#stack fanfiction

But the truth was, you had tried and failed. You tried so damn hard to pretend like other men could take his place. One of them was a trainer with big arms and perfect teeth. He was the kind of man who liked to call you “ma” and rub on your leg during brunch. Another was a quiet, artistic type who smoked clove cigarettes and read you poetry right before bed. The last one you entertained was rough with his hands but soft with his mouth, always asking if you were okay and checking in. You thought he would be a safe choice, but just like the others he didn’t fix the itch you needed to scratch.

Your free hand reached for your phone without thinking, the motion muscle memory by now. You rolled over onto your side and dragged the screen to life as the artificial glow casted shadows against your face. Your thumb moved in idle circles, tapping through names, numbers, grainy selfies, and old flings you couldn’t even remember fucking. You paused on a few and thought about what it might feel like to call one of them, just to get a little taste, but every memory came back warped and lacking. Their touches had all faded from your skin like chalk in the rain, unlike the ones from the asshole that branded himself on your heart.

A flashback ran through your mind and that’s when your fingers stopped scrolling.

Stack.

His name stared up at you, still saved under that stupid contact name you gave him: ‘Mr. Big Dick Headache.’ You swiped up without meaning to, pulled open the message thread and stared at the last thing he ever sent you—‘Lose my fucking number.’ It still made your stomach twist in knots, because deep down you knew he didn’t mean it. You were well aware that this was how Stack operated. He got off on cutting deep before you could slice him first. But this time around you were tired of pretending like you were the only one bleeding out.

Your thumb hovered over the call button, heart drumming a steady rhythm that went nowhere. You didn’t bother pressing it and instead let out an annoyed sigh when you remembered Stack blocked you two months ago, right after that last argument when you finally told him the truth. Told him you did fuck someone else but it was a one time situation to prove a point. The only reason you did it was because you wanted him to feel, even for a second, the kind of sick betrayal you felt every time he came home late smelling like another woman’s perfume. You didn’t cry when he cussed you out and called you everything but a child of God. Instead you just stood there, naked under his T-shirt, arms crossed, and waiting for him to finish expressing his anger so you guys could have makeup sex like you always did.

But this time, it didn’t happen. When he was done, he stormed out of your apartment and slammed the door shut.  And you hated how that still bothered you.

You hated how Stack got to be angry. How he got to act like you were the problem. Like you had broken the sacred code when he never even gave you a title. No “girlfriend,” no “baby,” not even a damn 24 hour instagram story. But oh, his raggedy ass knew how to claim you when it was convenient. Knew how to hold your face still when he slid inside you and said, “This mine. You hear me? Mine.” Knew how to threaten every man that so much as looked your way and leave marks deep enough to last until the next weekend he decided to come back around.

Even though your relationship with Stack was extremely toxic, you weren’t stupid. You knew what it was. You were the one woman who could take what he dished out. The only one who gave him the fight he craved and the submission he needed. And he was the only man who could tear you down, fuck you back together, and make you feel safe while calling you every disrespectful name in the book.

Still holding your phone, you let the rose toy fall limp between your thighs. You weren’t going to cum from silicone and batteries. Not tonight and probably not tomorrow either. Not until you got what you really needed.

Another sigh slipped past your lips. It was drawn out and bitten at the end like it tasted bitter coming out. You glanced at the time and groaned at it being 12:46 AM. If you left now, traffic would be nonexistent and you could be at his door in less than twenty-five minutes. Your heart was still dragging its feet like a disobedient child being told to go inside after playing too long in the rain. Logic was banging its fists against the locked door of your mind, shouting things about pride, dignity, knowing your worth, blah blah blah. But your body was already making decisions your brain didn’t agree to.

You padded barefoot across the cold floor, stepping over the discarded tank top you tried to wear for comfort. Your legs felt heavy, weighed down by equal parts sexual frustration and adrenaline. You flipped the bathroom light on and caught sight of yourself in the mirror. Your face wore a needy expression that made you whine internally and your chest rose and fell in shallow swells that made your nipples pebble from the draft. You looked used but not in the way you wanted. Not in the way he used to leave you.

You opened the cabinet, brushing past your night cream and sleeping mask as you reached for the little container of body shimmer you hadn’t touched since your last night with him. Stack always liked when your skin glittered, he said it looked like sin pretending to be sugar. You twisted the cap off, dipped two fingers in, and rubbed a little along your collarbones and down the center of your chest. Then more between your thighs.

You took your time dressing up. Half of you did it because you wanted to remind him of what he lost and the other half of you did it because you wanted him to notice you again. To see what he had been missing and hate himself for letting it go so easily. You drenched yourself in his favorite lotion, the one he used to lick off your shoulders with that grin that made you forget every lie he ever told. And when it was time to pick what to wear, you went for the nuclear option. Red lace. 

This particular lace bra left nothing to the imagination and put your hardened nipples on display. It came with a matching thong and a garter belt, that hugged your waist and did absolutely nothing to hide the curve of your ass. You pulled it on and smoothed the material over your hips before stepping into a pair of cherry red stilettos you hated but knew he loved. They were tall and dangerous, the kind of shoes that made you walk with your back arched and your thighs pressed tight together just to keep balance. Every step in them reminded you of how sore he used to leave you. How shaky your knees would get when he forced you to hold yourself open while he watched, arms folded and voice like poison wrapped in domination as he told you how you better not finish without his say-so.

You threw on a black trench coat over everything, buttoned only once at the waist, just enough to protect your false sense of control. The hem flared like a threat every time you moved, brushing the tops of your thighs. You grabbed your keys and didn’t think twice about your reckless decision. You didn’t bother calling a friend to talk through your emotions, you just walked out the door like a woman with no shame left to lose.

The drive to Stack’s home was quiet. Streetlights blurred past in long golden lines, smearing your reflection in the windshield. Your phone sat facedown in the passenger seat, untouched. Right now you didn’t need music or any outside distractions. You just needed to see him. Feel him. Erase the last two months in one filthy, hate-laced night.

You parked across the street like you used to, tires crunching over the gravel. His porch light was off, just like always. Stack was a man of routine. Lights off, cameras on and doors locked. You crept up the path in your heels, trench coat catching in the wind as you breathed hard enough to fog the air while your nerves screamed beneath your skin. Your fingers reached for the potted plant beside the steps, the one that always hid the spare key he swore he would never take back. Except… It wasn’t there anymore.

A frown creased on your forehead as your fingers scraped dirt, then mulch, and finally the hollow space where the key used to be. He actually got rid of it. That trifling son of a—

“The fuck you doin’ out here dressed like that?”

