet against your own, melting against you and setting a slow pace, letting you get used to the sensation. You couldn’t remember the last time Steve had kissed you, never mind like this.

When your hand moved to her chest, she knew she’d won and she began kissing you with more passion, her teeth sinking into your bottom lip. You gasped and she took the opportunity to slip her tongue between the gap in your teeth. You didn’t even bother fighting against her, wanting Natasha to take full control and use you however she pleased.

She separated your lips and began kissing your neck, her teeth ruthless against your skin as she began to mark you, leaving a trail of garnet blotches that would be seen by everyone. “Tell him how much you like this.” As much as you wished it wasn’t true, you were very much enjoying this. It was a terrible thing to admit to your husband but you had to remind yourself that his life was at stake here.

“I love it, I love being marked by you,” you said, “please don’t stop.” She pulled away when she reached your chest, reaching down and taking hold of your nightgown.

“Can I take this off angel?”

“Please,” you said, ignoring that Steve was in the same room as you. You wanted this, you needed this, you hadn’t had sex in so long. Too long. She lifted herself off your waist for a few moments so she could discard you of your nightgown before continuing her path down your chest, stopping right before she reached your breasts.

“So beautiful,” Natasha said before taking one of your nipples between her fingers and rolling it, earning her your loudest groan yet. She began to fondle the other roughly and the pain was soon replaced with pleasure that went straight in between your legs. You were a moaning mess beneath her, your forehead glistening with sweat and your breaths loud and sharp. “Listen to that, Rogers. Does she make these sweet, sweet noises for you? Do you Y/n? Tell me.”

“No,” I said, “only for you.” She tutted.

“Oh sweetheart, he doesn’t deserve you,” she said, “it’s okay, I’m going to take care of you now.” She ran her hands down your stomach and attached her mouth to your hardened nipple, your mind unable to decide what to concentrate on. She slipped her fingers beneath your panties and began snapping it against your skin, causing you to start bucking your hips into her.

“I need you,” you said. You expected her to make you wait but her expression softened as she began sliding your panties down your legs, throwing them in Steve’s direction. “Look how she ruined them for me. If you weren’t so neglectful, this could’ve been you, Rogers. Don’t you ever forget that.” You gasped as the palm of her hand pressed against your cunt, brushing against your swollen clint. “So wet.”

“Natasha, please…”

“Beg,” she said, running her fingers through your folds and collecting your arousal, “let him hear you.”

“Please Natasha,” you said, “I need you to fuck me so bad. I need you inside of me, please make me cum.” Your words made her groan and you whimpered as you felt her push two fingers inside of you, giving you only a few seconds to adjust before she began thrusting in and out of you at a quickened pace. You felt a burning sting, grabbing her wrist to try and slow her down. “Nat, it’s too much, it hurts.”

“What do you mean sweetie? Does he have a small cock?” There was a cruel glint in her eye when the realisation dawned on her. “He hasn’t fucked you in a longtime has he? How long has it been?” You were struggling to form coherent sentences at this point.

“Six months,” you admitted. He visited so little and he was always exhausted when he did, hardly even giving you any affection, never mind fulfilling your physical needs. You had shamefully been trying to fuck yourself for over a year now but you were either too embarrassed to keep at it for long or you were eventually forced to give up, too inexperienced to make yourself cum. You had never used more than one finger so you weren’t used to the stretch at all.

“You’re telling me your husband had access to this cunt anytime he wanted but he chose not to fuck you for half a year?” What a waste of such a perfect pussy,” she said, “shh, it’s okay, it’ll feel so good in a minute.” As if to prove her point, porn-worthy moans began to spill from your mouth as you were drowned in overwhelming bliss. She knew she had found that one spot inside of you when your noises became more intense and more wetness gushed from your entrance, the squelches of your arousal echoing around the room. You took fistfuls of the duvet beneath you in your hands, your walls began to clench around her fingers. But just before you reached your high, Natasha slipped her fingers out of you.

“No,” you cried, “I was so close.” She placed a kiss on your forehead.

“Not just yet,” she said, “I want you to cum on my cock.” You blinked up at her in confusion, not understanding what she meant. Was she perhaps intersex? “Get on your knees.” You scrambled to obey her command, your thighs glistening with white and she smirked. “Such an obedient thing. Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.” You did so without hesitation and she lifted up her dress and threw it on the floor, leaving her in a lacey bra and boxers. Your eyes fell onto her breasts that were full and sat perfectly, wondering how they’d feel in your hands and in your mouth. You were too distracted to pay attention to Natasha pulling down her boxers until a large, red strapon sprung into your face.

