“So I could escape,” she says, but she sounds less certain now.
“I almost broke you in half, but not so you could escape. I did it so that I could stay there. So that I could stay there without blowing my cover.”
She shakes her head. “Why did you need to stay? Why did you—”
“My cover? That took eighteen months to establish. Eighteen months of pretending to be a lowlife, of doing horrible things so they’d trust me. Eighteen months of my life.” I snap my fingers, knowing I’m being an asshole. “Gone. Down the drain.”
“Why are you angry at me?”
Why am I angry at her? I’m not sure whether I’m mad at her or myself, but I’m goddamn furious. “Because you were going to get raped, understand? Whether it happened that day or later, Peter was going to hurt you. Adam was going to fuck you. And I shouldn’t have cared about that. I’m well trained not to care about that, but I couldn’t let it happen.”
I’m pleading by the end of it, and her eyes aren’t furious with me. She looks soft and understanding. She looks like everything I want, and nothing that I deserve.
“You saved me,” she says simply.
I shake my head. “No, goddamn you. I hurt you.”
“You saved me,” she says again, pushing down her leggings, showing her sweet, pink pussy. My body doesn’t know that I’m full of guilt and regret and rage. It has the predictable response to seeing her pretty body exposed. I’m hard as a log in a matter of seconds.
She puts her hands on my chest and pushes—not hard enough to knock over anything, but there I go, toppling into the shallow water, letting her climb me. She fights with the wet denim to release my cock, and then she’s holding me with those clever fingers.
I drop my head back and look up at the blinding sun.
Heaven. How did I ever find myself here?
I belong in the other place. I belong back in that cell. It was my job and my mission, but more than that, it was the only thing I deserved. Now I have her gentle hands working me, too soft, too soft. A more terrible torture than Peter’s whip, her too-soft hands.
Then she climbs over my lap. She’s adorably awkward, the way she angles my cock toward her pussy. It’s like she’s hardly ever done this. We fit perfectly, I know that from last time, I know that from my dreams, but it takes her long minutes, hours, days to wedge me inside her. It takes an eternity of pressure as her body surrounds my cock.
Wet heat grips me all the way down, and I shout toward the sky.
“You saved me,” she says, bearing down, pressing until her pussy lips touch the thatch of hair at the base of my cock, pulling me with little pulses of her inner muscles. “Say it.”
“Never.” I’m holding myself with both my elbows in the mud. I’m completely open to her. She sets the pace. She decides when to raise her body and when to twist back down.
“Admit it, Elijah. Whoever you are.”
I grit my teeth against the sheer pleasure. “Mermaid. Siren. Fairy.”
She gives a small laugh that turns into a moan. “You saved—”
With a hard upward thrust I cut off the last word. “No.”
I flip us over so I can fuck her into the water, fuck her into the mud, fuck her into submission. “Do you want me to compromise everything I am? Do you want me to give up everything I have? It’s already yours, Holly. I’m yours to command.”
I slam my mouth down on hers. My hands drag up and down the length of her body, heedless of the mud and her injuries, feeling her in her raw state.
She moans as I tilt my hips to find that spot inside her. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Holly
I thought I knew what tiredness felt like. Thirty-six hours of flights with no sleep. A hike in the Grand Canyon. A particularly evil spin class at my local gym. I’ve known exhaustion, but nothing has ever come close to this. My entire body throbs. There’s an invisible knife stabbing my head. My heart seems to thump at double its normal rate. Every step sends nails into the soles of my feet.
The world goes dark.
I wake up on the ground, with my face wet. Elijah is holding me, shaking me gently, using his shirt to wipe something red from my cheek. “There you are,” he says, and though his voice sounds calm, almost dry, I sense the urgency underneath.
The sun beats down on me, relentless. “Can’t.”
Something soft brushes my forehead. Maybe a kiss. “We need to move, sweetheart.”
I force my eyes open. “Go without me. Please.”
Green eyes flash with anger—and maybe fear. “Absolutely not.”
“Come back,” I mumble, hoping he’ll understand what I mean. He can leave me here in the sun and get help. That’s the only way I see out of this. My feet won’t take another step. My body won’t move another inch. My mind feels full of damp cotton.
A strong arm shoves underneath me. Then I’m lifted into the air, held suspended against his hard chest. My arms move automatically to wrap around his neck.
“No,” I whisper.
“Don’t complain, sweetheart.” His lips murmur against my ear. “I’m not leaving you behind. Ask me to do anything, anything else. I’d lie down and die with you before I’d walk away.”
Tears squeeze from my eyes and slide down my cheeks. “Please.”
I don’t want him to die. That might happen if he carries me. He could survive on his own. Can he carry another human’s weight? I’m only going to slow him down. There’s no answer to my plea. He’s implacable about this. It’s not up for discussion.
There is no help I can offer him—so I give him the only form of strength I have left. My stories. My words. “Wonderland,” I say, the word faintly slurred. “Do you want to hear more?”
“Yes,” he says, his arms secure beneath me. “Tell me your story.”
There’s no story, not really. Nothing already written or formed in my mind. When I’m half-dead from exhaustion isn’t really the time to be my most creative, but here we are. “She goes in strong, using her knife and her cunning to defeat the creatures she meets, but then…”
“But then,” he prompts when I fall silent.
“But then she hears about the evil queen, the Queen of Hearts. Everyone talks about her, everyone is afraid of her, and Alice thinks…” Tears stream harder. “She thinks she can run away, but she can’t. She can’t run anymore.”
“Hell.” He rubs the scruff of his jaw across my forehead, a scrape that jolts me back to awareness. “You don’t have to tell this story.”
“She runs and runs anyway, until there’s nothing left. And then the Queen of Hearts finds her. The queen knows she’s weak, and she chooses that moment to strike.”
“No one’s going to strike you. Not ever again.”
Consciousness hovers in front of me. It’s like I’m deep underwater, and I can’t find my way out. The words sound like they’re far away, but they’re spoken in my voice. “She can’t fight back, because it’s her sister. Her sister is the Queen of Hearts.”
A gruff voice quiets me. “Easy. Easy now.”