The sound of his voice made you freeze and caused every nerve in your body to flicker. You turned slowly, heartbeat hammering. There he was, the bane of your existence looking annoyingly handsome and sweating through a gray tank top so damp it clung to every carved inch of his torso like a second skin. A black gym bag was slung over one shoulder, the strap dragging across the round curve of his delts. His shorts were loose but not loose enough, there was a very distinct eight inch bulge pressing forward, barely restrained, and you knew he was already more than halfway hard.

He wasn’t even trying to hide it as his eyes roamed and his tongue pressed against his cheek like he was already chewing on the storm you dragged with you. “I said…” He walked up the steps, each footfall heavy. “What in the entire fuck is this?”

You straightened your back, fists curled in the pockets of your coat. “I came to talk.”

“To talk?” he repeated, voice dropping to an octave that wasn’t soft or friendly, just low like fire burning underneath your skin. “You tryin’ my patience, woman. Look at you. Out here in the middle of the night dressed like a five dolla’ whore. You really this desperate?”

You squinted your eyes and clenched your fist tighter inside of your pockets. “You got rid of my key.”

“Damn right I did.”

“So that’s it, huh? All that time we spent together and you treat me like I was just… disposable?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You fucked on another nigga, then you wanna stand on my porch talkin’ ‘bout what I did?”

“You cheated on me first, Elias! You didn’t even claim me and I still let that shit slide! The one time I gave you a taste of your own medicine, you ghosted me like I was a side chick and took away my key like I ain’t never meant shit to you!”

His stare didn’t falter. It was as if what you were saying to him went in one ear and out the other. He didn’t bother engaging in an argument with you or meeting your tantrum with one of his own. Instead he looked at you and the wheels in his head began to turn. A breath slid through his teeth, low and crooked, like he couldn’t believe he was wasting time hearing you speak when your coat was flaring just wide enough to expose a hint of candy red lace underneath.

His eyes sharpened like broken glass and then the smirk came. One side of his mouth pulled back lazily like a lion watching a rabbit try to make demands. “So that’s why you here.” He dragged his eyes back up, voice curling around every syllable. “Lil’ nasty.”

You didn’t even blink when he stepped right up in your space, towering over you, his body hot and damp and stinking of exertion. He still smelled like whatever cologne he wore to the gym. It was expensive, dark, and spicy, but beneath that was him. Pure Stack. Sweat, testosterone, disrespect, and everything your body was already begging to wrap itself around.

He adjusted the strap of the gym bag and pushed past you like you were nothing more than an object in the way. You caught the heat of his bicep as it brushed your shoulder. He stopped at his front door and pulled out his key before turning the knob and opening it. To your surprise he didn’t step inside first. Instead he held the door open with one hand and looked over his shoulder at you. His eyes were darker now… full of mischief and hunger.

His voice dropped lower, forcing his Mississippi accent to hang heavy in the air. “Go ‘head, baby. Crawl.”

You blinked, heart punching your ribs. “What?”

Stack leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, cocked his head, and licked his bottom lip like he was savoring the sight of your confusion. “Since you wanna act like a bitch in heat, tryna hump whoever’ll take you…” He nodded toward the entrance. “Get on ya hands ‘n knees. Crawl inside. Show Daddy you know what you came here for.”

For a split second you didn’t move as your thighs squeezed together and the wetness you thought dried during the drive came back in full force. You swallowed down whatever pride you had left and let it rot where it stood.

The porch light stayed off. The street stayed quiet. The night wrapped around the two of you like it was complicit. For a long moment you just stood there, trench coat fluttering slightly around your legs, heels biting into the concrete, your mind screaming while your body leaned forward a fraction of an inch without permission.

Stack didn’t rush you as he stayed rooted in his spot like this wasn’t the most unholy sight he had seen all week. His eyes stayed locked on you, patient in the most infuriating way, like he already knew exactly how this was going to end and was enjoying watching you fight it.

“Clock tickin’, baby,” he drawled quietly, accent thick and lazy around the edges without softness. “Ain’t got all night. Legs already tired from the gym. Don’t make me wait.”

A lump bobbed in your throat and you hated that your knees trembled. Hated that your stomach flipped in that familiar way that always happened right before he stripped you of control. You peeled your hands out of your coat pockets slowly, fingers curling once at your sides as if bracing for impact. Then you bent.

The concrete was cold when your palms touched it. Rough and unforgiving material scraped faintly against your skin as you lowered yourself all the way down. Your trench coat fell open immediately, exposing lace and bare thigh to the night air. The stilettos made the position awkward and forced your back to arch instinctively just to keep balance while your ass lifted without you meaning to present it.

A sound left Stack’s throat, like a king satisfied with his subject. “Look at you,” he muttered, voice thick with that Delta drag that always made your insides melt and twist at the same time. “Ain’t shit changed. Still real pretty when you remember where you belong.”

Heat flooded your face and humiliation burned sharp and bright, chased immediately by lust so strong it made your fingers curl against the concrete. You crawled forward like he told you to, each movement obedient but shaky, heels wobbling, thighs brushing together, lace stretching tight across your body with every shift.

You crossed the threshold on your hands and knees, palms pressing into cool hardwood now instead of cement. The smell inside his house hit you instantly. Clean laundry, leather, his soap, and the faint metallic tang of bullets and blood that followed him everywhere. It wrapped around you like a memory you couldn’t escape.

Stack shut the door behind you and locked it. You barely had time to process it before his foot nudged your thigh, firm but not violent, just enough pressure to remind you who was setting the pace tonight. The toe of his sneaker tapped just beneath the curve of your plump ass like he was testing how obedient you were really going to be and if you were going to follow through with the filth you came here begging for. Like he wanted to see if the woman who stepped on his heart two months ago with venom in her eyes was really about to crawl back into it with no shame left to burn.

“Don’t stop,” he said behind you, voice thick and quiet, laced with something sticky and mean. “I ain’t tell you to pause.”

Your knees scooted forward across the hardwood, muscles shaking as you forced your hands to move again. You had made it halfway down the hallway, the heels on your feet doing more damage than good as they forced your hips higher and your back deeper into that humiliating arch he liked so much. Your palms were starting to sting and the material between your legs had turned from cute to torturous, soaked and clinging, as it stuck to your folds with every little motion.

Stack didn’t follow right away, you could hear him behind you, the quiet shifting of his weight as he leaned a shoulder against the frame and watched. You didn’t have to look back to know the expression on his face. It was the same one he always wore when he was winning. That infuriating calm, like none of this mattered to him.

Your fingers curled into the floor beneath you and you dragged yourself forward another foot. Then another. The silence pressed in on you and it was ironic how it was so loud it made your ears ring. The only sound was the faint creak of your heels and your own shaky breathing, each exhale catching as the air from the vents skimmed over your exposed skin.

