My arms ached to wrap around her. My fingers almost bled for the pleasure of touching her.

But I forbade any method of control.

She’d taken me.

She could have me.

I wouldn’t dominate her.

I wouldn’t direct or demand.

I was hers and completely at her mercy.

I grunted as she rode up, stealing my mind one piece at a time, claiming my heart until every broken fragment was hers.

I couldn’t catch a breath, groaning as she fucked me, stroke by stroke, replacing all the pain of sex with all the pleasure of it.

When she’d hugged me before, it’d overwhelmed me. The sensation of her giving me something so innocent and meaningful had tipped me over an alarming edge.

But this?

This was more than any sex or kiss or touch I’d ever experienced. Not because I’d been a plaything and treated like trash, but because this was her. This was us. This was raw and elemental—the joining of two bodies long after two souls had met, acknowledged, and intertwined.

She rocked up again, and I came apart beneath her.

The tingle I’d been chasing and lost thundered back with a vengeance, catapulting down my spine and shooting between my legs.

Christ, it felt good.

Too good.

I was losing my goddamn mind.

“Give in,” she murmured, her voice adding kindling to the already hissing fire in my belly. Unlike the fire that’d burned me alive before, this one lived inside me. She’d conjured it and nursed it, turning a tiny spark into an uncontrollable inferno, glowing so bright it illuminated corners of my soul that were rotten and torn, granting sunshine into places where perpetual night once reigned.

After decades of agony, she granted me peace, and I struggled.

I didn’t know how to be.

How to be the man she deserved.

I raised my hands to push her away, but she moaned under her breath and rode me harder.

And I didn’t stand a goddamn chance.

The tingle morphed to outright annihilation.

I wanted to come so fucking badly.

I wanted to come in her.

Fireworks shot through my cock as my entire body bunched and my forehead furrowed with greed. She vibrated above me, a living angel knowing full well how enraptured I was by her touch. How desperate I was for friendship. How afraid I was of reaching for something that might not exist.

She sank deeper.

And that was it.

I threw my head back, my skull clunking against the wall. “Shit—”

I came.

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

HE DIDN’T JUST COME.

He broke apart.

Wave after crippling wave, he gave in to me.

His belly rippled with shockwaves, his cock spurted over and over inside me, his breaths haggard, and grunts loud and animalistic. He didn’t speak. He was beyond speech. But each savage noise he uttered gave me all the thanks I needed. Every groan throbbed with gratefulness and manic desire.

I let him pump into me, vicious and needy as he suddenly wrapped his arms around me, trapping me over his lap, holding me down all while he purged every drop of evil into me.

“Goddammit—” he grunted, spearing deep, ensuring I would always know what it felt like to be taken by this lonely creature.

I didn’t think it would take him long to come. He’d been on the knife-edge the moment I’d sank over him, but watching him combust, hearing him gasp with bliss and knowing I granted that pleasure made my core clench in need.

There was something between us.

Something that hissed and licked and sparked.

And I wanted to feel what he did. I wanted to explode in his arms.

Like all the secrets of tonight, I had another. One I would bury deep, deep down because I would never admit that taking him this way had turned me on. While I’d ridden him, he’d worshiped me. I’d been his everything. I’d felt invincible as he’d forbidden himself from touching me until the very end, allowing me to rock and coax, greedily taking every inch of what he offered.

That was a heady thing indeed, having control over a man who’d only moments ago attacked me.

He’d gifted himself to me entirely, wholeheartedly.

Not as a slave who believed he didn’t have a choice but as a man who’d only just remembered how to live.

I gasped as the truth of that crowded my mind.

Kas was rough and wild and unstable, but perhaps that was the healing process for someone who’d only just come back to life? He’d spent a decade just existing, turning off his humanity, willingly slipping into silent loneliness and endless monotony.

Maybe I didn’t continually hurt him like I believed, but maybe, just maybe, I was making him come alive again. Maybe he’d begun the journey back to being healthy, to being whole.

Maybe this is the turning point, and everything will be better now.

He jerked one last time with a soft grunt, then his arms fell away, and his head tilted to the side. If shame had a color, he’d be painted in it from head to toe. He gulped. His hips shifted beneath mine, trying to disengage.

He couldn’t look at me.

His cock still rippled inside me.

But the longer we stayed joined, the more he withdrew until goosebumps scattered down my spine.

My heart pinched, and I couldn’t stand the feeling of him distancing himself from me, not after everything that’d just happened.

Shifting on my knees, I pushed upward.

His body slipped from mine, and I winced with frustration as I stepped away.

My own arousal still hummed in my blood, unsatisfied. A part of me wanted to be selfish and return to him. To find an equal completion.

But if I did that, then I would be as bad as the guests who’d used him. Whatever the reason he’d just pulled away, I had to accept it and not push. To push was to get hurt. I was sure of it.

Wrapping my arms around myself, I shivered with ice, becoming suddenly, horribly unsure.

Had I done the right thing? Had we reached a turning point, or had I just made things a hundred times worse?

I shivered again, fear rising as my mind raced for my own safety.

I should run before he snapped again.

I should—

Enough.

I gritted my teeth and stopped my unraveling thoughts.

This wasn’t about me.

It’d never been about me.

Even when he’d thrashed in his nightmare and pinned me to the floor. Even when he’d bound me in a chain and thrown me in a basement...none of this was about me.

Everything was about him.

God, how had I not seen it? How had I not understood the only way to earn my freedom was to give Kas his, entirely and completely—to teach him that he could leave. That no one would hurt him. No one would chase him. Whatever prison this valley had become had a door that only he could open.

He hissed under his breath, his haunted, color-shadowed eyes latching onto the trail of white as it oozed down my inner leg. He’d marked me. Come in me. Stark evidence that I’d given myself to him and he’d given himself to me.

He watched his release roll all the way to my knee before his face twisted, and once again, he came apart.

His legs shot up, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bowed into the cage as if he couldn’t cope without a prison. “Leave,” he whispered, sounding wretched and wrung out.

I had so many things to say. Things he needed to hear. To listen to and believe.

He hadn’t forced me.

I’d done this.

I’d willingly chosen to let him climax inside me.

I’d done it so he could rest. So he could fall asleep later tonight and not be terrified of his nightmares.

“Kas...I—”