With love, Whitero$e

The afternoon light in the loft was different. It wasn't the harsh, interrogating light of morning or the soft, romantic haze of evening. It was a clear, steady, golden light that streamed through the vast windows, illuminating the dust bunnies dancing in the air like tiny, scattered diamonds. The atmosphere had shifted, too. The charged, nervous energy of training had given way to a quiet, focused intensity, a sense of purpose that was almost academic.

Kayla was curled up on the plush, cream-colored chaise lounge, a throw blanket draped over her legs. But she wasn't reading a textbook on international finance or market trends. The heavy, leather-bound Moore legacy book was open on her lap, its pages filled with elegant, calligraphic script and faded, sepia-toned photographs. She looked like a student in a grand, old library, her brow furrowed in concentration, her finger tracing the lines of a passage about a formidable woman named Genevieve Moore.

Elijah sat opposite her, in a high-backed leather chair that looked like a throne. He wasn't reading to her; he was observing her, a silent, patient tutor waiting for his pupil to formulate the right question. He had a glass of amber liquid in his hand, but he hadn't touched it. His entire focus was on her, on the way her mind was working, on the way she was beginning to see the world not as a series of terrifying events, but as a complex, strategic game.

She looked up, her dark eyes clear and direct. "This part, about Genevieve," she said, her voice a soft, thoughtful murmur. "It says she 'neutralized a threat' from a rival shipping company in 1958 by 'securing the allegiance' of their CEO. It says she spent a weekend with him in the Hamptons." She paused, her finger still on the page. "It says she 'chose her method of persuasion.'"

She met his gaze, a flicker of the old fear in her eyes, but it was overshadowed by a genuine, burning curiosity. "Did she... want to? Or was she told to?"

Elijah leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, the glass of whiskey forgotten on the table beside him. A slow, appreciative smile touched his lips. It was the first time she had asked a question that went beyond the 'what' and delved into the 'why'.

"That is the most important question you could ask," he said, his voice a low, smooth rumble. "She was told to secure the deal. The objective was clear. The rival company was becoming a threat to our expansion in the Caribbean. Her husband, my great-uncle, needed it to disappear. He gave her the mission."

He paused, his eyes holding hers, a look of profound respect in their depths. "How she achieved that objective was her choice. She could have tried to bribe him. She could have tried to find blackmail material. But she studied him. She learned his weaknesses, his desires. She learned that he was a man who valued beauty, who was susceptible to a certain kind of charm. So, she chose her weapon. Her body. Her mind. Her wit. She spent a weekend convincing him that his allegiance to her was more valuable than his loyalty to his own company."

He leaned back, his expression a mixture of pride and solemnity. "That is the difference between a possession and a partner. A possession is a tool used for a single purpose. A partner is an ally who understands the objective and uses her unique skills to achieve it. She was not a victim that weekend, Kayla. She was a strategist. A general in a war fought with silk and champagne instead of swords and guns."

He looked at her, his gaze intense, a fire burning in their dark eyes. "Your mind is a weapon, Princess. So is your body. So is your spirit. You have been taught to obey, to submit. That is the foundation. But now, you must learn to wield it. You must learn to choose your weapon. You must learn how to fight."

Just as his words were sinking in, a new presence entered the room. Elias, fresh from a workout, his body glistening with a fine sheen of sweat, his muscles bulging under the thin fabric of his tank top, strode in with a tray. He was carrying three cups of coffee, the rich, dark aroma a welcome distraction from the heavy, intoxicating weight of Elijah's lesson.

He wasn't interested in the history lesson or the talk of war. His focus was entirely on her. He saw her curled up on the chaise, her brow furrowed in thought, and a slow, playful grin spread across his face.

"Don't fill her head with too much war talk, Eli," he said, his voice a low, teasing rumble as he set the tray down. "We're building a dynasty, not starting one. There's a difference, you know." He handed her a cup, his fingers brushing against hers, a warm, deliberate touch that sent a jolt of electricity through her.

He leaned down, his face close to hers, his scent an intoxicating mix of clean sweat and cologne. "He forgets that the best part of building a dynasty is the celebration afterwards," he whispered, his voice a seductive purr. He kissed her then, a deep, possessive kiss that was a stark, grounding reminder of the physical reality of their bond.

It was a kiss that claimed her, that reminded her that beneath the talk of strategy and legacy, she was theirs, body and soul. It was a kiss that said, You can be a general in his war, but you are my queen in our bed.

When Elias finally pulled away, Kayla was breathless, her lips swollen, her mind awhirl with the conflicting currents of strategy and sensuality. She looked from Elias's playful, possessive grin to Elijah's calm, observing gaze, seeing them not just as her owners but as two halves of a whole.

Elijah watched them, his expression unreadable, but a fire had been lit in his dark eyes. It wasn't the fire of jealousy, but of something else. Something deeper. He placed his glass on the table with a soft, decisive click and held out a hand to her.

"Come here," he commanded, his voice a low, resonant rumble that vibrated through the quiet room.

Without hesitation, Kayla went to him. He took her hand and pulled her down onto his lap, settling her sideways against his chest. His arm wrapped around her waist, a band of solid muscle that was both comforting and possessive. He smelled of clean linen and a trace of the whiskey he'd been nursing. He turned her face to his, his thumb stroking her jawline, his gaze intense and searching.

"The way your mind works," he murmured, his voice a low, intimate growl that was more arousing than Elias's kiss had been. "The questions you ask. It's... intoxicating." He leaned in, his lips brushing against her ear. "To see you take the lessons of the book and not just accept them, but analyze them... It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

Elias, who had been leaning against the chaise lounge, watching them with a fond, amused expression, pushed off and came over. He crouched down in front of them, his eyes level with hers, his playful demeanor replaced by a rare, serious focus. "He's right," he said, his voice a low, sincere murmur. "It's one thing to have a beautiful body, Princess. But a beautiful mind? That's a whole other kind of treasure."

They both looked at her, their expressions a mirror of her own conflicting desires: Elijah's intense, cerebral hunger and Elias's warm, possessive affection. It was time for the check-in.

"It's been a week since the gala," Elijah began, his voice a low, steady rumble. "We need to know how you're feeling. About your role. About what happened with the patriarch, with our cousins."

Elias picked up the thread, his voice softer. "You were a star that night, Kayla. But that was a performance. We need to know how you feel about the day-to-day reality of it. About being seen as... one of us. One of the Moore women."

Kayla took a deep breath, the weight of their gazes a comforting, grounding pressure. This was her moment. This was her chance to choose her weapon.

"I've been thinking about it a lot," she began, her voice quiet but steady. "About what you said, Elijah. About being a partner, not just a possession. And about what the patriarch said." She looked from one to the other, her gaze unwavering. "I don't want to be just another submissive outside of these walls. I don't want to be just a pretty thing on your arm, a silent doll for people to admire."

She paused, gathering her thoughts, the words flowing from a place of newfound clarity. "I've been reading the book, and I see these women. Genevieve, Isadora... they were more than just wives. They were strategists. They were advisors. They were the power behind the throne." She leaned into Elijah's embrace, drawing strength from his solid presence. "I want my 'weapon' to be my mind. I want to be the person you come to when you need a problem solved, when you need a different perspective. I want to be... indispensable."

Elias's eyebrows shot up, a slow, impressed grin spreading across his face. "Indispensable," he repeated, testing the word. "I like that."

Kayla looked at them both, a flicker of her old, ambitious self shining through her newfound submission. "You know the show Scandal?" she asked. They both nodded, their expressions curious. "I want to be your Olivia Pope. I want to be the fixer. The person who handles the things you can't. The person who knows all the secrets and how to use them. I want to be the one who wears the white coat and walks into the room and makes everyone nervous, not because I'm your submissive, but because they know I'm the one who really runs things."

The silence that followed her declaration was thick with a new, electrifying energy. Elijah's arm tightened around her, his eyes burning with a fierce, possessive pride. He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time, not as a captive he had broken, but as a queen he had crowned.

"Olivia Pope," he murmured, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face. "Our own personal gladiator in a white coat. I like it." He leaned in, his lips claiming hers in a kiss that was not possessive, but proprietary. A seal of approval. A pact.

When he pulled away, Elias was still kneeling in front of her, his eyes wide with a mixture of awe and admiration. "Damn, Princess," he breathed, his voice a low, reverent whisper. "You really are the most dangerous woman in the world, aren't you?"

Kayla smiled, a true, genuine smile that reached her eyes. She was no longer just a student of their rules. She was a student of the game. And she had just chosen her opening move.

The days following her "Olivia Pope" declaration settled into a new, fascinating rhythm. The loft felt less like a gilded cage and more like a war room, and Kayla was its chief strategist. She spent her mornings devouring the Moore legacy book, her afternoons cross-referencing its lessons with global market reports, and her evenings presenting her findings to Elijah. She was no longer just reading history; she was analyzing it, looking for patterns, for strategies she could repurpose for the modern battlefield of high finance.

Elijah was captivated, plain and simple. He watched her with a new, almost reverent awe, like a man who'd just stumbled upon a hidden spring in the middle of a drought. He’d sit with her for hours on end, not as a teacher, but as an eager student, listenin' to her break down the psychological tactics of some 19th-century Moore matriarch and then turn right around and apply 'em to a potential hostile takeover in the shipping lanes down in New Orleans.

He found her intellect to be the most potent aphrodisiac he had ever encountered, more than the finest whiskey, more compelling than the sweetest blues tune driftin' out of a juke joint. He would touch her with a new kind of reverence, his long, calloused fingers tracing the delicate curve of her collarbone or the smooth skin of her thigh as she explained a complex theory about market manipulation. His eyes would get dark, real dark, with a hunger that was as much for her mind as it was for her body, a deep, yearning need to possess every part of her.

"You're brilliant, chéri," he'd murmur against the warm, fragrant skin of her neck, his voice a low, thick Delta drawl that seemed to wrap around her, holding her close. The word, a soft, Cajun-French term of endearment, felt more intimate, more real than any 'Princess' ever could. "Absolutely brilliant."

The sound of it made Kayla still. It wasn't the polished, clipped, Ivy League-educated baritone he used on the phone with investors or the cold, commanding tone he used to give his orders. This was different. This was the rumble of deep water and slow-moving rivers, the sound of Spanish moss hanging from ancient oaks. It was an unpolished, honeyed thing, thick with the history of a place she'd only read about.

Elijah, she was learning, was a master of code-switching. He could sound like a Fortune 500 CEO in a boardroom, a street-smart operator in a backroom deal, and a king holding court in his own home. But this voice... this was something else entirely. It was a secret he had kept, a piece of himself ( and Elias ) he had never revealed, not even in their most intimate moments. He had always been in control, his speech as measured and precise as his actions. But now, as he praised her intellect, his carefully constructed facade had cracked, and the raw, unvarnished man from the Delta had spilled through.

He felt her tense, the subtle shift in her breathing against his lips. He pulled back slightly, his dark eyes searching hers, a flicker of vulnerability in their depths. He knew what she was hearing. He knew he had just given her a piece of him he had never given to anyone, not even his own brother, who had learned to speak like a New Yorker the moment they’d left Mississippi behind.

"My real voice," he said, his voice still thick with that slow, southern cadence, as if he couldn't quite put it back in its box. "I don't... I don't let it out much. Got to sound a certain way for certain people, you know? Gotta sound like I belong in their world, not mine."

He looked away for a moment, a flicker of an old, familiar shame in his eyes. The shame of a poor boy from the Delta who had clawed his way into a world of old money and Ivy League pedigrees, a world that would never truly see him as one of their own. He had spent a lifetime perfecting his camouflage, his voice a key part of the armor he wore to protect himself from the judgment of a world that saw his accent as a mark of his inferiority.

"But with you..." he said, his gaze returning to hers, his voice softening, the drawl becoming more pronounced, more intentional. "With you, I don't have to pretend. You see me. All of me. The good, the bad, the brilliant, and the... broken." He leaned in, his forehead resting against hers, his breath warm against her lips. "You're the first person I've ever wanted to give my real voice to. The first person I've ever trusted enough to hear it."

It was a confession, a declaration, a gift more precious than any diamond, any estate, any legacy. It was the key to the kingdom he had built around himself, and he had just handed it to her, no questions asked. And in that moment, she knew that her plan to be his Olivia Pope wasn't just a strategy. It was her destiny. She was the keeper of his secrets, the protector of his vulnerabilities, the one person in the world who knew the sound of his true voice.

Elias, on the other hand, was a whole different kind of captivated. Where Elijah saw a brilliant mind to be revered, Elias saw a wild, beautiful spirit to be cherished. He adored the fire her newfound confidence had ignited, the way her wit would flash like lightning in a summer storm, the way she could be a stubborn, sarcastic little brat one moment, givin' him that look that dared him to put her in her place, and then melt into a pliant, submissive puddle of desire in his arms the next. He loved her soul, her whole complicated, contradictory, magnificent self.

He was her champion, her cheerleader, the one who would bring her a cup of chamomile tea just the way she liked it and kiss her forehead, tellin' her, "You're gonna be the most feared and most loved woman in this family, Princess. Just you wait."

But his praise, like his brother's, had a secret voice. It usually came out in a smooth, city-slicker charm, a New Yorker's easy confidence that was as much a part of his armor as Elijah's CEO-speak. It was the voice he used to win over investors, to charm secretaries, to get exactly what he wanted without ever breaking a sweat.

One evening, after she had spent hours on a conference call assisting Elijah, calmly and brilliantly talking a European banker down from a hostile position, she hung up the phone, exhausted but exhilarated. She collapsed onto the sofa, her mind buzzing.

Elias was there in an instant, a bottle of water in his hand. He sat down beside her, pulling her feet into his lap and massaging them with his strong, knowing hands. "You were somethin' else in there, baby," he said, his voice dropping, the smooth edges of his city accent melting away like sugar in hot tea. It became a richer, deeper thing, a voice full of magnolia trees and front-porch swings, a voice that promised long, slow kisses and even slower nights.

"I swear, listenin' to you handle that man... had me thinkin' all sorts of things," he continued, his drawl getting thicker as he leaned in closer, his voice a low, intimate rumble just for her. "Had me thinkin' 'bout how I'd love to see you use that sharp tongue of yours on me later. See if you can talk me down the way you did him." His hands slid higher, up her calves, his touch a slow, possessive burn. "Or maybe you won't wanna talk me down at all. Maybe you'll wanna rile me up, see what happens when you push a country boy too far."

He loved her complexity, and he loved the way her body could accommodate both Elijah and him, a perfect, physical manifestation of their union. But more than that, he loved this—this moment when the real him came out to play. The unpolished, hungry man from the south, who saw her fire not as a threat, but as a challenge. A challenge he was more than willing to meet head-on.

"You got that city-smart brain, chéri," he murmured, his voice a thick, sweet caress, using the same intimate term of endearment as his brother, but making it his own—less reverent, more possessive. "But you got a down-home soul. I see it. And I'm gonna be the one to make it sing."

It was in this new atmosphere of intellectual and emotional blossoming that Kayla felt the strange, insistent pull towards Anya. She saw the other girl at a family dinner a week after the gala, a quiet, tense affair where the rivalry between the cousins, cold current under the surface of forced pleasantries. Anya was frail and silent, her eyes downcast, her hands trembling so badly she could barely hold her fork. She looked like a ghost, and seeing her, Kayla felt a pang of empathy so sharp it was almost painful.

Later that night, curled up between the twins in bed, she made her move. "Elias," she began, her voice a soft, hesitant murmur. "Do you think... could you get Anya's number for me?"

Elias, who was tracing lazy circles on her stomach, chuckled. "Anya? Marcus's little mouse? What do you want with her?"

"I just... I think I could use some 'girl talk," she said, framing it in a way she knew he would understand. "Another perspective. From someone who... gets it."

Elias, always eager to please her and intrigued by the idea of her allying, however small, agreed instantly. He had the number for her in minutes.

The next day, they met at a discreet, high-end café tucked away on a quiet side street. The tension was high the moment Kayla walked in. Anya was already there, seated at a small table in the corner, looking like a frightened deer. She was jumpy, her eyes darting towards the door every time it opened, terrified of being seen, terrified of what Marcus would do if he found out.

Kayla, channeling her newfound inner Olivia Pope, was the picture of calm. She didn't ask about Marcus or the gala or the suffocating pressure of their new lives. She simply sat down, smiled a reassuring smile, and asked, "Is the coffee good? I've heard they have the best lattes in the city."

The small talk was a lifeline. It was a normal, mundane conversation in a world that had become anything but. It gave Anya a moment to breathe, to remember what it felt like to be a normal person having a normal coffee with a friend.

The confession, the raw, honest vulnerability of it, was the key that unlocked Anya's defenses. A genuine, fragile bond was forming between them, a shared understanding of the unique, terrifying reality of their lives. Anya’s small, shaky breath hitched, and she looked at Kayla with wide, glistening eyes, seeing not a rival, but a reflection.

"It's... it's nice to hear you say that," Anya whispered, her fingers twisting the napkin on the table into a tight, shredded mess. "Marcus... he says I'm too soft. That I need to be stronger." She let out a hollow, bitter little laugh. "He and Dante, they look at me like I'm a puppy they found in the rain. And Simone... God, Simone looks at me like I'm something she'd scrape off her shoe."

The venom in Simone's name was a surprise, a flash of steel in a voice that had been nothing but fluff and fear. Kayla leaned in, encouraging her. "What do you mean? What does she say?"

"She doesn't have to say anything," Anya said, her gaze dropping to her coffee cup. "It's how she is with Dante. They're like a... a sadist couple, you know? A little performance for everyone else. Dante will say something cutting, and Simone will laugh, this high, sharp sound, and then she'll say something even worse. They feed off it. They feed off making other people feel small. Marcus thinks it's 'strategic.' He thinks Dante keeps Simone 'sharp' and Simone keeps Dante 'focused.' I think they just enjoy being cruel."

She took a shaky sip of her latte, her hand trembling so much the cup rattled in the saucer. "And they make me feel... weak. For not being like that. For not wanting to be like that. Marcus chose me because he said he was tired of all the... the fire. He said he wanted something sweet, something gentle. He charmed me, Kayla. He really did."

Anya's voice grew distant, her eyes taking on a faraway look as she drifted back to the beginning. "We met at an art gallery downtown. The one in the Design District. I was there with a friend from school, just looking, you know? And he was just... there. He wasn't with Dante; he was alone. He looked so out of place, but in a good way. Like a poem in a room full of shouting."

A small, sad smile touched her lips. "He started talking to me about the art. Not about the artist or the price, but about the colors. He asked me which painting made me feel 'peaceful.' It was so... different. He was so gentle. He asked me about my studies, about my family. He listened. Really listened. He made me feel like I was the only person in the room."

She looked down at her hands, her fingers now still. "He told me he came from this... intense family. That his cousin was all fire and ambition, and that he was looking for something real. Something quiet. He said my softness was my strength. That my gentleness was a refuge. He pursued me for two months. Flowers, sweet texts, surprise visits to my campus. He made me feel... cherished. Like I was precious."

She finally looked up at Kayla, her eyes filled with the pain of a thousand betrayals. "The first time I met Dante and Simone, I saw the real him. He changed. The gentle poet disappeared, and this... this cold, hard man took his place. And when I asked him about it later, he just laughed. He said, 'Baby, that was just the preview. This is the main event.' He tricked me, Kayla. He sold me a dream and then locked me in the nightmare."

Tears finally spilled over, tracing silent paths down her cheeks. Kayla's heart ached for her. She reached across the table again, her hand covering Anya's, her touch firm and steady.

"He's a monster," Kayla said, her voice low and fierce. "But you're not weak, Anya. You're not. He didn't choose you because you were weak; he chose you because you're strong enough to endure his darkness without letting it consume you. He chose you because your light is a contrast to his shadow. He just doesn't know how to appreciate it."

She squeezed Anya's hand. "And Simone? She's not strong. She's just loud. Loudness isn't strength. It's fear. Fear that someone will see how empty she is inside. You and I... we're not empty. We're full. And that's why they're so threatened by us."

A new kind of tears welled in Anya's eyes, but these were different. They were tears of relief, of gratitude. "You really think so?" she whispered.

"I know so," Kayla said, her voice firm with a conviction she was just starting to feel herself. "We're in this now. And we're not alone. We have each other."

They sat in silence for a long moment, a silent pact passing between them in the quiet hum of the café. It was more than just a conversation; it was an alliance. A lifeline thrown across the dark, turbulent waters of their new lives. Anya had found a confidant, a sister-in-arms. And Kayla, in helping Anya, had found a new sense of purpose, a new reason to fight. She wasn't just going to survive this world; she was going to change it, one frightened, beautiful girl at a time.

Just as they were finding common ground, the café door chimed, and Simone walked in. She was a vision in a form-fitting, fire-engine red dress, her curves on full display, her head held high. She spotted them immediately, a slow, predatory smile spreading across her full lips.

She didn't approach their table. That would have been too direct, too crude. Instead, she made her presence known with a loud, confident air. She strode to the counter, her heels clicking on the polished concrete floor, and ordered her coffee in a voice that was just a little too loud, just a little too cheerful. Her eyes, dark and sharp, flicked between them, a look of undisguised contempt in their depths. She was sending a message, loud and clear: I see you. I'm watching you. And this is my territory.

As soon as Simone left, the fragile bubble of confidence they had built around themselves shattered. Anya was visibly shaken, her hands trembling again, her eyes wide with fear.

Kayla put her hand over Anya's, her touch firm, her voice a low, steady anchor in the storm of her fear. "It's okay," she said. "We're not enemies."

The invitation to the private art viewing arrived on thick, cream-colored cardstock, the gallery's logo embossed in elegant, silver foil. It was for an emerging artist whose work, Elijah explained, was a blend of modern minimalism and classical forms, a potential investment for the Moore family's ever-expanding portfolio. Elias, upon hearing the words "art gallery," had groaned dramatically. "Baby, you know I love you," he'd said, kissing her forehead, "but if I have to stand around and listen to people talk about brushstrokes and negative space for two hours, I'm gonna need a IV drip of pure coffee just to stay awake. You and Eli go. Do your thing. I'll be here, holdin' down the fort."

And so, it was just the two of them. Elijah, in a perfectly tailored midnight black and blue trim suit that seemed to absorb the light, and Kayla, in a simple but stunning sheath dress, the color of a stormy sea. He had chosen it for her, his fingers lingering on the fabric as he'd told her, "This color makes your skin look like liquid gold. It's a weapon. Use it."

As they entered the cavernous, white-walled gallery, the air buzzing with the low hum of quiet conversation and the clinking of champagne flutes, Kayla felt a familiar thrill of nerves. This was a test. He was testing her, seeing if the "Olivia Pope" persona she had crafted could hold up under pressure.

And then she saw them. Dante and Simone, standing near the center of the room, a living, breathing work of art in their own right. Dante was in a deep burgundy suit, his arm wrapped around Simone's waist. Simone was a vision in a form-fitting, matching burgundy gown that hugged her generous curves, her hair swept up into an elegant, complicated twist. She was laughing at something the gallery owner, a distinguished-looking man with a silver ponytail, was saying, her head thrown back. It was clearly a setup. They had known they would be here.

Simone spotted them the moment they entered. Her eyes, sharp and calculating, locked onto them, and her signature predatory smile spread across her full lips. She excused herself from the gallery owner and glided over, her movements fluid and confident, a shark patrolling its territory.

"Kayla, darling," she cooed, her voice a syrupy-sweet poison. "It's so good to see you outside of a... formal setting." Her eyes raked over Kayla's dress, a dismissive flicker that was meant to be an insult. "And Elijah," she purred, turning her full attention to him, completely ignoring Kayla as if she were a piece of furniture. "I was just telling Charles how the artist's minimalist approach reminds me of your grandfather's early business strategies. So brutal. So effective."

It was a perfectly executed attack. She was using language and knowledge she assumed Kayla didn't have, trying to make her feel like an ignorant child, a pretty ornament who had no business in a conversation about art or strategy.

But Simone had made a critical mistake. She had underestimated her.

Kayla didn't flinch. She didn't even blink. She just smiled, a slow, serene smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "That's an interesting comparison, Simone," she said, her voice calm and even. "But I think you're missing the point. The artist isn't being minimalist. He's being reductive. He's stripping away the classical forms to their bare essentials, not to create something new, but to expose the flaws, the inherent instability of the old structures."

She took a step closer, her gaze meeting Simone's, a silent, unspoken challenge passing between them. "It's not a tribute to the grandfather's strategies. It's a critique of them. The artist is saying that the brutal, effective methods of the past are built on a foundation that's destined to crack. It's a warning, not an homage."

She paused, letting her words sink in, the air around them crackling with a new, electric tension. "Of course," she continued, her voice dropping to a more intimate, conspiratorial tone, "someone with a more... nuanced understanding of art history might see that. It's the same kind of nuanced thinking that separates the Gothic masters from the Renaissance copyists. It's the difference between building something that lasts and something that just looks impressive for a little while."

The blow was surgical. It was precise, intelligent, and devastating. She had not only defended herself but had turned Simone's attack on its head, using her own words to paint her as a shallow, uneducated wannabe.

Elijah listened patiently, his expression unreadable, but Kayla could feel the pride radiating from him, a silent, powerful wave of approval. When she was finished, he turned his gaze to Simone, his eyes turning cold, his voice dangerously quiet.

"Simone," he said, his voice a low, cutting rumble. "You are Dante's woman. It is unbecoming to flirt with me, especially in front of my own. And to do it so poorly... It's an embarrassment to him and to the Moore name. Your performance is weak."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. The public dismissal was brutal, a verbal slap that left a red, stinging mark on Simone's pride. Her face froze, her confident mask shattering into a million pieces. She looked like a fish out of water, her mouth opening and closing, but no sound coming out. From across the room, Dante, who had been watching the exchange, looked furious, his jaw tight, his eyes burning with a cold, dangerous fire.

Elijah took Kayla's arm, his touch a firm, grounding pressure. "Let's go," he murmured, leading her away from the wreckage. "Never let them see you flinch," he said, his voice a low, intimate murmur just for her. "Never let them think they know more than you do. Even if they do."

As they walked away, Kayla felt a surge of pride, a heady, intoxicating rush of victory. But beneath it, there was a chilling understanding of the battlefield she was on. This was not just a game of strategy and intellect. It was a war. And she had just fired her first shot.

The intrusion happened without warning. One moment, the loft was its usual sanctuary of quiet intensity; the next, the elevator chimed with a different, more authoritative tone, and the doors slid open to reveal a figure that instantly changed the energy of the room. It was Bakari, the patriarch. He was a man in his late seventies, but he carried his age like a crown. His hair was a crisp, white that contrasted sharply with his deep, dark brown skin, and his eyes, though framed by wrinkles, were as sharp and clear as a winter morning. He was dressed in a simple but impeccably tailored charcoal suit, a pocket square the color of deep blood, adding a touch of regal flair.

For the first time since Kayla had known them, the twins looked nervous. Elijah, who was usually a statue of unshakeable control, straightened his posture, his hands clasping behind his back. Elias, the eternal charmer, lost his easy smile, his expression becoming serious and respectful. They stood at attention as Bakari walked in, his gaze sweeping over the loft before immediately finding and locking onto Kayla.

"Boys," he said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that seemed to vibrate from the very floor. He didn't look at them. His eyes were on her.

"Bakari," Elijah and Elias said in unison, their voices a low, respectful chorus.

Bakari waved a dismissive hand, a gesture of absolute authority. "Leave us," he commanded. "I wish to speak to your 'Princess' alone." The way he said the word, "Princess," was a joke, a dry, teasing rumble that held a world of meaning.

They hesitated for a fraction of a second, a shared, worried glance passing between them. But they obeyed, moving to stand just outside the glass walls of the living room, their silhouettes tense and watchful. They were close enough to be called, but far enough away to give the illusion of privacy.

Bakari moved with a slow, deliberate grace, sitting down in the leather chair Elijah usually occupied. He gestured for Kayla to sit on the chaise lounge opposite him. As he sat, his entire demeanor softened, the hard lines of his face relaxing, the patriarch giving way to the man.

"You handled yourself well at the gallery," he said, his voice a low, thoughtful murmur. "Simone is a proud girl, and you pricked that pride without drawing blood. It's a skill. A rare one."

He leaned forward, his eyes holding hers, a flicker of a distant memory in their depths. "My wife, your namesake, was a master of it. Her name was also Kayla. She was a woman from a small town in Georgia, with no money and no family name. When I brought her into this world, they ate her alive. They saw her as a country girl I'd dragged into the city, a pretty trinket to be discarded."

He paused, his gaze distant, as if seeing a ghost in the room. "But she had a spine of steel. She learned their language, their customs, their secrets. She learned that a Moore man is the sword. We are the ones who go into battle, who make the hard decisions, who shed the blood. But a Moore woman... she is the hand that wields it. She is the target, the distraction, and the ultimate prize. She is everything."