You were sheltered and didn’t have many friends so your knowledge on how two women had sex was low. You had accidentally come across some brief information about strapons while scrolling through social media, closing the app immediately and uninstalling it. You had never told anyone you liked women so any mentions of the topic made you panic and run in the opposite direction. Natasha noticed your hesitation.

“It’s just like sucking a cock,” she said, “you’ve done that, right?” You shook your head. Steve was a very traditional man so you’d never done anything outside of the very basics. You had always wanted to explore more interesting options but you were too ashamed to ask or discuss any of your preferences with him. “God, so vanilla. Once I show you what you’ve been missing you’ll never want to go back. Do you want to try симпатичный (pretty)?” Her Russian Nickname for you sent a lustful thrum through your body despite the words being foreign and unknown to you. You knew there was only one correct answer to her question but you liked being able to show Natasha how much you desired to follow her orders.

“I’d love to try,” you said, “anything to please you.”

“Good girl,” she husked, nudging your mouth with the strap-on. Her other hand dug into your shoulder as she pushed it inside of your gaping mouth, your eyes rolling to the back of your head.

Natasha kept going even when you started choking, tears slipping from your eyes and smearing your makeup. The sight of you, a perfect housewife she had ruined and made a mess of, only made her thrust the toy into your mouth faster, desperately turned on. When she was satisfied that you’d wet it enough, she pulled out, showing enough mercy to let you catch your breath. “You’re already such a good cock-sucker.” She ran her thumb over your plump lips. “Aren’t you glad I put these lips to good use, hmm?”

“Yes,” you gasped, “thank you Natasha.” She placed a kiss on your forehead.

“So polite. Get on all fours and look at your husband.” You hesitated a little this time, suddenly remembering Steve’s presence. You turned around and followed her commands, your gaze meeting with his. Steve’s pupils were drowned in pain and clouded his emotions so you couldn’t identify them, blood still gushing from his gun wound.

“Natasha, I think he’s going to die,” I said, “his stomach…” She looked over and saw that he was on the verge of passing out, his blood loss now critical.

“I fear you’re right,” she said, “I thought we’d have more time with him, shame. Don’t worry милый (darling), he’ll be alright soon.” You heard footsteps thundering up the stairs before the door was flung open and several men dressed head to toe in black burst into the bedroom. You wondered how she had summoned them so quickly but you were too horny to dwell on the thought for long.

You tried to cover your exposed body, feeling vulnerable all of a sudden but Natasha slapped your hands away. “They won’t look my angel, they wouldn’t even dare. Don’t let them distract you.” You felt something prodding your entrance and you whimpered.

“Please,” you breathed as she circled your entrance with the toy, collecting your arousal.

“You’re somehow even wetter,” she cooed, “did you really love your face being fucked that much?” Before you could answer she began to push the tip inside, your soaked walls showing no resistance. She didn’t give you anytime to get used to the stretch, pulling out before slamming back into you seconds later. The pain only lasted a few moments before it dissolved into pure pleasure as Natasha pounded into you like a wild animal. You arched your bark, the dirtiest sounds you had ever produced spilling from your mouth and echoing through the room. You somehow managed to lift an arm and point it towards Steve’s shirt drawer.

“There’s divorce paper,” you strung together between gasps, “in that drawer. I already signed them.” The men followed your finger and moved towards them, aimlessly throwing Steve’s shirts onto the floor. You saw a pang of hurt in Steve’s expression but you didn’t care. He should’ve seen this coming and even if he didn’t, it was his fault anyway.

As the divorce papers and Steve were dragged away, you moved your hips in rhythm with Natasha’s to try and get the strap-on deeper into you, every brush against your walls sending electricity through your body. She gripped your hips, encouraging your movements, grunting each time you slammed back against her. Your groans changed when she found your g-spot again and after that, she made sure to keep hitting it, a knot beginning to tighten in your stomach for the second time that night.

“I need to cum,” you said, “can I this time, please?”

“Such a slut,” she said, “soak my dick baby. Go on.” You screamed her name as you released all over her cock, stars blinding your eyes as your body shook with bliss, each new wave stronger than the last. After the longest orgasm of your life, you finally finished cumming, liquid staining your thighs. But Natasha didn’t stop, moving her hands up to your ass and massaging your cheeks.

“Natasha, I’ve already cummed,” you said, expecting her to finally pull out but instead, she tutted.

