American Prince (New Camelot Book 2)

before

“Go or I’m pushing you down there!” Colchester shouted at Dag. In the background, the now-familiar click boom of a tripwire explosive thudded through the hallway, nearly knocking us off our feet.

“Check in,” I said into the radio, even though my ears were ringing too much to hear if they answered back. Ash was still shouting at Dag, barely fazed by the explosion; there were more shouts coming from down the hall.

Just three hours ago, the rest of Ash’s company and I had rolled into the abandoned town of Caledonia to set up an outpost. It was supposed to be easy—or whatever passed as easy these days—no guns needed, just some HESCO walls and a few generators, enough to select one of the evacuated buildings and fortify it. The sweeps of the other buildings in town were supposed to be perfunctory, unnecessary.

It had been a trap. A fucking trap. The whole fucking time.

Ash had thought of the elevator shafts as a way to get out, and almost all of the company who’d been caught in this rat-trap had made it down to the basement, but there were at least three unaccounted for. Three that were all my men. Ash had insisted that he’d be the last man down, and initially I was going to wait with him because I couldn’t stomach the thought of him waiting alone, but now that three of my men were stranded in this no man’s land between the lower floors and the enemy-occupied upper floors, there was no way in hell I could leave.

“Check in, or I’m fucking coming down there,” I yelled into the radio. I tried to peer down the hallway, but there was only smoke.

Christ. I’d been deployed for two weeks and I was about to die. In an ancient apartment building, halfway across the world from my family, yards away from the man I loved. On fucking linoleum. Who wants to breathe their last on fucking yellowed linoleum?

Whatever Ash had shouted at Dag, it had worked. Dag crawled backward through the open elevator doors and into the shaft, using the small ladder inset into the wall to work his way down. Ash turned to me.

“Ready?”

I shook my head, pointing down the hall. “We got three still out there, sir.”

His pupils widened ever so slightly when I said sir, just as they had the whole week since that strange moment with the pushups in his office. We hadn’t talked since then, or at least, hadn’t talked about anything that wasn’t duty and war, but the moment lingered between us, and I couldn’t look at his face without remembering what his boot leather felt like against my lips. I felt like he could see it in me, like he could smell the desperate confusion burning in my blood, but he didn’t push, he didn’t chase. If anything, I got the feeling he was a little hurt that I kept my distance, which made it twice now that I’d hurt him because I was too fucked up to get my shit together and admit what I wanted.

It was agonizing. Every minute of it.

But right now, all of that faded behind us. There was too much to do to survive in the here and now.

“I’m going down there,” I added, unshouldering my M4.

“It’s not safe—”

I was already down the hall. I’d claim I didn’t hear him if he tried to give me shit for it later, but there was no way I wasn’t going after the stranded soldiers. I heard him swear behind me, heard a shout from somewhere down the hall, followed by three telltale cracks.

My radio crackled to panicked life—it was the men trapped down the hall. “They’re up here! They’re in the south stairwell—” The radio crackled some more, punctuated by loud pops I heard both through the radio and outside of it. The explosive had left the floor and most of the walls intact, but it had lit odd portions of the walls on fire—it took me a moment to realize it was the wooden doors to the apartments. The acrid smell of burning paint stung my nose.

“Fuck,” I muttered, creeping through the smoke. My finger weighed heavy on the trigger. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Crack. There was a scream, and I stepped through the smoke to find my guys sheltering in a doorway, one of them now clutching a bleeding arm.

“I’ll cover you,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry. “Get to the elevator.”

Suddenly Ash was there—he’d followed me into the smoke-shrouded firefight. There was a shout in Ukrainian, and Ash pushed me into a doorway with him, the recess just barely deep enough to shield us. Reflected flames danced along the edges of his ballistic glasses, a trickle of sweat ran down from under his helmet and slid down the strong, graceful lines of his neck. He was tense, alert, but also completely in control, his tension contained by an immense sense of calm. Being near to him in this linoleum hell was like pressing your palm to a sun-warmed boulder or digging your fingers into the sand: inherently soothing, grounding, a reminder of what real power feels like.

