Page 79 of Deep (Chicago Underground 8)
hat night had been his injury, weak and half-conscious condition.
The rest had been relief, because he’d come. He’d come back to me.
His large hands locked behind my head, and he flexed his hips forward and then back. I closed my eyes because I couldn’t see anything anyway. I could only feel him, wide and invading. Only taste the salt he left on my tongue every time he pulled away—more of it now. His thrusts grew faster. His words came out on harsh staccato breaths.
“You want a white-picket fence with a low-down thug. You want a garden in the middle of a fucking war zone. Tell me, kitten. Tell me.”
I wasn’t even sure what he meant when he pulled me off his cock. I gasped with sudden emptiness, my mouth almost longing for him as much as my sex. “Want you,” I said, struggling to form the words. It felt like my mouth was only made to suck him, to hold him, a conduit for him to feel my throat.
“No,” he said fiercely.
Tears were streaming down my cheeks now, because he was only going to fuck me and then leave, because this debt would be goodbye. “I don’t want to change you,” I said brokenly. “I did before. I thought—I thought…but not now. I understand now.”
He bent low, his face inches from mine. “What do you understand? Tell me what the fuck you understand now.”
“That it would break you,” I whispered. “Because deep down…deep down you’re…”
He moved with terrifying care and slowness, twisting my body so that my palms landed hard on the stone floor. I cried out as my knees twisted on the stone carpet, skin breaking, blood spilling. Then he mounted me from behind—at least that was how it felt when he hitched my hips high so they would align with his cock, when he braced one foot beside me, the other knee on the outside of mine. “Deep down, I’m what?” he asked softly.
I shuddered, grasping handfuls of broken rocks in my hands, fisting my hands against the stone floor. Deep down he was both brave and scared, both sated and starving. “You want the same thing I do,” I whispered, and it was so crystal clear to me now. “A family.”
The layers of him, hard and impenetrable—they hadn’t been built up overnight. They’d been built up through eons, through his father’s abuse and his brother and sister being threatened, his baby dying. But inside, underneath it all, was pure longing. Like mine.
It was why he dragged me from the dorm at gunpoint.
Why he held me down and filled me with his come.
“Family,” he said, with a cold laugh. “Yes, family. Don’t know what I’ll do to you? How I’ll hurt you and fuck you and break you? When I look at you, that’s all I can see, how much I’ll destroy everything that you are.”
His fingers worked quickly at my jeans. Then he shoved them down with my panties until they pooled around my thighs. The hard length of his cock was heavy on the top curve of my ass, resting there, threatening.
He bent close to my head. “But then you know that,” he murmured. “You saw that firsthand. When I let you stay in my house, when I locked you in my fucking bedroom. I don’t want anyone to touch you. Don’t want anyone to even see you.”
The blunt head of his cock nudged my sex. He thrust deep in a single push, and I cried out, impaled, split open. My whole body was shoved forward, and my forehead fell to my arms, resting there—the only soft thing I could feel. His cock inside me was steel, his fingers on my hips like a vice.
“Except for me,” he said hollowly, almost haunted. “And I’ll ruin you all by myself.”
I wanted to tell him no, no, you didn’t, you won’t, I’m fine, but he thrust back inside me, stealing my breath. I cried out, because it did hurt, it hurt so much I couldn’t breathe—like the panic but different, again. He was doing this to me, turning me inside out, and I couldn’t respond, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but take it.
“That’s what you said, didn’t you?” He thrust deep, punctuating the question with a groan of pleasure. “I’m just like those fuckers in the penthouse. I want to fuck you, to own you, isn’t that right? Just like them.”
I was sobbing now, head in my arms, being impaled from behind. “No, no,” I said, even though I did—God help me, I did think that. I wanted him to fuck me, to fill me. I wanted him to claim me in the most primal way a man can claim a woman.
“I do,” he whispered, harsh and cruel against my neck. “Say it.”
“No,” I whimpered, weaker now.
“If you don’t say it, I won’t come inside you.”
I was trembling, on the verge of coming, shaking with the need to hide the truth, to expose it. “Please. Please, take me. Use me. Take me.” Tears tightened my throat, making my voice thick, my words somehow more raw. “Like them.”
He surged back inside me with a grunt of triumph, his hands harder than before, almost bruising me to the bone, and I reveled in the violence, the need of it. As if for one moment he might actually follow through. He might actually keep me.
“Yes, that’s right. I’m just like them. No fucking good. Hurting you, using you—and you like it, don’t you? Making you mine so you’ll never be able to leave. You fucking love it.”
I whimpered, unable to deny the truth of it. I loved what he did to me, how he broke me and put me back together. I loved the way I felt when he touched me, as if he were the soil wrapped around my roots, holding me so tight I could never get free.
He pounded into me, furious, turning my body soft and liquid—that was the only way to be in the face of such force, with the cuts on my hands and knees, spilling over. “You’re so good, kitten. So fucking good.”