He looked at Kayla, and she saw it then. He saw his wife in her. He saw the same quiet strength, the same fierce intelligence, the same potential to be more than just a possession. "I see the same fire in you, child. A fire that can warm a house for generations. That's why I want you to listen to me, and I want them to listen to me. They see you as their 'Princess,' a beautiful thing to be kept in a tower. That's their mistake. You are not a princess. You are a queen. And a queen needs a kingdom."

He stood, his command of the room absolute, and called the twins back in. They entered, their expressions a mixture of apprehension and respect.

"You have done well in finding her," Bakari said, his voice regaining its full, authoritative weight. "But a loft is no place for a princess. A princess needs a kingdom." He looked from Elijah to Elias, his gaze a sharp, critical blade. "You have the jewel; now you must build the setting. A woman like this, one who can command a room with her silence, who can dissect a rival with a few well-chosen words, is the foundation of the next generation. To house her in a starter apartment is an insult to her, to you, and to the legacy itself."

The decree hung in the air, a public chastisement and a direct order. It was a challenge, a test of their ability to provide for the woman they claimed to own.

Bakari walked to the elevator, but before he stepped inside, he turned and gave Kayla a slow, deliberate wink, a look of adoration and pride in his eyes. The doors closed, and he was gone.

The twins were silent, stewing in a mix of pride and humiliation. They had been praised for their choice, but scolded for their execution. They had been given a direct order, a challenge they could not refuse.

Elijah looked at Kayla, a new, determined fire burning in his eyes. "He's right," he said, his voice a low, resolute rumble. "It's time."

The next few weeks became a whirlwind of private jets and luxury SUVs, a blur of architectural blueprints and sprawling landscapes. The search for a "kingdom" had begun, and it was a spectacle of wealth and power that made the gala seem like a casual backyard barbecue. These were not houses; they were compounds, each one more breathtaking and imposing than the last.

They toured a sprawling plantation-style estate in Virginia, a place steeped in history, its manicured grounds and stately, white-columned mansion a testament to the old-money legacy Elijah so revered. He walked the grounds with a focused intensity, pointing out the strategic advantages of the rolling hills, the natural barriers created by the dense forests, and the historical significance of the land itself. "This is where we come from," he said, his voice a low, reverent murmur. "This is the foundation."

Elias, on the other hand, was more interested in the infinity pool that overlooked the valley and the state-of-the-art chef's kitchen with its two walk-in pantries. "You could host a party for a hundred people and never run out of space," he whispered in Kayla's ear, his eyes sparkling with excitement. "And this closet," he said, opening a door to reveal a room the size of her entire old apartment, complete with a central island, built-in shelving, and a plush chaise lounge. "You'll have a walk-in closet bigger than your whole old apartment, Princess."

Next was a modern architectural marvel in Louisiana, a glass and steel structure that seemed to float on the edge of the Bayou. It was all sharp angles and clean lines, a testament to the new-money innovation Elias craved. He was in his element, pointing out the smart-home technology, the automated lighting, the subterranean garage with enough space for a fleet of luxury cars. "This is the future," he said, his voice a confident, boastful rumble. "This is what we're building."

Elijah was less impressed. "It's a fishbowl," he said, his voice a low, critical grumble. "No privacy. No soul. It's all glass and no substance."

It was during the viewing of a beach fortress in Malibu, a stark, brutalist structure of concrete and glass perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, that they "coincidentally" ran into Dante and Simone. They were also looking at properties; their presence was a blatant, provocative declaration of their ongoing rivalry.

Simone was cold and silent, her humiliation from the art gallery still a fresh, raw wound. She refused to make eye contact, her gaze fixed on the ocean, her posture rigid with a forced indifference.

Dante, however, was smug, his smile a confident, predatory grin. "Well, well, well," he said, his voice a low, taunting rumble. "Looking for a little love nest? Good. A little stability might do you two good. Can't have your 'Queen' living in a starter apartment forever." He deliberately used the new title, his tone mocking and dismissive.

Elijah's jaw tightened, his entire posture radiating a cold, dismissive calm. He didn't take the bait, not directly. He just let a slow, knowing smile touch his lips, a look that was far more infuriating than any angry retort. "We're building a legacy, Dante," he said, his voice a low, cool rumble that cut through the salty air. "Not just buying a house. There's a difference."

Dante's smirk faltered for a second, a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. He wasn't getting the rise he wanted. "We'll see about that," he retorted, his voice a low, challenging growl. "The race is on, cousin. May the best man win."

"Oh, I think we already have," Elijah said, his voice dropping to a more intimate, conspiratorial murmur, a verbal dagger aimed directly at Dante's ego. "Bakari paid us a visit the other day. Unannounced."

The mention of the patriarch's name instantly shifted the dynamic. Dante's confident posture stiffened, his expression hardening. Simone, who had been pointedly ignoring them, flinched, her head turning just slightly, her interest piqued.

"He seems to have taken a real liking to our Kayla," Elijah continued, his voice a smooth, silken taunt. He reached out and placed a hand on Kayla's back, a gesture that was both a claim and a shield. "Sat down with her for nearly an hour. Just the two of them. Had some very... interesting things to say about the future of this family. About the kind of woman who will be leading it beside her men."

He let the words hang in the air, a direct, brutal shot. Bakari never gave private audiences. It was an unprecedented sign of favor.

Dante's face was a mask of barely suppressed fury. He opened his mouth to retort, but Elijah cut him off, his voice turning even colder, sharper.

"Which brings me to another point," Elijah said, his gaze shifting from Dante to Simone, who was now staring at them, her face a pale, tight mask. "You might want to teach your woman some manners. Or at the very least, teach her to stay on her leash. It's one thing to be ambitious, Simone. It's another thing entirely to be throwing yourself at another man at a public function. Especially in front of his own."

The verbal blow was so direct, so public, that Simone let out a small, audible gasp. A deep, furious blush crept up her neck, staining her cheeks a blotchy, unflattering red. She looked from Elijah to Dante, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and humiliation.

Dante's face twisted with rage. He took a step forward, his hands clenching into fists, his body a coiled spring of violent intent. "You watch your mouth, cousin," he snarled, his voice a low, dangerous growl.

Elijah didn't even flinch. He just stood there, a picture of calm, unshakeable authority, his hand still resting on Kayla's back. "I'm just looking out for the family's reputation," he said, his voice a low, dismissive rumble. "Can't have our women wandering off, sniffing around other men's territory. It gives the impression that their own men aren't keeping them satisfied. Or... in control."

The final shot was a masterstroke of psychological warfare. He had not only insulted Simone's character but had implied, in no uncertain terms, that Dante was a failure as a man, unable to control his own woman.

Dante was practically vibrating with fury, but he was trapped. To escalate further would be to confirm Elijah's assessment. To back down would be to lose face completely. He just stood there, his eyes burning with a cold, impotent hatred, his rivalry with Elijah no longer a game, but a blood feud.

Elijah, having delivered the final, devastating blow, turned his back on them, his attention returning to Kayla as if they were nothing more than a minor annoyance. "Shall we continue the tour, my Queen?" he murmured, his voice a low, intimate rumble, the honorific a final, triumphant declaration of his victory.

Finally, they arrived at the last property on their list. It was in the heart of the Virginia countryside, a historic, renovated manor on dozens of acres, surrounded by a high, stone wall and a dense, ancient forest. It was the perfect blend of old and new, a place with a soul and a future.

As they walked through the grand foyer, with its sweeping staircase and gleaming marble floors, Kayla could feel it. This was the one. It had the history Elijah craved, the original stonework and hand-carved woodwork that spoke of a legacy that had stood the test of time. And it had the luxury Elias demanded, the newly renovated chef's kitchen, the home theater, the spa-like bathrooms with their soaking tubs and rain showers.

They walked out onto the grand balcony, a sprawling expanse of stone that overlooked a manicured garden and the rolling hills beyond. The air was clean and crisp, the silence a welcome relief from the noise and tension of the city.

The twins flanked her, their presence a solid, reassuring weight. Elijah put his hand on her shoulder, his touch a warm, possessive claim. "This could be yours," he said, his voice a low, resolute rumble.

Elias wrapped his arms around her from behind, his chin resting on her head, his body a warm, protective shield. "Our kingdom, for our Queen," he whispered in her ear. He purposefully changed her nickname, the word a deliberate, meaningful shift. He and Elijah both understood what Bakari had meant. She was more than a princess, more than a submissive. She was their partner, their equal, their queen.

Kayla didn't answer. She just looked out at the vast expanse of land, at the kingdom that would be built around her. The thought of escape was a distant memory, a foolish, childish dream from a life that no longer felt like her own. The only thought was: What happens next?

“How long are these interviews supposed to take again?” You ask Michael, as you sit across from him on the couch in his office. 

With the recent release of Sinners, the interviews for press were constant. Luckily for you and Michael, today was one of those rare interview days when he could do them from home in the comfort of his office. 

You had the day off and you missed your man, so you opted to sit in his office while he worked. This wasn’t an unusual routine for either of you. You and Michael often worked together in his office. The simultaneous clacking of your keyboards, along with just being in each other’s presence was comforting. 

Today, however, you’d have to wait for Michael to complete his interviews before you could truly spend time together. Also unfortunately, today was just one of those days when you were really horny. 

It also doesn’t help that Michael is dressed in that black t-shirt that contours to every muscle on his body. He don a pair of sweatpants to keep himself comfortable during the interview. 

It’s not helping the wetness between your legs because you know that he’s free balling beneath the sweatpants. You’re practically hypnotized watching his print through the pants. 

“This is the last one. It’ll be about thirty minutes,” Michael responds, leaning back in the chair as he casually tosses up the fidget toy. 

He subtly eyes his Naruto hoodie that adorns your frame, along with the shorts that hug your thighs. He clears his throat and adjusts himself discreetly. 

The last thing he needs is to be hard during this interview. 

“And then we’ll spend time together?”

Michael catches the needy look on your face, “Yeah, baby. I’m all yours once this interview is over. We can do whatever you want.”

“Okay baby!” You chirp before settling back on the couch. You slide your book over to you and lay back to start reading it. Michael eyes lock on your bare legs. He clocks the anklet dangling from your anklet with his initials on it. 

For a moment, he allows himself to imagine the sight of the anklet as it dangles from his shoulder. He thinks back to a few nights when he had your legs over his shoulders as he feasted on you. He can still remember the chill from the anklet and the feel of your hands in his hair. 

His phone dinging from the desk reminds him of the upcoming interview. He clicks on the interview link before sitting up in his chair. Michael turns the camera on as he waits for the interview to start. 

Soon, the interview starts as Ryan, Wumni, Miles, Jayme, and Delroy also appear on the screen. Michael chuckles to himself because he can tell that they all had the same idea for keeping it casual. 

“Hey everyone, it’s nice to have you all here today. Thank you so much for your time,” the interviewer greets with much enthusiasm. 

Michael dons a wide smile as he waits for the interview to begin her questions. He peeks off the side to look at you, only to notice that you’ve changed positions while reading. 

You now lay on your front, casually moving your feet in the air. Michael’s eyes zero in on your backside, specifically where he can see that your shorts have hiked up. 

He swallows before directing his attention back to the screen. 

“Question for you Michael, how would say that all of your roles before this have prepared you to play twins?”

“I would say that all of my previous roles have taught me discipline and made me lean into creativity a lot more. I think that playing twins on screen, you kind of want to tweak them to make them their own separate entities. Like with Creed, it was the first time that I had to transform my body, so I think with playing Smoke and Stack, it helped to inform my choices on how I wanted to shape my body and move around as those characters.”

The interviewer hums. 

The interview continues to go on with additional questions being asked to different cast members. 

It turns out that you picked the wrong book to read. You were in your romance era of reading, so you’d trusted your homegirls in your book club with their next choice of book. Your friend had mentioned that the book was spicy, but you weren’t expecting it to heat up this early. 

You clench your thighs as your clit throbs from reading the steamy scene. To Michael, it looks like you’re adjusting your position, but actually, your shorts have pressed against your center and you have to control the moan from the stimulation that the fabric is giving you. 

You get to a specific part where the female lead is giving a blowjob to the male lead in the bathroom. You think back to having Michael’s dick in your mouth. Your mouth waters when you think of the heavy weight against your tongue and the taste of his cum hitting your taste buds. 

The idea hits your brain immediately. There might as well be a light bulb shining brightly above your head. You close the book before you can abandon the idea. 

You stand from the couch before dropping to your knees. You start crawling across the floor until you reach Michael’s desk. He’s so engrossed in the interview that he doesn’t notice you until you brush against his leg. He jumps before disguising the action like he’s adjusting in the chair. 

You move between his legs until you’re sitting pretty between them. With the height of the desk, it hides the fact that you’re sitting there. 

Michael tenses as you move forward and lay your head on his thigh. He tries to stop your hand as you grip him through the sweats. You smile mischievously at him as you fully stick your hand in the sweats to take his dick out. 

“So pretty,” you whisper to yourself. 

Michael’s mushroom tip is already leaking the pearlescent liquid that contrasts against his brown skin. You spit in your hand before moving it to wrap around Michael’s length again. You move your hand up until you’re firmly grasping the tip. 

Michael tries to control his breath as his pleasure starts to spike. For a few minutes, you casually jerk him off like you’re playing with a toy. 

But you are. He’s your favorite toy, and fortunately for you, you are allowed to put this one in your mouth.

Michael covers up a moan with a cough as your lips fully envelope him. You pull back to lap at his tip like it’s a lollipop. You allow a large glob of spit to leave your mouth as it trails over Michael’s length. You slurp the spit back into your mouth before repeating the process. 

You’re killing Michael. He tries to keep his cool as he answers questions dutifully. When he looks down again, you’re tapping his dick against your tongue while looking up at him. 

“Yeah..like I was saying….um..I’m sorry, what was the question again?” Michael asks, his mind foggy with lust. 

Everyone chuckles, but they’re completely oblivious to you taking the man apart under the desk. It’s at that moment that you choose to fully submerge your mouth on Michael’s dick. Your nose presses against his pubic hairs as you breathe him in. 

There’s faint sounds of your throat catch on the microphone, but everyone’s professional enough not to comment. Michael still yours head as he holds you flush to him. You breathe through your nose as you relax at the feel of him in your throat. 

Spit collects in your mouth and begins to leak out of sides as Michael continues answering the question. He keeps his voice calm, but wavers at the end when you swallow around him. 

He turns the mic off as the interviewer asks Delroy the next question. He releases you as you move back up to breathe. A long, thin line of salive connects your lips to him. 

He briefly glances down at his phone as it buzzes.

Coog

You good?

Michael

I’m straight..

Coog

So what was that noise?🙂

….Y’all nasty af man💀

You choose that exact moment to pull his balls out of the sweatpants to start mouthing at them. You suck on them as you jerk him off. 

Your tongue slides up until you fully envelope him down your throat again. Michael checks the mic to ensure that it’s muted as you fully start sucking him. You hallow your cheeks and moan lowly. 

He can feel the rising of his orgasm in the pitt of his stomach. He glances down at you and you’re honestly lost in your own world as you throat him. It only takes one more gag before he’s exploding into your throat.

Michael’s abs and thighs clench as pleasure radiates through his body. He feels the orgasm in his toes. He closes his eyes briefly before opening them again. 

Spurts of his cum hit your tongue and the back of your throat. It makes you wetter because it’s one of your favorite treats. Michael feels like he could cry as you swish his cum around in your mouth with his length still there. You lick the remnants of his cum from him as you release him with a soft pop.

“And that was our last question. Thank you all so much for being here today. It’s truly been an honor. Congratulations on the success of the movie!” 

Michael unmutes the microphone as he thanks the interviewer before he leaves the meeting.

Immediately, he slides the chair back to look at you in surprise. 

You shrug your shoulders, “What? I needed something in my mouth.”

End.

_____

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Day one of your argument you stayed strong and moved through the house like a queen in a castle that had been overrun by a jealous beast.

Your skincare routine? Luxurious.

Your work calls? On point.

Your outfit? A soft two-piece lounge set that hugged every curve like it missed you.

When dinner came, you threw yourself into it like you were being judged on Top Chef. You marinated lamb chops for hours. Cooked up homemade honey butter biscuits with a dash of cayenne in the butter… just the way… he… liked it. But you made it very clear: that plate was yours and yours alone.

As you cooked, Smoke lingered around the kitchen and his massive frame leaned against the fridge while watching you plate your meal like a hawk. His nostrils flared as his eyes burned holes into your skin. He couldn’t believe his woman wasn’t offering him a plate of food, but he also wasn’t a man who would beg.

While completely ignoring his existence, you sat at the dining table with your legs crossed, lips glistening with lamb jus and smirking between each bite like you were daring him to say something. He didn’t. But oh, the look he gave you… Girl run

When Saturday rolled in the silence started to feel dangerous. This was the one day out of the week when Smoke would usually hit the gym with Stack, run errands he couldn’t get to during the week and any other ‘man shit’ that you didn’t care to know about. But not today. Today, that man made it a point to stay his ass at home. All. Damn. Day. And worse? He did it wearing only grey sweatpants and no shirt.

Every inch of Smoke was carved out of marble by God. Smooth brown skin stretched over thick muscle and broad shoulders. His gold chains swung low, catching the light every time he reached for something. And those damn sweatpants? They hung low. Way too damn low while leaving nothing to the imagination.

You were sitting on the couch, pretending to scroll through your phone, but your eyes kept sliding up catching every stretch, every shift, and every flex Smoke would make.

When he purposefully reached his arm up to stretch, that’s when he caught you. “Fuck you staring at?” His voice was deep and sharp. His lips curled into a smirk even as his eyes narrowed, knowing exactly what you were doing.

Your mouth went dry but you sucked your teeth and rolled your eyes before firing back just as sharp. “Ain’t nobody looking at you, nigga.” You turned your head fast, placed a nearby throw blanket onto your lap, and squeezed your thighs shut like you weren’t damn near vibrating with need.

Smoke let out a scoff and dropped onto the armchair across from you, legs spread wide, one hand rubbing the scruff along his jaw, the other dragging down his thigh like he didn’t know what that did to you. But he knew. Of course he knew. Because he’s a SLUT. Smoke was a man born with sin in his bloodstream and you were his favorite outlet.

“You real bold when your pussy hungry,” he goaded without looking at you, just low enough to make your stomach flip. “Real fuckin’ bold.”

You didn’t respond. Your throat tightened and your fingers curled into the blanket as heat spread between your thighs like wildfire. You hated how your body betrayed you. How your nipples perked beneath your tank top just from hearing his voice like that. How your lower belly tightened at the memory of his mouth, his hands, his— Stop. You weren’t going to fold. Not this time. No. This time you had a point to prove… So you stayed quiet.

Smoke leaned forward then, his forearms braced on his knees, honey brown eyes finally locking with yours. He was so beautiful it made your chest hurt. That hard jaw. That slow burn in his stare. The way his gold tooth caught the light when he smirked.

“You gon’ act like you don’t hear me? I said…” he repeated, his voice dropping lower, rougher, “… you real bold when your pussy hungry.”

You tossed the blanket off your lap like a challenge and stood up, storming past him toward the kitchen. But before you could make it, his hand snatched your wrist. “Don’t touch me,” you snapped.

“I ain’t touchin’ you,” he said coolly, pulling you gently, slow and patient, until you were standing right between his legs. “I’m remindin’ you. That mouth? That attitude? That little fake-ass silent treatment you think you givin’? That shit don’t work on me, pretty girl.”

He looked up at you like you were the last good thing in a ruined world. And then his eyes dropped trailing slowly down your body, soaking in every soft curve, every part of you he knew like scripture. “Go on. Keep walkin’ away,” he muttered, voice like hardened steel. “But I know damn well you miss how it feel when I grab the back of that neck and tell you to hush while I—”

“Don’t.” You said it too fast. Too breathless.

He grinned. That arrogant grin that made your knees weak and your pride falter. “You really mad?” he asked quietly, now wrapping a hand around your thigh and easing you a fraction closer. “Or you just don’t wanna admit that I had a reason to knock that pretty boy barista out his damn shoes?”

You sarcastically laughed at Smoke’s audacity. “That man smiled. That’s it. You almost went to jail over a smile.”

“Don’t care.” He leaned forward, nose brushing against your lower belly, breath warm through the cotton of your tank. “Anyone smile at you like that again, I’ll put him in the dirt.”

You stared down at him, your fingers twitching by your sides. “You’re a damn lunatic.”

“Yup.” His eyes lifted, black and unrepentant. “Your lunatic.”

You wanted to slap him. You wanted to kiss him. You wanted to scream and bite and ride and cry and maybe all at once. But instead, you turned your head, stared at the wall, and whispered, “Don’t talk to me.”

Smoke scoffed and his grip tightened before he kissed the inside of your thigh, right on that special spot that always makes you forget how to think straight. The kiss was gentle… dangerous… knowing “Aight, baby,” his voice muffled against your skin. “I won’t say a word.” But the fire in those orbs told a different story.

When you finally pulled away, storming back into the kitchen to cool down, you could feel his stare trailing behind you like a shadow with claws. You stood next to the kitchen island hoping for a moment of peace but instead your heart rattled like a stray bullet in your chest. The room felt too hot, too still… way too still, like the moment right before a thunderstorm when all the air gets sucked out of the sky and the ground doesn’t know whether to shake or stay still.

You ran your hands through your hair and let out a frustrated sigh. After 24 hours of being strong, you couldn’t let yourself fold from a little thigh kiss. You weren’t even hungry, but your hands moved on autopilot, opening the fridge, grabbing things, pretending like your body wasn’t still humming from the feel of his mouth on your thigh.

Smoke wasn’t slick and you weren’t safe. Not from him and not from the heat building up under your skin like it was trying to boil you alive. Behind you, the sound of the armchair creaking and his footsteps thumping across the hardwood made you hold your breath. You didn’t bother turning, you already knew the look on his face was smug and cocky like he was just biding time until your pride finally tapped out.

“You heavy-footed on purpose?” you muttered without looking at him. “Or you tryna make sure I know you comin’ so I don’t swing a skillet at your head?”

Smoke didn’t say a word but you heard the slow grind of his teeth and a slight click when his tongue hit the back of them. Then, the fridge door beside you opened. His arm brushed yours with intent and his skin was as hot as a stovetop. He reached in and grabbed a bottle of water, twisted the cap off, and took a long, long drink like he had been parched since war-time.

You still didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking at him. Instead you stopped fiddling with the random assortment of ingredients and crossed your arms under your chest so tightly your hands started going numb. But none of that mattered. Smoke was standing so close now with his presence wrapping around you like a weighted blanket made of lustful desire, silently daring you to keep dismissing him.

“You really don’t want me talkin’ to you?” he asked finally with his tone full of challenge. “Even though your thighs damn near gave up and invited me in just now?”

You turned your head and squinted your eyes at him. “You punched an innocent man for smiling at me!”

“And I said a barista don’t need to be starin’ at what’s mine like he got a fuckin’ chance!”

“You don’t own me, Elijah,” you mumbled.

That was the first time you’d said his real name in days. And you had the nerve to use it while telling him that he doesn’t own you.

Smoke’s jaw ticked. His nostrils flared. And then he laughed like he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with you right now. “I don’t own you?” he repeated, stepping in now, cornering you against the counter. “You right… You right, you grown, huh? Real grown. Is that why you been sittin’ in this house clenching your lil thighs every time I so much as stretch?”

“Back up,” you whispered. It didn’t sound as strong as you wanted it to. Not when your back hit the cold of the cabinet and your front was all warm-blooded temptation and hard muscle.

Smoke leaned in like a snake slithering across grass before striking its prey. His lips brushed your ear, and his voice dropped to a place that made your belly twist. “Tell me to back up one more time, baby,” he taunted, “and mean it.”

You swallowed thickly, chest rising fast beneath your thin top.

His hand settled on the counter beside your hip, the other drifting ever so gently down the side of your arm, brushing like a warning. “Say it,” he taunted again. “Or let me remind you why you don’t ever sleep right unless I’m wrapped around you.”

Now it was your turn to clench your jaw but your breath betrayed you. Your thighs pressed together again, heat rushing back like a tidal wave. “Why you always gotta be like this?” you breathed, voice barely holding on.

He chuckled darkly. “Because I know what’s mine.” His hand slid beneath your shirt, fingers brushing the dip of your waist. “And I know when she lyin’… putting on a front.” He kissed your neck just once to test the waters. It was soft but full of possession.

And when you didn’t stop him, when you didn’t shove him away, he nipped your collarbone and muttered, “You gon’ keep fightin’ me or you gon’ let Daddy fix this?”

“I’m still mad at you,” you said, even as your fingers gripped his sweatpants.

“Stay mad then,” he growled, lifting you up onto the counter like you weighed nothing. “But don’t pretend you don’t need me.”

It took all your might to not whimper when his hand slid between your thighs, the heat of his palm making your eyes roll back. “I told… you not… to talk to me,” you gasped.

Smoke smirked against your throat. “Then put that pretty lil pussy in my face and shut me up.”

Your eyes squinted into a glare and heat rushed up your neck as your lips parted in disbelief. Your body wanted him. Badly. But your mind… that damn stubborn, bratty, prideful-ass mind was not about to let him win this round so easily.

And so… you did what any unhinged woman dating Elijah Moore would do and shoved a hand into his perfect face… and mushed him. What color roses do you want at your funeral? You pushed his cocky expression away like you were slapping a mosquito. The suddenness made him take a step back, just long enough for you to hop down from the counter in one quick motion and scurry away like a rabbit setting itself free from a snare.

“I said don’t talk to me, nigga!” you yelled, snatching your composure back like a silk robe off the floor.

You stormed out the kitchen, and tossed a middle finger over your shoulder. “And put some damn clothes on! Walkin’ ‘round this house like I could buy you for the night with two dollars and a half-stick of gum!”

Smoke stood still like a statue and for a second he didn't know if he was dreaming or if his woman was truly out of her damn mind. Then that low, dangerous laugh rolled from his chest like thunder over wet concrete. It was a sound that did nothing but pour gasoline on the flames already licking between your thighs. He loved when you got like this, wild-eyed, stubborn-lipped, and sass pouring from your throat like it was made of honey and broken glass.

He knew you’d fold. And when you did… he’d be the one to catch you.

The rest of the day you avoided Smoke like the floor was lava and he was the devil waiting at the bottom. You locked yourself in your shared bedroom and buried yourself in the sheets like they could protect you from the walking sin on the other side of the door. You distracted yourself for hours. Scrolled through your phone. Scrolled again. Played lo-fi beats. Switched to gospel. Thought about cooking. Decided not to because that would involve you leaving your sanctuary. Thought about apologizing. Decided not to because it would be a cold day in hell before you apologize to him. Thought about touching yourself… Absolutely did not… yet.

Eventually, your body gave in to exhaustion. The softness of the pillows, the hum of the AC in the background and the scent of Smoke lingering on the sheets rocked you into a tense, twitchy sleep. And then your mind betrayed you.

Of course your unconscious mind decided to betray you as you went off into dreamland. Dream-Smoke had his mouth everywhere on your body. On your neck. Down your chest. Between your thighs. This version of Smoke was utterly ruthless. He said your name like it was a threat and a prayer. His hands gripped your legs like he was holding onto the only thing that made sense in this godforsaken world.

“Open up, baby. Yeah, just like that…”

Your body arched in your sleep, your mouth parted, a soft moan fluttering against the dark. And right when you were about to reach that shimmering edge, Dream-Smoke pulled back and taunted in your ear, “Shouldn’t’ve told me not to talk, huh?”

You gasped yourself awake and the bedroom was cloaked in darkness, only a soft sliver of moonlight slipped between the curtains. Your chest heaved and your pajama shorts were damn near soaked through. The cotton stuck to your core like it had a vendetta. A frown pulled at your lips and a tear slid down your cheek before you could stop it.

You turned your head to look at the blinking alarm clock through wet eyes and frowned again. It was currently 2:03 AM and you couldn’t believe you somehow slept the entire the day away.

Peaking over your shoulder you let out a disgruntled sigh. Smoke was laid out like he didn’t have a care in the world. One arm slung behind his head, chest rising and falling with calm, heavy breaths. That same damn pair of grey sweatpants still clung to his hips. He looked peaceful. Angelic even. You wanted to punch him and make him suffer for what Dream-Smoke started but didn’t finish. But since you already got away with mushing him in the face you didn’t want to test your luck and simply whined.

A shaky, bratty, needy whimper left your throat as you wiped your still falling tears and leaned over, gently nudging Smoke's shoulder. He grunted and cracked one eye open. “What, baby?” His voice was sleep-worn and you tried not to focus on what hearing it was doing to your already wounded up body.

You pouted in the dark, nose wrinkled, lips trembling. “This is ALL your fault.”