That was Ash in battle. The inevitability of stone, the strength of storms and waves.

He glanced at me and bumped my shoulder with his. “We’re getting out of here, Embry.”

I scowled at the end of the hallway through the smoke. “Those Carpathian fuckers won’t.”

I didn’t give a shit why the separatists wanted their own country right now; I didn’t give a shit about anything except that they’d tried to kill men I cared about, they tried to kill me, and fuck them. Fuck them for picking this jagged, piney piece of crap country to live in, for choosing this ugly-ass Soviet-era bullshit for me to die in, fuck them all.

“Hey,” Ash said, and I realized I was still scowling. “Getting out of here is the first priority, okay? Living is more important than killing.”

On cue came a crack crack crack crack from through the smoke.

I dropped to a knee as Ash stayed standing, both of us squeezing our triggers to fire bursts of bullets at the enemy. My three guys across the hall took the chance to run back, and then Ash yanked at my shoulder as he started walking backwards. “Come on, Lieutenant.”

I shook him off, staying on my knee and firing. I could almost tell where they were shooting from, almost, and if I just got a little closer…

“Embry,” Ash said. “Get the fuck on your feet.”

I ignored him and moved forward to the next doorway. I was going to nail those motherfuckers, I knew it, and all the rage and certainty fused together in my blood, pounding through my body. I hated them, I hated this building, I hated the smoke and peeling paint, I hated the cold sweat on my neck as bullets buried themselves in the wall around me.

They let loose another volley, short bursts of fire, and I finally pinpointed the corner they were shooting from. I kept my body low, but I moved into the center of the hallway and let loose onto them, shuffling backwards but still exposed because fuck it all, I was going to put them down like dogs—

A sledgehammer hit my shoulder.

I staggered back, the breath knocked out of me, looking down in a daze to see where the sledgehammer had come from, but it wasn’t a sledgehammer at all. In fact I couldn’t see much of anything in the smoking darkness—except for a growing wet stain on the shoulder of my combat jacket, right outside of where my body armor ended.

And then another sledgehammer tore through my calf. I felt the fire and tear of it, the hot blood running into my sock. I’d just washed that fucking sock.

“Shit,” I said calmly, and then laughed. My voice sounded so funny, so mildly surprised, like I couldn’t find the keys to my Audi R8 or my favorite watch or something. Still laughing, I raised my gun and kept shooting back, shooting and shooting for what felt like several hilarious hours, but was probably only a few seconds.

Maybe less, because Ash was there shouting at me, clearly upset, clearly panicked, and it bothered me to see Ash panicked. I liked it better when he was calm. Why couldn’t he see how funny it was about the sock? About my voice?

I tried to tell him, but when I spoke, the words came out in jagged tremors and the only words that came out were blood and sock and Audi. He bit his lip and swept his gaze from my bleeding shoulder to the spot where blood had begun to drop from my leg to the floor. “Little prince,” he said, his voice breaking. “What have you done?”

Bullets tore into the linoleum next to us, and I saw the moment he became stone again, the minute he became an Army captain and not the man who once begged me not to disappear. He hooked my arm around his neck and—as an afterthought—lifted his assault rifle with his other hand and shot into the smoke as we retreated backwards, almost all of my weight on his sturdy shoulder. The giddiness had faded and the pain had come, stealing my breath and my thoughts, like a hook in my stomach that kept my ribs from expanding all the way.

“North stairwell,” Ash said as we got close to the elevators. “There’s no way you can climb down that shaft right now.”

He saw the look on my face and added, “I’ll be right there with you. But you need to go first.”