“We’re not finished yet,” she said, “If I wanted to, I could have you cumming all over this cock all night. We’re done when I say we are. You are all mine after all, gorgeous.” After the initial discomfort faded away, you were soaring back up to cloud nine, ready to do whatever Natasha wanted.

“Of course,” you said, “I’m all yours now.”

#black widow #natasha romanoff #natasha romanoff smut #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanov #natasha x you #natasha romanoff x y/n #natasha x y/n #marvel #marvel cinematic universe #mcu #marvel mcu #marvel smut #mcu x reader #mcu x you #mcu x y/n

2K notes · View notes

compacflt · 1 year

Note

how do you think mav realized he liked men? i kind of always imagined him being in a bar one night and a guy hitting on him & him being drawn more to the danger/socially unacceptable part of it at first (because he’s reckless) and then realizing that he is attracted to men through experience

goose.

i have spoken on this issue in the past. goose was his first. will not be elaborating further.

#ok i can elaborate a little bit: my mav’s rule-breaking turning point was him getting rejected from the USNA #before that he was the ‘perfect’ kid #see my post the other day about ice/mav’s fathers. my maverick was denied what he deserved so retaliated by acting out #meeting (an already married) goose right out of college and sleeping with him = one of the first steps of that rebellion #i dont think maverick ever consciously ‘realizes’ he’s attracted to guys. as ive been saying #for a while… his archetype is thoughtless action. he wants it so he goes after it. no realization required. base desire. no need for labels #pete maverick mitchell #top gun #nick goose bradshaw #mavgoose #now. this is ancilliary but my problem is i am so used to writing goose as a symbol i have NO IDEA how to write him as a character #which is the sole reason the lesbian charliemav au is delayed (indefinitely)#idk how to write goose!!!! He is a symbol for ice and mav’s guilt!! he can’t have speaking lines 😭😭😭

24 notes · View notes

caffeinewitchcraft · 3 months

Text

The Mayor's Daughter and the Outlaw

Summary: After ten years, you've finally got your shot at your revenge. You've found the Hero. You have him in your sights.

-----

Pull the trigger.

You’ve worked too hard not to pull the trigger. The sweat, blood and tears you’ve shed have been the least you’ve given to be here. The air is crisp and clean nearly a hundred feet up in a pine tree overlooking a remote forest. You’re probably the only person in the world capable of spotting the brown, camouflaged building spanning the length of the small river running through the valley. There’s a hologram of the river it’s covering playing over the building’s walls. Hell, there are even birds flicking occasionally across the illusion, not often enough to draw attention, but just often enough their movement sends your eyes darting to other trees, trying to find where they went.

You breathe in the scent of sun-heated sap so slowly that it takes a solid minute for your lungs to expand. Your pupils flex and adjust whenever the wind rocks your tree. The window you’ve been staring at for the past hour remains in your focus.

The Sun, hair just as fake-gold as it was ten years ago, sleeps on. He’s definitely older now that you can see him in real life instead of on magazine covers or under studio lights. The skin of his neck is loose and folded under the weight of his chin drooping towards his chest. His eyes flicker under his eyelids. The bastard still has the audacity to dream. His arms are crossed over the sun motif emblazoned across his breastplate, his dust-covered boots kicked up on his desk so you can see how worn the soles are. Judging by the way his lips tremble, he’s snoring.

Pull the trigger.

You exhale. This is when you should do it. When your shoulders drop and the wind dies so that, for a moment, the world stands still. There are no whispers across the canopy. Every bough is frozen. The reflection of the sun in the river is overcome by a well-timed cloud and the Sun’s head tilts back to expose the long line of his throat.

The trigger presses back against your finger like an eager puppy. There’s nothing special about the bullets, nothing special about this gun. It’s not the right weapon for what you’re asking it to do, but you’ve had longer and harder shots. You know that you’ll shoot true and the confidence steadies your hand even more. You smoothly pull--

If you kill a Hero, there’s no going back.

Your pupils dilate at the memory. For a moment you don’t see the Sun; you see her with her face burned as red as her prom dress. You try to dispel the image, try to remember that she didn’t die in her prom dress, but it’s too late.

I want you to live, Elian.

You’re suddenly aware of how your lungs ache and your legs burn from the way they’re wrapped around the tree and the bark is digging into your cheek and your fingers are like ice on the trigger. You’re out in the middle of nowhere. This is the Sun’s private residence. The security must be insane even if there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around. What’s your exit strategy again? Your thoughts scatter as her voice rings through your head again.

More than anything, I want you to live.