Raising your voice early in the morning got Smoke’s full attention and he blinked slowly, as the remnants of sleep cleared from his face like a curtain lifting. His eyes found you in the moonlit darkness. You looked so adorable to him, pouty-lipped, flushed cheeks, and thighs pressed tightly together under the covers.

“The fuck you yellin’ at me for and cryin’ this early in the morning?” he asked, now fully awake, his tone clipped with concern and confusion.

You sniffled. “I… I need… I want… I want… to touch myself,” you admitted, lip quivering dramatically. “And since I’m still mad at you… I need you to leave the bed.”

Smoke blinked once at you and then again into the darkness like he was on an episode of The Office. He didn’t expect to be so entertained by your antics today and he started to chuckle to himself. This wasn’t a typical ‘I love how bratty my girl is acting’ type of laugh. No, this was a dark, ‘this girl done lost her fuckin’ mind’ laugh.

“You woke me up,” he said slowly, to make sure he got all the details correct, “to tell me that you’re horny… and I need to leave our bed… so you can touch what belongs to me?”

Your throat tightened. When Smoke repeated everything out loud it did sound kind of insane but that was besides the point. “You heard me,” you said, lifting your chin and pointing it to the door. “Now go.”

Smoke let out a final chuckle and didn’t move. He leaned back on one elbow, eyes gleaming in the dark like he could see the mess you’d become under those covers. “You really out here throwin’ tantrums at two in the morning ‘cause you can’t handle how badly you want me to fuck that attitude out of you?” he teased.

“I am handling it,” you bit back. “I’m asking you to leave. Like a grown woman.”

His tongue slid along the inside of his cheek. Then he reached down, adjusted himself in those sweats just slightly, and let out a hum that made your thighs twitch. “You sure?” he asked gently, like he was talking to a skittish wild animal about to bolt. “You sure you want me to leave, baby?”

“Yes,” you whispered, even as your legs squirmed beneath the blanket. “I don’t need you. I can do it myself.”

“Mhm… is that right...”

Smoke sat up slowly before swinging his legs off the side of the bed. He stood to his full height and then without saying another word he discarded his sweatpants, letting the moonlight shine on his intimidating half-hard manhood. You sat in complete shock, unsure what to say or what to do. Your mouth stayed agape and you could’ve sworn you didn’t breathe for 2 minutes, Your whole body burned with need and you hated this feeling.

And he spoke again in a cruel velvet-slick tone, “Go on then.” He climbed back in bed and laid on his back with his hands behind his head like he didn’t just take his pants off. “Show me how you don’t need me.”

The silence that followed was so thick it felt like smoke itself. It crackled with the weight of what you wanted to do and what your pride wouldn’t allow. Your fingers trembled under the blanket. You hated him, yet you wanted him. And you hated how badly you wanted him. All of this only made the leaking faucet between your thighs turn into a full blown fire hose.

He bit his bottom lip before antagonizing you. “Might help if you stop cryin’, baby. You can’t see your lil fingers down there with all them tears foggin’ up your eyesight.”

Your fists balled with annoyance but your thighs began to slightly part. Smoke didn’t move or touch you. He didn’t even acknowledge the way he could smell your sweet aroma in the room. He just gave you a look that said, ‘You can play this game all night, pretty girl… I’ll be here when you break.’

And you were so, so close to shattering. You stared at him like he’d summoned a demon into the room and dared you to dance with it.

Smoke stretched his long body across the bed like he was on display. Like he wasn’t a man who just dropped his pants in the middle of a silent standoff and dared you to stay proud. With his arms folded beneath his head, the swell of his chest rose and fell as if he weren’t aware of the war going on inside your body. The tension. The hunger. The absolute need that clawed at your insides like a caged animal. His dick sat heavy between his thighs, thick and idle, like it had time to wait. Like it knew it would be fed eventually.

“You got five seconds before I close my eyes and go back to sleep,” he grumbled without looking at you. “So go ahead. Get to rubbin’. Let me hear how good you make yourself feel without my help.”

Your lip trembled. You weren’t crying anymore, not from frustration anyway. But your thighs were sticky, your panties were soaked through, and every nerve ending in your body was throbbing like you’d been edgewalking through purgatory. Still… you weren’t gonna give him the satisfaction of begging. So you huffed in a loud and obnoxious manner before wiping your cheeks like a toddler who just got scolded. You then yanked the covers off your body and laid flat on your back beside him, arms stiff at your sides.

Smoke turned his head slightly, one brow arched. “Thought you said you didn’t need me,” he said, tone sharp and mocking.

“I don’t,” you snapped. “I just need space.”

He smirked. “You sound stupid.”

You glared at the ceiling. “You look stupid.”

Another beat of silence. Then your hand slowly dragged beneath the waistband of your pajama shorts, and your breath hitched. You weren’t even doing anything yet, and your whole body tensed like you were about to commit a crime.

Smoke didn’t move but he watched from the corner of his eye. You could feel his eyes burning into the side of your face, heavy and loaded. Like if he blinked, he might miss the exact moment you broke. Your fingers brushed against your panties and found them soaked, the cotton clinging to your folds like it was trying to apologize for being in the way. You let out a shaky breath and your fingers twitched as you slid them beneath the fabric and gently grazed your clit.

The behemoth of a man next to you exhaled through his nose but he didn’t say a word as he continued to observe. You rubbed slow circles, small and hesitant, still stubborn as hell and still trying to prove a point you were seconds from losing as a soft and breathy moan slipped out.

Smoke turned his head toward you fully now, his gaze dark and unreadable. “You always make yourself sound so pretty,” he said, voice lower now, rough and molten. “But it don’t hit the same, do it?”

You didn’t answer him but your hips rolled in response to his question. Your hand moved faster. Your breath stuttered. Your back arched. Still—not a word. You didn’t plead or cry for help. To prove your point you used your own hand and held back the silent scream in your throat. Then you finally felt it… that build. It climbed your spine and tingled through your limbs, coiling low and tight in your belly like lightning trapped behind your navel. But just as your toes curled and your moans grew louder… Smoke’s hand slammed down on your wrist and you yelped.

He was above you now, face inches from yours, his chest heaving, lips parted. “That’s enough,” he growled. “This little show? Over.”

“Wha—? I didn’t even—” you started, but he cut you.

“You really gon’ make yourself cum when I’m layin’ right here?” he snapped, pressing your wrist into the mattress with one hand while the other dragged your shorts down in one brutal yank. “Tryna act like you in control of somethin’ when this pussy don’t even belong to you no more?”

You whimpered as his mouth crashed into yours, all heat and dominance, devouring your lips like he was punishing you for breathing without permission. His tongue pushed into your mouth while his hips settled between your thighs, and you could feel all of him, heavy and hot, grinding against your bare heat.

“You should’ve just asked,” he murmured against your mouth, voice trembling with restraint.

You blinked up at him, dazed and breathless. “Asked… what?”

“If I was done bein’ mad,” he answered, dragging his tip along your soaked entrance, teasing but never pushing in. “Cause I wasn’t. Not yet.” And with that he slid in excruciatingly slow. So slow you nearly blacked out.

“Now,” he growled, gripping your throat just enough to make your heart flutter, “you don’t talk to me.”

Your breath caught in your throat as he filled you inch by inch, until all nine inches of his rock hard flesh stretched you out causing your back arch off the bed. Once he was completely sheathed inside of your warm gummy walls Smoke didn’t move. Not yet. He held himself still with his hand still resting on your throat—not choking, just a firm reminder of who was in control. Of whose name was stitched into the folds of your body like ownership. Like scripture.

Your lashes fluttered as a soft, broken whimper escaped your lips.

“Yeah,” he hummed, watching your face intently. “That’s what I thought.”

The weight of him, the heat, the way his body caged yours like a storm rolling over weak land, every bit of it made your spine tremble. He didn’t have to say it, didn’t need to ask… he already knew. This wasn’t about sex anymore. This was about submission. About surrender. About you thinking you could ignore him, silence him, deny him, and still sleep soundly next to him every night.

His hips rolled meticulously and grinded so deep you swore you saw stars behind your eyes. His pace was punishing in its patience. Purposeful and steady. Like he wanted you to feel the agony he felt every second you ignored him. Every breath you wasted pretending you didn’t need him.

“You really thought you was gon’ touch yourself in this bed?” he grunted, lips ghosting over your jaw as he rocked into you again. “While I laid next to you? Like I ain’t the one that got this pussy cryin’ in the first place?”

You couldn’t even respond. Your mouth opened but no sound came out, just a sharp inhale, a choked moan, and the clenching of your legs around his hips.

He groaned low like he felt your apology in the way your walls pulled him in tighter.

“This one… if for every time you rolled your eyes at me,” THRUST.

“This one… is for every time you walked away from me,” THRUST.

“Fuck… and THIS one is for every time you told me not to talk to you,” SLAM.

You whimpered beneath him, nails digging into his arms as your pride cracked wide open and your body begged to be ruined. You couldn’t handle this torturous unhurried fuck session. You needed your walls plowed to smithereens and you needed it to happen right now. “I hate you,” you gasped.

“Shut up. You love me,” he corrected with a smirk, snapping his hips against yours harder now. “You love me when I got you stuffed full and dumb off my name.”

Your moans turned shameless… so soft, high, and desperate. Each slow thrust had you melting further, your bratty resolve unraveling like a ribbon. And Smoke? He watched the transformation like it was art. “There she go…” he whispered. “There’s my girl. Ain’t no talkin’ now, huh? Just that lil mouth open like you got somethin’ to say… but still don’t know how to say sorry.”

You finally met his gaze, eyes wide and glassy with need. “I’m—” you tried.

He pressed his fingers against your lips. “Nope.” Another thrust. Brutal. Deep. You cried out. “Don’t say shit else to me... Just take it.”

He dipped his head, kissed the corner of your mouth with an intimacy that contrasted the way he was owning you from the inside out. You wrapped your legs tighter around him, hips rising to meet him while chasing the edge of pleasure like you’d die if you didn’t reach it soon.

“I got you,” he whispered, his breath warm and ragged against your ear. “Go on, baby. Let go. Let me take it.”

Your orgasm crept up your spine like a threat, your whole body tightening under him. “Smoke—” you breathed, one hand tangling in the bedsheets beneath you, the other clutching his shoulder like a lifeline.

“I know, I know. Shhh, baby,” he cooed. “Come on. I got you.” And when you finally shattered—mouth open, legs shaking, eyes rolling—he never let up. He kept fucking you through it, hips grinding, mouth pressing kisses to your throat and chest, whispering your name like prayer and punishment all at once.

You went limp beneath him and he pulled back just enough to look you in the face, brushing a lone tear from your cheek. “You still mad?”

You blinked up at him, dazed and ruined. He smirked again. That same crooked, devilish thing that started it all. “Yeah… you look like you still got a fuckin’ attitude.”

Your chest rose and fell in shallow waves with your skin covered in sweat as you lay there boneless and ruined beneath him.

Smoke hovered above you like a storm cloud that refused to pass. His body didn’t press down; he just hovered, solid and still, like a hunter watching his prey breathe after the first strike. His arms caged you on either side, head tilted slightly as his gold chain swung gently from his neck and tapped your collarbone. Your legs still trembled from the aftershock and your thighs involuntarily locked around his waist, trying to pull him closer.

But Smoke didn’t move, he was so deep inside of you that you could barely think. And instead of chasing his own pleasure like any other man might, he just stared and studied you like you were the most precious thing he’s ever laid eyes on. You felt the subtle twitch of him inside you, ready, but not rushing. Not desperate. Because Smoke wasn’t a man ruled by impulse. He was ruled by control. And he wielded it like a blade.

“You done squeezing my dick?” he asked quietly, voice low and relaxed, like he had nowhere else to be but right here. “Or you need a minute to remember where you at?”

You blinked slowly, lips still tingling from where he kissed you, still too blissed out to string a proper sentence together. But he waited—patient, immovable—as your brows knit together, that ache you just got rid of was already building again and you finally realized… he wasn’t finished. He still hadn’t moved. And now, you were too aware of it. Too aware of the way he filled you like he’d been carved just for you. Too aware of the steady rise and fall of his chest. Of how warm and thick and ready he still felt inside you.

“Smoke,” you whined, voice hoarse and fragile.

He cocked a brow, his gold tooth glinting in the dark. “Yeah, baby?”

Your thighs flexed around him again, a needy little roll of your hips that made you whimper even as you tried to hold your pride in place. His hand slid slowly up the side of your throat, fingers curling around the hinge of your jaw to tilt your face up toward his.

“You feel that?” he murmured.

You nodded weakly, lips parting.

“I been sittin’ still. Holdin’ back,” he whispered, each word slipping into your mouth like honey and heat. “You been cryin’, whinin’, beggin’ me to leave. But I ain’t goin’ nowhere, baby.”

He leaned down, forehead nearly touching yours. “I stay when you bratty. Stay when you act like you don’t want me. Stay when you try to punish me with silence.”

A soft, broken sound spilled from your lips.

“I stay… ‘cause you mine.” Then finally… he moved again. Just a slow roll of his hips. Barely there. Just enough to make you feel the stretch again. Just enough to remind your body that your first orgasm was nothing but the beginning. Your nails found his back again, dragging lightly over the skin of his shoulders as your breath caught.

“You thought I was gon’ break first,” he said, dragging himself out slowly before sinking back into you. “Didn’t you?”

You moaned, head tipping back, throat arching beneath his palm.

“You thought that lil attitude was enough to make me lose my cool.” Another thrust. Deep and slow. The kind that made your vision blur.

“But you forgot who you dealin’ with,” he grunted as his lips brushed your ear. “I can fuck this perfect pussy slow like this for hours and still not cum.”

You whimpered again, your hips twitching, your body betraying you as your heat reignited. He kissed the curve of your cheek, your jaw, your ear.

“You don’t get quick fucks when you act like you don’t need me.” His hand slid between your bodies, fingers slipping down until they found that tender, swollen bundle of nerves. “You get discipline.”And as his fingers began to move in calculated devastating circles, his hips continued their cruel rhythm and your body began to shake again.

You could barely breathe. Every inch of your body was coated in sweat, your skin fever-hot, while your senses flooded with overstimulation. Smoke hadn’t let up and he hadn’t sped up either. That was the worst part… or maybe the best. He moved with purpose and mastery. Every grind of his hips was deep, as he poured himself into you like he was trying to combine your souls into one. And his fingers… God. The pads of them circled your clit with such devastating precision, you swore you were unraveling on a molecular level. Like you were coming apart from the inside out.

You gripped at his shoulders, his back, his biceps, wherever you could reach… but you couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t change the pace. Couldn’t make him move faster no matter how much your legs shook or your voice cracked. “P-please,” you breathed, not even sure what you were asking for. Release? Mercy? More?

Smoke leaned down, brushing his lips against your cheek with a smug grin carved into his face. “Oh… You beggin’ now?” he asked. “Wasn’t too long ago you was flippin’ me off and actin’ like I was walkin’ around here like a cheap thrill.”

His voice vibrated against your neck, dragging goosebumps down your spine. “You wanna cum again, pretty girl?” he murmured, fingers pressing down just slightly harder, swirling against your clit like he was drawing a map to your breakdown. “Is that what all them little tears are for?”

You whined, nodding frantically, your thighs beginning to quake again. Smoke didn’t speed up. He didn’t need to. Your body was desperate for him and would greedily take whatever was given. He knew you so well he could fuck you out of a meltdown without ever changing rhythm.

“You don’t deserve to cum yet,” he said lowly, pulling his mouth back to hover just above yours. “But I’m gon’ let you anyway. Just so you remember who got you moaning so loud our neighbors might file a noise complaint tomorrow.”

He moved in again with one solid and controlled stroke that made your eyes roll and your nails dig so deep into his back you swore you could feel muscle give. Your body started to quiver. “No—no, wait—” you whimpered, because you felt it building too fast, the peak rising like a wave with nowhere to go.

“Shhh,” he whispered, voice laced with hunger now, though his pace never changed. “That’s it. Go on. Cum on my dick.”

He kissed you and swallowed your cries as your walls constricted around him and you came again, harder than before. Your body jerked beneath him as your second orgasm crashed through you like a tidal wave smashing through a dam. You sobbed into his mouth, a mix of bliss and frustration and pure, helpless surrender. Your thighs shook uncontrollably and your nails dug into his flesh like he was the only thing keeping you from drifting away.

Smoke pulled back just enough to look at your face that was flushed and tear-streaked, while your mouth hung open in silent shock as you rode the aftershocks. “I don’t think that attitude is gone yet” he rasped, still deep inside you, still hard as stone. “You need another reminder. Don’t you, baby?”

You nodded weakly unable to form words.

Smoke slid his hand up your ribcage, slow and reverent, until he cupped the side of your face. His thumb brushed your bottom lip, tugging it gently. “I ain’t even started your real punishment yet.”

Your heart stuttered.

“Two days you gave me attitude,” he murmured, kissing your chin. “Two days you walked around this house actin’ like you forgot what my name felt like between your thighs… I'm nowhere near done with you yet.”

You gasped, your fingers twitched around his arms, already worn down and so full of him. You didn’t know if it was seconds or minutes or lifetimes that passed with him moving inside you like that—slow, deliberate, dominant. Your body felt swollen with sensation, soaked in the aftermath of two back-to-back orgasms that had left your breath scattered like glass shards across the mattress.

Your skin was hot to the touch, your muscles limp, your mind foggy with a heady mix of defiance and surrender. And through it all, Smoke hadn’t broken his rhythm. His stamina was inhuman, like he fed off control, fed off the way your body twitched and sobbed under his. The way you needed more and hated that it had to come from him.

But then… Something shifted. His eyes… those dark, obsidian things dragged across your face. He licked his lips, slow and thoughtful. Then he pulled back again. All the way out. You cried at the loss of fullness and rose your hips involuntarily trying to chase him. Smoke grinned but it wasn’t a playful or kind grin. Without a word, he grabbed your hips, flipped you over onto your stomach, and yanked your ass up until you were on your knees, chest pressed to the mattress. He spread your legs with his own and ran a hand down your back.

“You said I looked like I could be bought for two dollars and some gum,” he growled, dragging himself against your folds, wet and swollen and already twitching from anticipation.

You swallowed, face buried in the sheets. You remembered and silently cursed to yourself.

He leaned down, mouth grazing your ear as he lined himself up behind you. “Good thing for you, I don’t charge. But I do collect.”

And then he slammed into you. No warning. No patience. The thrust knocked the wind out of your lungs. “E-ELIJAHHHH! F-FUCKKK!” you cried, hands gripping the sheets like a lifeline.

Smoke’s pace was nothing like before. All that held-back heat, all that restraint? Gone. His hips snapped against you with vicious precision, his grip digging into your hips as your ass slapped against him, over and over, filling the room with the sound of skin meeting skin and your broken cries.

“This what you wanted?” he grunted, every word punched out between thrusts. “All that mouth, all that attitude… This what you needed to calm down?”

You couldn’t even answer. Couldn’t form a thought. Your voice was raw with whimpers and your tears stained the pillow as you arched back into him on instinct, chasing every brutal, perfect stroke.

He reached around and grabbed a fistful of your hair, pulling your head back just enough to whisper against your jaw. “You talk big,” he hissed, thrusting deep, “but this pussy always tell the truth.”

You sobbed out a yes. Or maybe his name. Or maybe just a noise—because that’s all you were now. A body molded to his pace. A vessel of heat and ache and want. And then… He slowed again. But this time, his strokes were hard and measured. That had your eyes rolling and your teeth sinking into the pillow to stop yourself from screaming his name like a confession.

“You feel how deep I am?” he groaned, voice thick and low behind you. “You gon’ run your mouth next time a man so much as smiles at you?”

You shook your head quickly, biting down on your bottom lip as you wavered between reality and subspace.

“Use your words,” he demanded before landing hard smacks on your ass that turned your ebony skin bright red.

“No—no, Smo- Daddy! I won’t, I swear—” you gasped, voice choked and high.

“Damn right you won’t.”

He dragged you up by your waist, pulling your back against his chest, one arm wrapping across your ribs, the other snaking down to rub your clit in slow, punishing circles again.

“Let another nigga smile at you again in public and I’ma bend you over right then and there,” he whispered, biting your shoulder. “Make sure everybody knows who you belong to.”

You cried out again, the pleasure building faster than your body could handle. It was too much but you loved every second of it. And Smoke? He was relentless. Focused. Determined to etch his name into your skin, your bones, your fucking soul.

“You gon’ cum one more time for me,” he ordered, fingers working faster now. “And then I’ll think about lettin’ myself nut.”

You couldn’t even reply because your body was already shaking. Your walls were already spasming around his brutal rod. You felt your mind spiral into that place that only he could take you. The place where pride didn’t exist and control was something you gave him freely.

“Go on, baby,” he ordered. “Make my dick shiny. Cum for me.”

And you did. Harder than you’ve ever climaxed before. This orgasm felt spiritual like your soul kissed the feet of God before asking for forgiveness and traveling back into your human vessel. You screamed his name into the pillow like a secret finally confessed, your body convulsed, your legs collapsed beneath you as he held you upright, grunting through clenched teeth.

Smoke held you there, both of you trembling in the twinkling moonlight shining through the bedroom. Your back was slick against his chest, your breath short and stuttering. His arm was still banded tight across your stomach, the other gripping your thigh with bruising intensity, like he didn’t trust his body not to break you if he let it go free. You felt every inch of him—still deep, still pulsing, still holding on with that impossible restraint that made you ache in places words couldn’t touch.

“Fuck… Fuck… Don’t move,” he moaned, his voice cracking down the middle—low, rasped, and dangerous. “Don’t.”

You didn’t dare disobey your man. You were already trembling too hard, barely tethered to your body. Your face was damp with tears, your thighs quaking, your walls still fluttering in waves around him.

“Shit, baby…” he growled, his voice buried somewhere between awe and agony. “You tryin’ to milk me dry, huh?”

You whimpered. Not out of pain. But because you felt it—felt that slow-building quake start to rattle through him. The way his grip tightened. The way his hips stilled just for a beat too long. You felt the flex in his abdomen, the tension coiling at the base of his spine like a spring being wound to the brink of snapping.

Your last orgasm clenched down onto his dick perfectly and now he was close trying to fight against it. You turned your face slightly from the pillow, voice hoarse and barely above a whisper. “Why’re you holdin’ it in?”

Smoke gritted his teeth tightly. “‘Cause once I let go…” he hissed, “you ain’t gon’ be able to walk, let alone keep talkin’ shit like you ain’t mine.”

You shivered under him. “But I am yours,” you whispered, the confession slipping out with a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.

That broke him. Smoke let out a low, raw groan as his grip shifted. He grabbed your hips with both hands, holding you still as his restraint finally began to splinter.

“Say it again.”

“Smoke—”

“Say. It. Again.”

Your voice caught in your throat, but you gave it to him, every word thick with truth and heat. “I’m yours,” you breathed. “I’ve always been yours.”

He let out something between a moan and a curse as he started to move again. Each thrust was rough with purpose, his rhythm tight and controlled even as his body fought against itself for release. “I should’ve made you say that two days ago,” he murmured into your neck. “Could’ve saved us both a whole lot of trouble.”

You could feel him on edge now. His hands were shaking. His thighs flexed with every grind forward. His jaw locked. “Fuck, baby… you feel too good,” he rasped. “Too fucking good.”

You whimpered, barely holding yourself up as he rutted into you like it was the last thing he’d ever do.

“Where you want it?” he choked out, voice frayed and thick with hunger. His hand fisted the meat of your ass, keeping your hips tilted perfectly, helplessly open for him.

“Tell me. Right here?” he ground into you deeper—deeper—and your whole body jolted like he’d struck a nerve that reached your soul.

“Want me to fill this pretty pussy up?” he growled, hips snapping forward again, rough, rhythmic, merciless. “You want me to cum so deep you leak for days, huh? So every time you open your legs, you remember who the fuck owns it?”

You tried to answer, but your voice cracked around the sound of your own moan.

Your body was done. Shaking, oversensitive, strung out from back-to-back orgasms—but still hungry for him. Still desperate to take all of him, to feel the final blow. The one he’d been holding back since the minute he put his hands on you.

Smoke’s thrusts became heavier and it became obvious he was losing the reins. His grip on your hips turned bruising, and a deep, guttural snarl ripped out of him like it came from the base of his spine. “Answer me, baby! Where. You. Want. It?”

“Inside,” you cried, head buried in the sheets, hips bucking against him. “Please, Smoke, fill me up.”

Smoke roared before grabbing you by the back of your neck and forcing your chest flush to the mattress. His other hand yanked your ass back into him, hard enough to make your eyes roll. His body collapsed over yours, hot and massive and trembling as he began to pound into you like a man possessed. No more teasing. No more patience. Just raw, primal need.

“You fuckin’ take it,” he growled in your ear. “You take every drop. That’s mine. You hear me? Mine. This pussy… this whole fuckin’ body… you think I’m lettin’ it walk around untouched, unclaimed? Nah. Nah, baby. I’m leavin’ my fuckin’ mark.”

His thrusts were devastating now. Every stroke came with the full weight of his body. His hips snapped forward like punishment, his chest slick against your back, his voice a broken, dirty prayer in your ear.

“I can’t—” you gasped, sobbing against the sheets.

“Yes, you… can,” he growled, his voice deep and guttural, hips pounding harder now. “You will. You gon’ take every drop I give you… then lay here… and thank me for it like a good girl. Understand?”

You felt the tremor roll through his body as his thighs tensed, his back flexed, and the ragged stutter of his breath grew as he chased his own breaking point. He was close. So close. “Say it,” he demanded, his voice sharp as a razor. “Say you’re mine while I paint these walls. Say it with my dick buried in this pussy.”

You cried out, clawing at the sheets, tears streaking your face. “I’m yours, Smoke! I’m yours, please—cum inside me!”

With a final, brutal thrust, he buried himself so deep you screamed, and then he moaned your name like it was the last word he’d ever say.

You were on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness when you felt Smoke’s hot and heavy load spilling into you in thick waves as his body seized behind you, every muscle locked in place. His nails dug into your hips as he held you there, stuffed full, claimed and ruined. His head dropped into your neck, his moan drawn-out, ragged, the sound of a man breaking as he finally gave in.

He stayed like that. Still pulsing inside you and panting. His lips grazed your skin, open-mouthed, breath hot. Then, after a long, heavy silence—he exhaled and murmured low, almost reverent: “Mine.”

And this time, you didn’t argue. Because your body? It agreed.

.

.

.

.

.

Authors Note: This was just a one shot to get all the horn horn energy out before I finish my series🥴🙂‍↕️ I understand mean Smoke isn’t for everyone but… HE IS VERY GORGEOUS TO MEEEE!!!

Bunny let the door shut behind her with a quiet click. She pulled up the smile she had spent years perfecting, the one that reached her eyes just far enough to be convincing without costing her anything real, and she moved toward the vanity to set down her small kit. "Evenin', sir," she replied, voice sweet as honeysuckle draped over a fence post in July. "You get yourself settled alright?"

"Settled?" He laughed, the sound was disgustingly wet and blunt. "I been waitin' damn near twenty minutes."

"I apologize for that, sir." She turned subtly, sizing the client up again in the mirror's reflection while she appeared to be checking her hair. She took notice of the way his body tilted just slightly to the left when he tried to sit straighter. The way his hand reached for the bedpost to steady himself without seeming to realize he had done it. The glassy, navigating-through-fog quality of his stare. Bunny had been in this business long enough to know that a drunk man in a room with a woman he had paid for was a man operating without a leash, and a man without a leash was a dangerous creature.

She angled herself toward the door by a few degrees. Just enough to escape if needed. "Sir," she said, keeping her voice sweet and calm, "I just want to make sure you feelin' alright before we get started. You seem like you might've had yourself a full night already and I wouldn't want—"

The remainder of her sentence was cut off because the drunken man moved without warning. He lurched to his feet, knocking the small side table with his hip and sending its single glass of water spinning off the edge to shatter against the floor. His face had turned a particular shade of red that lived between embarrassment and fury, and his jaw worked like he was chewing something bitter before he could get the words out.

"Useless bitch," he spat. The syllables fell out of him ugly and hard. "Think I paid to have some whore tell me I done had too much to drink? Think I need you lookin' down at me? I'll kill you, you hear me?!? I'll put my hands ‘round ya' neck and I'll—"

His arm swung mid rant, but Bunny was already moving.

She dropped her chin to her chest and turned her body so the arc of his open palm caught nothing but air, and in the same motion her right hand went up to her hair. The blade she kept there was small, barely two inches of steel with a handle thin enough to disappear between two curling papers. It was something she had carried since she was nineteen years old and had learned in the most painful way possible that a pretty face and a small curvy frame were not assets in every room. Her fingers found it without hesitation, but with the calm surety of someone who had practiced the motion until it lived in her muscles instead of her mind.