By the time you made it past the hallway and into the wide mouth of the living room, your arms were aching and your pride was somewhere back on the porch. The soft lamp glow from the kitchen spilled across the floor in broken amber lines, casting your body in fractured shadows. You dropped your forehead against the hardwood, not from exhaustion, but to breathe through the heat blooming low in your stomach. It was unbearable now. This was the kind of ache that turned your thoughts into soup, made your jaw tighten and your mouth press shut to keep from saying something you couldn’t take back.

He let you stay there for a long minute. Just kneeling and waiting, trying not to fall apart before he even touched you again. Then the sound of footsteps filled your ears.Each one dragged with intent across the floor, cutting through the silence like the blade he kept hidden under his mattress.

He stepped into the living room behind you and stood there, long enough for the heat of his body to lick across your skin in a wave. You stayed exactly where you were, heart hammering against the floorboards, fingers trembling slightly against the wood.

“Look at you,” he said. “Actin’ like you ain’t just spend two months tryna replace me.”

You didn’t respond but you felt his presence shift behind you as he got closer and lowered himself down. His voice cut through the space between your shoulder blades like a brand being pressed to your spine.

“Raise it up.”

You knew what he meant. Your elbows bent immediately and you lifted your head from the floor before arching even deeper and spreading your knees. You pushed your ass back until your cheeks tilted up toward him, the lace cutting into your hips and barely covering anything now. The coat spilled open completely, bunching beneath your stomach like discarded evidence.

Stack exhaled hard through his nose. “That’s better,” he said, voice darker now, simmering under his accent like a storm behind his teeth. “Don’t come to my house beggin’ unless you prepared to earn it.”

His hand skimmed up the inside of your thigh, fingers tracing the stickiness smeared there, dragging unbothered circles into your skin like he had all night to figure out exactly how wet you were. He paused at the edge of your panties, thumb dipping beneath the elastic, pulling it to the side with a snap that made you gasp.

He stared silently for a moment and you could feel his eyes on your skin. That heavy intense stare he did whenever he was pretending not to be impressed. Pretending you didn’t still mean something to him.

“Damn,” he hummed. “You came here drippin’, huh?”

Your voice was barely a whisper. “I tried… I tried everything else...”

That made him laugh, like full on belly laugh.  “You think I give a fuck ‘bout what you tried?” His fingers slid down the crease of your folds without warning, dragging through your sticky honey like it was something that belonged to him. “You think I care you been ridin’ other dicks that ain’t make you cum?”

You gasped as his fingers brushed your clit, just once, before pulling back.

“I ain’t no substitute,” he said. “I’m the fuckin’ standard.”

You whimpered and your toes curled so hard inside your heels you thought they might snap off. His words landed heavy, settling deep in your chest and lower, right where your desires lived. You swallowed but your throat was dry and your skin buzzed like it was stretched too tight over your bones. He stayed pressed behind you for a heartbeat longer, letting the truth of it sink in and letting you feel how solid he was.

Just when you thought he was going to give you what you wanted, he pulled away. The loss of his heat was brutal. It left you empty and aching, forcing your hips to rock back instinctively like your body hadn’t gotten the memo yet. You sucked in a sharp breath through your nose, fingers curling against the floor as you tried to steady yourself once more.

Stack stepped around you and dropped onto the couch with a careless sprawl, like none of this cost him anything. The cushions dipped under his weight. He leaned back, elbows spread wide, gym clothes still clinging dark and damp to his chest and thighs. Sweat traced slow paths down his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his tank. His shorts sat low on his hips, the outline was still there and unmistakable. His third leg was so thick and heavy even without him touching himself.

He looked at you like you were an unfinished task. “You got two minutes,” he said, checking an invisible watch on his wrist, voice flat and merciless. “Convince me I should fuck you ‘fore I kick you out my house, take me a shower, an take my black ass to bed.”

Your heart slammed hard against your ribs.

“Two minutes,” he repeated. “That’s it.”

You didn’t argue or stall, the second the words left his mouth your body moved like it had been waiting for permission. You pushed up off the floor, heels wobbling and knees screaming as you staggered toward the bathroom. The light flicked on and you grabbed a washcloth from the rack before running it under warm water, and wringing it out fast while your hands shook with urgency and panic and need all tangled together.

You came back into the living room just as fast, cloth in hand, eyes already tracking him like a magnet. You dropped down in front of him, knees hitting the rug, trench coat falling open completely now as you reached for his thigh.

His hand shot out and caught your wrist mid-motion. “Nuh-uh,” he said quietly. “I ain’t tell you to touch me like that.”

Your breath came shallow. “I just wanna—”

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, face close enough now that you could see the glint in his eyes. He was testing how far he could push you tonight since he was still pissed. “Don’t come at me with no damn rag. You know better than that.”

Your stomach flipped. “Stack—”

“Uh-uh.” His thumb pressed into the inside of your wrist. “Use ya mouth. Same way I taught you... If you still remember.”

Heat flooded your face and your thighs squeezed together. Shame and want twisted up so tight it made your head spin. You dropped the washcloth to the floor without another word and settled back onto your knees, posture straightening automatically, shoulders back, and chin lifting just enough to show him you were listening.

He leaned back again, spreading his legs wider this time, gaze never leaving your face. “Clock still tickin’, baby,” he said. “You wastin’ time.”

You scooted forward on your knees, hands resting on his thighs, thumbs brushing over damp fabric. You bowed your head and pressed your lips to his knee first, then higher, kissing the sweat-slick skin through the thin cotton of his shorts. Your mouth worked slow with devotion, tongue tracing the outline of his quad, teeth grazing lightly where you knew he liked it.

A quiet sound slipped out of him before he could stop it. You smiled to yourself and leaned in further, mouth open now, dragging kisses up his thigh and your hands tightening as your confidence crept back in. You hooked your fingers into the waistband of his shorts and paused, looking up at him through your lashes.

“Please,” you said softly. “Let me.”

He stared down at you for a long moment. Then he nodded once. “Go on,” he said. “But don’t rush it. You rush, you done.”

You tugged his shorts down just enough to free him, the weight of him heavy in your hand, hot and already throbbing. You leaned in and dragged your tongue along the underside, slow and thorough, tasting sweat and salt and him. Your mouth closed around the head, lips stretching and tongue pressing flat as you took him in inch by inch, just like he liked.

His hand came up and tangled in your hair immediately, not pulling, just reminding you who’s in charge.  “There you go,” he groaned, voice low and thick. “That’s it... Show me you ain’t forgot.”