-------Ten years ago----

You’re what the heroes tactfully call a nuisance. A juvenile delinquent with powers, aka a kid that the police aren’t equipped to handle and the local Hero chapter is too overqualified and too understaffed to address often.

Your moral compass has never had a true north and it only gets worse the more your powers develop. Soon you aren’t just stealing your mom’s car – you’re stealing the neighbor’s and then the neighbor’s neighbor’s and then the neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor’s until you’re breaking into houses at the top of the hill and joyriding in a car worth more than your entire neighborhood together.

You find out pretty quickly that the heroes care a lot more when money is involved.

You spend your first night in jail after getting chased for three hours in a neon green lambo by the four heroes packed like sardines in a standard issue SUV. It’s laughably easy to out-drive them, choking around corners and careening down alleys that you scouted in the afternoon. Honestly, it would have been easy to get away, but your mom called just as the tank hit empty, asking when you were coming home. You decided to give the heroes a break before they decided to play too rough with a minor.

Mom isn’t thrilled when you tell her you won’t be home in time for school tomorrow.

You kind of expect to be sent to prison the next day when you find out just whose car you stole. The Mayor’s daughter’s car, bought new for her seventeenth birthday a month ago. There are two open secrets about the mayor. One, he’s probably one of the heroes that protect the city judging from how much he praises them every time there’s a mic nearby. Two, he loves his daughter more than anything else.

So when you’re released the next day with a slap on the wrist? Yeah, you’re surprised.

When you’re released the next day to find the golden-haired, blue-eyed Mayor’s daughter waiting outside? Having just bailed you out?

You feel fear for the first time.

“You could have at least crashed it,” she says when she notices you gaping at her from the end of the parking lot. She’s leaning against the hood of a black SUV that looks a lot like the one the heroes chased you in last night. She waves a hand in the air. “Dad says the dents you put in the side will be out by tomorrow.”

Fear, apparently, makes you snarky. “What, you wanted to spend another week getting chauffeured by a hero?”

Her brows jerk up towards her hairline. She throws a glance over her shoulder. “You seeing ghosts? Nobody’s in there. I drove myself.”

“Good for you,” you say. You think you smell. They didn’t give you access to a shower last night. You’re upwind from her and damnit why are you embarrassed if you smell or not? Your chin jerks forward in a challenge. “You gonna give me a ride back home?”

You’re joking, but she nods like it was the plan all along. “Let’s go.”

Is that an answering challenge in her words? Your teeth grind as you force yourself forward. “Very kind of you,” you chirp, swinging up into the passenger seat. The car smells like leather and justice. “Just drop me off on the other side of the train tracks. I can find my way home from there.”

She snorts. “Is that a Footloose reference? Very dated.”

You stare at her profile. “…No. I literally live on the other side of the tracks.”

She flushes. “Right. Well…I’m not dropping you off yet. I want to talk first.”

The doors are locked. You swallow as she carefully pulls out of the parking lot and then guns it into the road without looking. Luckily, no one’s there. “Talk? About what?”

“About how you’re going to steal my car again,” she says. “And this time you’re going to crash it right.”

“You hate the color that much?” you joke.

Her tone is not joking. “You have no idea.”

You don’t find out her name until dinner when your mom’s managed to entice her into a third slice of homemade pizza. She stares down at the slice while your mom waves for you not to stay up too late before going to bed early. Gamely, you’re already on your fifth helping. Criminal activity takes a lot of energy.

“Does your mom know who I am?” she asks.

“Like, in theory,” you say. You’re full and warm as you lean into the hard wooden back of your chair. Mom added olives to your side of the pizza. “She probably doesn’t know you’re the Mayor’s daughter though. Just that he has one.”

“The Mayor…right,” she says. Her jaw firms. She flicks some olives off her pizza and then eats half the slice in one bite. “I’m Gina.”

“Elian,” you say instead of No, you’re the Mayor’s Daughter. You refill her soda cup before your own, just to show her you can be fancy and have manners too. She’s so out of place in your family’s one bedroom apartment. Her shirt is crisp and white, her gold necklace so shiny, that it’s like there’s a sepia filter over the eggshell walls and oak cabinets. “Sprite. Only the finest for the lady who bailed me out.”

“I’m thinking you can take my car next weekend,” Gina says so abruptly you nearly spit out your soda. There’s a hard light in her eyes. “Dad’s out of town for…business. He won’t notice for a few days. You take it, you get out of the city, you drive it off a cliff once you’ve wrecked it doing donuts or whatever.”