She drew it in the same breath she stepped to his left side, and when she came back up, she sliced him across the cheekbone in one clean swipe.

The sound he made wasn’t quite a scream and not quite a word. It lived somewhere between the two, high and stunned. The moment he was sliced, his hand flew to his face as the blood welled immediately, vivid and dark, running between his fingers and dripping onto the collar he had loosened two buttons down. He staggered back into the bedpost as his eyes went wide, and suddenly he was brutally sober.

"Help!" The plea tore out of him then, ragged and furious. "HELP! She cut me! This wicked bitch cut my damn FACE!"

Bunny stood quietly like a marble statue with the blade still in her hand. Her chest moved in controlled, shallow breaths as her heartbeat threw itself against her ribs like a prisoner testing the walls, but her face… her face was completely still. Still like a woman who had survived more than enough dangerous rooms, and this was no different. She didn’t bother running or crying, instead she watched the blood run down his cheek and she waited.

Two seconds passed and the door swung open before the echo of his second shout had finished bouncing off the walls.

They filled the frame the way they always filled every frame they walked through, shoulder to shoulder, the both of them constructed from the same Mississippi clay and hardened by the same Jim Crow fire. Stack came through first, his jacket slightly disheveled as if he was in the middle of something… or someone, signature gold tooth catching the lamplight as his coffee brown eyes swept the room in three seconds flat. Smoke followed a half step behind, and his gaze went to the blood first, then to Bunny, then to the blade still loose in her fingers, and in that order he read the whole story without a single word being spoken.

The two of them looked at each other and it lasted less than a millisecond. They shared a sacred twin language, and there was no need to speak out loud when they could discuss everything necessary through a simple glance. There was no need for none of the vowels and consonants that other men required. Stack's chin lifted two degrees. Smoke's jaw shifted once to the right. That was all.

Smoke marched over to the bleeding man and grabbed him by the back of the collar with one hand. The client sputtered, grabbing at Smoke's wrist, voice rising again into something wheedling and enraged all at once, but Smoke wasn't listening. He was already moving, already dragging the man toward the door with that flat, unblinking quiet that was a hundred times more frightening than any raised voice.

Stack waited until the door swung shut behind his brother and then he turned to Bunny. He looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he needed to balance, thorough, patient, and giving nothing away in his expression. His hands found his jacket pockets and he stood with the loose posture of a man who had all the time left in the world. "Tell me what happened," he said.

Bunny's fingers curled tighter around the blade before she caught herself and lowered it. "He was drunk when I walked in," she explained, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, considering. "Not just a couple of drinks. He was drownin’ in it. I called it out because I wasn't about to start a session with a man who could barely hold his head upright and when I did…" She nodded toward the door. "He called me out my name, said he was gonna kill me, and he swung. I moved… And I cut him."

Stack said nothing for a moment as his tongue rolled against the inside of his cheek. He looked at the blood on the floor where the man had been standing, then at the broken water glass, then at Bunny's face. "You ain't in trouble," he said finally, his Mississippi drawl coating every syllable like a second skin. "But I need you to hear me on this." He pulled one hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger at her. "Next time a client get rowdy, stupid, or liquored past the point of sense, you don't reach for that blade. You call for one of us. That's what we here for. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure the instruction had gone somewhere it would stay, and then he nodded once. "Go on, wash up an get you some rest." He turned for the door, then paused with his hand on the frame, not looking back. "You did real good, not fallin' apart. Just... next time… let us handle the mess."

The door closed again, and Bunny stood alone in the room with the broken glass and the ruined sheets and the small blade still warm from her grip, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in several minutes.

Out behind the brothel, the alley smelled of ash cans and summer.

Smoke walked the man through the rear exit with the same grip he used to drag him out of the room. He deposited him against the back wall, the man's knees finally gave out forcing him to slide down the brick and land in a graceless heap on the ground, one hand still pressed to his sliced cheek, blood threading between his fingers and dripping off his chin.

Smoke stood over him. His hands went to his jacket, straightening it once, and then settled at his sides. He looked down at the man like he was a disgruntled God figuring out what type of punishment to inflict.

The man looked up at him and found whatever he needed in Smoke's expression to start talking. "She attacked me," his drunkenness slipping out of his voice now that fear had come in to replace it. "That bitch came in there and she just… she had a knife. She cut my face. You need to do somethin’ about that. I paid good money for a civil hour and instead I get—"

"You said… you was gon' kill her."

The man blinked. "I was angry, I didn't—"

"Called her out her name twice in my presence."

The man's mouth opened and closed.

Smoke crouched down until his eyes were level with the man's, and in that position he looked less like a man and more like a demon ready to indulge in his bloodlust. His voice hadn't changed. It never changed. It held that same smooth, unshifted cadence through every conversation regardless of what the conversation was about. "Ion’ know exactly what went on in that room yet," he said. "But I want you to understand somethin'. That part don't fuckin’ matter to me. What matter to me is that you walked into my house, disrespected somethin' that belong to me, an then you done put ya' voice on her in a way that reminded her she needed a blade." He paused, letting that sit. "I don't take kindly to that."

His hand moved to his jacket, fingers parting the lapel, and the grip of his pistol caught the thin light of the alley moon.

The man's eyes went very wide. His injured hand came up, palm out, his whole body pressing back against the brick like he could dissolve into it. "Wait, wait, wait, I'll pay double, I'll pay whatever you—"

The hammer drew back with a soft, final click that cut the man's sentence clean off.

Smoke looked at him with those coal-flat eyes and the man fell silent as a stone thrown into deep water. No more words. Just the ragged labor of his own breathing and the thin, continuous sound of his blood hitting the ground.

Footsteps came down the alley behind Smoke and he didn’t bother turning around because he didn't need to. There was only one set of feet in the world that sounded like that.

Stack came up beside him, his hands loose at his sides, gold tooth catching the moon when he tilted his head down at the man on the ground. He took in the full picture. The gun. The blood. The look on Smoke's face. Then he took in a breath, slow and satisfied, and began to speak.

He told Smoke everything. The condition the man had come in. The things he had said when Bunny called it out. The swing that didn't land. The blade that did. When he finished, Stack was quiet for a moment, and then he reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a knife with a blade four times the size of whatever Bunny had been carrying. He turned it once in his fingers, the steel catching and releasing the light in alternating flashes, and he smiled. It was the crooked smile, the one that reached his eyes and meant he was genuinely pleased about something.

"Lemme’ talk to him first," Stack said. "I ain't had a good conversation in a minute."

Smoke looked at his brother and then he looked at the man on the ground, who was now visibly shaking, tears cutting through the blood on his cheek without any prompting at all. Smoke stood from his crouch, straightened his jacket once more, and stepped to the side. He put his pistol back without a word, folded his hands behind his back, and watched.

Stack crouched in his place, knife resting easy between two fingers, his face open and joyful in the particular way that meant the worst thing imaginable was coming next. "How you doin', friend?" he asked, accent thick as summer mud, voice warm as a lit match. "Tell me somethin'. You ever have somebody look after you real good, put you somewhere soft an warm an safe, an you go an spit in they face for it? You ever do that?"

The man couldn’t answer.

Stack tilted his head and grinned like a Cheshire Cat. "Naw, naw, take ya' time. I got all night."

The alley didn’t hear from that man again after that. Not in any language that would've made sense to a person passing on the street.

A month passed by and it had the audacity to feel like three.

Bunny sat on the edge of her bed in the room the twins had given her and pulled a brush through her texturized hair for the fourth time that evening. She counted the strokes the way she had been taught to count them since childhood, one and two and three and four, because there was nothing else to count and the act of counting kept her hands busy and her hands being busy kept her from acknowledging a particular restlessness that had been living under her skin for the better part of two weeks.

The room she was stationed in was nice. That was the first thing she had thought when Stack walked her to it, one week after the incident, with his hand at the small of her back and a short instruction to make herself comfortable. She had expected a small, utilitarian thing, the kind of space a working doll got assigned on the upper floor with a shared bath down the hall and a window that faced the brick wall of the building next door. What she got was a room with curtains. Actual curtains, silk ones that pooled at the floor and caught the last of the day's light in a way that turned the whole space the color of a candle flame. A vanity with a proper oval mirror. A wardrobe that had been stocked before she arrived with dresses and wrappers and nightgowns of a quality that made her catch her breath the first time she opened its doors, fabrics so fine they slipped through her fingers like water. On the small table beside her bed, a covered dish of food arrived three times a day whether she asked for it or not. Things she hadn't tasted since she was a little girl sitting in her grandmother's kitchen, sweet potato pie with a crust that shattered her taste buds like stained glass, braised oxtail over white rice, pound cake soaked in lemon syrup that left a sweetness on the roof of her mouth for hours.

She was being treated like a woman of some standing… And it was driving her absolutely out of her mind.

Bunny set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the vanity mirror with an assessing expression she reserved for private moments like these. She was thirty-four years old. She had curves that grown men wrote embarrassing letters about and women studied with something too complicated to be called jealousy and too honest to be called admiration. She had hands that knew how to work, thighs that knew how to hold, a mouth that had never once left a client feeling cheated, and a reputation in three separate cities that had always, always been built by her own effort, her own body, her own particular genius for the kind of pleasure that made a man feel like he was the most important thing in the room. She hadn’t come to this brothel to be kept like a flower in a glass case. She had come because she heard that the Moore twins ran the most lucrative operation north of the Mason Dixon and she wanted in on it. She wanted to work.

The bath she had taken earlier still clung to her skin in the form of the vanilla oil she had worked into her arms and her neck, and the nightgown the wardrobe had produced tonight was deep gold that made her brown skin glow like something lit from within. She looked breathtakingly beautiful, yet she felt like a caged thing in beautiful wrappings.

After looking herself over one more time in the mirror, she stood and made a silent decision as she made her way to the kitchen.

The brothel at midnight had a particular quality to it, a quietness that fell somewhere between a sleeping house and a thinking one. The downstairs jazz had stopped three hours ago. The girls were either asleep or occupied, and the hallways that had been warm and perfumed with commerce earlier in the evening were now cool and dim, lit by the occasional wall sconce that’s wick had been turned down low. Bunny moved through the brothel on her bare feet, the gold nightgown sighing against her legs with every step, and she told herself she was just going for a peach before confronting the twins. There was always a bowl of peaches in the kitchen. She had discovered this on her second day and found it oddly comforting that someone in this house thought fresh fruit was important enough to replenish daily.

She pushed open the kitchen door and the room was drenched in darkness. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it wasn’t empty.

As Bunny's eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, eventually she was able to see there was a woman sitting at the long kitchen table in the dark eating cornbread.

Bunny stood in the doorway with her hand still on the door and looked at the mystery woman as she took her in piece by piece. Height first, even sitting, the woman had somewhat of a long-limbed frame that telegraphed itself. Bunny guessed that she was maybe five foot eight or nine if she stood. Her skin was deep, even brown like good molasses in a jar, paired with hair that fell straight and unadorned down past her shoulders, jet black, the color of ink before it dries. And to finish it off, she had a face that did a thing Bunny had only seen faces do in paintings, not the kind hung in houses like this one, but the kind in old churches where the artists tried to put something holy and something frightening in the same expression at the same time. The mystery woman looked young feature wise as if she hadn’t yet turned twenty-two, but her eyes… her eyes were something else entirely.

Bunny wasn’t a woman who was scared easily. She had lived too much, seen too much, and cut too many men across the face to give fear the kind of real estate it wanted in her mind. But those violet eyes made something ancient crawl up the back of her neck, not unpleasant, just… aware. Like stepping into a room and understanding that whatever was in it had been there since before the house was built.

The woman looked up from her cornbread and regarded Bunny with an expression of complete composure, as though being found eating cold food alone in a dark kitchen of a brothel in the middle of the night was exactly where she was expected to be.

"You Rosalie," the woman said. It wasn't a question.

Bunny blinked. "How'd you—"

"You look like a Rosalie." She broke off another piece of cornbread, unhurried about it. "I'm Josephine. Everybody an they mama call me Josie."

Bunny stepped into the kitchen and let the door drift shut behind her. "I go by Bunny," she said, and then, because she couldn't help herself, "why are you sittin' in the dark?"

Josie ignored the question with such thoroughness that it was almost artful. She tilted her head at Bunny and asked, "They call you Bunny 'cause you can bounce on a dick 'til a man start beggin' for his mama?"

The initial response that leaped to Bunny's lips was something ladylike and deflective. What came out instead was a flustered, sputtering exhale, as her cheeks went warm and her hand raised halfway to her mouth before she caught it. She cleared her throat. "That's… yes," she admitted. "That's… um… exactly why."

The corner of Josie's mouth moved in something that could've been a smile if it committed to itself. She pushed the plate of cornbread forward by an inch, the gesture of a woman sharing without making much of it. "Have some."

Bunny looked at the cornbread. It was ice cold and hard as a rock. She could see the waxy surface on it that cornbread got when it had been sitting awhile. She was fond of cornbread. She was not fond of that. She moved instead to the bowl on the counter and lifted a peach, testing its weight in her palm before biting into it, and she hummed as the juice ran down her chin warm and sweet.

She stood there eating the peach and watching Josie, and Josie let herself be watched for a time, eating her cold cornbread with equanimity, apparently perfectly at peace with the scrutiny. But Bunny was staring and she knew it and the reason she was staring was the thing she couldn't pin down, the thing that sat off-center about this woman the way a picture sits off-center on a wall. She wasn’t dressed like any of the other dolls Bunny had met in the past month. No lace, no slip, nothing that mirrored the nature of this house and its business. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a flowy dark skirt with her feet bare on the kitchen floor. She looked like a woman who had stepped in from another dimension entirely and simply hadn't gotten around to leaving.

Bunny had met all the other dolls in the house during her first week. She was certain of that. This woman had not been among them.

Josie took another bite of her cornbread and looked at Bunny the way Bunny had been looking at her, with that clear, still assessment that took nothing personally and missed nothing either. "How you likin' it here?" she asked. "Smoke and Stack pretty decent owners, far as that kind of thing go."

The word owners sat in Bunny's mouth for a moment before she swallowed it. "I wouldn't know yet," she reluctantly admitted. "I had one client, one incident, and since then they've had me locked up in a room like I'm made of porcelain and they're afraid I'll chip." She took another bite of peach. "I haven't worked a single real night. I came here to make money. Instead I've been eatin' pie and watchin' the curtains move."

Josie's eyes sharpened the way a fire sharpens when you give it more air. "Which one claimed you?" she quipped.

Bunny frowned her brows in confusion. "I'm sorry?"

"Which twin? Smoke or Stack? Elijah or Elias? Which one claimed you as his doll?"

The frown deepened. "Neither of them," Bunny said slowly, like she was working out whether that was the right answer even as she gave it. "When I arrived they walked me through the rules, explained how the percentages worked, showed me the floor. Neither of them said anything about… claiming."

Now it was Josie’s turn to be confused as she stopped eating and placed her cornbread very gently on the plate in front of her. She looked at Bunny with the full force of those ancient alien lavender eyes and she was quiet for a stretched-out moment that had weight to it. Then she leaned forward and without a word of warning she took Bunny's face between both her hands and squeezed her cheeks together, compressing Bunny's lips into a surprised, rounded 'O'.

"You are thee cutest thing," Josie cooed, with the slightly awed sincerity of someone who had just found a very small, very charming animal in an unexpected location.

Bunny's eyes went wide above her squished cheeks. She made a sound that was supposed to be a protest and emerged as something closer to a muffled quack.

Josie released her with an unrushed giggle and settled back in her chair as though that had been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Alright," she said. "Let me explain how this house works."

Bunny smoothed her cheeks with her palms and fixed Josie with a look that she reserved for people who had just done something she didn't have the vocabulary to address properly. Then she sighed, finished the peach, and sat down.

Josie explained the rules of the house with a questionable amount of knowledge that Bunny would inquire about later. When a doll went through something the way Bunny had gone through something, they were taken off the floor. Not longer than a week, typically. No clients, no housework, just time to let the body and the mind settle back into themselves without being asked to perform. After that period, whichever twin had claimed that particular doll would take her through a retraining week. A proper retraining. Not punishment, not because she had done something wrong, but because the mind needed to be walked back through safety the same way the body needed to be walked back through strength after a sickness. The twins were a great many things, Josie explained, and some of those things weren’t things that would be listed in a church bulletin, but they weren’t complete monsters and wouldn't send a shaken woman back to work before she was ready. That wasn’t morality for morality's sake. It was also just bad business, and they were nothing if not precise businessmen.

Bunny absorbed this. Processed it. Turned it over. And then arrived at the part that had been sitting sideways in her chest since the question first got asked.

"It's been a month," she said.

Josie looked at her dumbfounded like she didn’t hear her correctly.

"It's been a month," Bunny said again. "The incident was a month ago. Nobody took me through any retraining. Nobody said anythin’ about when I'd go back to work. And you're telling me that the reason for that is…"

She could see it in Josie's expression before she said it, like she was about to deliver news that amused her to the highest degree.

"Either you one of the special ones," Josie said, the childish grin breaking through now, unconstrained, like a schoolgirl who had been holding it in for the last five minutes, "or you somehow so boring that both of them forgot you exist entirely."

Bunny straightened up in her chair. "I am not boring," she said.

"I didn't say you were."

"You implied it."

"I offered it as a possibility."

"It is not a fuckin’ possibility." Bunny's chin came up and her voice took on the tone of a woman defending something she had built with a considerable effort over many years. Before she had walked through the Moore brothers' doors she had left three separate establishments because she had outgrown them. She had a clientele that wrote letters to find out where she had gone. She had a reputation that didn’t include the word boring in any language. "I done made grown ass men cry," she said. "Not from pain… From gratitude."

Josie held up one hand in a gesture of peace, her playful grin not moving an inch. "Alright, alright. I believe you. I apologize." She folded her hands on the table. "The other explanation, then, is that they both want to claim you and neither one of them know how to go about it without steppin’ on the other's toes."

Bunny's chair scraped back half an inch. "Both of them?"

"It's rare," Josie whispered, as if she was saying too much too soon. "In the whole time this house been runnin’ there've only been two dolls that both of them claimed at once. Just two. The second one is named Buttercup. She handles their books and investments. She’s been both of theirs for many moons." A pause, thoughtful and private. "The first one…" She picked up her cornbread again and looked at it, not at Bunny. "Well..."

The silence that lingered behind that one word forced Bunny to really look at Josie's profile. She took in the serenity of it, the complete and settled comfort with which this woman occupied any space she entered, including dark kitchens in the middle of the night. The way she didn't need to finish the sentence because the sentence was already obvious to anyone paying attention.

"Hypothetically," Bunny said carefully.

Josie's mouth curved with mischief. "Hypothetically..."

"If a woman found herself in that position. Both of them. At once. How would she… manage that?"

Josie was quiet for a moment, chewing her cornbread, looking somewhere past Bunny's shoulder as though consulting a memory that lived in the middle distance. "Hypothetically," she repeated, "such a woman would need to learn how not to get frostbitten by an avalanche of coldness." A pause. "While also not burnin’ up in a lake of uncontrolled fire." Another pause, this one carrying a slightly different weight, the weight of something remembered in the body as much as the mind. "And on top of all that, she would need to learn how to take two men at the same time without tearin’ in half."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"That's… useful information," Bunny said finally.

"I thought you'd think so."

They sat for another minute, the two of them, in the warm dark kitchen with the peach bowl on the counter and the plate of cold cornbread between them, and something passed between them that couldn’t be labeled as friendship yet but was the thing that comes just before it, a recognition, a sense of shared understanding arrived at by different roads.

A few more comforting minutes passed and then Bunny stood. She pulled the gold nightgown straight across her hips and ran one hand through the freshly brushed waterfall of her hair and looked at Josie with the expression of a woman who had made up her mind about something and had no further interest in deliberating. "Hypothetically, if I wanted to speak with them tonight... you know where they are?"

"Their office," Josie said. "End of the hall. Door on the left." She reached for the last piece of frosty cornbread. "Knock four times when you get there. Even count, same rhythm. That's how they know it's a doll behind the door and not somebody they need to put a bullet in."

Bunny's eyes widened slightly. "Good to know."

"One more thing," Josie said, without looking up, the words landing easy as a stone dropped into still water, "whoever open that door? Look him dead in the eye when you tell him what you want. Don't let him take the silence from you first. They'll stand in a quiet room and wait you out 'til you forget what you came for. Don't let him." She broke off a bite of cornbread. "Now go."

The hallway to their office was dim and long as the floorboards under her bare feet held the warmth of the day's heat, soaked up and slowly releasing into the night. She walked it with her chin level and her footsteps quiet, the vanilla oil on her skin mixing with the faint residual perfume that lived in all the walls of this house. At the far end of the hall, beneath the last sconce, a door sat closed and faintly rimmed with the amber line of lamplight from beneath it.

She stopped in front of it. Pressed her palm flat against the wood for one second. Then she knocked. Four times. Even. The same rhythm. Just as Josie had instructed.

On the other side of the door, the office breathed with the quietness of two men working in a comfortable parallel. The desk was spread with ledgers and cash in organized columns, the ashtray on its corner nursed a half-finished cigarette that had gone cold, and the lamp threw a yellow circle of warmth across the arithmetic of their operations. Stack stood at the desk's far edge, jacket off, suspenders down, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand moving down a column of figures with the end of a pencil. Smoke sat on the lounge couch along the near wall, his own jacket folded beside him, a glass of brown liquor balanced on the arm of the cushion, his eyes moving across a folded sheet of paper he had been reading for the third time.

Four knocks came through the door.

Even. Measured.

Both men went still.

Stack's pencil stopped and his eyes lifted from the ledger to find his brother's face across the room. Smoke had already set the paper down. His hand had already moved to the glass, lifting it, not drinking from it, just holding it in the idle way of a man whose other hand needed to be free. His eyes were steady on the door.

The four-count knock meant a doll. Both of them knew that. The problem was that only two dolls in their entire operation knew that particular code, and neither of those two women were supposed to be within three city blocks of this brothel for another three days.

Smoke set the glass down very carefully on the side table before standing and crossing the room to the door. His shoulder holster rode against his undershirt as he pulled his pistol free in one clean motion before turning the knob and pulling the office door open.

Bunny stood in the hallway nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The lamplight from inside the office hit her caramel brown skin from the side and the effect of this wasn't something Smoke had originally budgeted for. She was soft, luminous, small, and entirely the kind of woman that a man had to consciously remind himself to look away from, all of that deep-curved, warm-skinned, doe-eyed beauty arranged in the specific way that made the gold fabric laced over her body look like it had been commissioned for her personally. She blinked up at him. Her eyes were the color of good rum and they caught the light and held it, and for one unguarded half second the hardness in his face did something complicated before it arranged itself back into its usual flat composure.

Smoke held the pistol at his side. His face settled back into the expression of a man who was conducting business regardless of the hour. His eyes moved over her once, the way he surveyed any situation that required assessment before a response. "Why," he said, voice smooth and level as a road built to last, his Mississippi roots dragging slow and warm beneath every word, "is you at my door knockin' four times?"

Bunny didn’t flinch as she looked him in the eye exactly as Josie had instructed and she held the look steady. "Because," she said, "I am tired of being treated like I'm made of glass." She let a breath pass as she remembered who she was speaking to. "... Sir."

Smoke looked at her for a long minute. He ran his mind back, sorting through the preceding month like how a man sorts through a drawer looking for something he put down without thinking. The girl on the floor. The drunk client. The blade. Stack handling her, him handling the client. The decision to move her to the room across from theirs. Then the weeks had continued to happen, the operation had continued to require their attention, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the particular task of walking her back through had gotten caught in the gap between what he assumed Stack had handled and what Stack apparently assumed he had handled.

He let the exhale come through his nose, small and contained. Then he stepped back from the door and nodded once towards the interior of the room. "Come in."

Bunny wasn’t a woman that needed to be instructed twice as she came in.

Smoke shut the door behind her and walked back to the couch, settling into it with the glass of liquor retrieved from the side table. His eyes stayed on her as she took in the office, the desk and its columns, Stack still standing at the far edge of it now with his arms folded. Smoke's gaze moved from her face to his brother's and he said, with the absolute calm of a man stating a mathematical fact, "You done forgot to recommission ya' doll."

Stack's expression moved toward as expression of confusion that was also slightly offended at the framing. "Fuck you mean my doll?" he quipped. "Thought she was yours."

"I moved her to the room 'cross the hall," Smoke said. "I was leavin' the rest to you."

"Nobody told me that."

"I ain't gotta tell you everythin’, Elias. Use ya' brain."

Stack unfolded his arms and planted both hands flat on the desk. "My brain was operatin' under the assumption that the woman sittin' over in that room with the good curtains was your doll that you was handlin' in ya' own time, Elijah. Had I known she was mine to recommission I would've had her back on the floor four weeks ago."

"She been over there four an a half weeks."

"Four an a half weeks then. My point stands, muthafucka."

"Ya' point is that you wasn't payin' attention—"

"My point is that you could've opened ya' mouth like a grown ass man an said the words 'Elias, go handle Bunny' an I would've gone an handled Bunny, but instead you sittin’ over there on that couch drinkin' ya' liquor an assumin' I was gon' read ya' mind—"

"I don't need you readin' my mind, I need you payin' attention to what's happenin' in this house—"

"Stupid bitch, I pay more attention to what happens in this house than you do, I just ain't also expected to be a fuckin' mind reader on top of everythin’ else—"

"Language, Elias.” Smoke said.

"Now I need to read ya' mind an watch my mouth?"

"We got a doll present. Tighten up." Smoke's eyes cut to Bunny for one brief moment that carried the tiniest edge of an apology.

Bunny had been watching this exchange with the expression of a woman who was simultaneously relieved that Josie was right and also annoyed that Josie was right. She looked at the ceiling for one moment, gathering something, and then she looked at Stack directly.

"I didn't come here to listen to y'all argue about whose doll I am," she cut in. The words came out clean and direct, and beneath them ran a current of something real, something stored up across four weeks in a pretty room with silk curtains and three meals a day that she hadn’t earned. "I came here because I am a woman who been working since I was old enough to understand that money you make yourself is the only kind that belongs to you in full." She let that settle for a moment. 

Before she had walked through their door she had left three establishments because she outgrew them. Before that, back when she was Rosalie and not Bunny, she hadn't been permitted to own so much as the dress on her back. That life was behind her and it would stay behind her as long as she had a body to work with and the sense God gave her to use it. "I appreciate the food," she said. "I appreciate the nightgowns and the curtains and the sweetness. I do. But I am not a woman who takes without giving back, and I am not going to sit in that room one more week eating indulging in things I ain't earn. I want to work."

The office held the sound of that for a brief second.

Stack analyzed her from top to bottom. The annoyance from the argument with his twin had drained off his face entirely, replaced by something more attentive and interesting. He possessed the look of a man who had been watching something he wanted for some time and had just been reminded of it. His gaze moved down the gold nightgown with the focused assessment of a man reviewing an investment he had forgotten to manage and was now reconsidering with renewed and comprehensive interest.

He came around the desk, crossed the office floor, and closed the distance between them until his chest was close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. His hands came up. His fingers settled first at the hollow of her throat, light and acquainting themselves with the shape of her, feeling the small flutter there she couldn't suppress, feeling the way she swallowed. Then they traveled with thorough patience across her collarbones, over the generous swell of her chest through the nightgown's thin fabric. She was built lavishly, heavy and warm everywhere in a way that made his hands slow down and pay attention, and he let them linger there, cataloguing her, until her breathing changed and she tried to hide the change but couldn't.

His hands continued their inventory, moving down the soft plush landscape of her stomach, the deep inward curve of her waist, spreading wide across the full round geography of her hips. He took his time with her hips. He spent what felt like an extended amount of time mapping them, as though committing their particular architecture to some private record he intended to revisit at a later date. Then one hand swept low and around, and he brought his palm down hard and flat across the full magnificent curve of her backside with a crack that split the quiet of the office like a starting pistol.

The sound rang off the walls, the bookcase, the glass in the lamp, everything. Bunny's gasp tore out of her before she had the opportunity to make any decisions about it, sharp and bright, her body moving without consulting her brain, tilting forward into the impact and then backward away from it, settling finally against Stack's chest in a way that was involuntary enough to be entirely honest.

Stack felt her melt against him and his exhale came out long and satisfied. His arm wrapped around her from behind, pulling her flush against the front of him, and he bent his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I'm gon’ be the one runnin' ya' retrainin' tonight." He pressed his mouth closer to her ear, words dropping to a rough near-whisper. "An dependin' on how that go… I might need to keep you locked away from everybody else for another month… Really take my time so ya' body don't ever forget who it belong to."

The sound Bunny made was small, strangled, and entirely against her will.