The pain robbed me of my will to argue. I let him ease me to the floor and then I did as I was asked and crawled to the stairwell, a one-armed, one-legged crawl that left a smear of blood behind me. Ash kept shooting, dodged fire, tossed a grenade or two down the hall, shouted things into the radio to the men downstairs—he was a one-man battle in and of himself, single-handedly bearing the brunt of the enemy’s malice and saving the rest of us at the same time.

I made it into the stairwell, pulling out my handgun with a shaking hand in case it was occupied. It wasn’t. A moment later, Ash joined me, kicking the door shut behind him and pulling out his flashlight. My whole body was shaking now, violent shivers, pain racing along every nerve’s pathway with vicious, electric sizzles, and there were moments where life seemed to fade in and out: static, then Ash with his flashlight, then black static once more.

“Little prince,” he said. His voice was so far away and so close at the same time. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

I tried. I really did. But despite the adrenaline surging through me, I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t keep the static from crowding at the edges of my vision. I remember grabbing at Ash’s jacket and telling him to leave me behind and to save himself. I remember him dropping a quick kiss onto my helmet. “You’re not Patroclus yet,” he said. “You’re not dying here.”

I’m still not sure what all happened next. I was carried, I know that much, and there were more gunshots, more moments where panic and adrenaline plunged me into the kind of prey-alertness that had my heart hammering and the blood spilling out of me faster and faster. There was a moment when I remember sitting on the ground as Ash pulled a rucksack off a dead Carpathian soldier and rifled through the contents. Another moment when I heard him cursing after trying to hail help on the radio multiple times with no response.

And then the moment when I finally came to completely, gradually swimming up through a hazy layer of strange dreams to see Ash’s boots pacing in front of me and a pile of rucksacks and our body armor next to me. Night had come, and in the forest, it had come with a vengeance, sweeping darkness like a layer of paint under the canopy of trees. It had also brought a thin breeze that wiped at my skin with cool fingers. I shivered.

The boots stopped. “It’s too dangerous to light a fire,” Ash said, “but I can give you my jacket. We might be here a while; I can’t get anyone over the radio for an evac and we got separated from everyone else. I took off your armor to work on your shoulder—and mine to make it easier to move you around—but we should probably put it back on soon. How are you feeling?”

“I…” I felt fuzzy but not terrible. A little weak, maybe, and my mouth tasted like metal, but I wasn’t dead or dying or writhing in agony. So definitely a welcome surprise.

The boots resumed their pacing, and I noticed Ash’s hands now, balling and flexing restlessly by his thighs as he paced. “The Carpathians carry morphine in their first aid packs. You were moaning as I taped you up, so I gave you some. It’ll be our little secret.”

Morphine. That explained the fuzziness, the way the pain felt like it was shouting at me from a distant room. I struggled to sit up, fuzziness quickly turning to dizziness and the pain’s shouts getting closer. But I managed, propping myself against a tree and taking several, slow breaths as Ash continued to stalk around our makeshift camp like a caged tiger.

With cautious fingers, I lifted my jacket—the sleeve had been unceremoniously cut open, probably for Ash to get to my bullet wound more easily—and I probed the bandage underneath. I could smell antiseptic, see where he’d sponged away the blood as best he could, and admired the neat lines of tape and gauze. My calf was done with the same careful precision.

“You’re not so bad at this,” I said weakly. “You should have been a doctor.”

“If I were a doctor, I wouldn’t have been there to save your life,” he growled, and then raw, real pain edged his voice. “What the fuck were you thinking, Embry?”

“I don’t know.” My fury at the Carpathians was spent. Even the high I normally had after an engagement with hostiles was gone—bled out, dulled by the morphine. “I should have stayed back.”

“Fuck yes, you should have,” Ash snapped. “You almost died today and for what? Separatist assholes in a town nobody knows the name of?”