“A cliff?” You know exactly where she’s talking about. There’s an abandoned quarry about an hour outside of town. You shake your head. “That’s where people dump bodies. No way am I going out there.”

“They find bodies there because it’s outside of Hero Force’s patrol,” Gina says. She waves her hands in the air so the yellow light from the inset ceiling lights catches on her golden manicure. “If you think about it, it’s the best place to dump a car. Especially when the heroes are going to be out of town.”

You stare at her. “Did you just admit your dad is part of Hero Force?”

Her eyes skitter away from yours. “No.”

“Your dad is out of town next weekend.”

“Yes.”

“And the heroes?”

“Maybe they’re traveling together.”

“I don’t think anyone is supposed to know when the heroes are going to be out of town. Isn’t that like a national secret, or something?”

“We’re not a big enough chapter for it to be a national secret,” she denies. She bites her lip. “Probably a state secret though.”

You stand and your chair chatters against the linoleum. “No. Absolutely not.” It’s time for Ms. Mayor’s Daughter to leave.

She scrambles up after you, following you into the living room. “Why not?! You already mess with the heroes. Weren’t you the one who kept breaking into the mall on a motorcycle? You hijacked one of their delivery trucks a month ago—”

“A food delivery truck,” you say. “Which was more of a commentary about the city’s investment in Hero Force luxury rather than after school programs—” You bite your tongue. You spin so that the couch stays between you. You glance at your mom’s closed door and consciously lower your voice. “How do you even know that?”

“I’ve been watching you,” she says. She laughs without humor, dragging one hand through her golden hair. “Sometimes living in this town is like being in a simulation. We have four A-class heroes for a population of 30,000 and everybody loves them. Nobody thinks it’s strange to have walking nukes in a small town. They love my dad. Did you know no one’s even run against him for the past two elections? It doesn’t matter what he does. He owns this place and these people. He has – could commit murder and it would be justified. People would think it would be justice.”

“He loves you,” you say weakly. Isn’t four heroes a pretty normal number? Sure, the ones in your town are big names, but that’s not weird.

Is it?

“He loves me so he gets to be a tyrant?” Gina scoffs. “If he’s even capable of love.”

“I’m not going to mess around with heroes’ civilian identities just because you’ve got daddy issues,” you say. When hurt flashes across her face, you wince. “Sorry. But it’s one thing to mess with heroes in masks, okay? Messing with a hero’s family—”

“You didn’t seem to have a problem when you were stealing my car the other night.”

“That was before I knew your dad was Mr. Solve or whatever—”

“The Sun,” Gina says.

“What?”

“My dad’s the Sun.”

“That,” you say, “is so much worse. Didn’t he burn some minor villain’s eyes out last week?”

“Yes,” Gina says. Her mouth twists. “The guy got off easy compared to some others.”

You stare at her, momentarily speechless. “And you wonder why I’m not going to antagonize the guy?”

“But you already do,” Gina says. Her eyes are glinting. She looks so out of place against the dim interior of your home, a radiant girl dressed all in white and gold. She rounds the couch and snatches up one of your hands between two of her own. “Everyone else loves my dad. Except you. My entire life, and you’re the only one who dares to make—make statements about Hero Force consumption by stealing their deliveries or make the heroes chase you around an abandoned mall on foot like regular people. You challenge them, Elian. All I’m asking is that you do it again.”

“That sounds like a lot more than just crashing your car,” you say. Your voice sounds very far away. You never thought of your actions as so noble. There’s a tingling in your stomach that you’ve never felt before and your hand is so warm. She sees you. You shake the fantasy out of your head. “I—look. I’m flattered, but I’m not your guy. The heroes know my face. It’s only a matter of time before I get sent to whatever detention super-powered kids get sent to. I have to graduate high school.”

Rather than discourage her, Gina presses closer. “What if I told you there’s a way to do both?”

Her closeness fogs your brain. “Both?”

“Take the heroes down a notch and maintain your identity,” she says. She releases you and whirls to get her purse off the couch. “I can help you. We can train so that the heroes never recognize the new you. You can use your powers in new ways. And you can wear this.”

She thrusts a piece of chewed leather into your hands. A mask.

“I’m thinking,” she says, “we call you Outlaw.”

------ Now ----

You can’t shoot. Night is falling by the time you admit it to yourself. You press your back against the rough bark of the tree and stare up at the first stars. You cradle your gun in your hands.

The bloodlust is still there. You aren’t a fair lily incapable of staining your petals red (as red as her). So why can’t you pull the trigger? Because of her ghost? Her last message to you?