He reached for the thin strap at her shoulder and slid it down. The other strap followed. He peeled the gold nightgown from her slowly, letting it whisper down her curves until it pooled at her feet in a gilded ring, and what was left standing in the middle of their office was every generous, luminous, full inch of Bunny without a single layer between her skin and the lamplight. The lamp threw amber across the swell of her hips, the deep curve of her waist, the heavy softness of her breasts, the deep brown warmth of her, and the office became immediately a different kind of room.

Stack stepped back and bit down on his bottom lip as he took in her goddess figure. Then, with the easy authority of a man in his own house, he waltzed over to the couch where Smoke sat and dropped down beside his brother. He plucked the liquor glass from Smoke's hand, drained what remained, and reached for the refill trolley at the couch's edge. Smoke didn’t argue with his twin. He simply shifted his weight to accommodate Stack’s presence and locked his eyes on Bunny.

Two men on the same couch. Side by side. Undershirts and slacks, loafers, the warm lamplight running along the defined lines of their arms where the fabric ended, the undeniable press of their interest visible in the material of their trousers. Stack poured a fresh glass and settled into the cushion. Smoke took Bunny in from head to foot with that flat, complete attention that gave nothing away and missed nothing. The air in the room had changed and pressed heavily on all their shoulders.

Stack leaned forward, elbows to his knees, glass hanging loose in his fingers. "Show me," he said, "why you worth the trouble of retrainin' when you already cost me a dead white man, two dry cleaning bills, a shovel we had to replace after breakin' it diggin' that peckerwoods grave, plus four an a half weeks of room an board an meals that even my top earners don't see on a regular Tuesday." He settled back into the cushion. "All that, an you ain't brought us a single dollar. So show me what you got, Bunny."

Bunny stood naked in the center of their office and looked at both of them. She took one breath. Then she walked to Smoke.

She came to stand directly before him and held his gaze and placed one knee on the cushion beside his thigh and then the other, straddling his lap with the practiced ease of a woman who had made herself at home in more difficult situations than this. She could feel him beneath her already, the dense, insistent hardness of him through his slacks, and the discovery sent something bold climbing up her spine and into her shoulders. She rolled her hips, one slow and complete rotation, felt him twitch beneath her, and did it again. She leaned forward and put her mouth to the side of his neck, the warm brown skin above his collar, and kissed him there. Felt his jaw tighten. Kissed across his collarbone, the gap where his undershirt opened at the throat. She found his earlobe with her teeth, caught it just barely, and felt the exhale that came out of him, contained and controlled, the only version of a sound he was willing to give her yet.

She pulled back and looked at Stack over her shoulder. "I can't promise I won't cause more trouble with your clients," she said, her hips still moving against Smoke's in that slow, measured grind. "That ain’t a promise I can keep. But I am an investment." She felt Smoke's hand settle on her hip, heavy and certain, the grip of a man who was claiming something without announcing he's done it. "And you'd be foolish men to let me go."

Then she climbed off Smoke's lap and moved to Stack.

She settled herself across his thighs before he had quite finished processing the intention, and his hands came up instinctively, finding her hips, and she moved against him the way she had moved against his brother, with that same frank, unhurried competence, rolling her hips in grinding rolls that had him fully hard inside his slacks under a minute. She kissed along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, found his throat and bit softly at it and felt him grip her harder. She turned her mouth to his ear. "Well?" she said quietly.

Stack's answer was both hands sliding down to fill themselves with the full, heavy weight of her backside, squeezing with the proprietary thoroughness of a man claiming something he had decided belongs to him and only him.

From the other side of couch, Smoke reached forward and caught the back of her hair in his fist. Not rough, not gentle, just completely unambiguous, pulling her head back until she was looking up at him from Stack's lap with her neck at a stretched and exposed angle. Smoke looked down at her, his eyes never leaving her face. "Who," he said, each word its own complete and unhurried thing, "taught you that knock?"

"Josie," Bunny replied quickly.

The quality of the silence that followed was specific. She felt Stack go still beneath her. She saw something shift in Smoke's expression, not much, just a recalibration of a single degree. "Josie," he repeated. Flat.

"She was in the kitchen," Bunny continued. "Just now. I spoke with her before I came down here."

Smoke's eyes moved to Stack's face. Stack's eyes moved back. That language again, the one that needed no words. Whatever moved between them in that half second was mutual and resolved by the time it was done.

Smoke released her hair. He stood, adjusted the set of his shoulder holster with one practiced motion, and looked at Bunny. "Come," he said.

Stack stood from the couch with Bunny still in his arms, lifting her from his lap without any apparent effort, her weight absorbed into his frame as a matter of course. He carried her out of the office. Smoke walked ahead through the dim corridor, his footsteps quiet on the floorboards, and they moved as a unit through the darkness of the second floor until they reached the kitchen.

Smoke pushed the door open.

Bunny looked into the kitchen from over Stack's shoulder.

The room was empty.

The room wasn't just vacant as if someone had just stepped out, the room was suddenly empty in a way that was wrong. Profoundly, specifically wrong. The chair at the table sat at the exact angle it had been in when she first sat down across from Josie, as though no one had adjusted it at all, as though no one had ever pulled it out to sit in it. The plate of cornbread was gone without a trace, not in the washtub, not on the counter, not anywhere. Simply absent from the room as if it was never there. The peach bowl sat exactly where it always sat. The lamplight came through the window at its usual angle and landed on a kitchen that offered no evidence whatsoever that a woman with ancient eyes had been sitting in it not even twenty minutes ago.

Bunny stared. The hair on her arms rose.

"She was right there," she said, and her voice had climbed half a register before she noticed. "She was sittin' right there at that table. She had cornbread on a plate, cold cornbread, she had it on a plate right there in front that chair, she offered some to me and I took a peach instead. She squeezed my cheeks." Bunny's hand rose and touched her own face at the memory of it, the very real and physical memory of Josie's palms pressing her cheeks together. "She was a real person who was in this room. She had feet. I heard her feet on the floor when she shifted her chair. That ain't somethin' I imagined." She heard her own voice rising once more and made herself stop. Swallowed down her confusion and looked from the empty table, to the empty chair, to the empty counter where a plate had been sitting less than a few minutes ago. The wrongness of the empty kitchen pressed against her like a cold hand. 

"Where'd she go," she whispered, and this time her voice came out quieter, stripped of its former certainty, with something underneath it that was very close to fear. "The hallway is one hallway. I walked the whole length of it to get to your office. I would have seen her. I would have passed her. Where'd she—"

"I believe you."

Smoke's voice arrived quietly and cut through everything else like a lamp lit in a dark room. He stepped next to Stack and reached out, taking her chin between his fingers, tilting her face toward him with a gentleness that wasn’t his usual mode and was therefore more effective than almost anything else he could’ve done. His eyes moved across her face, reading whatever he found there with that same thorough attention, and then he said it again without elaboration or apology. "I believe you. You saw her. You spoke to her. It's 'ight." He held her gaze until the climbing quality went out of her breathing, until her eyes settled from startled back to present. His thumb moved once along her jaw, the lightest possible contact, and then he released her chin and looked at Stack over her head. 

The look between them lasted one second and carried something private in it, something that had history in it, some understanding of Josie that they shared between themselves and weren’t presently sharing with Bunny. "Need to put a leash on that woman," Smoke grumbled, with the flat certainty of someone adding an item to a list.

"You an me both, nigga," Stack said, quietly.

Smoke turned from the kitchen. He didn’t go back towards their office, instead he went the other direction, toward the room at the far end of the hall, and Stack followed with Bunny still in his arms, carrying her away from the empty kitchen and the empty chair and the cold and inexplicable absence of a woman who had been sitting in it minutes ago eating cold cornbread like she owned the place.

The room at the end of the hall was broad and purposeful. A wide bed sat at its center on a dark mahogany frame, the headboard tall and unadorned. White linens, clean. A single lamp burning low in the corner, its flame turned down until the light came out warm and intimate. This was a simple room designed for one thing and one thing only, retraining a doll that didn’t need to be disciplined. 

Stack deposited Bunny in the center of the bed with more chivalry than intended. He straightened up and looked at her sprawled across the white linens, her moisturized brown skin drinking the lamplight the way it was built to, every curve of her catching and holding the warmth of it. He let out a small satisfied grunt before rolling his shoulders once and then bending down to kiss the inside of her knee.

The sound Bunny made started in her throat and got halfway out before she caught it, her thigh twitching under his mouth. Stack felt the twitch and registered it with the calmness of a man who had spent a considerable amount of time studying the language of women's bodies, then he returned and pressed his lips to her inner knee again. 

One kiss… two kiss… three kiss… four… Stack continued his playful worship before moving lower, or rather higher towards Bunny’s inner thigh. He was greeted with the soft warm skin there as his mouth opened against it, tongue dragging along the crease where her thigh met nothing and then meeting the next crease. He was learning the deep inner geography of her, building the path inward with a patience that was intentionally designed to make her lose her mind before he arrived at his final destination.

Her scent hit him before his mouth did and he let out a low sound against her skin that was pure appreciation. "Four an a half weeks," he said, lips moving against her inner thigh, his breath warming the space he hadn't touched yet. "You been sittin' in that pretty room unfucked all this time, huh, lil’ bunny rabbit?"

Bunny responded vocally with something that was technically a word, or at least she thought she did.

Stack chuckled to himself and then his mouth immediately found her aching bundle of nerves. He worked her the way a classically trained musician works an instrument he knows intimately. He didn’t rush his performance but instead attended to the specific truth of her responses with the kind of focused and intelligent attention that made up the difference between a man who was present and a man who was going through the motions. He learned her in the first thirty seconds, learned the particular way her hips moved when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her center, the way her thighs tried to close around his head and then caught themselves and spread wider, the way the sound she made climbed an entire octave when he tended to her clit and circled it with skilled precision.

He effortlessly brought her to the edge in under four minutes.

He knew when she was there. He had been watching for it, feeling for it in the tightening of her thighs and the change in her breathing, the way her hands had found the back of his head and were pressing down with that desperate and gnawing pressure that meant she was right there, right on the rim of it, one more motion and she would go over. He could feel her gathering herself, the coil of it pulling tight in her body and her hips tilting up to meet him.

But, because Stack was Stack, he couldn’t help himself as he pulled back and denied Bunny instant relief. She wasn’t a doll that needed to be punished, but she was still a doll under control of her master. He didn’t pull away far, just enough for his mouth to leave her core and rest against the inside of her thigh instead. He looked utterly composed as he breathed against her soaked, twitching heat while she fell apart beneath him in a different way than she had intended.

"Stack," she breathlessly whined, the word arriving with a thicker desperation than she had planned.

"Mm," he said, mouth still against her thigh.

"Please… Don't do that."

"Do what? " he asked pleasantly.

She made a frustrated sound and whined again before Stack returned to his honeysuckle feast.

He took his time getting there, moving up through the wet of her with his tongue like he was reading something he found interesting, and then he was back at her clit and the sounds coming out of her rebuilt themselves immediately, climbing again, her hips rolling, her fingers curling into the sheets. He gave her forty-five seconds this time before the edge showed up again in the ragged pacing of her breathing, and he pulled back once more. Pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. Breathed. And let her curse at him out.

"You raggedy ass nigga," she managed.

His laugh came out against her skin, warm and genuinely amused. "I done been called worse, babydoll."

At the head of the bed the mattress dipped. Bunny's eyes reopened, head turning, and Smoke leaned above her, and the sight of him was enough to make every other thought in her head exit quickly. He had shedded everything. His undershirt, slacks, holster, all of it was gone, and what was left was all of him, broad and carved and rich dark brown skin. His body looked like the map of a man who had moved through the world with physical force for a long time and had the evidence of that written in muscle and old scars. He was hard, entirely and obviously, and looking at her with those flat obsidian eyes that gave nothing away.

Smoke said nothing as he reached for the small table at the bed's edge and a cigarette appeared between his fingers, a match scratched against the bedframe with a brief bright leap of flame before it found its target. He took the first pull, held it, let the clouds of tobacco climb toward the ceiling in a long and perfectly controlled column. And then he looked down at her, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his eyes traveling across her face with the calm, weighing assessment of a man reviewing something he may or may not be satisfied with.

"Who," he said, voice low and quiet and warm as the smoking end of something burning, "you think you talkin’ to like that in my house?"

Between her thighs, Stack's mouth had found the soft heat of her again, and the sound that tried to escape Bunny's throat was intercepted by her own determination not to give Smoke the satisfaction of an incoherent answer before she had the chance to give him a real one. "I-I didn’t mean none by it… I-I wasn’t givin’ orders," she managed.

"Mm." Smoke's eyes dropped from her face to the space just below them, where his erection jumped and throbbed directly above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and then his eyes came back up to hers. "You came to my office," he continued as he lazily gripped his manhood before taking another puff. "Told me what you was tired of. Told me what you wanted. Got yaself’ naked in front my brother an I, then sat in both our laps like you had the right." He exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, away from her face. "That sound like a doll who know her place to you?"

Before she could respond, Stack's tongue distracted her by circling her clit with renewed and specific intention, as one finger pressed into her slowly, testing the heat of her… the tight grip of her. She was utterly soaked and already shaking in a finely controlled way, like how a bow shakes just before the arrow is released.

Smoke watched her face with the careful attention of a man reading a weather report. "A doll," he said, voice quieter, the edge in it sharpening enough to send shivers down her spine, "asks. She don't tell. She don't march down a hallway an knock on my door like she owed somethin'. She asks her owner. She say please. She waits." His thumb brushed her jaw, the touch light and intentional, as his eyes dropped to her mouth and then came back up. "You still ain’t proved you worth the trouble."

It didn't take much for Bunny to read between the lines as her right hand moved from the sheet and gripped Smoke’s precum dripping length. She felt the substantial weight of him against her palm and heard the slight controlled catch of his inhale as she felt him twitch against her hand. He filled her hand, dense and hot, and she stroked him from base to crown once with a grip that was firm.

She angled her head against the pillow, opened her mouth, and drew him in.

His size settled against her tongue, thick and dense, and she worked her lips around him with the exploring attention of a woman who had been told her whole career that her mouth was something extraordinary and had spent years proving it right. She hollowed her cheeks and sucked on him with an unhurried suction, her tongue mapping the underside of him on each pull, tracing the swollen vein that ran along his length, lapping at the crown when she came up before gobbling him back down again. Her free hand wrapped around his base and worked in a measured counterpoint. The combination of hand and mouth coordinated with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that it lived in her body the way playing an instrument lives in a musician's hands had Smoke internally losing his mind.

Smoke's own hand found her hair, fingers settling among her now sweated out tresses without pressing, without directing, just resting there with a weight that communicated his full attention. The quality of his breathing changed almost immediately, each exhale coming a degree longer than it should have, each inhale a degree more controlled than usual. He brought the cigarette to his lips with his free hand and took a pull, held it, let the tobacco clouds go from the side of his mouth. The image of him above her doing that while she worked him below was the most Elijah “Smoke” Moore thing she could imagine, controlling himself with a lit cigarette while she did her damnedest to remove that control from him entirely.

For a long minute, Bunny genuinely believed she was finally in control, but then, the devious twin still situated between her thick thighs added a second finger inside her and she gasped. It only lasted a split second as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head while she momentarily let the pleasure consume her, but that was short lived with a slight tug to her hair.

"Look at me," Smoke demanded.

She didn’t need to be told twice as she retrained her eyes back onto the owner that was in front of her.

"Mmm… good… you capable of suckin’ dick an followin’ instructions," he said softly, in a voice that had dropped below the level where it was meant to sound gentle and instead sounded much more intimate and a whole lot more dangerous. "You got somethin' to say?"

Bunny, whose mouth was still full of raw meat, slightly shook her head ‘no’ and continued servicing Smoke’s dick. Her tongue continued working the underside of him in the way that she had been complimented on in cities that were miles away from this one. She went down until the back of her throat met him and held there, breathing through her nose, feeling his fingers tighten in her hair by one degree, and then she came back up and did it again.

Smoke's exhale was long and relaxed. "Mm," he said, and it was the most honest amount of praise he had given Bunny all night.

Stack had brought her to the edge twice more in the interim, each time withdrawing with the particular cruelty of a man who is enjoying the architecture of her desperation more than he would enjoy its resolution, and she was by now a tightly wounded and thoroughly soaked little doll. Her body was operating at a level of need that had begun to make her cry a little. Not from pain or unhappiness, just from the relentless accumulation of pleasure with nowhere to go.

"Stack… Sir…" she managed, pulling off Smoke for a breath.

"Still here," Stack said, against her thigh.

"Please." The word came out stripped of all pretense. Just the word. Just the need in it, raw and uncomplicated.

Stack looked up at her along the length of her body. His mouth was wet, his eyes were bright, and he looked like a man who had been given an exceptional gift that was in no hurry to unwrap it fully. "Please what?" he asked rhetorically already knowing the answer to the question.

"Please… l-let me finish."

"Let you finish?" His voice carried genuine amusement. "Babydoll, I barley scratched the surface."

Smoke looked at the tears streaming from Bunny’s eyes. Something moved across his face, an emotion too foreign for anyone to decipher. He pulled free of her mouth with a soft sound and moved, climbing off the mattress and coming around the foot of the bed, and the sight of him moving toward Stack's position made Stack lift his head.

Smoke looked at his brother. Then he looked at the place between Bunny's thighs, the glistening, swollen, and desperately twitching evidence of the last fifteen minutes, and he looked back at Stack with an expression that was entirely final.

"Move," he said.

Stack sat up and squinted his eyes in disbelief. "S’cuse you, nigga?"

"Move," Smoke said again.

Stack's eyes narrowed. "She's my doll, Elijah."

"Yeah… well… she’s also mine," Smoke said. "I just decided."

Stack stared at him. The look on his face was the look of a mannish boy who didn’t like having to share his toys. "You can't just decide that," he complained. "That ain't how this works. You can't crawl over here in the middle of my session an claim a whole woman like you can’t go pick another damn doll—"

"Elias."

"What?!”

"I been watchin' her for a month," Smoke said, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "She in the room ‘cross the hall from ours. I been the one who had her moved there. I been the one who made sure her meals was right. Made sure her room was right an made sure nobody bothered her." A pause. "She mine. She also yours. Move."

Stack's jaw tightened. He looked at Bunny. Bunny looked back at him from the mattress with wide eyes, her lips still swollen, her thighs still trembling, and her expression carrying the cocky confusion of a woman who had just been claimed by two men simultaneously while lying naked in their bed and was still in the early stages of processing this information. Stack pointed at Smoke. "You owe me," he said. "You owe me big time, nigga."

"Mhm. Add it to the list," Smoke said.

Stack moved, climbing up toward the headboard with a muttered stream of commentary, and Smoke took his place between Bunny's thighs before lowering his head. He wasted no time as his mouth found her center without preamble, his tongue worked her with the focused of a man who went through life either doing something well or not at all. The sound Bunny made was enormous and immediate, her hands flying out to grip the sheets.

Smoke was vastly different from Stack in how he devoured Bunny’s pussy. Stack built her pleasure up as if he was an architect with a boundless amount of patience. Whereas Smoke treated her pleasure like a man reading a language only he knew. Every response she gave him, he immediately incorporated it into what he did next, adjusting, refining, arriving at the exact pressure and rhythm that made her thighs lock around his head and her back clear off the mattress as every coherent thought she had exited the premises.

He didn’t bother edging her since he had already clearly read what the edging had done to her. He could read the accumulated tension in every line of her body. Instead, he drove her straight to the finish line without stopping. The orgasm that finally rippled through her felt spiritual as if her soul was raptured out of her body. Her voice tore out of her open and honest, her hips grinding against his mouth as he worked her through every wave of it, his hands locked on her hips to keep her from pitching away from him.

Stack sat at the headboard watching all of this with his arms folded like a sulking child. When Smoke finally lifted his head, Stack uncrossed his arms and pointed at his brother with one finger. "My turn," he said.

"She sensitive," Smoke said, sitting back on his heels.

"I know she sensitive. That's the point."

Smoke moved aside without any urgency, and Stack replaced him between Bunny's thighs with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting for his turn at something exceptional. He looked at the convulsing center of her for a beat with something purely acquisitive in his expression, and then he put his skilled mouth back on her.

Bunny's entire body jerked backwards. The sound she made this time was considerably more desperate than the last, her hips trying to back away from the overstimulation and Stack's hands locking around them before she got anywhere.

"Stay," he murmured against her, voice vibrating right against her hypersensitive clit.

"Stack I can't, it's too much—"

"You can," he growled, and meant it, and went back to work.

Smoke let his twin have his fun as he situated himself on Bunny’s left side, and his mouth found her breast. His lips closed around her nipple and sucked on the coco nub with an intensity that sent a euphoric sensation shooting directly down her spine. His other hand flattened on her ribs, feeling the heave of her breathing, the rapid and helpless rise and fall of her chest. He worked across to her other breast with the same thorough attention, his teeth grazing just lightly enough to make her gasp, and then moan, and then grip the back of his head.

Meanwhile, Stack feasted like a starving madman. His tongue worked her pulsing and overstimulated pussy with an almost vindictive thoroughness, licking into her and circling her clit with alternating attention, building the sensation higher than it had any right to go given that she had just come apart under his brother's mouth not two minutes ago. He watched her face when he could, watched the progression of it, the way her mouth fell open, how her brows drew together, and when the tears started again fresh from the corners of her eyes, overstimulation and pleasure braided together until she couldn't separate one from the other.

When she came the second time it was different in character, wilder, less controlled, her body arching and convulsing with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, and the flood of her against Stack's mouth was audible in the quiet room. He drank her juices down with a delighted groan while his jaw still worked her through every aftershock, refusing to stop until her thighs had gone from locked to trembling to limp and her voice had dropped from cries to the soft and utterly wrecked sound of a woman who has nothing left to give.

Thirty seconds of blissful torture occurred until Stack finally sat back. He looked at the evidence of what he had done to her with profound satisfaction, wiping his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked at Smoke. "She ready," he said.

"She definitely ready," Smoke agreed.

Smoke laid down on his back on the mattress beside Bunny, his nine inches pointing toward the ceiling. He turned his head and looked at her where she lay against the linens, trembling and thoroughly undone. His voice, when it came, was dominate and certain. "Show me," he said, "how you got ya' name, bunny rabbit. Show me why you worth the trouble."

The second Bunny heard Smoke’s request, she sat up on trembling arms. She looked at him stretched out beside her, at the full dark length of him, at the patient flatness of his expression, at the way he was simply waiting with the absolute confidence of a man who knew what was coming and secretly couldn’t wait.

She was still a little loopy from her prior orgasms but gathered up enough strength and swung her leg over him. She positioned herself above him and reached down to guide him to her entrance before sinking onto him with a long, controlled descent that pulled a sound from the back of her throat and a sound from the back of his. Both of them couldn’t help themselves responding to the stretch, the heat, and the fullness of her pussy wrapping around his length as she settled herself completely onto him. She stayed there for a second, adjusting, letting her body accommodate the considerable size of him and feeling him everywhere at once before beginning to move.

It only took three bounces for Bunny to prove to Smoke why she had earned her name. She wasn’t just a lady of the night who knew how to ride a dick until sunrise. No. She had spent years refining a specific combination of bouncing, grinding, and rolling that made men weep, beg, and reach for her like she was the only water in a desert. She worked him with her hips, rising and falling in the deep rolling motion that used every muscle she had, the sound of their bodies meeting building in the lamp-warm room, her succulent breasts moving with every stroke, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, her thighs flexing and releasing with each downward drive.

Smoke looked up at her and something happened in his face, some arrangement of his features that wasn’t quite expressionless in the way he usually was, instead something behind his eyes showed a genuine side of him that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. His hands came to rest on her thighs, not to direct or control the pace, just to hold her, to feel what she was doing from the closest possible position.

He let her have it. He laid there beneath her and he absorbed every stroke with the stillness of a man receiving something with his full attention. His only movements were the tightening of his hands on her thighs, the slight flare of his nostrils, and the slight clenching of his jaw that betrayed how thoroughly he was feeling everything she was giving him. "That's it," he groaned, voice rough and lower than usual. "Keep goin'. Show me everythin’."

And indeed she showed him everything. She rolled her hips in her signature deep figure-eight that made her thighs burn and made men forget what city they were in. She let out a needy whine when she felt him twitch hard inside her, felt his fingers dig into her thighs and felt the sound he made rumble up from somewhere below the place where he usually kept his inner desires.

"Goddamn," Stack praised from somewhere behind her.

Bunny had nearly forgotten, in the consuming present-tense occupation of riding Smoke, that Stack was still in the room with them. She remembered now. She remembered specifically when she felt his hand press warm and flat against the small of her back, pushing her forward just slightly, changing the angle, and she felt the presence of him settling in behind her, the specific warmth of a second body entering the space, and something in her belly turned over at the knowing of what was coming next.

"Don't stop movin'," Smoke growled below her, his voice steady and laced with something that wasn’t quite command and not quite warning, something between the two that communicated that her motion was the thing keeping him from losing his composure. "Keep ya pretty eyes right here."

It was difficult, but she kept her eyes on him. She kept moving, slower now, the rhythm becoming something more rocking and less bouncing as Stack's hand remained at the small of her back and his other hand reached for something on the side table. The sound of a bottle. The sensation of something cool worked at the back entrance she hadn't been using, Stack's fingers pressed and circled with a careful, methodical preparation of a man who knew exactly how to stretch a doll without tearing her. He worked her chocolate starfish open with practiced patience, each circle and press accompanied by Smoke's hands on her hips maintaining their slow rhythm and his voice occasional and low.

"Breathe," Smoke said, one hand traveling from her hip to her stomach, palm flat and warm against her skin. "Stay with me. Just breathe."

She breathed. She kept her eyes on his and kept rolling her hips over him and breathed through Stack's fingers working behind her, opening her gradually, each moment of it accompanied by Smoke's voice and Smoke's hands and Smoke's eyes holding her in place in every sense.

After a minute of probing and preparing, Stack withdrew his fingers. The blunt pressure that replaced them was broader, and it pressed forward with the slow and inexorable patience of a man who had done this enough times to know that patience here was not optional. Bunny's motion over Smoke stuttered as the pressure built and Stack worked his way inside her. He knew better than to rush or force his way inside, instead he continued steadily forward until the stretch had gone from too much, to full, to something that rewired every nerve ending she had at the same moment and left her gripping Smoke's chest with both hands and pressing her face into his shoulder.

"There it is," Stack said from behind her, voice strained as he relished in the tightness of her asshole. "You got all of it, babydoll. You got it."

This wasn’t the first time Bunny participated in anal sex, but it was the first time she had both of her holes filled to the brim. She took both of them, fully, completely, in the most total sense of that word, and the feeling of it wasn’t something she could’ve prepared herself for no matter how plainly Josie had described it. Her body had become an instrument of pure sensation, attended to from both directions at once, filled past the point where she could distinguish between the fullness and herself.

"Move with me," Smoke ordered, and began to rock his hips upward in a slow, careful rhythm.

Stack matched it from behind, withdrawing just barely and pressing back in on the same count, the two of them falling into sync with the ease of people who have shared a frequency their entire lives. Bunny gripped Smoke's chest and held on.

Smoke's hands ran up from her hips to her waist to the curve of her sides, mapping her as she moved, grounding her with the weight and warmth of his hands when the sensation from everywhere else threatened to become too much. "Look at me," he said.

She looked at him.

"You ours," he continued. Not a question, just a statement of something that had apparently been decided and was now being confirmed. "You understand that."

"Yes," she breathed.

"Say it."

"I-I-I'm yours," she whined, and her voice cracked on the last word because Stack had adjusted behind her and found the angle that turned her thoughts entirely to static.

"Fuck," Stack hissed through his teeth. "Keep squeezin’ me like you finna cum an I'm gon' embarrass myself."

Smoke's jaw ticked. He drove his hips up sharper than he had been, once, and her forehead dropped to his chest. "Hold it," he said, one hand traveling up her spine, settling between her shoulder blades. "Don't finish yet."

Like a good little doll, Bunny obeyed even if withholding her orgasm was one of the hardest things for her to do. She held it through the next several minutes of the two of them working her from both sides with building and competing intensity. Stack's hips found a rhythm behind her that grew less restrained with each stroke, his hands gripping her waist with the force of a man holding onto something he didn’t intend to lose. Meanwhile, Smoke drove up into her pussy with a calculated and precise force that hit the same place every time and built the pressure in her body to a pitch that had no precedent in her experience.

She held back her orgasm with her fingernails deep in Smoke's bare chest and tears running freely down her face from the sheer accumulated pressure of pleasure with nowhere to go. Her body shook uncontrollably between them in continuous tremors.

"Hold it," Smoke said again, quieter this time, his hand moving from between her shoulder blades to the back of her neck, his thumb pressing at the base of her skull with a firmness that was grounding. "Hold it for me. Just a little longer."