I peered up at him in the dark. My battle high had spilled out of me, but I recognized all the signs of it in him. He wasn’t stoned with it like some guys were and he wasn’t giddy with it, like I sometimes got. He was vibrating with it, as if he were gripping a live wire with both hands. His eyes flashed in the dark, tension rolled off his body. He was a man who needed to drink or fuck or fight, or all three—the kind of man I was often, but with Ash, it felt different. That kind of hot, desperate agitation was different when it burned through a man as powerful as Ash, that kind of restlessness was perilous when it infected a man who wasn’t used to feeling out of control.

Ash was dangerous right now. Unsafe to be around.

And me? Was I frightened? Uneasy around a man who looked like he wanted to tear me and the whole world apart with his bare hands?

I wasn’t.

More—I felt a heart-stopping kind of awe, a delightful kind of terror, the kind knights in legends have when they realize the woman they met by the river is a great and terrible fairy queen now intent on eating them alive.

I stared at Ash as he stopped his pacing and stood in front of me, asking me something. I struggled out of the morphine haze to focus on the present moment.

“—death wish,” Ash was saying. “Do you want to die? Is that it? Do you hate me so much that you’d make me watch you do it? You’d make me be responsible?”

“You weren’t responsible,” I answered. The morphine and pain made my voice sound weary. Beleaguered.

“Like fuck, I wasn’t responsible,” Ash hissed, my weak voice doing nothing to stay his anger. “You honestly believe that I’d be able to hand your mother a folded flag and just walk away, like I had nothing to do with it? I protect all my men, but you—” His voice broke and he turned away, kicking savagely at a fallen branch. “Fuck you and your death wish, Embry. Fuck you.”

Remembering the first day we met, I tried for a joke and failed. “I’d rather it was the other way around.”

In an instant, he was on me, straddling my thighs, one hand yanking my head back so I had to look up into his face. “Don’t play games with me,” Ash warned in a low voice. “Not tonight. Not after what you did. You don’t even want to know the things I’m thinking about right now.”

I could barely breathe. Pain sang out from my shoulder and hunger sang out from my thickening cock. I was at the mercy of a monster—in the hands of an angry god, as they say—and I’d never felt more alive. It was like kissing his boot, like that first moment I’d been shot at in the trees—the whole world came to life, the forest thrumming and the leaves rustling and my blood and heart all part of this incredible symphony of magic and music that was playing all the time, if only I had the ears to listen. Being with Ash was like my battle high, the fragility of life so apparent, the thrill of surviving it so exhilarating. Surviving him.

“Take it,” I said, my fantasies from all those years ago coming back and making me stir underneath him.

“What?” he asked quietly.

“Take what you’re owed. Take what you deserve for saving my life.”

His lips parted, his eyes hooded, and he pulled my head back even more, exposing my throat. “And what exactly do you owe me?” he asked. “What exactly do I deserve?”

I met his eyes, which were almost black in the dark. “Whatever you want.”

“What I want will have you flat on the ground with tears in your eyes. You think you want to give that to me?”

“No.” I swallowed. “I want you to take it from me.”

He went still.

“Let me thank you,” I begged. “Let me make you feel better. Use me. Use me how you need.”

“Oh, that’s what you want, is it?” he breathed. He leaned in, his thighs on my throbbing erection, and I felt his own, an iron bulge pressing into my stomach. It was massive. He’d tear me apart with it. “You won’t let me have you any other time, not with kisses or love letters, but when you’re bleeding and I’m furious, that’s when you’ll open yourself to me? That’s when I get to have this?”

How could I make him understand? That it had to be like this? That I had to be conquered, not wooed? Because it was new to me too; only with Ash did this part of me exist. I could still barely put words to it inside my own head.

But maybe he saw it in my face. Maybe he already knew the answer. He leaned down and bit my neck—not gently but hard, so savagely I cried out. His hand left my hair and began yanking impatiently at the Velcro and zipper fastenings of my uniform coat, efficiently stripping it off of me, taking some care with my shoulder but not enough that I felt gentled. He was still furious, still a monster, still a dark and stormy fairy tale prince, and I the person he’d rescued.