You worked him with your mouth, steady and eager, hollowing your cheeks, tongue tracing familiar paths. Your jaw ached but you welcomed it. You wanted to hurt. Wanted to prove something. Your hands slid up his thighs, nails digging in, grounding yourself as you took him deeper.

“Time still runnin’,” he reminded you. “Why shouldn’t I throw you back outside when I finish?”

You pulled back just enough for air, saliva shining on your mouth, your chin damp and eyes sharp when you looked up at him. “Because you like me right here,” you said confidently. “Because this is the only thing that gets you to shut you up.”

His mouth twisted with annoyance and he pushed your head back with two fingers under your chin, not rough, forcing you to look at him. “Nah,” he said. “You know what I think, sweetheart? I think you should go call that nigga you fucked. Bet he’d love to see you on ya knees like this. Go on. Call him.”

The words hit like a splash of cold water and gasoline all at once.

Your eyes flashed with anger. “Fuck you.”

He smiled wider, taunting you. “There it is.”

“You really sittin’ there actin’ brand new,” you shot back, voice rising and heat pouring out of you now that the dam was cracked. “Like you ain’t been runnin’ through bitches since the day I met you. Like I ain’t swallowed your lies and your dick with the same damn mouth.”

His brows lifted slightly amused at your audacity.

“I mirrored you,” you continued, getting to your feet, anger stiffening your spine, heels planting hard against the rug beneath you. “That’s all I did. I mirrored you. And suddenly it’s a problem when it’s not just you doing the dirt.”

He leaned back against the couch, arms stretched out against the cushions. “Difference is,” he said calmly, “I ain’t never pretended I was loyal. You knew the type of man I was ‘fore you got with me.”

“And I ain’t never pretended I was yours,” you fired back. “You don’t get to cheat on me and then act like I committed some unforgivable sin.”

His gaze dragged over you like a blade, not even bothering to hide the contempt crawling up the corners of his mouth. “You never was mine,” he said, voice dipped in venom now. “Just some decent pussy to fuck when I ain’t have nothin’ else to do.”

A breath left your chest like he had punched it out of you. You blinked twice and then your throat worked around the lump swelling up like fury and heartbreak at once. You knew Stack fought dirty. You knew it. And still, every single time somehow, he found new ways to dig beneath the skin and pull the ugliest parts of you right out in the open.

“Wow,” you whispered, voice raw. “That’s how you really feel?”

He tilted his head and smiled like someone who knew they were hurting you and liked how quiet it made you. “If I wanted somethin’ real, I would’ve picked a bitch that didn’t need to fuck somebody else to feel seen.”

You lost your mind for a second as you moved and your palm cracked across his face. Your fingers stung instantly from the hit and his head jerked a little from the impact, but his expression didn’t change. That same crooked grin stayed there, blooming wider now, like you had just handed him a gift.

“Damn,” he breathed, blinking slow. “There she go.”

“Fuck you, Elias,” you hissed.

He didn’t bother answering you with words.  One second you were standing in front of him, chest heaving, eyes burning, and the next his hand shot out and yanked you down onto his lap. You let out a sharp gasp, palms flying to his shoulders, and before you could push off, he twisted his body and pinned you underneath him on the couch. Your back collided with the cushion, coat open wide and legs spread by the force of his hips between yours. The position was too familiar. Too natural. Your body molded to it like it had been waiting.

His hands were on either side of your head, arms caging you in, tank top still sticking to his chest as sweat clung to both of you now. His eyes locked on yours, and his voice dropped to that lethal hush that always came before you lost all control. “I’mma tell you this one time an one time only,” he said, inches from your mouth. “Don’t put ya fuckin’ hands on me.”

You glared up at him, refusing to shrink beneath the weight of him. “You act like I’m supposed to forget all the shit you did and let you talk to me crazy just ‘cause your dick big,” you spat.

He leaned in closer, nose nearly brushing yours. “It ain’t just my dick that got you showin’ up in the middle of the night dressed like a whore.”

Your hand flew up to slap him again, but he caught it mid-air, fingers tightening around your wrist before pushing it back into the cushion above your head. 

“You think I ain’t peep that lil’ lingerie set?” he sneered. “That coat. Them heels. Walkin’ up to my door like a treat I ain’t earned. Baby, I own this pussy. Don’t matter what I say or do, you’ll always come back to me.”

“You don’t own shit!” you shouted, twisting beneath him. “I let you fuck me, that doesn’t mean you get to treat me like this—”

“You begged me,” he growled. “Ain’t no lettin’ me. You need me!”

“You need me!” you screamed back. “You're just too scared to say it!”

That cracked something open as Stack dropped his weight against you in one hard push, hips pressing into yours, and kissed you so fiercely it felt like a car crash. This kiss was lip bruising and tongue invading. The kind of kiss that destroyed logic and rebuilt it in his name. Your free hand clawed at his back. His fingers tangled in your hair, tugging your head back so he could bite your bottom lip, breath mixing with yours, teeth scraping, mouths cussing between kisses.

“Stupid-ass bitch,” he gasped against your throat.

“Piece of shit motherfucker,” you panted, grinding up against him through your soaked panties.

His hips jerked at the friction, letting out a ragged breath that vibrated against the side of your neck. His teeth grazed the skin just below your jaw, not biting yet, just dragging slow like he was thinking about it. Like he wanted to leave a trail of bruises so deep even your next lifetime would know who you belonged to.

Your back arched off the couch, legs spreading wider without permission and heels digging into the cushions for leverage. The trench coat had bunched beneath you, and the lingerie clung to your body like second skin, sheer and stretched and soaked straight through.

Stack pressed his forehead to yours, eyes burning, breaths coming through his nose like he was holding back something ugly and hungry. “You think anybody else could handle this mouth?” he hissed. “You think that nigga you cheated with could deal wit’ you screamin’ an scratchin’ like this?”

“I wasn’t screamin’ for him,” you shot back, voice wrecked. “Wasn’t scratchin’ neither.”

He grinned with cocky triumph. “‘Course you wasn’t,” he said, tongue flicking the corner of his mouth. “Cause ain’t nobody ever fucked you like me.”

You rolled your eyes and scoffed at his arrogance. “Unfortunately.”

His hand shot down between your legs and pressed against the damp fabric of your panties, cupping you so hard your words turned into a stuttering breath.

“Still talkin’ crazy when this pussy cryin’ for me,” he growled. “You lucky I ain’t make you beg out loud in front of my neighbors.”

“Fuck you,” you gasped, hips grinding against his palm now, unable to stop.

He pulled the fabric to the side roughly, letting the elastic snap once before sliding two fingers along your drenched lips. He didn’t push his fingers in, just dragged the tips over your clit in tight, taunting circles.

Your head dropped back, mouth falling open in a silent cry.