If you kill a Hero, there’s no going back. More than anything, I want you to live, Elian.

You grind your teeth. Easy for her to say. The dying never have to feel the weight of consequence. They can just say whatever the fuck they want.

You aren’t thinking when you climb down the tree. Your powers give you a lot of things – speed and healing, an instinct for the outdoors, and excellent eyesight. You don’t need to look to find one branch and another, dropping to the forest floor in ten-foot increments. By the time your boots hit the ground, you know what the problem is.

Unlike your other kills, this one is personal. It was never going to be enough just to see him dead. You need him to know why you’ve got him in your sights.

The Sun is an old school hero. The traps you were so afraid of are predictable, turns out. You pick your way around bear traps and landmines, sharp eyes easily picking out silver trip wire when it glints in the moonlight. There are cameras, but there’s likely only one person with access. In the past ten years of following the Sun, you’ve learned two things about him.

One, he’ll kill the things he loves before he loses them.

Two, he doesn’t trust anyone but himself.

You get to the building inside of an hour. The first floor is hidden by steel shutters and there’s no light peeking out from behind them. The second floor window where he’d been sleeping for most of the day shines with the faint blue glow of a television.

The front door looks like a bank’s with how thick it is. There’s a keypad and a biometric scanner you don’t have a prayer of hacking.

That’s okay. You’ve already seen your way in.

You climb up the nearest pine tree. The Sun likes to think of himself as a competent hero, but too many mayoral kickbacks over the years made him soft. He surrounded himself with powerful heroes and never once struggled to win. Because of that, he’s missing some caution and common sense. The building’s first floor is locked up tight, but the windows on the second are regular glass.

And he hasn’t trimmed the tree line back far enough.

You fire your first shot of the night into his empty desk chair, exactly where his chest had been hours earlier. Immediately a siren sounds, and the TV glow coming through the office’s open door is consumed by bright light. You run two steps and then leap, neatly flipping through the empty window frame. Your boots slide for a moment on the broken glass and you catch yourself on the edge of his desk. There are medical papers scattered across it, prescriptions and diagrams of the face and eyes and heart.

You chew your cheek at the sight of a pill bottle. There had been rumors that the Sun is sick with his own radiation poisoning. It’s good you’re here before nature runs its course.

The siren wails for another beat before dying. The silence rings. Your heartbeat picks up as your ears strain to hear if anyone’s coming to meet you. Strange. The Sun had to have been the one who shut off the alarm.

So where is he?

You hold your gun out in front of you and check your mask. The Sun knows who you are by now, but you want him to see the mask she gave you. The handsewn leather, patched more times than you can count, is recycled from one of his old leather jackets. It feels oddly poetic to be dressed in the first iteration of your costume, cowboy hat tipped back and a biker vest embroidered with the name she gave you.

Is the Sun hiding? You creep out of the office, eyes darting from the quaint landscapes hanging on the wall to the tasteful wooden floors. The Sun’s safe house feels more cabin-y than you expected. The property deed has been in his name for the past fifteen years. Did Gina ever visit? Her ghost runs ahead of you, golden nails dragging along the peach wallpaper to the first open door on the left. She looks over her shoulder and smiles.

There are times when you’re glad for the afterimages your brain conjures. This is not one of those times. You don’t think she’d be happy to see what you’re about to do.

You swing around the doorway gun first, a snarl on your lips. “You old bastard, drop what—”

The smell of antiseptic hits your nose first, dashing away the red haze filling your vision in an instant. A TV murmurs against the wall, some rerun of an old western, but it’s not what holds your attention.

There’s a bed in the center of the room. The Sun sits at bedside, his attention wholly invested on the hand he’s holding up. Carefully, he applies gold paint to the nails without once looking up at you.

The woman in the bed is obscured with white gauze and beige compression bandages. Her breathing is soft and even. The one eye you can see is closed and still. No dreaming, no awareness.

“Outlaw,” the Sun says. He gently sets Gina’s left hand down on her stomach and picks up her right. He squints at her pinky nail. “Close the office door, would you? I don’t want the heat to escape.”

“What,” you breathe, “the fuck.”

-----Ten years ago ----

It’s a good year with Gina. You never realized how friend-starved you were until she was there, over at your house every day after school. She always makes it sound like she’s coming over to talk about the Outlaw thing, but there’s other stuff too. Movies and cooking and tutoring.

“Life is about balance,” Gina says sagely during one such tutoring session. “Besides, even heroes don’t go on more than two missions a month. We’re doing just fine.”