My T-shirt came off just as roughly, and there was no admiration, no petting or caressing, nothing that would distract him from his relentless anger. He moved off me, and one moment I was sitting against a tree, and the next I was forced over a rucksack. Impatient hands tore at my nylon belt, worked my pants down to the tops of my thighs. The air was cool—not chilly, but close—and I felt goose bumps pebble on my back and hips, across the firm flesh of my ass.

Through the morphine and the pain came a slight moment of embarrassed panic—what was I doing? Of all the men I’d slept with, there’d never been a time when I’d been unceremoniously stripped and opened, treated like nothing more than a convenient hole to fuck…

But the thought of it, of being so dehumanized when normally my lovers adored and worshipped me, brought me dangerously close to pumping cum all over this rucksack.

Ash clamped a forearm across my lower back, pinning me in place as his other hand smeared Vaseline from the first aid kit where he needed it. “Is this what you want?” he asked, not a little coldly. A fingertip pressed against my entrance, sliding in to the knuckle, and I bucked backwards. It felt wrong, my body interpreting the invasion as pain, but I’d done it enough times to rewrite the feeling as pleasure. After a few seconds, he added a second finger, deeper and wider, and something grazed against my prostrate.

“Answer me,” Ash demanded. “Is this what you want?”

“Yes,” I moaned.

“You’re going to let me use you, aren’t you? Fuck you any way I want?”

I moaned again as those clever fingers left me, unconsciously rocking my hips against the rucksack to get some friction against my cock.

“Yeah,” Ash muttered to himself. “Yeah, you are.”

I looked back, unprepared for the sight that met me: Ash without his jacket, his T-shirt clinging to the lean muscle of his shoulders and chest, the biceps in one arm tensing and relaxing as he fucked a fist full of Vaseline through the open fly of his pants. Everything about him conveyed his power over me, his right to take what he wanted—the fact that he was still fully clothed, the slide of that brutal cock in his fist, the forearm still cruelly pinning me in place.

Finally, he had his cock slicked and glistening, and he moved closer, still holding me in place while the wide, blunt crown of his dick began to press against me. It felt huge, unbearably big, a monster, and I squirmed and gasped, instinctively trying to move away from the violation.

“Oh no,” Ash breathed. “You’re not getting away that easily.” He moved his arm underneath me, against my lower abs and hips, to keep me from moving forward any more, and then he continued his intrusion, the thickly swollen head of him pressing past the first ring of muscle and then past the second.

It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. The roughness, the pain from my gunshot wounds, the morphine. The years of wanting and wishing and furtively jacking off to ideas just as fucked up as this. It hurt, it hurt so badly it stole my breath, and yet my own dick felt stretched tight like a drum, wet with precum and throbbing with a needy heat.

Fingernails raked fire down my back and I arched in response, causing Ash to give a cruel laugh behind me. He shoved in another inch, the new angle making it so his tip pressed against that firm, full gland at the front of my inner walls, and I dropped down in morphine-drunk ecstasy, my body completely draped over the rucksack now.

Ash followed me, bearing down until his full length was buried inside. “Fuck, it’s hot inside your ass,” he hissed, almost sounding angry about how good it made him feel. He ground his hips into me, pulling out a few inches and rocking back and forth to tease that spot inside me.

“Oh God,” I mumbled. My hips thrust against the bag—it was a reflex, I couldn’t stop it if I wanted, and there was more cruel laughter behind me.

“You gonna come like a teenager humping a pillow?” His hand slid under my throat, curving me back towards him so he could talk into my ear as he slowly pistoned his cock in and out of me. “Huh?”