“Yeah,” he breathed, watching you fall apart beneath him. “That’s what I thought. Same mouth that said I wasn’t shit… now you beggin’ me to fuck it full.”

You frowned and bit down on his shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark, to leave evidence and remind him that you weren’t just going to take this lying down… except that’s exactly what you were doing. Laid out under him, back pressing deep into the cushions, thighs spread, coat falling off your shoulders, heels still on. He smelled like gym sweat and pride and the type of anger that didn’t go away with time, only with friction.

He laughed quietly in your ear, voice sticky and dangerous. “A temper tantrum ain’t gon’ save you,” he said. “You came here to get used. So I’ma use you.”

“You keep acting like I didn’t let you,” you bit back, legs twitching around his waist. “Like you ever had control without me giving it to you.”

He pulled back just far enough to look at you and stare down at you like he was re-reading a sentence that pissed him off. His lips twitched and he spoke. “You really sittin’ under me talkin’ like you special,” he said, voice drenched in disbelief. “You not. You convenient pussy. Easy an familiar.”

You blinked once, and the sting in your chest made your hands curl into fists. “Right,” you scoffed. “That must be why you nutted inside me four times last time and said you felt like crying when you had to pull out of me.”

His jaw ticked, the muscles underneath his skin showing his visible frustration. 

You smirked. “Oops. Forgot I wasn’t supposed to remember shit like that, huh?”

“Bitch.”

“Asshole.”

“You know what?” he said, shaking his head, the smile on his face as ugly as it was honest. “I don’t even like you.”

“I don’t like you either,” you shot back, dragging your nails up his sides just to feel him twitch. “You think that dick of yours makes up for that trash personality.”

“Maybe it do,” he said, and shoved his hips forward once, hard enough to make the breath leave your lungs in a gasp as your eyes rolled back for a moment. “Cause it got you showin’ up like a damn junkie beggin’ for another hit.”

You sucked in air through your teeth, hands gripping the cushions beneath you, anger and want tangling together until they both combined into needy desire. Your chest rose and fell hard, sweat slicking your skin, hair sticking to your temples.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Elias,” you shot back, voice strained but biting. “You ain’t special either. You are nothing but a placeholder until I find someone better.”

Way to go, that was the straw that finally broke the camels back.

Something in Stack’s expression shifted. It was quieter and dangerous as the amusement drained from his eyes, and replaced itself with something focused and tired of the back-and-forth. He straightened over you, hands braced on either side of your head, studying your face like he was deciding how best to break you without touching you at all.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I’m done arguin’.”

Before you could respond, his hands went to your shoulders and dragged the trench coat down your arms, fabric sliding rough against your heated skin. You barely had time to register the cool air hitting your chest before he yanked the coat free completely and tossed it aside like trash. His attention dropped to the lace beneath, cherry red and vibrant against your skin.

His mouth curled. “Real cute,” he muttered. “Shame you think you get to keep this.” He hooked his fingers into the straps at your shoulders and pulled hard. The lace protested before it stretched and tore with a sharp rip that echoed too loud in the room.

Your breath caught. “Stack—”

“Oops,” he said flatly, not sorry in the slightest. He tore the rest away in quick, ruthless motions, fabric shredding under his hands until there was nothing left but scraps clinging uselessly to your hips. “Ain’t nobody else need to see you in this.”

Heat flared through you, equal parts fury and arousal. “You don’t get to decide that!”

He leaned down, face close enough that his nose brushed yours, eyes dark and unblinking. “Just did. Don’t like it, then leave.”

Then he pushed your knees apart wider and slid down the couch, grip firm on your thighs as he repositioned you exactly how he wanted. Your back arched instinctively, skin buzzing and legs trembling as he settled between them. The sight of him there, his broad shoulders filling the space, hands steady, and jaw set made your stomach twist tight.

He looked up at you once more. “Don’t make a fuckin’ sound,” he said quietly, accent thickening, voice sharp with warning. “Tired of hearin’ that mouth.”

You let out a breathless laugh. “You know that I can’t—”

His mouth met you without mercy. You didn’t even get to finish the sentence before his tongue pressed flat against you, licking up the mess you had made just by thinking about him. The laughter on your tongue died instantly, strangled into silence as your back twisted off the couch, hands scrambling to grip anything that would hold you down.

He didn’t ease into eating you out. There was no building or softness, just Stack’s reckless mouth moving like he had been waiting two months to remind you who the fuck you belonged to. Every lick felt personal and every swirl of his tongue was laced with malice and memory.

And then a sound that was small, high and involuntary broke loose from your throat. His head lifted and one eyebrow arched. You barely had time to blink before his palm came down hard on the inside of your thigh. The slap echoed like a gunshot in the room, heat blossoming where his hand struck.

You cried out in surprise, but quickly slapped your own hand over your mouth.

“Thought I said quiet,” he said without lifting his voice. “You act like you don’t remember how to fuckin’ listen.”

Then he dove back in, tongue flicking fast against your clit, lips sealing around it, sucking once more and just when you felt another moan building, another slap landed on the other thigh. This one was harder and stinged with correction. 

You jerked under him and whined. “Stack—”

Smack.

“You don’t follow my rules, you get punished,” he said against your flesh. “Ain’t nothin’ changed.”

You tried again and bit down on your knuckle. You squeezed your eyes shut and dug your heels into the couch cushion before lifting your hips as if that might help, as if meeting his mouth halfway would take the edge off. But Stack wasn’t letting up. His tongue flicked with devastating accuracy, and just when you thought he might give you a break—smack. Another hit. This time lower, right under the curve of your ass.

You whimpered, unable to hold it in.

“Every time you make a sound, sweetheart,” he said without pausing, “I’mma hit you harder.”

Another moan, this one sharper.

Smack.

Your thighs were shaking now, red and stinging, your body caught somewhere between unbearable pleasure and brutal discipline. His hands gripped your hips, pulling you open wider, mouth locked in place like he had nowhere else to be but right there, destroying you slowly, thoroughly, deliberately.

This went on for three minutes and then he just abruptly stopped. The sudden absence hit harder than any slap. Your hips jerked, chasing what disappeared, a broken sound spilling out before you could trap it.

Stack lifted his head and stared at you, mouth slick, eyes flat. “Still loud,” he said. Not angry. Just done. “Guess I gotta give you somethin’ worth all that noise.”

He rose to his feet without another word and left the living room.

You laid on his couch exposed, legs trembling, chest heaving, and skin still burning from where he had hit you. The quiet was unbearable and every second that passed amplified how you could feel your body screaming for contact while your mind spun in frantic circles, wondering what he was about to do.