She felt like an overfilled waterballoon on the verge of popping but she held it a little longer.

"Now," he said.

The second Smoke gave the command, Bunny let go. This orgasm made her entire body convulse between them, and the viper grip of her fluttering holes around both of them became violent and involuntary, her voice tearing out in a sound that came from a place so primal and ancient it didn’t have a name. Stack grunted hard behind her, the sound losing its edges, his rhythm breaking apart, his hips pressing deep and going still as her body worked around him without any input from her at all. Smoke's hands locked on her hips and held her through every spasm, his breath coming in controlled pulls through his nose, his jaw set, his eyes on her face.

She was still a shaking mess when they moved her.

Stack withdrew and the absence of him was its own overwhelming sensation as they repositioned her between them with fluid and efficient coordination, guiding her body into the new arrangement before she could fully process that things were changing. Her hands and knees were positioned on the mattress with Smoke now behind her. Stack was in front of her, already at the edge of the bed, his hand finding her hair, his thumb tilting her chin upward.

"Open," Stack said, his voice dragged rough by the effort of the last several minutes.

She opened. He slid into her mouth and she wrapped her thick lips around him and worked him with the full attention of a woman who had made sucking dick into an art form, her tongue pressing along his length, her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Behind her Smoke gripped her hips with both hands and pressed into her pussy from behind with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, each thrust was deep and drove her forward into Stack so that the two of them worked her from both ends in a rhythm that had its own crude, overwhelming music.

Smoke's hand came down on the curve of her backside, a sharp slap that made Stack look over her head at his brother with raised brows.

Smoke looked back at him with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing except his full awareness of what he had just done. "She a doll. She our whore," he said casually between thrusts.

Stack's grin broke across his face, gold tooth and all. "Mm hm." His hand joined Smoke's sentiment, fisting tighter in her curls, working himself into her mouth with an authority that matched his brother's behind her. "Take it," he said, "just like that. All of it."

She took it. She took all of it, from both of them, from behind and in front. Her tears ran freely down her face again, dripped off her chin, and ran down Stack's length where he fucked into her throat. She felt another climax building from somewhere deeper than the previous ones had come from, further down, more structural, and her body told her it was coming whether she was ready or not.

Stack felt it in the change of her mouth around him. Smoke felt it in the change of her hypersensitive pussy around him. Both of them drove harder at the same time as Smoke's hand came to her hip and gripped it with the force of a man who wanted to feel the final round tightness squeeze around him. "Give it," Smoke said, rough against her.

Bunny’s body clenched and released in a rolling sequence that started at her core and moved outward, her voice was muffled around Stack’s twitching length and her thighs shook against Smoke's grip. Everything in her narrowed down to the specific and enormous fact of coming apart between these two men who had decided, right then and there, that she was theirs. Stack's hips completely lost their rhythm entirely and he groaned from deep in his chest, his hot sticky release filling her throat in long, heavy pulses, his hand in her hair tightening as he worked through every second of it. Behind her Smoke thrusted into her through the spasms of her climax with a final series of strokes that cost him the last of his control as his hips pressed flush against hers and stayed there while he finished inside her, the sound that came out of him brief and real.

The room after was silent except for breathing.

Three people in various states of collapse across the ruined white linens, the lamp still burning in the corner, the amber light still doing its only job. Bunny was laying face down in the center of the bed with no intention of moving for the foreseeable future. Stack was somewhere to her left, his hand resting on the mattress near her shoulder. Smoke stood after a moment, crossed to the washstand, and returned with a warm cloth. He cleaned her with that same focused efficiency she had heard other dolls gossip about but never experienced, his hands moved over her with the attention of a man who considered this part of the task just as important as any other.

It was Stack’s turn to move from his spot on the bed, as he waltzed over to a nearby drink cart and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey glass, took a long sip, and exhaled with the deep satisfaction of a man at genuine peace with every decision he had made in the last several hours. He looked at Bunny where she laid against the linens, a beautiful and thoroughly claimed wreck of a woman. Then he turned to look at his brother across the room.

"She can't go back on the floor," he said.

Smoke wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Mm?"

"I'm serious, Eli. Her talent is undeniable. That thang she did with them hips is somethin' I intend to study at length for the next several weeks of my life." He took another sip. "But her control? Her control is nonexistent. She finished too many damn times in one session. You put her in a room with a payin' client who came here expectin' an hour an she gon' be done in two minutes. That man gon' feel robbed an robbed men talk… an talkin' men bad for business." He set the glass down and crossed his arms over his chest like a man presenting a logical conclusion. "Two more weeks. Minimum. We retrain her every night ‘til she can hold back a nut the way a real doll ‘posed to."

Smoke stayed quiet as he came back to the bed, sat at its edge and looked at his twin with the knowing expression he wore when Stack was making an argument he wanted to put an immediate end to. "Elias," he said.

Stack looked at him.

"Drink ya' whiskey an shut the fuck up."

Stack sucked his teeth but he kept his eyes on Bunny.

Bunny turned her face against the pillow and looked at both of them from the comfortable horizontal vantage point of a woman who had been thoroughly wrecked. Smoke, quiet at the bed's edge, let his hand come to rest at her ankle. Stack, whiskey back in hand and gold tooth gleaming was already building his next argument with the enthusiasm of a man who was looking forward to the next two weeks considerably more than he is letting on.

"Two weeks," she mumbled underneath her breath, to the ceiling.

Stack pointed at her with excitement. "See! She gets it. That’s a good lil’ bunny rabbit."

"But the food stays the same," she added.

The room went quiet for a moment. 

Then Stack started laughing, full and genuine, the sound rolling through the room and finding all the corners. This time he pointed at Smoke with the glass. "Eli," he said, "I like her."

"I know," Smoke replied as he kept his hand on her ankle. “I know…” 

.

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Author’s Note: Wowzers! See I ammmmm capable of writing the twins as civilized deviants… *cough* So… um… how about that Josie?? 😏

Nobody:

Bunny:

I remember the first time that I met you. 

You were standing in the middle of the room, women and men flocking around you. All hoping for just one chance to have your eyes on them. 

I watched you that night. I don’t think there was one moment when my eyes didn’t glance in your direction. I was at a weird point in my life. I’d just lost Anthony. Another heartbreak added to a list of unreliable men that all derived from my father. 

I kept my eyes on you. I could feel my interest growing more and more with each passing glance that I gave you. I wanted you to see me just as much as you were seeing everyone else. Call it a coincidence or some sick act of fate, but you did. 

You slid your body into the seat next to mine and ordered a glass of Hennessy. I knew that you were waiting for me to finally acknowledge you, which I did after a few short seconds. I was “playing hard” as my mother had taught me as a young girl. You always make men wait for you. Never let them get the assumption that you’re “easy” because then they’ll leave. 

At least, that’s what my mama always told me. 

“So you gone keep pretendin’ like you don’t see me starin’ at you?” You asked. 

I flicked my gaze over you, “I thought they taught all good Southern boys that it was rude to stare.”

You laughed, and not some mild chuckle, you fully laughed at my statement. A smile crossed your face next. I’d known enough men to know what each smile meant. That night, yours meant trouble. You leaned closer to me, as if we were sharing some deep secret, “Well, suga’, I’m not one of those good Southern men ya’ mama and grandmama probably told you about. I’m way better.”

I liked that about you. Your arrogance. It wasn’t like other men’s arrogance. Where theirs bordered on into dangerous territory, yours ventured more in line with self-assuredness. You knew who you were, and you weren’t afraid to let it be known.

“What’s your name?” I asked, taking a small sip from my drink.

“Elias Moore, but you can call me Stack,” You answered in return.

I rolled the syllables of your name around in my mouth for a few moments. Three syllables. What I found interesting was the notion that the “lie” sound in your name stretched out. I suppose that should’ve been my first warning not to fall for you. But I’ve always been bad at relationships, and I’ve always been good at picking very bad men, including you.

You asked for my name, and I gave it to you. 

Naturally, you complimented my name. ‘Said it fit my face and that it was the prettiest thing you’d ever heard. For the remainder of the night, we sat at that bar, exchanging knowledge and thinly concealed desire. I liked it. I liked being seen by you. I now recognize why so many people were drawn to you. You had the distinct ability to make others feel like they were the center of your universe.

And God was it infecting. 

I wanted more.

I needed to have more of you.

I’ve known many men in my life. 

But I can say with full assurance that I haven’t loved many. In fact, I’ve only loved three.

The first was my father. 

He was bound to be the first man that I’d love in my lifetime. But see, my father, he’s a very talented man. He’s the only man that I know who can disappear and reappear all at the same time. By the time that I was born, my mama and daddy had already split up. Problems that were too complicated for a child my age to understand, but I grew to know more. 

Growing up, I didn’t see my father much. There’d be a handful of times that I could count on my hand that I had memories with him. He’d appear in my life with empty promises of sticking around and building our relationship. I’d always been a foolish and naive girl, and it started with him. I believed that he meant it when he said that he wanted to be around. 

But reality comes in quick to remind you that love isn’t always eternal. 

I liked to think of my father as a Jack-in-the-box. One minute, he was here, and next, he wasn’t. There’d be a bitter acidic feeling swirling through the cavity of my chest when I realized that he had left. The phone calls decreased. The Saturday pickups stopped. He was my very own ghost.

When my father appeared again, he didn’t appear alone. He appeared with another girl whose resemblance to mine was nearly identical. I watched as he laughed and paraded his perfect daughter around. I watched their interactions. The inside jokes and laughs. There’d be moments when I saw him be immortalized in pictures with her when I had none of my own to cherish.

That was the first time I’d ever felt the hunger. 

It clawed away at my chest and rattled beneath my ribs. My gums ached with a distinct urge to consume.

My father was the first. 

Lee was the second.

Sweet Lee. 

I was a sophomore when I met him. He’d just gotten out of a relationship with a very pretty girl. We clicked together in this strange way. The first moment of us texting consisted of corny jokes and poor pickup lines, but I liked it all. I liked being in those moments with Lee when it felt like I was at the center of his entire world. 

The strange thing about Lee and I, we never had a moment to properly kiss until our last moments together.

There’d been this moment outside of school where we stood toe-to-toe, like we were in some romance movie, and we smiled at each other, but I felt the hunger simmering low beneath my stomach. When he leaned in to kiss me, I turned my head at the last second so that his lips landed on my cheek. What I loved about Lee is that he was a real gentleman. He didn’t mind that I turned my head. He just assumed it meant that I was shy. 

I smiled at him that day–perfect porcelain teeth hiding thinly concealed fangs. 

A common theme in my life with men is that they all inevitably leave. And coincidentally, they all end up leaving for another woman. I’d watched my father leave and go on to create a perfect family with another woman and child. His perfect family. 

It was only nature that Lee would do the same thing. 

The aforementioned girl from earlier wasn’t over Lee. In fact, she was just as possessive over him as I was. I saw that look in her eye. It’s a look of predatory disposition that only women can seem to sense in each other. However, the girl didn’t know that I possessed something much more dangerous than she and anyone else could ever comprehend. 

This face that I wear is not my own. 

It’s one that I inherited from my mama and from her mama, but that’s all it is–a mask. I’d grown so used to wearing it that I can’t remember what my real face looks like. I knew I loved Lee, but I was never brave enough to say it aloud. I wouldn’t express that kind of emotion unless he told me that he loved me first. I knew that we were well on our way to that stage until his love started to waver. 

The calls decreased. The texts went unanswered for hours. I knew in my heart that he was with her. 

Then came the feeling again. 

The hunger. The ravenous bloodthirst and ache in my gums to sink my teeth into raw flesh. 

By the end of the week, I asked you to come over. You thought it was to finally end things, which was true in some way. That night, I stepped closer to you. Your chest was pressed up against mine, and I could hear the thudding of your heartbeat against my breasts. I trailed a hand up your chest before settling it upon your cheek. I remember you leaned into my touch and closed your eyes at the warmth of my hand. 

I brought your face closer to mine until your lips were pressed to mine. 

Only a few minutes later were you gone.

The ache and hunger that I felt were gone, too.

Anthony was the third. 

He was the one that I loved the most out of any man. I loved Anthony more than my father, and I loved him more than Lee. I met Anthony in my senior year of high school. I was bright-eyed and eager to finally transition to the next stage of my life. 

Then he walked in and ruined my life. 

Smooth brown skin and hazel eyes. 

My mama had always told me to watch out for those men with the pretty eyes. They’d use their eyes to draw you into their lies. That’s exactly what Anthony had done to me. 

I tried to fight the interest that I had for Anthony. It was all in vain when he spoke, and his words wrapped around me like silk. He was the first boy that I’d ever let see me–the real me. I bared parts of myself to Anthony that I don’t think I’ve ever recovered. 

Anthony started the game first. He’d been doing this for far longer than I had. We developed a friendship first. Isn’t that how all good relationships start? The relationship came next, or I’d rather refer to it as something more parasitic. Anthony took, and I gave. That’s the way that it worked. 

He’d give me scraps, and like a hungry dog, I licked them obediently from the floor. Even worse, I’d look at him and thank him for it. There’s always been something interesting about Anthony. He was so talented at giving you breadcrumbs of his love and then stealing the rest away for later. 

The first time that Anthony kissed me, it felt like he was taking something away from me. I could taste the metallic iron on his tongue, and only after a few seconds did I realize that it was my own. He swirled his tongue around in my mouth like he wanted to consume every piece of me for himself. He held me close, hands gripping at the curves of my still girlish body. He trailed his lips down and ran his tongue upon my neck before biting down. I remember the dizziness that I felt from it all. The hunger settled in my stomach, and it felt like a hot piece of iron searing into the depths of my soul.

In that moment, I gave every piece of myself over to Anthony, and he’d given me a small portion of himself, too.

There were moments of bliss before the darkness started to take over again.

He found another girl. 

When he wasn’t with me, he was with her. I’ll let you in on a little secret: he was always with her more than he was with me. Just as my father, Anthony, would immortalize himself in pictures with his other, more perfect girl. I watched. I wept, but I still wasn’t ready to let him go. He’d come back eventually. He’d take a piece of me as an offering each time before he’d disappear. I let him.

It was only when he was taking from me that I ever felt wanted by him. 

The hunger grew inside me–stronger than I’d ever felt it. This time, it made me sick to my stomach. I’d wake up in the morning with my gums aching something awful before running to the bathroom to throw up yellow bile. I dry heaved over the ceramic bowl as my mother rubbed my back. 

As she looked at me, I knew that she recognized all the signs of my peril. 

Besides, she’d been the one who passed this curse down to me.

“You need to eat, baby,” She whispered against my hair.

I don’t remember when the change happened, or when the light switch flipped, but suddenly, I wanted to reclaim all of the parts of me that Anthony had stolen. I wanted to take from him just as he’d done to me. That night, I rubbed at my gums, smearing blood across my teeth and moaning at the taste of it.

I met Anthony in the middle of the woods. 

In those very woods, our bodies connected one last time, rolling around in the dirt like we were animals. I clawed at his back, fingernails carving at his back. I wanted him to feel the pain and not be able to discern it from pleasure. 

Then he was gone. 

There was blood. Lots of it. It covered my body. I went down by the river and washed it from my face.  I walked home, and my mama was waiting there for me on the porch. A cloud of smoke covered her face as she held the Virginia Slim between her fingers. She stood from her chair and ushered me inside the house. 

I sat between her legs as she picked the dried leaves and things from my hair. She was so patient and soft as I lay my head against her thigh. She started at the front of my hairline and began to braid my hair. She leaned down to press a kiss against my temple, “It’s okay. It’s over now.”

I let myself close my eyes as I still tasted the remnants of blood on my tongue.

You surprised me, Stack. 

I didn’t expect ot fall for you as quickly as I did. But you made it so easy to want you. After the first night of meeting you, I started to see you everywhere. You’d even managed to haunt my dreams when I closed my eyes at night. 

I saw you a few days later at The Chow’s grocery store. I felt you before I saw you. Funny enough, I could smell your cologne permeating throughout the air, even though I was sure that you were still standing at the front of the door. The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention as you slithered behind me. 

A serpent came to tempt Eve, and Lord, I was willing to eat any forbidden fruit if it meant that I got experience life with you. 

“Sure is nice seein’ you here,” You said, shamelessly trailing your eyes up and down my figure. The dress clung to my body due to the sticky nature of the humidity that day. 

I locked my eyes onto you, “You sure you ain’t stalkin’ me?”

You smirked, flashing that gold in my direction. Your smile, it always felt dangerous, even if it was sincere. There was something predatory that lay beneath that smile. But I’d always been the lamb that found herself being devoured by the wolf. 

“No stalkin’. You know this town is small enough for me to turn around and see you. Plus, it’s easy to spot you, seein’ as you ain’t from here.”

“What gives you the impression that I’m not from around here?”

You leaned your body closer to mine, “Well, I’ve been livin’ here my whole life and I ain’t neva’ seen a pretty gal like you here. Trust me, I’d remember.”

I remember laughing at your statement. You always had this way of making me laugh, even when I was so mad at you and ready to burn the house down. You’d blown the match out and made some joke about keeping me warm. You always made me laugh, Elias.

I miss that about you. 

I’d be telling a lie if I didn’t say that our relationship progressed rather quickly. Once you were in my life, you became entwined in ways that I couldn’t fathom. You introduced me to your family: Smoke, Annie, and lil’ Sammy. I remember the first time that Smoke and Annie saw me. That almost quick, indiscernible look of concern as they took me in, standing next to you.

I was smart enough to avoid any contact with Annie. 

I know she’d figure me out with just one touch. 

It was Smoke who kept his eyes on me the whole time. I never told you about the conversation that he and I had in the kitchen. 

“Where you from?” Smoke asked from behind me. 

I turned from the sink and leaned against it, “All over. My mama and I moved a lot growing up. I grew up in the Delta, though.” 

He nodded. That quiet disposition and distrust sinking away at his eyes. For a moment, I felt that ache in my gums. I wondered what his eyes would taste like squishing between my molars. 

I took another sip of water to dispel the hunger. 

“My brother seems to like you a lot,” Smoke commented.

“I like him a lot.”

“You don’t think that’s pretty quick?”

I shrugged, “When it’s meant to be, it’s just meant to be. No use fightin’ it.”

Smoke nodded, but I could still see that weariness and older sibling protectiveness dripping from him. However, he was right to worry. 

“Just be careful. My brother can be very careless when it comes to women.”

“Noted. Thank you, Elijah.” I said, concluding the conversation. Even though he tried to hide it, I watched the flinch that overcame him at me saying his name. 

I took you to meet my mama. 

I don’t think you realized how much of a privilege it was. I rarely brought men home to meet my mama unless I was sure that it was serious. My mama greeted you with a smile and a Virginia Slim between her fingers. 

I watched the interaction between the two of you. 

You were being your usual charming and charismatic self. You didn’t even realize that my mama had already picked up on what type of man that you were. She’d always been good at spotting wolves, even when they tried to hide in sheep’s clothing. 

Later that day, as my mama and I sat on the porch, she brought you up, “Be careful with that boy of yours. He ain’t the type to be chained down.”

Upon hearing her words, I felt the ache and burning start to consume my throat. My mama rocked in her chair and held the cigarette out in my direction. I grabbed it from her fingers and took a long drag from it. The bitter nicotine burned at my throat, but it helped satiate the hunger. 

“It’ll be different this time. I care about him. We’ll make it work.”

My mama didn’t say much. Just took the cigarette from my fingers and held it back up to her lips. As she expelled the smoke from her mouth, she spoke again, “I hope for your sake that it’s true. But remember this, baby…you need to eat.” 

I didn’t go visit her for weeks. 

There’s something about you, Elias. You have a way of slithering yourself beneath the layers of my skin that I was aware of. You’re the embodiment of physical desire and passion. You always had this way of making me feel like I was on fire everywhere. When you touched me or pressed your lips against mine, I always felt like you were taking a canister of gasoline and pouring it all over me. 

I’d gladly give you the match. 

Late at night at the juke joint, you press my body against yours, holding me close like I’d slip through your fingers. You settled your mouth against my pulse and kissed there. 

“All these men here. Lookin’ at you and wishing that they had a chance, but you’re all mine, babygirl. I ain’t eva’ letting you go.”

I remember the chills that scattered across my body at your clear possession over me. You wanted me. You desired me. I didn’t have to question it. 

I remember looking up into your eyes, “I’m all yours, Elias. Forever.” 

That night was the first time that we made love. I’d never felt anything like it before. It felt like I was being infected with you, and there was no cure for it. You and I weren’t gentle about it either. I remember how you slammed me against the wall, rutting your body into mine. The sounds of your hips slapping against mine as I clawed relentlessly at your back.

It looked more like we were fighting than making love.

It was something primal, but it was ours. I remember that as I rolled my hips across yours, I draped my body across yours and mouthed at the place where your neck and shoulder met. Suddenly, it was as if I could feel the blood moving beneath your skin, and my mouth watered in anticipation. 

I bit you. 

Not just some gentle love bite. A bite hard enough to imprint my teeth in your skin. You flinched and came inside me. I think it surprised you just as much as it surprised me. When I released you, I could feel the shame settling over my body. I was prepared for you to throw me off you and kick me out. 

But you surprised me. 

You smiled. Wild, unhinged, and dark. You threaded your fingers throughout my hair as you brought me down into another earth-shattering kiss. 

My eyes met yours as we pulled back from the kiss, “You can bite me too if you want.”

It’s funny how things seemed to deteriorate for us, Stack. 

We were good. God, we were so good. 

You’d told me you loved me more times than I could comprehend. Even though he was still wary, Smoke had started to come around to the idea of you and me being together. From what I’d discerned, this was the longest relationship that Stack had been in.

It felt good to hear it be called a relationship. Not some situation, but an actual relationship between you and me. 

But I was so blind. So consumed by love that I didn’t see the signs that you were starting to fall out of love with me. 

It started when she came into town.

Mary. 

Some white girl, yet you claimed that she was nothing of the sort. I should’ve sensed the signs when you couldn’t keep your eyes off of her in the train station. When I asked you about her, you claimed that she was old news. Nothing to worry about. How naive I was to actually believe your words. 

It started small with you. You trailed crumbs across the floor of your indiscretions and sins. You wouldn’t be outright with your betrayal. No, you were a man who valued the thrill of danger. Your connection with her started emotionally before it became physical.

That’s what hurt more. 

You’d already been giving her the pieces of yourself that I had masterfully crafted and catered to. The hunger, it came back fierce and unwavering when you came home, smelling of her perfume. I pretended not to notice, but it made me sick to my stomach. 

That night, we engaged in another session of primative mating. It was borderline violent as I released my frustrations onto you. I think you suspected that I knew, but you gave it back to me just as fiercely as I gave it to you. Your fingers tangled in my hair, and you pulled so hard that I could feel the strands breaking. 

I wondered if you were this rough with her. 

Did you give her these same brutal thrusts, or were you gentle? Were you slow and methodical in your movements? Did you whisper sweet nothings into her ear as she withered and cried in pleasure? What was she giving you that I wasn’t? 

I bit you again that night. Harder than I ever have before. This time, it broke skin. Your blood filled my mouth and trailed down your back. You moaned through it all as our mutual releases hit. I let you go and wrapped my arms around your neck as the blood continued to seep down between our bodies. 

Hot tears flowed down my face and burned as hot as lava. 

You turned my face to yours as the tears touched your skin. For a moment, we stared at each other. For a moment, you were in love with me again. For only a moment, you were mine again.

Only a moment later did I watch your love go away. 

Small towns have a way of holding the darkest secrets, especially if it’s for one of their own.

Curiously, I waited for someone to slip up and confirm your infidelity. I wanted to see if there’d be any brave souls who wanted to put me out of my misery, but there were no takers. They’d all kept their loyalty to you. 

But I saw the stares. The low murmurs as I passed through the stores. The poorly hidden faux masks of sympathy. You were parading your whore around at night, while her husband and I were expected to play supporting characters in your affair. 

I waited. 

You left for the night to go to the juke joint. I followed you, but I stayed concealed by the shadows to observe. I swallowed down the bile as I watched you and her, bodies coiled together like a piece of rope. You held her and whispered in her ear just as you’d done to me. What hurt the most was how carefree and in love you looked. 

There was a clicking in my throat and that familiar burning of hunger. 

By the time that you came home that night, I’d quietly packed my things to leave. I walked to my mama’s house, and as expected, she was waiting there with a pack of Virginia Slims. 

“Come here, baby,” She said, patting her lap. I sat between her legs, just as I’d done a thousand times in my life. She ran her fingers across my forehead, feeling the spike of heat beneath her fingertips. 

“You need to eat,” She said, smoke billowing around us. The quiet song of crickets and frogs filled the outdoor space as my mama continued stroking my hair. I felt my mouth water as the violent urge to devour enveloped me. I turned my head to my mother’s bare leg and bit down roughly. Her metallic blood filled my mouth, and she never made any signs to show that it hurt her.

Besides, we’d been doing this since I was a child. Just as her mother had done for her and her mother before her. We were all women weaned on violence, and we’d give this same thing to our babies.

It was just the way of life. 

Word spread rather quickly of me leaving you. You showed up just as I expected. Sorrow and shame were present in your eyes as you stood in front of me. The hunger was back. It tore at my gums and scattered across my taste buds. 

Suddenly, I wanted to take from you. I wanted to see the inside of you and feel your blood dripping into my mouth. I invited you into the house. My mama was gone for the day. 

I turned to face you as you stood across from me in the bedroom, “Did you ever love me, Elias? Truly love me?” 

“I did. I mean, I do. What Mary and I have is complicated. But you matter to me just as much as she does.” 

A low laugh rattled from my chest as the hunger rummaged beneath my ribcage. I stepped closer to you, “So choose. Me or her.” 

I waited for your reaction. I wanted to see, and just as expected, you disappointed me. The flash of conflict in your eyes let me know that it’d never be me. It’d always be her. You’d managed to become my father, Lee, and Anthony all in one blink of an eye. 

I trailed my fingers up your chest before grasping your face in my hands. I pressed my lips against yours softly. I could taste the remnants of her on your lips, and it made me ill. 

“Make love to me one last time, Elias.” 

The grief passed through your eyes. You always were selfish and greedy. You truly believed that you could have it all. Our clothes fell to the floor in whispers. I straddled your thighs on the bed as I sank down on you. That same breathless gasp left your mouth. We weren’t violent this time. There was no need to sully this moment with violence. Just as your climax consumed you, I clamped down on the same place where I’d bitten you before.

Only this time, I didn’t let go. 

This time, I tore the piece of flesh from your neck and swallowed it. Your eyes widened in pure terror as the blood spluttered from the wound and covered both of us. You tried in vain to push me off of you, but the blood loss was happening too quickly. I held your wrists down to the bed as I drank my fill of your blood. My teeth sank into the middle of your neck as I ripped another piece from you. Your vocal cords were exposed. 

I watched the muscles contract. The same vocal cords that you’d used to tell me you love me and lie to me all in one breath. You continued sputtering on the bed, but I was able to witness that final moment when you’d taken your last breath and your eyes glazed over.

I made sure to hold contact with you so that I’d be the last thing you ever saw. 

I ate the rest of you. Each and every piece. I didn’t want any piece of you to go to waste. Even when I’d made it to your bones, I sucked the pieces of meat from the bone and swallowed them all. Your cum was still staining the bed, and it had mixed with your blood. I licked the tangy and sweet fluids from the sheets. 

The only thing that I’d kept of yours was your skull. 

I added it to the collection next to my father’s, Lee’s, and Anthony’s. You’d be forever immortalized with them. You’d be with me forever. I’d always love you, Elias. By consuming you, I was honoring you and showing you that love. 

My mama came home later as I lay beside your skeleton. 

She took your bones and buried them down by the swamp. Surely, no one would ever find you there, unless there was some gator or storm that washed you up. 

She came back and ushered me from the bed. My mama led me to the bathroom where she’d drawn a warm bath. She ran the sponge across my skin as the blood stained the water a violent red. She dressed me just as she had when I was a child. 

In the living room, I sat between her legs as she grabbed the wide-tooth comb and the Blue Magic Grease. Just as she’d always done, she braided my hair. 

“It’s okay. We’ll be gone in the morning before they come.”

I held your chain between my fingers. 

You’d always be with me forever, Elias.

I told you that this was a love story, right?

“That friend of Sye’s was attractive. He had dimples.”

“You also said he’s too young and he smells like cinnamon.”

“Well, he did- Are we really discussing my love life right now?” She asked while laughing.

“You said we should enjoy ourselves while we’re here.” Boitumelo replied with a shrug.

“Well, what about you? Any friends I should know about?”

She lifted her finger to silence him, “Don’t think I haven’t seen those looks between you and Oya. You two are not discreet. You might fool everyone, but you can’t fool me.”

