We both need this.
I let my hands drift down his stomach and his abs clench at my touch. His lips part, he groans, and our tongues lash. His nails dig into my scalp and I feel completely consumed by him.
My fingers draw lower, gliding down his front, and easily find the base of his cock. I don’t care whether he gets hard. I don’t care whether he fucks me. I just feel some instinctive primal need to reclaim him as mine. I know it should be wrong to feel that way considering…well, everything.
But I feel it.
So, I wrap my hand around his girth and slowly stroke down. He jerks in my hold, slamming his right palm on the wall behind me and I hear the slap of it loudly against my ear. I pull back, breaking our kiss just so I can look at him. His eyes are half-hooded as he looks at me and I can see the spark of something bringing the light back to his eyes. I stroke again, my hand striking the match to ignite that flame and fuel his fire. I stroke him slow and long, running my thumb over the tip of his cock at the end, making him shiver.
He grows hard and thick in my hand and his arousal triggers mine. I let out a moan on my exhale and his eyes widen in need. He crowds me against the wall, and I stroke him a little faster, grip him a little tighter. We stay this way for minutes, minutes that pass as quickly as seconds, minutes that I wish would stretch on for hours.
His eyes drift shut when I know he’s getting close, when his cock is thrumming its own pulse in my grip and a groan rumbles deep in his chest.
“Ezra,” I moan to get his attention and when his eyes meet mine, I ask for him to let me reclaim him fully. “Mine?”
His chest rises and falls heavily as I keep stroking, keep dragging him closer to the edge. He bends, his forehead touching mine, his nose nuzzling the tip of mine. I stroke faster.
Just on the edge, his hips jerk forward, thrusting himself harder into my hand. With a gruff voice, raw and stripped bare, he replies, “Yours”
I feel his sincerity. I feel it in my heart, in my soul, in the palm of my hand. His cock swells and throbs in my grip and I gasp at the feel of him, at the look of ecstasy on his face, at the pulse of his soul giving strength to mine.
He cries out when he comes, spilling and dripping over my stomach. I smile, moaning at the feeling of power he gives me. It’s a power I can’t take from him—it’s something he gives me freely and it’s something I treasure.
Finally, he smiles, big and bright and entirely disarming.
“Ezra, I love you. No matter what.”
He slams me with a bewildering kiss and I’m lost in him.
Chapter 21
Ezra
“I want to have the baby back home, at Mikhailov Manor,” Anya says.
I drop my fork on my plate unintentionally and the metal clangs loudly against the porcelain dish. Murphy shoots daggers at me with his eyes, clenching his fork with a fierce grip before pointing a finger at me. His eyes narrow at me and he speaks through gritted teeth, “Be careful. Those were my grandmother’s.”
Well, shit.
Who knew monsters could be sentimental?
I raise my palms in mock surrender before making a show of how carefully I’m minding Grandma O’Shea’s porcelain dishes. Murphy sniffs and his nostrils flare, and he cuts himself another bite of his rare steak.
I knew Anya was going to bring this up soon, but I didn’t know it was going to happen tonight. Kostya’s been here with us at the O’Sheas’ estate for the past month, and he and Anya have been plotting. I shouldn’t say plotting. Anya’s been building a friendship with him. She’s been successful in that, too, and just within the past week she’s been putting a bug in his ear about escaping.
Kostya’s come to our side—as fed up with the four families’ bullshit as any of the rest of us—and though we can never really know for sure if he’s lying, we have no choice but to hope and trust that he’s with us…because there is no escape plan without him.
Kostya opened up to Anya, telling her that he really did care about his cousin Nikolai. He told her they’d been close friends, though the context of their relationship had them behaving like employer and employee—and that’s because they were. Still, Kostya feels a sense of pride to keep his promises to Nikolai as a friend, and one of those was to keep Anya’s heart beating.
He felt betrayed by the four families when he was injured in the escape from the Vittoris last quarter. He told Anya that he was tortured by the Vittoris’ extended family. It went on for hours when the board left to hunt us down at Mikhailov Manor after our escape with Nikolai. He said the board turned a blind eye to the torture because they thought he deserved it for helping Nikolai steal back Anya. But Kostya argued he should’ve been praised for doing his job and blindly following the orders of his leader, his family’s Head of House—it’s what he was trained to do, what he was raised to do.
But they didn’t care, which is why he’s now willing to help us escape to spite them, because he’s ready to leave, too. At least, we have to trust that he is. I suppose we can’t know for sure until we’re gone from this nightmare. I have hope that he’s truly on our side—with Nikolai and his family gone, he’s got nothing and no one else except for the friendship Anya has so carefully curated with him.
And that makes us fucking lucky.
I glance furtively at Anya when I sense her eyes on me, her anxiety growing when Murphy doesn’t respond to her. I tilt my head in his direction, urging her to speak up and try again.
“Murphy—”
“I heard you the first time, lass.”
I feel the steeling breath she takes from where she sits beside me at the long rectangular table in the dining room. “Then I’d like to hear your response.”
He sets his utensils down on his plate, folding his hands in front of him with his elbows on the table. It’s unusually quiet in the dining room tonight. We’re expected to be here for family dinners every Sunday and Wednesday night. But Murphy’s parents are gone on an anniversary trip to their vacation home in Portugal and they took the O’Shea talent slave with them—and I honestly don’t care to know why.
And today, it just so happened that his brothers needed to leave on important family business—a routine maintenance check at one of their factories. That sounds so innocent outside of context, but really, it means that they were popping in to do a surprise inspection of their human assets at one of the warehouses where they keep women they’ve kidnapped to sell. Kostya is off doing the same at one of the Mikhailov factories—factories that now belong to Anya. Thank fuck they don’t expect her to do that. I’d surely have their blood on my hands if they tried to make her.
Murphy takes his time to chew and swallow. I see his wife Stella’s annoyance with him tick as she leans back sullenly in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. She sits on the far end so they each form bookends to the large dining table—they’re as far apart as they can get. The dim lighting and crackling flames in the fireplace behind Murphy add to the uncomfortable ambience of this unusually quiet family dinner.