You barely had time to gather yourself before he came back. Stack re-entered the room already stripping his soaked shirt over his head, fabric peeling off his skin and tossed aside carelessly. Sweat glistened across his chest and shoulders, muscles flexing as he rolled his neck once, twice, like he was resetting himself. Like he was preparing for work.

In his hand was a small black bullet vibrator. Your breath stuttered and he didn’t look at you right away. Instead, he bent down and picked up your phone from where it had slid onto the floor earlier. His thumb flicked the screen awake. One glance at the contact list. One name.

He smirked.

“Damn,” he muttered. “You really do keep trophies.”

“Stack,” you warned weakly.

He ignored you as he tapped the screen. The FaceTime ring tone filled the room, sharp and intrusive, bouncing off the walls. Your stomach dropped and the screen lit up with Calling…

He set the phone on the coffee table, angled just right so you could see it, so you could hear it. Then he crouched between your legs again, calm as an undisturbed river.

“Relax,” he said quietly. “The nigga ain’t answer yet.”

The ringing continued and your heart pounded so hard it made you feel light headed.

“Hang it up before he answers,” you snapped. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He leaned in close, voice low and even. “Teachin’ you how to shut up.”

Your skin crawled in anticipation, heat crawled up your neck, and your chest rose unevenly as you tried to keep still beneath the weight of that voice… That intent. One more ring came through the speaker of your phone before that dreaded FaceTime Connected sound blasted loudly. You gulped as the screen went to a live, front-facing video of the man you cheated on Stack with. 

His room was half-lit and he was sitting shirtless on a couch, blinking in confusion as he stared into the camera. “Hello…?” he said, rubbing his face. “Yo—who the fuck—?”

Stack didn’t even look up from between your thighs. “Bitch-ass nigga,” he said dryly, thumb still resting on the power button of the vibrator but not moving it yet. “What’s good?”

The man’s face twisted instantly. “Huh? Who the fuck is this? Where my girl at?”

You tried to sit up, panic flooding your body in waves, but Stack’s hand landed on your stomach, pushing you back into the couch like your body belonged to the furniture.

“She busy,” Stack said casually. “But I figured since you was so damn memorable, I’d let you watch how it’s really done.”

“Stack,” you hissed through gritted teeth, trying to grab the phone. “Turn that shit off—”

Stack pressed the vibrator directly onto your clit and your whole body bucked. The sound that flew from your mouth wasn’t human.

“That’s my woman!” your ex shouted, his jaw tightening on the screen. “You really went back to that fuck nigga? After everything he did? Have you lost your mind?”

Stack’s laugh rang through his living room like an angelic melody.  “Nah,” he said, keeping pressure on the toy with his palm as he looked directly into your pleading eyes. “You must’ve lost yours thinkin’ she actually belonged to you.”

You weakly slapped him on the chest. “E-Elias! H-Hang up!”

He shoved your thigh wider, eyes narrowing, tone turning darker.  “Nah,” he growled. “You wanted to be mouthy tonight. This the price.”

“Aye, fuck you, bruh,” the ex barked, voice rising now. “You outta pocket. Who the fuck even are you?”

“I’m the nigga that you’ll never be,” Stack fired back. “I’m the reason she won’t be answering ya texts anymore. I’m the reason she drippin’ all over my couch right now.”

“You sound real comfortable behind a screen, bitch,” the man snapped.

Stack finally looked up, sweat glistening across his chest, muscles flexing as he tightened his hold on the toy that was now pulsing rhythmically against your most sensitive spot. “I am comfortable,” he said into the screen, his voice calm and cruel, Southern syllables slithering out like a threat made of silk and blood. “I’m sittin’ on my own couch, shirt off, dick hard, while my bitch squirmin’ under me.”

You let out a strangled moan, hips bucking against the toy, one hand grasping at the armrest above your head while the other curled uselessly at your side. The vibrator buzzed in relentless, brutal circles against your clit, sending fresh waves of heat crashing down your spine like tidal water laced with shame.

Stack didn’t spare you another glance. His eyes were locked on the screen. The tight smirk on his lips made it clear, he wasn’t just speaking to your ex. He was performing. Declaring. Marking his territory with his chest out and his toy buried between your trembling thighs.

“You ever see her like this?” Stack asked, brows raised, tone sharp and casual like he was talking over a card game. “Nah. You ain’t never earned this.”

“Stack—fuck—I can’t—” your voice cracked, high and shuddering.

He looked down at you then and he saw everything. The tremble in your lip, the glassiness in your eyes, the way your thighs jerked with every pass of the toy, and how your back lifted off the couch like your body was seconds from coming completely undone. You were close, too close. Closer than he wanted anyone else to see you. 

Stack’s jaw ticked once, then he reached forward and ended the call.

Click.

The screen went black and he tossed the phone behind him like it wasn’t worth another second of his attention before looking back down at you. His woman. Spread out beneath him completely ruined and needy without him fucking you yet. On the edge of something too raw for pride to interrupt.

“Ion’ share,” he said simply, voice low, dragging and thick with possession. “Not even that part.”

Your hips jerked again, thighs trembling as you choked on another moan, but he didn’t let up. He pressed the toy harder on your clit, the rhythm brutal, your orgasm so close it felt like static in your veins.

“Look at me,” he commanded.

You tried but you couldn’t stop your eyelids from fluttering. The pleasure was pulling you under too fast, forcing your mouth to hang open on a sound you couldn’t hold back.

“Look. At. Me.”

Finally your eyes met his and your body shattered as your climax hit like a car crash. Your legs clamped around his wrist, hips bucking, every muscle locking and twitching as the orgasm tore through you. You screamed without sound, hands digging into the cushions like you were trying not to disappear through the floor. Your whole body convulsed under his hand, thighs shaking violently, tears slipping down your cheeks as you rode it out in full view of the only man who could ever drag something like this out of you.

Stack just watched silently. His lips twitched into a smirk as you finally collapsed with your chest heaving like you had just run a mile. “That’s what the fuck I thought,” he said, pulling the toy back and tossing it to the floor like he was done with his appetizer and finally ready for the main meal.

You blinked up at him, dazed with your mascara streaked and body wrecked. But still there was that look in your eye. A bratty little spark that never died.

Stack saw it and his smirk deepened. He hovered over you, his breath heavy and hot as it poured down across your flushed face. His bare chest gleamed in the dim light, the scent of sweat and satisfaction clinging to his skin like warpaint. His forearms caged your head back in place, and he was far from finished.

You could feel his desire for you pressing right against your inner thigh. His dick jumped with excitement as his swollen tip left streaks of precum across your skin. Every inch of him hovered above you, commanding and still, like a beast watching his prey blink back into focus after the first strike.