There’s always a pressing need to do more though. Whenever you pull off a particularly daring heist, she smiles this secret and pleased smile that makes your stomach flip. Sometimes, when the two of you watch news coverage of your getaways, she murmurs how impressed she is, how smart you are, how cool your powers are.

It makes you want to do anything for Gina.

You’re watching the news one day, waiting for a recap of how you stole the Sun’s favorite shield from the armory, when a rare story comes on. A Hero is dead, some guy named Ibis from Atlanta. There aren’t any leads to the culprit except for eyewitness accounts of a mysterious, winged super-powered individual flying low over the city, hiding in storm clouds.

“I’d kill a Hero,” you blurt out.

Gina jerks so hard that the popcorn bowl goes flying out of her hands. She doesn’t seem to notice. “What?”

“N-not your dad or anything,” you say quickly although yes, if you had to kill anyone, you’d start with the man who makes Gina cry like that. “Just…in general. The news anchor said Ibis was connected to a civilian’s death, right? I could kill a Hero like that.”

“No,” Gina says. She drops off the couch to kneel by you. “No, Elian.”

You flush like you’ve done something wrong. You sink into your hoodie. “I’m not going to, I’m just saying—”

“If you kill a Hero, there’s no going back,” Gina says. She’s too close, so close that you can see the flecks of gold hidden in her eyes. “Your life—it’s not like what we’ve been doing. Dad’s got rules when it comes to stealing. But if you kill a hero?” She shudders. “I want you to live, Elian.”

“I got it—”

“Please,” she blurts out. The plea in her voice makes you really look at her despite the pounding of your heart. Her eyes are wild and her mouth is pressed into a thin line. “No matter what. Promise me.”

“I—” No matter what? You slowly shake your head, trying to get away from the instinctive desire to agree with her. “I-if someone is really bad, I’d—”

“Elian—”

The tension makes you truthful.

“If your dad hurt you, I’d kill him,” you say. When she rears back, this time you follow. You brace your arm against the couch so you can lean into her space. With your other hand, you trace the fading burn on her cheek that could pass for an old sunburn if you didn’t know the truth. “I know you don’t think he will, but he’s been erratic lately. And I know about his temper. If he hurts you, I’d kill him.”

The air thickens between you. It’s rare that you don’t back down, but you’re not backing down now, staring into her eyes. Competing wills. For a moment you let everything you feel come to the surface. Your frustration when she visits with that fucking shadow in her smile, the helplessness when there’s another burn on her arm, the adoration when she’s just there.

Gina shudders and looks away first. She licks her lips. “I—I…appreciate what you’re saying, but I’m fine. You agreed I got to make the rules for Outlaw. I’m telling you one. Don’t kill heroes.”

She’s pulling away. You do too, falling to her side and sitting next to her rather than hovering over her. You try for a careless shrug but fall short. How can she make you feel so powerful one second and so powerless the next? You avert your eyes. “I won’t kill heroes,” you promise.

You hear her suck in a breath. “Good. Because I need you alive.”

“I do like being alive,” you say and don’t finish the sentence with with you.

“We’re done studying,” she decides. She darts up towards the kitchen. “I’m getting another bowl of popcorn before we start the movie. You want some?”

You stare at your reflection in the dark TV. Your jaw works. Finally, you say, “Nah. I’m good. I’ll just eat it off the floor.”

“Don’t be gross, Elian!”

------Now.----

“I will regret that day for the rest of my life,” the Sun says. He hasn’t looked at you once. His eyes are glued to the steady rise and fall of Gina’s chest. He times his breathing to hers and then sighs. “What a fool I was. Drunk on power.”

You’re standing on the opposite side of the bed. Your gaze flicks from Gina to him and back again. “Is she ever conscious?”

“It’s a medically-induced coma,” the Sun says. “The doctors say she should wake up any day now that most of her injuries have healed. Her last surgery was the final one. Now it’s up to her.”

This might be the first time in ten years that you’ve breathed. You suck in air greedily and imagine you can taste her scent under the layers of sickness and medicine. “They told me she died.”

“I told Hero Force you did it,” the Sun says. There’s no remorse in his voice. “They always tell villains they were successful, so they don’t try again.”

A decade of rage slides around your ribs. “You fucking bastard.”

“I did think it was your fault ten years ago.” He carefully picks up Gina’s left hand again to apply a second coat. It takes all your willpower not to slap him away from her. “If you hadn’t stolen Hero Force data, I wouldn’t have had to come after you with my full power. She would never have been in the line of fire.”