“She enjoys my company.” He replied plainly.

Kele frowned at the vague answer, “And you?”

“I like that she enjoys my company.”

She gaped, “That doesn’t answer anything!”

“I just like that she enjoys having me around.” He defended, shoulders rising. “It’s that simple.”

“Do you like her?”

“Not like that.”

She gasped dramatically, “Boitumelo!”

He stopped walking and turned to her. “Kele, we have so much on our hands. She understands that. I don’t want to be with someone who asks for more than I can give.”

“So, you two are just fooling around?”

“We have an agreement.” He answered.

Her hands wrapped around his arm, “I hope you’re not doing this because of my sister.”

“Partly, yes.” He admitted, continuing their walk. “But also, because we have an obligation.”

Kele smiled sadly, her gaze moving to the bustling scene in front of them. It made her feel calm, almost made her forget everything that was waiting for her back home. The smell of food, the sound of children laughing as their feet ran across the bustling market, friends hanging out in large groups and the sound of music and drums in one corner. All so nostalgic and bittersweet.

“We burn every bridge we cross- Tladi and I.” She sighed. “Living as a ghost is lonely. I don’t want you to live like that.”

“This is our fight.” He reassured her.  “How long are you going to avoid the dinner?”

Her steps faltered.

She sighed, her eyes casted down to her feet, “Maybe when we come back.”

“Don’t avoid it for too long.” He returned a comforting smile. “When Tsholo sent you here, she knew what it would entail. She wants you to meet them.”

She shook her head, “It feels like I’m taking away something that she should have. I can be Azzingah to the world but not to them. Tsholo needs that more than I do.”

“Tsholo burned that bridge so you wouldn’t have to.” He squeezed her hands. “You need this.”

She sighed and batted her eyelashes, “Oh Boity. Why couldn’t you be my brother?”

“No way!” He looked offended at the suggestion, while she gaped.

“What’s wrong with me? I’m a good sister.”

“When you want to. I’ve seen the times Tsholo wanted to just throw the two of you off a building.”

Kele sulked and leaned against him, “She said she’s going to throw us in the portal next time aliens come to Earth.”

Boitumelo snorted, “She just might.”

“You always take her side.” She mumbled.

“She’s older and wiser.” He chuckled. “She wouldn’t throw you in a portal unless it was to protect you.”

“I bet this is why Oya fancies you.” She smiled teasingly. “You always know what to say.”

“And you should let go of my arm before people think we are lovers.”

Kele scoffed and rolled her eyes, “Why? What’s wrong with people thinking we are lovers?”

“The princess is here.”

Her head shot up, her eyes scanning the marketplace. She stopped once she saw her.

Shuri was being dragged through the marketplace by her brother. A satisfied grin on his face as she begrudgingly moved.

“It seems she always finds herself in these situations.” He added quickly, “Being dragged around that is.”

“I wonder what she does with her time. She doesn’t enjoy social activities.”

“Meh.” Kele responded nonchalantly, her gaze still set on the princess. “Science. She’s the head of the Wakandan Design Group.”

“Do you think we should say hi?” He asked as he watched Kele with amusement.

“I don’t know her like that.”

Kele didn’t tell him that she couldn’t get inside the princess’ head. The idea of not having the upper hand did not sit well with her. And what Kele didn’t know, she stayed far away from it.

“We should take another route.” She mumbled and hid in his arm.

“No.” He responded with a smile and continued walking. “It would be suspicious to turn around in the middle of the road. Plus, they are walking towards us.”

“What?” She blurted out and looked at the two siblings.

T’Challa and Shuri were walking towards them. A smile on the older sibling’s face as they approached. His steps seemed deliberate and purposeful.

“It seems like you did catch their attention at the celebration. Now the question is: which one?”

“Please stop talking.” She muttered and glanced at Shuri.

“You don’t pay me enough for that.” He continued, knowing Kele would just try to run away if he didn’t keep her distracted.

“I don’t pay you at all.” She mumbled.

“Maybe I should start charging.”

“Hello.” The prince greeted and stopped in front of them. He seemed as if he wanted to add something until, he realised he didn’t know anything about the two strangers.

“Kele.” Shuri called out and smiled, “Hi.”

“Hey, Princess. Prince T’Challa.” She swallowed nervously and smiled.

The first touch the entity placed on your skin was barely a touch at all. Its presence hovered over you and only allowed you to feel the suggestion of its fingers trailing up the inside of your thigh. The weight of its movements carried a certainty that told you, even then, that whatever was mapping out the shape of your body had done this countless times before. Had catalogued other women before you and knew the exact nerve ending it was hunting for before it arrived at its destination.

When it finally reached its goalpost, you gasped. The sensation that radiated from the entity's single point of contact moved through your entire body like a tidal wave of pleasure, and it didn’t spread outwardly from its origin the way an ordinary touch from an ordinary man did. No, this touch sent fireworks of bursting euphoric bliss throughout every single nerve ending in your body as if your nervous system had been primed for this moment and was finally given the signal to let go. Immediately your back arched off the mattress and your hands flew between your thighs attempting to grip onto something that wasn’t truly there.

“Shhh,” said a voice you couldn’t place. It was charming and thick with the particular cadence of the Deep South. Stretched vowels, swallowed consonants and the easy rhythm of something that was in no hurry at all. “I got you.”

As your dream mind attempted to figure out who this mystery voice belonged to, a warm mouth found you.

In true dream logic fashion, you hadn’t been wearing anything below the waist and your core lay bare as the first press of that skilled mouth landed against your center. Just like before, the sensations you were feeling were like nothing you had experienced in the waking hours. What you were receiving wasn't just merely oral. This was the targeted application of something that understood your body with an expertise level of intimacy that should have taken years to learn, and had no business existing in the context of a first encounter with an entity you couldn’t even see.

The tongue that moved against you was much too long and too thick in a way that no human muscle could replicate it. Every time you attempted to estimate the size of its dimensions, it grew larger and slithered deeper into your pulsating canal. You silently whimpered as it curled and pressed against your pussy, finding places deep inside you that made your vision spotty and reactively forced your thighs to clamp around something that wasn’t quite a head but was large and utterly unmovable like one.

In layman's terms, whatever person or thing that was between your thighs, it feasted on your core like it was famished. There was no other word for it. The way this otherworldly tongue flicked against you, it silently communicated that it was beyond the point of hunger. It was feeding on you, consuming your responses as fast as it drew them out. From the sounds you made, to the slick it pulled from your body, and the trembling of your thighs. All of this was taken over and over again without any indication it would ever be satisfied. The pleasure built past the point of bearing and it kept building as tears started to tack down from the corners of your eyes into your hair. You didn't mean to cry, and had no intentions of crying but the continuous pressure of unreleased pleasure sitting in your lower stomach was driving you towards the brick of insanity. 

Your moans grew louder and desperate as your hands scrambled against the sheets for purchase, and then, at the precise moment when your entire body locked up and the sweet promise of release was right there, cresting, inevitable, one breath away… The warmth vanished and the withdrawal was instant, like a switch thrown. The weight lifted off your body and the presence withdrew so completely it was as if it had never been, leaving you flat on your back in your dark bedroom with your chest heaving, your thighs soaked, and your body wound tight around an orgasm that had been unfairly revoked at the last possible second.

You laid there sexually disgruntled for a full minute before you could move, and then you got up, changed your underwear, and told yourself a realistic dream like that was just a response to the stress from school.

The second dream was less subtle...

This one contained the same warmth and the same knowing presence, but this time it took shape, not in a way your sleeping mind could fully resolve, but enough. The entity was large and dark, with the impression of a face that was too beautiful and too something else to look at directly. Before you knew it, possessive hands gripped your hips with an assurance that allowed for no renegotiation, and this time the mouth found you faster, because it already knew where to go. It spent longer on you this time and that was the true torment of it all, the infinite patience this entity had. The way it worked you up through three distinct peaks, each one higher than the last, each one denied at the exact moment of culmination with the specific cruelty of something that knew exactly what it was doing and was enjoying itself thoroughly. You begged like a proper slut in the dream but it escaped out loud into the realm of the living, and the only reason you know this is because you woke with your voice raw and your roommate knocking on the wall between your rooms asking if you were okay.

“I-I’m fine,” you called out. “Just a bad dream.”

Not a lie, technically.

By the fifth night the dreams had graduated to something that had no clinical framework in your research notes. You were on your hands and knees on your bed, face pressed into a nearby pillow, and the presence behind you was no longer ambiguous about its intentions. The hands on your hips were large and rough-palmed, and the weight of two enormous pieces of flesh pressing against both of your pulsating holes from behind made your sleeping body shudder with a want so deep it had no bottom. It entered both of your canals slowly, given the enormous size of its double members, and it filled you to a depth and completeness that your waking anatomy had no accurate reference for. Simultaneously, this was where your sleeping mind began to seriously question how much you could take, but before you came to your own conclusion, something else found your mouth. It pressed past your lips with a purposefulness that was entirely at odds with the roughness of the hands at your hips. 

All three of your holes were filled and your body accommodated all of it without pain or resistance, just an obliterating fullness that pressed against every wall you had all at once.

The entity moved all extensions of itself in a synchronized rhythm that was clearly the work of a single intelligence orchestrating multiple points of contact. Three separate rods of sensation worked in unison with a calculated focus that had no interest in your comfort, only in extracting a maximum response until you were shaking apart from the inside out. The sounds the entity pulled out of you during this dream weren't any that you wanted to claim ownership of in the morning. 

And then, right at the moment of completion… 

Poof. Gone.

As soon as the entity vanished you woke up screaming like a sexually frustrated mad woman into your pillow, and your roommate moved out two weeks later.

By week two, you started making changes to your day to day life in an attempt to combat what you still considered just stress dreams. You went to bed exhausted on purpose, hoping to fall too deeply into sleep for the dreams to reach you, but somehow they reached you anyway. You tried sleeping with the light on, but the presence didn't need darkness and the dreams still persisted onward. You tried sleeping in the living room on the couch, but somehow you always woke up in your bed without any memory of moving.

In addition to switching up your routine, you tried with increasing desperation and decreasing dignity, to relieve the built up sexual tension yourself, but that didn't work either. This was the only part you were having a hard time finding a logical explanation for. Unlike everything else, you couldn’t just file being unable to masturbate under the category of a stress response or the psychosomatic effects of spending eight hours a day immersed in erotic folklore, due to the fact that playing dj hero on expert mode has always been the number one way you’ve relieved stress in the past. It didn't matter what you did or how you did it, your body simply would not release. Each time you tried you would get achingly close, and then the sensation would simply stop, as though someone had reached in and removed the mechanism. As though the ability had been quietly confiscated.

You sat on the edge of your bed at two in the morning on the fourteenth night and pressed your palms to your sleep deprived eyes and said, out loud, to the room, “This isn’t real. This is not happening.”

As soon as you spoke, the shadow in the corner of your room shifted.

You looked at it for a long time before scoffing at it and mumbling, “Lamp,”

The shadow didn’t move again and instead of trying to indulge in self pleasure, you went back to your dissertation and wrote four more paragraphs about the psychological origins of incubus mythology with the specific, driven energy of a woman arguing with something she refused to name.

By week three, you were an absolute train wreck.

You had bruised hollows under your eyes, a hair-trigger temper, and a tight tension in your body that had moved past physical discomfort and into something pressurized that your body no longer had the vocabulary to name. You snapped at your advisor during office hours. You knocked an entire shelf of books onto the floor in the campus library and left them there before walking out. You sat in your car in the parking garage for forty minutes staring at the steering wheel before you remembered you had meant to go somewhere.

That night you came home, you were too exhausted to cook and settled on eating half a bowl of cereal before showering and falling into bed at nine-thirty like a woman who had lost a war. Because of your depleted state, you didn't notice how the shadow in the corner of your room was darker than usual, denser, like it too had reached its breaking point and needed to be fed something. 

You were asleep for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds before you woke up to the feeling of being crushed. This crushing sensation wasn't like the ambient, low-grade unease of the past three weeks but the specific, acute, suffocating certainty of a body above yours. Whatever or whoever it was, had you pressed into the mattress with a weight that pinned the breath in your chest before you’d even fully surfaced from sleep.

Your tired eyes snapped open and hovering over you was him. His forearms bracketed your head on either side, both palms flat against the mattress, his torso blotting out the ceiling in a way that erased the water stain, the crack in the plaster, and the fan turning overhead. He had positioned himself so his weight distributed above you without fully resting on you, holding the threat of himself over you like a promise.

It took a couple seconds for your mind to try and process him. You couldn't comprehend him in his entirety and decided to process him in pieces. He was gigantic. Even braced above you with minimal space between your bodies, his frame dominated everything around it, too large for the ordinary furniture, too large for the room itself, the way a predator in a domestic setting made the furniture seem like props. His skin was a deep coffee brown, flawless in the low light of your bedside lamp, with a muscular frame that suggested he had never once in his existence worried about being threatened. Long hands planted into the mattress on either side of your head, with fingers slightly too long and nails slightly too dark at the tips.

His face was the thing that stopped you completely.

He was breathtakingly beautiful for a man… or a man adjacent entity. His face existed at the uncomfortable intersection of stunning and wrong, where every individual feature was arranged in a way that sent something ancient in your hindbrain screaming. High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut glass. A mouth set in a line that wasn’t quite a smile but carried all the confidence of one. His eyes were red, not bloodshot or irritated, but red. A deep arterial red, the color of old garnets held up to light, glowing with their own soft interior luminescence in the dark of your room. They were fixed on your face with an expression that held no humanity, but his eyes were focused and assessing you like he had already made a decision about you and was now in the process of collecting what he considered his property. Right above his eyes held two curved, dark horns rising from his temples, sweeping back and upward with the angular geometry of something grown rather than placed. And at his shoulders, filling the space above both of you, a set of wings fanning outward to the walls of your bedroom, swallowing the available light, making the room smaller by several degrees.

The full scope of what was lingering above you registered in your body before it registered completely in your mind. You opened your mouth to speak and he wasted no time making his first move. 

One hand came off the mattress and closed around your throat, cutting off 25% of your airway. The contact hit your nervous system like a struck match and lit every nerve from your collarbone to the base of your spine in a single cascading surge. Three weeks of compression, denial, and your body’s desperate need for release met that one point of contact and combusted outward. Instantly, a wall of sensation crashed through you so fast your back arched off the mattress before you could even think about it. Your thighs tried to instinctively close, but his knee was already between them, braced against the mattress, preventing it completely.

He looked down at your face as this happened. Watching your body melt completely beneath him from just one simple touch. “So pretty,” he mumbled. His voice was everything the dream voice had been and more. “Three weeks. An one touch.” The not-quite-smile didn’t deepen as he tilted his head to the side and his voice quickly shifted from charming to demeaning. “You real fuckin’ pathetic, you know that?”

His insult quickly sobered you up as you glared at the man? entity? demon? hovering above you and began wiggling around. “Get hell off me,” you said. Your voice was shaking. 

“Mm mm.” He didn’t move. The hand at your throat stayed wrapped around you like it was a necklace you were expected to wear for eternity. “You done with that?”

This time you did more than try to wiggle out of his grasp and shoved at his chest with both hands. He might as well have been made of concrete because that shove didn’t move him an inch. Instead, the close contact from both of your palms pressed against the warm bare skin of his chest sent fresh waves of pleasure radiating up your arms and straight between your thighs. Your own hands betrayed you, fingers going flat with defeat against him instead of pushing again.

He looked down at your hands and smirked with a knowing expression. “Mmm hmm,” he gloated.

“Don’t.” You yanked your hands back.

“Lil' late for all that.” He tilted his head to the other side, reading your face like you were a new toy handed over to a spoiled child on Christmas morning. “Know what ya problem is? You think too much.” The red eyes tracked down the length of your body beneath him, cataloguing, assessing. “Lemme’ help turn that brain off.”

“I’ll scream,” you said.

“Who the fuck gon’ hear you?” 

The city outside your window went on about itself, indifferent and noise-soaked. You both knew he was right. 

His free hand moved, and touched the center of your chest. One fingertip, directly over your sternum, pressing through the thin fabric of your sleep shirt with a settled intention that told you he had been here before, had mapped this exact spot, and had been waiting to press it. The surge that followed was different from the throat contact, deeper and more central, as though he had pressed a button wired directly to your spinal column. Your back arched again, involuntarily, hard enough to lift you completely off the mattress, forcing a sound from your mouth that you felt ashamed of before it finished leaving your body.

He silently watched as your body collapsed back down onto the mattress, still under his touch and control. “If you done bein’ dramatic,” he said, “that there is the mark… my mark.”

You stared up at him dazed and confused, still coming down from whatever that feeling was. “The what?”

“You called my name… said it real sweet too.” He stated simply and factually, like he was having a regular conversation about the weather. “Week two. Third night. You was in the dream, right at the edge, an you screamed my name.” His thumb traced a single line over your sternum and each pass of it sent smaller waves of sensation radiating throughout your body, enough to keep your breathing unsteady. “When a marked woman calls, the mark sets. Ain’t somethin’ I decided. That’s just the nature of the thing.”

You started up at him with a bewildered expression. You didn't know this man… entity from a can of paint and your brain was currently too frazzled to piece together what he was talking about. “I didn’t know your damn name.”

“You’d been writin’ ‘bout me for six months.” He held your gaze. “Some part of you knew.”

“Si-Six months?” The realization and the recognition started to settle in, but your stubbornness refused to believe that HE was currently present in your bedroom. After months of disproving the existence of incubus, there's absolutely no way The Shadow Man, also known as Elias ‘Stack’ Moore, the infamous incubus known for brutally feasting and discarding his victims was present in your bedroom… right? RIGHT?

“Yeah… its clickin’ now aint it?” he quipped, and a considerably dangerous flash of murderous intent slid beneath his eyes. Stack tilted his head again. “You spent six months studyin’ what I been doin’ for over a hundred years, little scholar. Fifty women in the Delta. Thirty in Chicago. Ten moe’ up here in this city.” His thumb pressed the mark again. “An nan one of ’em still alive.”

What little air you had left in your lungs evaporated.

“I don’t keep ‘em,” he said, with the same flat, unceremonious tone he might use to discuss something beneath his interest. “I feed, an I move. That’s how this goes.” He watched your face process that. “But you…” The thumb stilled. His eyes narrowed by a fraction, that cataloguing attention sharpening into something closer to actual curiosity. “You smell different. Even through three weeks of bein’ this close to you an only takin’ the crumbs.” He exhaled through his nose. “I ain’t decided yet whether that’s your problem or mine.”

For the first time in your life, silence blanketed you and you said nothing. Every smart thing you’d ever learned felt very far away.

“Now, what’s ‘bout to happen,” he continued, his voice dropping to a register that bypassed your ears entirely and settled at the base of your spine, “is I’m gon’ finish what I started three weeks ago. All them dreams I done built up an took away.” His eyes burned. “I’m collectin’ what's mine. All of it. Tonight.”

Another deathly silence fell over the room like a weight. Then out of nowhere you gained the foolish and courageous audacity to speak up. Regardless of what you knew about Stack’s endeavors as one of the top five devious incubi to ever exist, you refused to just lay down and take what was being forced upon you without a fight. “Nigga, have you lost your rabbit ass mind? I don’t care what or who you are. Remove this mark and leave my room!”

When you spoke, something shifted in Stack’s face. The not-quite-smile he was holding onto cracked open into something real, brief and genuine, but it was gone in an instant and replaced with something that lacked patience or concern for your wellbeing. 

“Mmm, nice to know this lil’ school girl ain’t lose that mouth,” he said softly. “Been wonderin’ when that was gon’ come out.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I know you ain’t.” He looked at you with indifference and intentionally pressed the mark again before greedily watching the wave of cruel pleasure roll through your body with clinical satisfaction. “You scared, turned on, an you pissed off ‘bout both. So you come out swingin’ ‘cause that’s what prey do when it ain’t got nowhere to run.” He pressed again. “But we both know how this ends.”

“You keep saying that.”

“‘Cause I might tell a joke, but I ain’t neva’ told a lie.”

He sat back on his heels between your thighs, and the full height of him settled itself above you. You immediately understood with a cold, clarifying certainty that he had allowed you to see the room this whole time, had allowed you the illusion of something to run toward, because it had amused him. But tonight there would be no running. He had been living in your apartment walls for three weeks and now he wanted to live in your other set of walls for eternity. 

Stack kept his intense glare locked on you as he reached down and removed the remainder of what he had been wearing, which had been minimal and evaporated it into thin air with the snap of his fingers. As your eyes traveled from his face down to his groin, the full reality of him boldly presented itself in the warm lamp-lit air of your bedroom. When you locked eyes with his twitching girthy member that was leaking clear ropes of precum, your brain frazzled out and stopped working. He was built proportionately, and the heavy weight that curved upward between his thighs had surprisingly not been an exaggeration within your dreams. 

He watched you looking.

“‘Leven inches,” he said, conversationally. “Case you was tryna calculate.”

Your mouth went completely dry and you could feel your face heat up with embarrassment for staring so intensely. “It’s just like… in the dreams…” The sentence dissolved. “But… that can't be… That was…”

“Them dreams I gave you was accurate… sorta kinda,” he said nonchalantly. “I can make my pecker as big or as small as I want. Figure most women can take ‘leven inches… a properly trained slut can take moe’.” He paused and a sly grin spread across his face as he casually palmed his hardened length and stroked it. “”Member how, in them dreams, you was never empty? Not one hole of you?”

Flashbacks to weeks of being filled and denied the ability to climax raced at lightning speed through your mind. Your thighs pressed together when you thought about the first time he filled every hole with little to no resistance, as if your body was created to take everything he gave you with no complaints.  

“Watch,” he commanded. The air around him shifted as the shadow-substance of him slithered around his body until beneath the first rod, emerged the second. It was identical to the first one, same length and girth, separated by just a few inches of space and curving in a slightly different direction with the readiness that couldn’t wait a second longer to be buried inside of you. 

You continued to lay in the same position and said nothing for a very long time. For six months you spent hours upon hours gathering data that proved incubi were nothing more than a sexual myth spread amongst sexually deprived wives, but now the truth was staring right at you and this wasn't a dream. 

After another minute passed you finally spoke, or at least attempted to. “Oh,” you said finally.

Surprisingly your silence amused Stack. You gawked at him as if he was a degenerate spawn of Satan sent from hell (he was), meanwhile the leaking lips between your thighs revealed a truth the lips on your face refused to confess. A connection was set in stone, he was now the one who wielded the keys to your pleasure and if you wanted to cum you would need to play by his rules. 

“Oh, that’s…” You stopped yourself and thought for a moment. Your dissertation had seventeen footnotes about this specific capability. You had called it physiologically implausible mythological embellishment. “That’s…”

“Real?” he offered.

You closed your eyes briefly and took a much needed deep breath. “I owe some of my sources an apology.”

His laugh was genuine, short, and gone as fast as it came. “Yeah, you do.” He positioned himself over you again and the proximity of all of him filled your senses in a way your body responded to with immediate, embarrassing clarity. “Now.” He looked down at the full length of you beneath him with the flat, appetite-driven attention of something that had waited long enough. “You done wastin’ my time.”

That wasn’t a question.

The black tentacles arrived before you had finished deciding anything. They materialized from the shadow-substance of him the way all his other alterations had, not emerging from somewhere external but flowing from within, liquid darkness given direction and purpose. The first one coiled around your left wrist, the second found your right ankle, the third and fourth bracketed your thighs and repositioned you exactly the way he wanted, spread open and presented in front of him like an offering to a deity.

Where each tendril made contact with your skin, a warmth spread inward, not the warmth of touch, but the warmth of something entering your bloodstream, a seeping heat that traveled from each contact point along your veins and gathered at your core with a rising intensity. You felt it move. Could track its path spreading under your skin, pooling between your thighs, rising up through your chest and flooding outward to your fingertips.

And then out of nowhere an intense sensation of amplified sensitivity turned your brain to mush. Your nipples hardened so fast you made a whining sound, desperate for anything to touch them. The sensation at each tip was so acute and present that even the faint flow of air against them made you gasp. The heat between your thighs went from warmth to something else entirely, something that soaked through you in a rush you felt dripping, actually felt the wetness spreading and pooling beneath you on the duvet, your body betraying you with a thoroughness that left nothing unrevealed.

Stack watched as your body reacted to the aphrodisiac released from his tentacles. Each movement and twitch you made confirmed that he made the right decision edging you for three weeks, because now you were primed and ready to take everything he was willing to give. He glared at you with an expression that went beyond incubi hunger. His gaze held no warmth in it at all. You were a resource. You were something that had responded correctly. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

“There she go,” he said flatly. “Every nerve probably feel lit up like a Christmas tree.” His eyes tracked the hard points of your nipples, the soaked state between your thighs and the way your whole body was vibrating at a frequency several registers above normal. There wasn’t a sliver of appreciation in his eyes. He just stared at you with the same assessing quality a man used when checking that an engine had turned over. “Took long enough.” 

“What did you…” You couldn’t complete a sentence. Each word required more focus than you could currently locate.

“Natural chemical process,” he said, crouching down to your level to analyze you better. “What my kind produce… it amplifies what’s already there.” His eyes met yours. “An what was already there was…” He looked you over again, that flat inventory gaze. “Adequate.”

Before you could register the backhanded shade, Stack reached out and barely grazed the back of two fingers across the curve of your breast and the sensation that traveled from that graze through your entire chest made your hand jerk against the tendril holding your wrist. He pulled his hand back immediately and looked at what your body had done with the expression of a man confirming a predicted result.

“Sensitive,” he said, to himself more than to you.

“Shadow Man… Stack…”

“Don’t call me that.” His eyes cut to yours. “When I’m inside you, you call me Elias. When you beggin’, you gon call me Elias. Every other time, you don’t call me nothin’ at all.”

“I don’t…” Your voice gave out around the sensation still radiating from where he last touched you. “I’m not going to beg for you for shit.”

He looked at you for a long, flat moment before chuckling lowly to himself. “Yeah, you is,”

He dragged the same two fingers up the side of your other breast, over the top, and then traced the curve underneath, and what came out of you wasn’t a sound you planned on producing voluntarily. It tore itself free from your esophagus, raw and soaked in three weeks of denial. He studied the sound the way a linguist studied a dialect. Cataloguing. Storing.

“Nasty lil’ trinket,” he said, no warmth in the words, only that same nonchalant, clinical quality. “Look at all this.” His eyes moved over your body with thorough attention, the soft, generous swell of you, the brown skin gleaming covered in a thin layer of sweat, the roundness of your belly and the width of your hips and the full, heavy weight of your breasts nestled on your frame. “Three weeks I been smellin’ this an drinkin’ off the edges.” He sounded genuinely put out about it, not in the way of a man who cared about you but in the way of a man who found inefficiency irritating. “Almost felt like I was wastin’ my time.”

“You did it to yourself,” you managed.

“Yeah… I did,” he agreed. “An’ I’m done with all that… I’m starvin’.”

All you could do was watch in anticipation as Stack positioned himself between your spread thighs with the ease of something that had done this many times before. His forearms braced on your inner thighs and the full contact of his skin against yours sent cascading surges of sensation rippling down to your core from both sides at once. He looked at the state of you with his chin nearly resting against the inside of your thigh and his red eyes moving over your center with an expression that was purely functional.

“Look at this fuckin’ mess.” He drew one finger through your swollen folds, barely any pressure at all, the lightest possible contact, and held it up, examining what it had gathered. “Soaked clean through. Drippin’ on the sheets like you ain’t got no control over yaself.” He clicked his tongue in false disappointment. “An this ‘posed to be the lil’ schoolgirl who spent six months tryin’ to tell the world ion’ exist.”

You hated that this cocky ass incubus was correct. For six months you scrubbed through every crevice of the internet and readily available libraries in your district. For six months you worked day and night to prove that beings like this didn’t exist… just to be bound to a bed by one. “Don’t…” You mumbled quietly underneath your breath. Your mind was too far gone to even think about fighting back, but your stubbornness still held onto a small ember of defiance you refused to let die. 

“Don’t what?” The question was filled with sarcasm as he pressed two fingers through your folds with slightly more intent and your hips jumped toward him involuntarily. He pulled back immediately, watching your body chase his hand. “Look at that. Can’t even hold still. Desperate lil’ cocksleeve.” The word landed low in your belly and lit something there that you weren’t going to examine at the moment. “Three weeks I kept you right on that edge an ya body got the audacity to act surprised.” He shook his head. “Pathetic.”

“You caused…”

“I know I caused it.” He pressed his thumb against your pulsating clit, barely, just resting it there, not moving, just the warm weight of contact, and watched you seize beneath him. He removed it and listened to the frustrated, broken sound you produced without any change in his expression. “I caused it ‘cause I wanted you exactly like this. Wanted to see what the scholar look like when all them fancy words run out.” He tilted his head to the side and smirked. “You look real stupid an needy like a bitch in heat... Case you ain’t know.”