I shivered violently, devilish heat scissoring through my groin. My balls were drawing up, my thighs so tense they almost hurt more than the gunshot wound in my calf, and the morphine put everything on the near edge of surreal. For a moment, the man behind me with his cold laugh and humiliating taunts really was a twisted storybook prince. For a moment, this really was what happened all those years ago on that day he’d stood over me with his boot on my wrist—after defeating me at the drill, he flipped me over to finish that defeat in the most complete and total way possible.

He kept his hand on my throat, but his head dropped as he gave himself over to the feeling of fucking me, his strokes going deep and mean, hard enough to jar my shoulder every single time, hard enough to loosen the dressing on my wound. “Fuck,” he said to himself. “This is what I needed. Goddammit, hold still—” my hips were thrusting against the bag again, my climax only the barest breath away “—hold the fuck still like I want you to.”

That’s all it took, that stark confirmation that he was indeed using me, that right now to him I was just a tight hole that couldn’t fight back, and I came, rubbing against the bag, a horny teenager just like he’d said, and not a man with multiple confirmed kills and a garage full of sports cars. It was Colchester inside me, Colchester gripping my throat, Colchester showing me the side of him filled with limitless cruelty and selfish, animal strength. Colchester, Ash, my captain, staking my body with his cock like a conqueror, like a king.

And my climax went on and on and on, thick lines of ejaculate spattering the bag, and Ash kept my body curved towards him so he could watch it all from over my shoulder, as if I was putting on a show for him. And once I’d emptied myself, he pressed me back over the bag and let loose, as if my orgasm both angered and aroused him beyond measure. Almost all his weight was draped over me, I could feel the muscles in his thighs and abdomen and chest all working in concert to drive those powerful hips into me, all working to bury that cock deep and hard and fast. It was all I could do to breathe, all I could do to keep ragged, guttural groans from spilling out of my throat; it was his massive frame folded over mine and also that massive cock, unrelenting and greedy and unsatisfied, determined to wring everything it wanted from me before it finished.

Ash seemed lost to himself too, his jabs and cutting remarks from earlier now gone, just irregular grunts and the inexorable invasion of his dick as he speared me over and over again.

And then, without warning, his teeth sank into my shoulder and he exploded in a flurry of sadistic thrusts that left me with tears searing my eyelids. I could feel the scorch of his semen as he pumped himself into me, the hot spurts of him, and I could also feel the fresh blood trickling warm down my chest from the gunshot, and through my tears, a strange giddiness arrived. Colchester—Ash—had just fucked me to within an inch of my life, just spilled himself inside me at the same moment blood spilled out of me, like he was a vampire or a fairy queen or a wolf. I’d waited four years for this, and it had been more deadly and brutal and beautiful than I ever could have hoped.

We laid there for a moment, Ash still draped over me, and then—impossibly—he began moving inside me again. Still fucking hard.

“I hope you didn’t think it was that easy,” he murmured in my ear. He shifted his weight and tilted my body up, and I could feel the thin smears of blood from my leaking wound across my stomach as he positioned my body. The blood didn’t bother me and it certainly didn’t seem to bother him, not with the way he held his fingers up to the moonlight to look at it.

More shifting and moving and then my rapidly swelling cock encountered a warm palm full of Vaseline. His fingers closed around me and my eyes fluttered closed of their own accord and he suspended me between two realities—the reality of his thick cock stroking me from the inside and the reality of his slick fist, tighter and meaner than I liked to handle myself, but somehow even more perfect for that exact reason.

“I’m going to—” I broke off, it already happening, Ash’s dark laugh echoing in my ears as he kept jerking me through my climax. A few minutes later, he came again with a low growl and pulled out after his contractions slowed. I thought that was the end, but when I saw—even more impossibly—that he was still hard, I knew it wasn’t. He rolled me onto my back and eagerly tugged off my boots and pants, and then entered me again.

“You like being fucked like this?” he asked, pressing our chests and stomachs together so that my cock was squeezed between the flat muscles of our bellies. Whenever he peeled himself away, there were smears of blood and precum across the ridges of his perfectly sculpted abdomen.