“You look like you seen a ghost,” he said quietly, one brow raising. “That lil’ nut took it outta you?”

You swallowed. “You act like you didn’t just try to kill me.”

He leaned down, mouth brushing your ear, and dragged his words across your skin like teeth. “That nigga still breathin’. I was bein’ nice.”

Your eyes shut closed, breath catching as his hips pressed lower, the weight of him grinding against your bare center.

“But since you still wanna act like a mouthy lil’ bitch,” he continued, voice calm and sharp, “we can do this the other way.” Your thighs squeezed reflexively. He chuckled, deep and full of filth. “Ahh… there she go. Actin’ like she don’t love when I talk to her like this.”

You wanted to tell him to shut up. You wanted to say something mean and nasty, just to keep up the tension, just to keep the game going. But your mouth wouldn’t cooperate. Your brain was still recovering from the overload he gave you. All you could do was lie there, stripped bare of pride, heart hammering, and thighs still shaking in that aftershock rhythm.

He bit down on his bottom lip as his hands tugged your ruined panties down the rest of the way and off your ankles. His fingers trailed down the curves of your thighs with a sick kind of admiration, like he was preparing a meal he had waited too long to devour. His gaze dipped down between your legs, and he let out a low breath.

“Still twitchin’,” he groaned. “You that fucked up already? Two months without Daddy got you this sensitive?”

You managed a weak, bratty laugh. “Please. I’m just getting warmed up.”

He looked at you then and that trademark Stack expression spread across his lips like a storm: proud, annoyed, aroused, and possessive.

“Cute,” he said. “You still talkin’ like you in control.”

He spit into his hand before palming his dick and giving it a few tugs. Veins wrapping down his brown shaft like he was built to destroy and nothing else. He had the kind of dick that made your mouth water and your eyes widen. The kind of dick that made your thighs instinctively shift apart to make room even when your body was already shaking from everything he had just done.

“Turn over,” he ordered. “Face in the cushion. Ass up.”

You unintentionally hesitated and Stack was on you in an instant, flipping your body like you weighed nothing. He grabbed your hips and dragged them up until your knees sank into the couch and your ass arched high, back bowed, face buried in the cushion like a punishment.

“Yeah,” he praised, voice thick now, tone changing. “This how I like it. This how I missed it.”

His hands roamed down your back like they were retracing territory that had been stolen from him. His palms dragged along the curve of your spine, heat radiating through his fingers like fire looking for somewhere to catch. He gripped your waist again tighter this time before his thumbs pressed into the dips just above your ass as if molding you into the position he wanted, not what you thought you could give.

You were open and vulnerable in a way that should’ve made you ashamed, but all it did was make your walls flutter around nothing, already begging for him. Stack’s length slid between your swollen lips, heavy and dragging through the mess he just made, tip nudging your entrance without going in. And he just held it there as he let his possessiveness fester.

You could feel it before he said anything. How it boiled in his skin, pulsing behind his grip. That jealousy he never liked to admit. That quiet rage tucked beneath the bravado. It was all there, swelling under the surface, waiting for an excuse to come out and you were the perfect excuse.

His voice dropped lower and rougher. “You gave him this?” he asked, hips pressing forward just enough for the head to breach, then pull back again.

You opened your mouth to speak and swallowed the words back down.

“You let him touch what I broke in?”

You swallowed hard, face still buried in the cushion. “It wasn’t like that—”

“Don’t lie to me.” His hand came down hard on your tender ass, palm stinging against your skin, the sound loud and final. You jolted beneath him, a gasp falling out of your mouth before you could catch it.

Stack’s hand stayed there, firm and heavy like a silent warning. “You got me fucked up thinkin’ I’m just another nigga in rotation,” he said, grinding the tip against your entrance. “This mine. You don’t get to hand this shit out like clearance candy.”

Your hips jerked back on instinct, chasing the contact, the friction lighting you up in a way that made your thoughts scatter. The denial sat sharp in your chest, equal parts anger and need, and it made your voice come out reckless. “You don’t get to say that,” you shot back, breath uneven and fingers bunching the cushion beneath your cheek. “You don’t get to claim shit when you disappear whenever it suits you.”

His grip tightened, it was hard enough to make your body register it as a command. He leaned in, chest pressing along your spine and heat seeping through you like a warning flare. “I get to say and do whatever I want,” he replied, accent thickening, words cruel and dangerous. “You still spreadin’ yourself open for me.”

You sucked in a sharp breath as he rolled his hips again, the head of him dragging through you with maddening patience. It felt like he was tracing your outline, memorizing every reaction and cataloging every twitch like proof.

“See that?” he continued, voice low near your ear. “That little shake. That’s you rememberin’.”

“I remember you lying,” you snapped, still bratting, still biting even as your knees trembled. “I remember you saying you’d be back and not showing up.”

His hand slid from your ass to your hip, fingers digging in, holding you steady. “An I remember you answerin’ texts you shouldn’t have,” he countered. “I remember you lettin’ another nigga think he had access.”

The tip pressed in a fraction, then retreated. Again. Again. Each time closer, each time crueler.

“You still wanna argue?” he asked softly. “We can argue like this all night, baby.”

Stack nudged forward just enough to make you gasp, not enough to satisfy, then pulled back again, leaving you empty and aching. Your thighs shook. A sound threatened to escape, and you bit it back, teeth sinking into the cushion. A quiet sound slid out of his chest as his hand left your hip and slipped beneath your thighs, fingers spreading you wider, lifting just enough to change the angle and steal what little balance you had left. The shift sent a sharp jolt through you, heat pooling fast and heavy. His thumb brushed your bundle of nerves once, feather‑light, like an accident he planned from the start.

“There it is,” he said, voice calm, almost patient. “That little twitch. You still wanna talk?”

You didn’t want to give Stack the satisfaction of giving up so easily as your mouth opened with something sharp lined up, something mean and clever, something that would keep the fight alive. Instead, another broken sound slipped out, thin and helpless, and you hated yourself for it.

He smiled without looking at your face. His thumb circled your clit again, firmer now, tracing slow, taunting paths that made your toes curl and your back bow deeper. You could feel him pressing into you at the same time, the head of him thick and insistent, slicker now. The heat of it pulsed against your inner walls, and you felt the telltale warmth spread where he leaked into you, sticky and undeniable.

“I know you feel that,” he taunted, almost conversational. “That’s from me bein’ backed up an irritated.”

Your breath came uneven, chest dragging air like it wasn’t enough. “You always gotta make everything a fight.”

He laughed quietly. “You the one who won’t shut up.”

His thumb pressed harder, just enough pressure to make you see stars. You tried to pull away, more reflex than plan, and his grip tightened instantly, fingers locking you in place.