“Fuck you. I am going to…”

“You gon’ what?” Again, his tone was full of ego and sarcasm as he called out your empty threat. Even if you somehow fought through the cloud of lust that now infiltrated your mind, you wouldn’t last another night without tasting the sweetness of release. 

Silence filled the room for a second before Stack let out a dry humorous huff. “That’s what I thought.” He lowered his head. “Now shut up an’ lemme see if this juicy pussy as sweet as it was in them dreams.”

His warm mouth found you and the first contact pulled a sound from your throat that bounced off every wall in the room and came back to you unrecognizable. His tongue was just as otherworldly in real life as it was in your dreams. It was longer and thicker than it had any right to be and it was capable of configurations that no human musculature supported as it curled and pressed inside you, locating untouched zones in your pussy that your nervous system had never had a formal introduction to. It went directly where it was needed with no need for unnecessary exploration or uncertainty. Three weeks of dream-reconnaissance had given it a map it had memorized.

He licked through you like you were something he had been craving specifically, a long flat drag from base to tip that made your back bow off the restraints with your voice cracking on his name.

“E-Elias…”

He lifted his head just enough to speak against you, his voice rough and scraping. “What I tell you?” He pressed his tongue back inside you and curled it forward in a way that made your free hand fly to his head before a tentacle caught your wrist and returned it firmly to where he wanted it placed.

He devoured your pussy like a man making a point. All the responses he pulled out of you, from the overflow of your forbidden honey to the sounds you couldn’t contain, he silently catalogued everything and used it to calibrate the next strike. He found the specific place inside you that three weeks of dreams had identified as the most devastating and returned to it using his tongue with a frequency that removed your ability to form language of thought.

Just like in your dreams you began crying from overstimulation. Whenever he placed himself between your thighs you never intended to cry, but something about how he effortlessly built your pleasure past the point of bearing and kept building, your tears had no excuse but to fall from your eyes. Your body felt like it was on cloud nine and you so desperately wanted to teeter over that edge into the abyss of bliss. The tears tracked hot from the corners of your eyes down your flustered cheeks, while your thighs shook against his shoulders and your hands went pale in the shadowed restraints.

“Taste so goddamn sweet,” he growled against your fluttering pussy, and for once there was something raw in his voice outside of the nonchalant sarcasm he wore like a mask. “All the others…” He sealed his mouth over you again, tongue working in a tight, relentless rotation, and the sentence dissolved. He said it against your skin anyway, half to himself: “Nothin’ like this. Not one of ’em.”

That revelation shouldn’t have done what it did to you as your walls clenched at the compliment. You mentally filed this away for later.

He spread you wider with two fingers and rotated his tongue deeper before pulling his head back far enough to spit directly onto your entrance and then sealed his mouth over you again. The indignity crashed into the pleasure and made the pleasure worse, deeper, more consuming, your whole body jolting in the tendril’s grip, a sob tearing from your chest.

“Don’t… don’t you dare stop…”

Based on everything that transpired so far, you would assume that you would’ve learned to follow Stack’s rules by now, but you couldn’t help yourself. The second that whiney sentence escaped your mouth, he stopped. The withdrawal was instant and his mouth left you as the cool air hit your soaked and oversensitized skin, forcing you to make a sound that was a genuinely desperate, broken plea that you felt in your own sternum and could not recall back.

He looked up at you from between your thighs with his jaw glistening, his eyes burning, and one brow raised. “Thought I told you to shut the fuck up,” he said pleasantly.

“I… you… Elias…”

“You talk,” he cut you off, “I stop. Simple math. You wanna keep bein’ difficult or you wanna cum?”

Your jaw snapped shut as you silently glared at the bane of your existence settled between your thighs. You quietly decided to listen… for now. 

“Mmm smart girl.” He lowered his head. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Stack finished what he had started with a relentless focus and refusing to leave his work incomplete. He worked you up through three distinct peaks, each one higher than the last and each one permitted to crest fully because he was no longer denying you. He was getting drunk off your pussy juice and indulging on every drop you released into his mouth as if he was a dehydrated man drinking from a well.

Your first orgasm after three weeks of denial almost made your soul leave your human vessel. As your voice hit a register that surprised the both of you, your body seized and wave after wave of backed up euphoria crashed through you while he effortlessly held you open and slurped up every drop.

Even though your orgasm was enough to almost make you pass out, he didn’t stop. Instead, his tongue retracted from your pulsating canal and he refilled your needy hole with two of his fingers while letting his tongue focus on your sensitive bundle of nerves. The dual input left your conscious mind with nothing to work with.

“Elias…” Your voice was wrecked. “E-E-Elias, I can’t… it’s too much…”

His massive hand came down hard across the outside of your thick thigh. The crack of it echoed in the room and the sting bloomed hot across your skin as the sharp contrast to everything else made you clench around his fingers hard enough to make him groan in delight.

“What I say?” he quipped against you. If you were any other human he would’ve ended your life right then and there for making him have to repeat himself.

Your mouth locked shut as you felt his controlled murderous intent linger in the air. 

“Good little slut,” he said, and dove back in.

The second climax rolled through you just as harshly as the first one. Long devastating waves of pleasure left your legs shaking around his head and reduced your voice to a continuous, formless sound. When he finally lifted his head, his face was soaked and his eyes were burning brighter than they had been when he first appeared. He was now well fed and his eyes reflected that as they shined brightly in the dark. 

“Two,” he said, voice rough and thick. “Just sum’ to the edge off.” He wiped his jaw with the back of his hand. Looked down at what was on it and then looked at you before licking your residue off his skin. “Now I’m confident I can fuck you without killin’ you.”

He moved your plush body with ease, his hands gripped the generous, soft flesh of your hips and repositioned you in a way that pleased him. You were pliant in a way you couldn’t prevent and couldn’t be embarrassed about because embarrassment required cognitive resources you no longer possessed at the moment. He turned you onto your stomach. Large hands spread across the full width of your hips, lifting, tilting, and settling you at the foot of the bed, knees and upper body braced across the mattress, the full generous curve of your backside presented to the room behind you.

He silently appreciated the fullness of your perfectly round ass and his palm came down before you were fully settled. The spank cracked through the room with a sound that made your whole body lurch forward, the sting blooming hot and immediate, causing you to yelp into the soaked duvet with your hands flying back instinctively. He caught your wrists, both of them, and pressed them into the small of your back.

“Keep ‘em there,” he said. “Move ‘em again an I’ll use a belt on you.”

“A belt? But… you don’t have a…”

His hand landed again, harder, on the same spot. Your teeth snapped shut around the cry you held back.

“I’m a demon, sweetheart. If I can produce two dicks, I can produce a muthafuckin’ belt.” His hand smoothed over the heat his palm had left, squeezing the soft flesh there with the assessing grip of someone checking the quality of something he owned. “Keep. Them. There.”

You learned your lesson and refused to make him repeat himself again as you obediently kept your hands where he wanted them.

“Look up,” he said.

You complied and the floor-length mirror in front of your bed reflected everything. You were spread, flushed, and looked thoroughly undone from just two simple oral climaxes. Every roll, curve, and generous soft inch of you was displayed beautifully under the dim lamplight with no concealment available. The roundness of your belly pressed to the mattress edge. The width of your hips were framed by his enormous hands. The fullness of your thighs trembled. And behind you, rising to his full height with his shadowed wings fanning wide and his horns catching the lamplight, both of his lengths were present and heavy as they gently nudged your aching entrances.

“Look at this ass,” he said, and now there was something in his voice he wasn’t entirely containing, something that crept through the flat, functional register and carried actual wanting in it. He squeezed both handfuls of your plump backside, spreading and releasing, over and over again, the flesh giving like playdough under his grip. “Softest thing I done ever touched. Should’ve had this weeks ago.” His hands continued to knead the generous curve of you, his thumbs pressing into the give of your lower back. “Gonna mark every inch of this pretty brown skin ‘fore I’m done with you. Leave somethin’ behind so ya body ‘member who it belong to now.”

His palm came down again, three times in rapid succession on alternating sides, and your wrists jerked against your own back but you held them in place, tears starting fresh in the corners of your eyes from the compounding sting.

“That’s it,” he said. “You learnin’.”

He looked at your reflection with those burning red eyes. Watched your face while his hands mapped every soft, full inch of your derriere and thighs. “Look at yaself,” he said. “Look at what you is right now. Bent over with that ass arched up for a demon that don’t know what mercy is an’ don’t want to.” His head tilted to the side and smirked. “An you love it. Look at ya’ face.”

Your reflection looked back at you with swollen lips, wet cheeks, and pupils blown wide. He was right. You hated that he was right.

He lowered his head and his teeth found the curve of your shoulder, the bite he left was sharp and deep enough to make you cry out. He sealed his mouth over the mark and sucked until your skin bruised dark beneath his lips, intentionally pressing the evidence of himself into your flesh like a brand. He pulled back to look at what he’d left there in the mirror.

“Mine,” he mumbled, to the mark more than to you.

Then his teeth found the back of your neck and he bit again, harder this time, one hand gripping the back of your head to hold you in place, and the sharp bloom of pain cresting into the pleasure already coursing through your system made your whole body lurch forward into the mattress and pull back against him in the same contradictory motion.

“Got a trail of bitches I done fed on in the Delta,” he said against the nape of your neck, his voice rough and low, the drawl thickening. “Couple more of ‘em up here in this bright ass city.” He pressed his teeth against another patch of skin at your shoulder blade and bit again, not as deep, dragging a sound from you that you felt deep in your bones. “Every single one of ‘em… I was done with after drainin’ ‘em dry.” His hands gripped the full width of your hips and held. “An then there’s you...”

He pressed both of his lengths against you simultaneously, one against your soaked entrance, the second against your chocolate starfish the stimulant had lit up completely, and his hand came around to wrap around your throat from behind, keeping you in place and silently reminding you who was the new owner of your body.

“Look at me in that mirror,” he commanded. “You look away, an I can’t promise I’ll keep bein’ nice.”

Immediately you locked eyes with him in your reflection as he slowly began pushing both of his lengths inside. Just like in your dream, he controlled and thrusted both of his dicks at once and the stretch they left behind was obliterating. His hand at your throat tightened, just enough, just the right amount of pressure that reduced your airflow without completely cutting it off, while making every sensation sharper and more present.  

“So fuckin’ tight… mmm mmm,” he grunted, the control fraying at the edges. “Perfect lil’ fucktoy.” He drove deeper and the muffled cry you produced vibrated against his palm. “Both these tight holes. After three weeks.” His forehead dropped briefly to the back of your shoulder and the sound he made was genuine as he let out an uncontrolled satisfied groan.

For a few precious moments, Stack continued to give you slow and careful strokes until he felt your body loosening up, allowing him to stuff you deeper with dick. The moment your body gave him a silent green light, his hips drew back and snapped forward.

Your cry hit the room and he didn’t muffle it. Let it ring off the walls, watched in the mirror as your whole body absorbed the impact and rippled with it, the tender flesh of your thighs, belly, and backside shuddering with each drive of his hips. He watched that specifically. The way your body moved under him. The way the soft, full weight of you responded to every strike. His teeth found your shoulder again and tore another mark into your skin without breaking rhythm, and the quadruple combination of pain, pleasure, fullness, and his hand at your throat reduced your entire conscious mind to a single sustained frequency.

“Listen to you,” he said, his rhythm building, each stroke harder than the last. “All that smart mouth an now all you can do is cry on my dick like a greedy lil’ whore.” He drove forward and your knees buckled beneath you. His hand tightened on your throat, pulling you back up. “Stay up. I wanna see you take this dick.” He thrusted again. “Look in that fuckin’ mirror. Look!”

Even though it was one of the most difficult requests you were commanded to complete in a long time, you looked. What you saw reflecting back in the mirror was something you had no vocabulary for. The enormous, monstrous, and devastating reality of him behind you, wings spread, eyes burning, two separate places inside you being attended to simultaneously while his hand collared your throat and the mark on your chest glowed steady between your swaying breasts. When your eyes landed on your face you looked back at yourself as if you were seeing your reflection for the first time ever, and maybe you truly were. 

He bit your neck again, on the other side this time, and the groan that tore from him when you seized around both lengths almost made you climax again.

“See it?” His voice was raw, grinding through clenched teeth as he worked into the tight grip of both of you. “See what you is right now? My cocksleeve. My personal filthy lil human fucktoy.” His free hand cracked across your backside again, hard enough to snap your attention and draw a fresh cry. “Answer when ya Master is speakin’ to you!”

“Yes…”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, sir… I-I-I see it…”

“Mmm.” He drove forward and held, grinding deep, both lengths pressing against their respective points of obliteration simultaneously. “An you like what you see. Don’t you?”

You unintentionally stayed silent for a moment too long and his hand at your throat tightened by one fraction.

“Don’t you?”

“Yes,” you said, and the word came out honest and immediate, stripped of everything you had been protecting. “Yes, I like it…”

“That’s my nasty lil’ bitch,” he said. The praise and the degradation arrived tangled together, inseparable, and your body seized around both of him hard enough to make his rhythm stutter. “I felt that. You squeeze me like that again an I’ll edge you for another week.”

Your inner walls loosened immediately.

“Smart girl,” he said.

He moved, and there was no performance left in it, no patience, no management, just the driven rhythm of a starved incubus taking what it had been wanting for a very long time. His hips snapped against the soft give of your ass with a force and sound that left no academic language available. The tentacles repositioned around your breasts, coiling and working your nipples with a relentless suction that pulled continuous sound from your throat above the steady percussion of his hips against yours. A fifth tendril found your swollen clit and circled it in tight, merciless rotations.

Everywhere simultaneously. Nothing was left unattended. At this point your body was nothing more than a complete and total instrument in his hands.

“You gonna cum again,” he demanded. Not a question.

“I… yes… Elias…”

“Say please.”

“P-p-Please…?”

“Please what, cumbucket?”

“Please…” The word broke. “P-Please let me cum…”

His free hand came down across your left asscheek. This time he landed six sharp strikes in succession that had you lurching forward into the mattress, the sting radiating up through your lower body and compounding with everything else until you couldn’t tell pain from pleasure and didn’t want to. “You gon’ beg better than that,” he said.

“Please…” Your voice was openly sobbing now, tears and saliva and all of your composed doctoral-candidate dignity dissolved completely. “P-P-Please, I need it, please… M-Master Elias I can’t… please…”

“Mmm sound like music to my ears.” his voice was low and dark, riddled with lust and domination. “That’s how a slut beg her Master proper.”

No other words were spoken as he drove forward once, deeper than expected, and the tendril at your clit pressed hard, forcing your body to make a decision on your release without waiting to be told.

This third orgasm hit you like a structural failure. You didn't experience a simple wave of pleasure coursing through your veins like before, but instead, you felt a blissful collapse as everything that was compressed and pleading for release finally received its wish. Your whole body convulsed around him in both places, the clench of you rippling around his dicks causing a string of profanity from him that was half prayer and half something else you couldn’t decipher.

“S-Shit…” He drove through it, chasing the feeling, his rhythm losing its pacing and becoming momentarily sloppy. “Demon dick got you feelin’ so good you tryna’ push me out?” He bit the back of your neck again, hard enough to make you see twinkling stars, and the sting made you clench harder. “Do that shit again.”

In all honesty, at this point you couldn’t have stopped even if you wanted to. His hand left your throat and came to your hair instead, gripping the base of it, wrapping once, pulling your head back until your spine curved and you could see the ceiling. The stretch of it combined with everything else made your body shudder uncontrollably under his touch.

“I’m gon’ fill you up,” he said, his voice stripped to its barest register, thick and rough and no longer making any effort at composure. “Every single hole. Tonight.” His hips drove forward and held, both of him buried to their full and impossible depths, your body wrapped tight around everything he was giving it. “An you gon’ take it. Understand me?”

There wasn’t much time to fully break down what Stack meant about filling all your holes before a shadowed tentacle pressed into your gaping mouth. The tentacle was warm and sweet on your tongue and effortlessly slid up and down your esophagus, skillfully avoiding your gag reflex. Just like the previous tentacles, this one released aphrodisiac fluids into your mouth, sharpening every sensation. He set a rhythm then that used extensions of himself simultaneously, in and out, in and out, the synchrony of it was like an orchestra with one conductor and nowhere in your body left untouched.

He continued to pull you up by the hair until you were chest-to-back with him, both of you upright at the foot of the bed, your back against his chest and his hands now settled on the soft rounds of your breasts, squeezing, releasing, and indulging in the generous weight of them. His teeth found the junction of your neck and shoulder and tore another mark into your skin while his hands worked your nipples relentlessly, and when you jerked against the pain he held you tighter, pinning you against the full length of him with one arm banded across your chest.

Your head fell back against his shoulder. Your hands gripped his forearms.

“Look at this,” he muttered into your ear, his voice guttural. “Marked up already. Every inch of this pretty neck an shoulder got my teeth in it.” His eyes found yours in the reflection and held. “That’s so everybody that come after me knows. Don’t matter what you put on, don’t matter how many layers… you walk out of this apartment tomorrow an you wearin’ me.” He rolled his hips forward, deep, and watched your face in the mirror as your mouth continued to deep throat his tentacle. “Mine,” he said, against the freshest mark. “Every filthy inch.”

He released your breast and tipped you forward again, your hands catching the mattress, and his hips resumed with the driven urgency of something approaching its own limit.

“Imma fill this ass first,” he grunted, through his teeth. “Then that slutty lil’ pussy, an finally that smart ass mouth.” He drove forward relentlessly. 

The tentacle in your mouth pressed deep, adjusting to the dimensions of your throat with an intelligence that left no room for resistance, making your eyes water and your fingers curl into the duvet. It continued thrusting at a set rhythm in your throat and you had no choice but to accommodate it, your jaw stretched wide around the girth of it, saliva gathering and spilling freely from the corners of your mouth as it pressed deeper with each stroke.

“Every hole,” Stack rasped behind you, his voice stripped to its barest register. “Every one of ’em mine.”

You didn’t know how it was possible but his strokes became rougher as he thrusted uncontrollably within your tight walls and mouth. The sound your body made around that much fullness was obscene, wet and continuous. Your pussy walls and stretched asshole both, spasmed protest that his hips drove through without acknowledgment.

Then out of nowhere his already large lengths began to grow. It happened slowly enough that your overworked holes registered each degree of it separately, the stretch widening by fractions, your body forced to accommodate more and then more. Both of his dicks expanded inside you at the same time, thickening and lengthening in the way the dreams had shown you was possible and that your waking body was now receiving with an airless, wide-eyed, tear-streaming reality.

“A-A-a-A-a-Ah…” The sound was muffled entirely by the tentacle seated in your throat. Your hands clawed at the duvet. Your thighs tried to kick apart further as if more space might be found somewhere.

“You feelin’ that?” His voice was guttural, barely language. His hands gripped the wide, soft rounds of your hips with bruising force, his fingers pressing deep into the give of your flesh, holding you exactly where he wanted you while he continued to expand inside you. “Feel me gettin’ bigger in both them holes at once, lil’ cumbucket?”

You couldn’t answer. Your throat was thoroughly occupied, the tentacle stroking deeper with each pass, the fluid it kept releasing sending cascading heat down through your chest and belly that mixed with everything else until your body felt like one continuous raw nerve.

“Look at that stomach,” he ordered, as one hand released your hip and pressed flat against your lower belly, and there it was, the faint but undeniable outline of him visible through the plush skin there, the shape of what was inside you pressing against the surface. His palm pressed over it and you felt the pressure from both sides immediately. The sound that came out of you around the tentacle was shameless and continuous. “Feel that? Feel ya’ Master all the way up in this pretty belly?” He pressed his palm firmer, and his voice when he continued had roughened by several degrees. “You was made for this. Built just for this.” He pummeled forward and the pressure beneath his palm intensified. 

The tentacle in your mouth pressed deeper, finding the resistance of your throat and pressing past it in slow, rocking strokes that left your eyes streaming and your lips obscenely stretched. Your face was a mess covered in a mixture of tears, drool, and sweat. 

Stack looked at your face and growled as his dicks twitched inside of you. “Messy lil’ thing,” he mumbled. “Cryin’ an droolin’ like a good filthy cocksleeve.” His hips snapped forward, the force of it knocking your knees further apart. “That’s all you is, you know that? My new personal toy. Found you by accident an…” He drove forward again, harder, and the sentence took a moment to resume. “Decided to keep you. ‘Cause this pussy too good to waste.” He bit your shoulder again, in a place he had not yet marked, and the fresh sting drew a muffled sob from your throat. “Gon’ keep you alive. Long as you keep feedin’ me like this.”

He set his full rhythm then, both hips and tentacle synchronized, the triple occupation of your body moving together in a coordinated assault that left your body unable to prioritize any single input. The tentacle stroked your throat in the same cadence that his hips rocked against your backside, the fullness inside you now specific and pressing against every interior wall you had. The additional tentacles reappeared and latched back onto your body. The two at your nipples worked in pulsing, rhythmic suctions and the one circling your clit flicked back and forth in a clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. You were experiencing nothing but stimulation layered on top of stimulation, wave stacked over wave, and your body’s capacity to separate any single sensation from the mass of it was completely overwhelmed.

“You gon’ cum again,” he rasped. “Right now. With all of me inside you.”

Your muffled sounds around the tentacle were continuous and broken.

“Nod if you hear me.”

You nodded and let your mind continue to get drunk on the pleasure.

His palm pressed harder against your belly, pressing the outline of himself from outside while driving deeper from within, the pressure meeting itself through the soft wall of your skin in a way that made your thighs seize. “You so fuckin’ full. So fuckin’ stuffed like a proper lil’ bitch.” He withdrew both lengths almost entirely and then drove forward in one devastating stroke, burying himself to their hilt with no mercy.

Your final orgasm of the night had you questioning what life was like before this incubus infiltrated it and presented you with sex good enough for you to throw away your morals. Your whole body locked, thighs went rigid, back bowed, hands white-knuckled in the soaked duvet, and then finally your climax erupted through your body so violently and continuously that the tentacle in your mouth muffled a sound that might otherwise have woken the entire apartment building. Your walls convulsed around both lengths in frantic, milking waves, your body trying to process the simultaneous fullness and the crashing release at the same time. 

Stack fucked you through every wave of pleasure. His hips never stilled, never slowed, working through your clenching and convulsing with a focused urgency as he began chasing his own limit. His rhythm became erratic and his breathing audible and ragged over your marked shoulder.

"Keep goin'," he said, through clenched teeth. "Don't stop. Gimme' every drop."

Your body obeyed its Master's command. The orgasm extended past any reasonable duration, sustained by the continued stimulation of the tentacles at your nipples and clit, drawn out past the point of coherence into something that felt less like pleasure and more like dissolution.

He hit his own limit in the middle of it. The sound that tore out of him was nothing like the controlled, drawling entity that had spent the last hour cataloguing your responses with clinical detachment. It was guttural and stripped of every layer he had on, ripped from somewhere as if he was genuinely overwhelmed for the first time in a very long time. His hips stuttered once, twice, losing the rhythm entirely, and then he drove forward with his full weight behind it and buried both lengths to their absolute hilt in a single punishing stroke that knocked you flat into the mattress and pulled a scream into the tentacle still seated in your throat.

He didn’t stop there. His release came in waves of his own and he chased every one of them, hips snapping forward in short, brutal drives that had no patience left in them, just the raw and shaking urgency of something taking what it needed. The first surge of heat inside your chocolate starfish filled you from the inside so completely that you felt it everywhere at once. The second wave inside your core drew another round of undone sounds from his chest, and his hands on the wide rounds of your hips gripped so hard you knew without looking that the bruises would be spectacular in the morning. The third had him pressing his forehead into the back of your shoulder, his breathing audible and wrecked, the drawl completely gone from what little language he had left.

"Shit," he said, against your skin. Then again, lower, more honest, "S-Shit."

The tentacle in your throat released in the same rhythm, filling that space with the same hot, steady pulses, and the combination of all three holes receiving his sticky seed at once reduced your body to a single sustained note of overwhelming fullness. You felt it pooling. Felt it gathering in the tight spaces his lengths had carved out and made their own. Felt it when he rolled his hips forward one final time, grinding himself to full depth with a slow pressure that was less about chasing release and more about making absolutely certain you felt every last pulse of it.

His hands on your hips shook and you felt that. Felt the tremor in the grip of something that didn't tremble, had never trembled, had spent a hundred and thirty-seven years putting its hands on women and leaving with nothing but a full belly and a body behind. You felt it and you filed it away in the part of your brain that was still running the dissertation, the part that took notes even now, even like this, and you said nothing about it because some things were better left unexamined for both of you.

As his body calmed back down, he pressed his forehead deeply into the back of your shoulder. Neither of you made a sound for a long moment beyond breathing. The tentacle in your mouth withdrew from your throat slowly and carefully, and the gasp that followed sounded as if you were on the verge of drowning. Your lungs pulled in air with desperate, greedy pulls. Your jaw was aching and your lips were wet and swollen. You swallowed what was left on your tongue. Shuddered in delight at the taste of him, then swallowed again.

After two long minutes and a few extra spurts of cum, Stack pulled free of both places with the same careful, deliberate slowness, and the sounds your body made at the loss of him were slightly embarrassing. The emptiness that followed was its own specific quality of devastation, your body reaching for fullness that was no longer there, walls fluttering against nothing, the absence amplified and felt everywhere.

He settled you down onto the dry portion of your bed. Both hands, steadying the soft weight of you down with a thoroughness that used every generous inch. Then he sat at the edge of the bed, threw his head back, and looked at the ceiling.

“Damn,” he said, to no one in particular. His voice was wrecked. Rough and stripped and nothing like the controlled, cocky entity that had appeared above you an hour ago.

You lay face-down in the duvet and assessed your situation. You had a dissertation to revise. You had office hours on Tuesday. You were thoroughly and completely destroyed by a century-old Mississippi Delta incubus who had just filled all three of your holes simultaneously and was currently sitting three feet away looking at the ceiling like a man who had also been through something. Your neck and shoulders were marked in at least ten different places, the bruises already surfacing in the dark, already tender when the cooled air of the room touched them.

“Four footnotes,” you said, eventually, into the duvet.

Stack turned his head and analyzed you but stayed silent.

“In the dissertation. I owe four separate footnotes an apology.”

The laugh that came out of him was genuine and startled both of you. It was gone just as fast as it had arrived, like he hadn’t intended to produce it. “Yeah,” he said. “You do.”

The lamp burned low in the corner of your bedroom. The fan turned overhead. The mark on your chest glowed faintly between your breasts, warm and steady in the dark.

Stack was quiet for a moment longer. Then he reached out and pressed his palm flat against your lower back. The heat of his hand spread through tired, overworked muscle the way a brand cooled slowly, staying in the skin long after the source withdrew.

“You gon’ be sore,” he said.

“I’m aware.”

“Gon’ be sore for a few days.”

“Also aware.”

A pause. “I’ll bring you somethin’ for it.”

You lifted your face from the duvet. Just enough to look at him sideways like he lost his mind. “You are an ancient demon entity,” you said, “with no human morals and a documented body count.”

“Mm hm.”

“And you’re going to bring me something for soreness instead of killing me?”

“For a scholar you sure do have a tough time listenin’. I done told you, you my property now,” he said, without a single inflection of irony. “Can’t have you damaged. That’s just maintenance.”

You put your face back in the duvet and sighed. “That is not the wholesome framing you think it is.”

“Wasn’t tryna be wholesome.”

Silence. The city outside went on with itself, thoroughly unaware.

“Elias,” you said.

“Mm?”

“The Moore documentation from 1923.” You turned your head enough to see his profile, the strong jaw, the horns catching the lamplight, the folded wings. “Hattie Price. The one who never wrote anything down.”

His expression shifted slightly. “What ‘bout her?”

“What did she know that Beaumont and Alcott didn’t?”

A long pause.

“She knew,” he said slowly, “that the women who called me did it on purpose.” He looked at the ceiling. “Every one of ‘em. Beaumont thought they was victims… Technically they was since I killed ‘em. Alcott thought they was sinners.” The corner of his mouth moved into a half smile. “Hattie knew they was just women who wanted somethin’ they didn’t have a safe way to want.”

You looked at him. “That’s the revision,” you said quietly.

“Yeah,” he quietly agreed. “That’s the revision.”

The shadow in the corner of your room breathed with its own slow tide. The lamp flickered once and held.

You closed your tired eyes. For the first time in weeks you felt as if you would be able to get a good night's rest. “Don’t let me sleep through my alarm,” you yawned lazily.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Stack.

He was lying. You both knew it. But the hand stayed settled on your lower back, warming the marks he had left into your skin, and the shadow stayed exactly where it was as you drifted off to sleep. 

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