You’re fists shake at your sides. “I didn’t steal Hero Force data, I stole your fucking car. Don’t rewrite history.”

“There was Hero Force data in that car.”

“It was your Porsche, your civilian Porsche!”

“My fault to have left sensitive data out,” the Sun says. His confession surprises you into silence. “But I had to get it back no matter what. Then I blamed you by thinking how if you’d only asked me to take my daughter to Prom, I would’ve known she was in the car.”

“She’s not your property and it’s not the 1800s, of course I didn’t ask if I could take your daughter to—”

“I’m telling you what I thought,” the Sun interrupts. He finally looks at you. He looks worse than he did earlier, the years cutting deep lines into his face. There are black bags of exhaustion under his watering eyes. He breathes out shakily. “I had to tell myself it was your fault. It was the only way I could survive, Elian.”

Your real name shocks you. You stumble back. “How do you know that name?”

“She calls for you sometimes,” the Sun says. He drags a hand over his face before grimly returning to his daughter’s nails. “She’s never been really conscious for long. The d-damage took a long time to heal. But when she’s awake, she calls for you and she calls for Outlaw. Wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.”

Your chest throbs. “I should have been here. You should have—I could have—”

“Blaming you let me keep her by my side,” the Sun says. “I don’t expect you to forgive me or even understand me. But I…I regret more than anything what I’ve done to my daughter.”

“You’re going to regret it even more,” you say. The rage you feel is like a tidal wave. Ten years. Ten years. You could have held her hand through her recovery. You could have been there for her. And this selfish asshole who never even loved her like a father should took that away from you. You remember your gun. “You never deserved to be her father.”

“I didn’t, did I?” the Sun asks. He sets her hand down and swallows hard. He looks down the barrel of your gun without flinching. “She says one other thing, you know. When she asks for you.”

The curiosity stills your trigger finger. “What?”

“She says, Don’t kill heroes.”

Your face contorts. There’s the memory of popcorn in your mouth and the heat of her eyes on you. “Yeah, she said that to me before too. Back when I offered to kill you the first time.”

The Sun hangs his head. If he’s surprised to hear that, he doesn’t show it. “I wasn’t a good father.”

“No. But she didn’t want you dead.”

Understanding dawns. “Don’t kill heroes.”

“Exactly.” You tilt your head. “Do you feel like a hero?”

His lips tremble. His gaze drifts back to his daughter. Her eyes are flickering under eyelids. “I—I—”

The trigger presses back against your finger, eager and ready. “Do you?”

He licks his lips. “N-no,” he whispers. He closes his eyes. “No, I don’t suppose I do.”

This time, it’s easy to take aim. Steady your breath. And—

Fuck.

“Leave,” you say. You drop your gun back to your side and scowl when the Sun’s eyes fly open in surprise. “If you do what I say, you’ll live long enough for Gina to decide what to do with you. Leave and don’t tell anyone about this.”

The Sun shakes his head. “No, no I can’t leave her—”

“Then die here,” you snap. You bare your teeth at him. “Leave. We’ll be gone in a week. Maybe she wakes up and calls you. Maybe she—” You take a deep breath. “Well. Maybe she doesn’t. Either way, your part is done here.”

“I need to be there when she wakes up. Please, I’m her dad—”

“You’re her murderer,” you say. More than anything, you want to pick Gina up and run out of here before the Sun can stop you. You eye the monitors and know three people you need to call for advice before you even attempt to move her. A week should be just enough time to disappear. “You think you deserve to stay by her side?”

The Sun opens his mouth twice before he finds words. “I just—let me stay until she wakes up. That way I’ll know.”

“I spent ten years thinking she was dead,” you say. “You can last a month in limbo. If I have to ask you again, we’ll finally see who’s stronger now that I’m all grown up.”

The Sun picks himself up slowly. You think he cries. You’re not sure. He may even plead with you again. You’re deaf to it. Your brain has given up on splitting your attention and every atom of your being is homed in on Gina.

She’s alive. She’s alive.

You kneel at her bedside and wait for her to wake up.

----

Thanks for reading! If you want to read more of work or get access to stories like this a week (or more!) early, please consider checking out my Patreon (X)! This week's short story for my Triple Shot and above tiers is about a world where being loved adds years to your lifespan!

Based off this prompt (X): Love determines how long you live, some people are in their hundreds, but some don’t even live to be 20.

#my writing #short story #superheroes and villains #my superpowers

1K notes · View notes