We both groaned at the sight of the blood. “Yes,” I managed.

Oh God, there was no way I could get it up again, no way I could come, but it was going to happen, I could already feel it. Ash bent his head down to nip at my jaw, and I turned my face to look at him with feverish eyes. He was only half-monster now, and there in his face I could see my Achilles again, the man who danced with me, and was it wrong of me that I craved both? The man who danced and the man who bruised me?

And then he stilled, just for a moment, one hand coming up to press against the side of my cheek. “You’re beautiful in the moonlight,” he said quietly.

And he wrapped his arms underneath me and cradled me as he fucked me, his warm, firm lips finding mine and kissing the breath right out of my lungs, and when we came, we came softly and painfully, our fingers digging into each other’s backs and our teeth in each other’s necks.

I’d never been religious or spiritual until that moment. It was the first time I felt like there could be a god, and if there was a god, he or she had created humanity for exactly this reason, for exactly this sticky, breathless, erotic, painful moment.

Ash cleaned me up afterward, redressing the shoulder wound that had opened, giving me a second dose of morphine, using extra gauze and alcohol to clean off the blood and cum that had stained us both. “Of course it had to be bloody,” I murmured, the new morphine already swimming through my veins.

“Hmm?” Ash asked, now checking my calf bandage.

“It’s just…it feels right. That it was this way. With pain and violence.”

Ash was quiet for a moment, packing things away and then helping me back into my T-shirt and jacket. “It didn’t have to be this way,” he said finally. “And it doesn’t have to be this way again.”

“You said that in your letter,” I said. He finished tidying up and then he did something unexpected: he laid down next to me and pulled me against his side, my injured shoulder up and cradled by his arm, my head resting on his chest. It was a little ridiculous—I was a half-inch or an inch taller, so my feet extended way past his—but nevertheless, it felt good. It felt right.

“I said it because I meant it,” Ash told me. “I can be any kind of man you want me to be. As long as I can be your man.”

I sighed. “I don’t want you to change for me.”

“Embry, that’s bullshit—”

“No,” I interrupted, “you aren’t understanding what I’m saying. Not, ‘I don’t want you to change yourself for a relationship,’ but ‘I don’t want you to change at all, especially for me, because I want you the way you are.’ Besides, I don’t think you can change, Ash. I think you could try for a while. I think you could hide it if you had to. But I think there’d always be an itchy, dark corner of you screaming in the shadows to be loosed. It would eat you up from the inside.”

For a long while, we laid there, listening to the breeze in the leaves, the chatter of the night animals. Ash’s hand ran idly along my arm, and despite the roughest sex I’d ever had, despite the bullet wounds and being effectively stranded in the middle of a war zone, I felt a sweet kind of peace. It was Ash, I realized. Ash made me feel that way. Protected and cherished, even though I was already extremely good at protecting and cherishing myself. But it was different when it came from someone else, I supposed, all the social wiring of the human brain designed to reward the feeling of another human’s attention.

It didn’t just feel like wiring though. It felt like incandescent magic, a secret alchemy, all created by the sweep of his fingers across the tattered sleeve of my coat and the steady beat of his heart under my ear. How funny that he warned me I would end up flat on the ground with tears in my eyes, and here I was, flat on the ground with stupid, happy warmth pricking at my eyelids, except my body was flush against his warm one and my tears were leaking onto his jacketed chest instead of into the dirt.

“I don’t know why I’m this way,” Ash said after several long moments. “And I go from accepting the things I want to hating how I need them. But if you don’t mind how I am, Patroclus, I’ll endeavor not to worry about it. So long as you don’t disappear again.”

“I’m done running from you,” I said honestly. “I tried and it didn’t matter—you haunted me everywhere I went.”

“And you haunted me,” he murmured, rolling over to press his lips against mine once more. “My little prince.”

And so the next act in our tragedy began.