“Uh‑uh,” he warned. “Stay.”

Your hips betrayed you, rocking back into his hand, chasing the contact even as your pride burned hot. He felt that too as he leaned in closer, chest brushing your back, voice dropping lower and heavier.

“Finish sayin’ whatever bullshit you had ready so I can finally fuck you proper,” he said. “Go on. Get it out.”

“I hate how you do this,” you managed, words breaking apart. “You act like you don’t care and then—then you—”

His thumb swept just right, and the sentence died in your throat. “An then I what? Huh? What does Daddy do to you?” he prompted, pressing into you again, letting more of that heat spill inside. You felt it this time, unmistakable, his need leaking into you as much as yours was pulling him in.

“And then you make me forget why I’m mad,” you admitted, breathless and angry at yourself for it.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

His hand moved with more purpose now, thumb working steady, fingers lifting your thighs higher to keep you open, exposed. He didn’t rush you. He didn’t let you drift. He kept you right there, suspended, arguing with him in half‑sentences and broken sounds while your body told the truth for you. The truth was, despite everything, you were his. You hated him. You wanted him. You were brattier than he could stand, and he was meaner than you could handle, and yet, here you were, strung out on his touch.

Stack kept his hand between your thighs until your legs trembled, until your head dropped forward, until the only sound leaving your lips was a strangled whimper. Then when you were back on the edge of no return, he pulled his hand away, and slammed himself into you with no warning.

You sobbed with delight from the sudden fullness, your hands clawing for anything to steady you as he bottomed out inside you, all that leaked frustration now buried deep in your walls, throbbing with each brutal inch.

His breath left him in a grunt. “Fuck.” All the anger, all the months of silence, the imagined visions of you with someone else, the ache of missing you but being too damn prideful to admit it… it all hit at once.

Stack gripped your hips like they were handles and dragged you back onto his dick with vicious, hungry strokes. His rhythm was punishing, each thrust landing like he was carving his name into you from the inside.

“You don’t get to leave me like that,” he growled, sweat rolling down his spine, skin slapping yours in loud, wet echoes that filled the room. “You don’t get to walk out, give this shit to somebody else, then come back actin’ like I owe you a soft welcome.”

You cried out beneath him, head dropping, arms collapsing beneath you.

“Couldn’t even breathe without thinkin’ about this pussy,” he spat, pace never slowing, dick punching into you with a rhythm that forced your body to comply. “Had me losin’ sleep. Dreamin’ ‘bout you. Wakin’ up hard, mad as hell I ain’t hate you enough to let it go.”

Your only answer was a cry that was raw and desperate and torn from your chest as his grip tightened and his body crowded yours. The couch groaned beneath you both, cushions dipping with every drive of his hips, the room filling with the sound of skin meeting skin and the rough drag of breath you couldn’t steady. Your thoughts scattered. Every time you tried to form a word, he stole it back with another thrust, deeper, firmer, and claiming space inside you like he was filling the silence he had carried for months.

He leaned in, chest pressed to your back, sweat slicking you together. His forearm slid beneath your thighs again, lifting, changing the angle, making everything feel sharper and closer all at once. The pressure bloomed, hot and demanding, and you felt how wet you were around him, how you took him without hesitation despite every argument you had thrown like knives.

“Say somethin’,” he urged, voice rough at your ear. “Say you hear me.”

“I hear you,” you managed, words breaking apart as your hips betrayed you, pushing back to meet him. “I hear all of it.”

He answered by setting a pace that made your legs tremble. His hand slid from your hip to your stomach, fingers spreading, holding you still when your body tried to run ahead of him. Then everything shifted as he hauled you up and over in one fluid motion, strength effortless, like he had been waiting for this angle the whole damn time. Your back hit the couch cushions again, breath spilling out of you as he folded you in on yourself, thighs pressed tight to your chest, knees hooked over his shoulders. Your body bent and open, nowhere to hide, nowhere to look but straight at him.

“Eyes on me,” he said, already there, already lined up.

His legs planted wide on either side of the couch, muscles locked, stance solid as he drove back into you. The change left you breathless and getting fucked like this felt different. Every thrust felt deeper and louder in your body. Every stroke pushed something loose inside you. Every pullback made your toes curl as he came right back in again, hammering with intent and with all that pent‑up frustration he had been carrying since you guys broke up.

You grabbed at his forearms, fingers digging in, nails leaving marks you would see tomorrow and pretend not to remember.

“Look at you,” he said, breath heavy now, eyes dark and fixed on your face. “Tryna argue with me when this how you fold.”

“I hate you,” you said, but it came out thin, breathless, wrecked by the way he filled you.

He smiled and let out a chuckle. “Say it with your eyes,” he told you, thrusting harder, hips snapping forward until the couch thudded against the wall. “Say you ain’t been thinkin’ ‘bout this every night.”

Your gaze locked with his, pupils blown, jaw tight as another wave rolled through you. You nodded once, sharp and helpless.

“Good,” he said. “Don’t lie to me now.”

His grip shifted, hands sliding under your thighs, lifting you higher, folding you tighter until the stretch made your muscles burn. His legs braced, powerful, keeping him steady as he drove into you again and again, each stroke landing right where you were weakest.

The couch creaked under both of you, the rhythm harsh and unforgiving. You couldn’t catch your breath and your body was coiled so tight it felt like you were unraveling one nerve at a time. Stack didn’t let up. He didn’t blink. Didn’t soften. His eyes tracked every tremor, every twitch, like he was reading a code only your body could write. But then a wave of tightness squeezed his dick and he paused for just a second as his brows lifted.

“You tryna cum again?” he asked, words like smoke curling off a live wire. “Hmm? This dick got you feelin’ good?”

You whined and nodded as your thighs shook and clit throbbed in time with your heartbeat. He smirked and then spit. Thick and hot, the trail of it landing right between where you were joined. It dripped down, sticky and warm, and made your whole body jolt.

“Ight,” he said, the edge in his voice cutting deep. “I been doin’ all the work. Rub it out. Right now. Make a mess of that pussy.”

Your hand trembled as you reached down, fingers slipping between your folds, circling that swollen bundle like it owed you something. It was too much to handle with his dick buried inside of you, the way he held you there, stuffed full and stretched wide, and the filthy slick sound of everything between you amplified by spit and slick and need.

Your other hand reached out on instinct, bracing against the only thing that felt real, Stack’s lower stomach, firm and warm, rippling under your palm.

“Uh uh,” he warned, eyes narrowing with something darker. “Move that hand.”

You froze.

“Get that hand off my stomach an keep rubbin’ that clit.”

“I—I just needed—”

“You need to follow directions,” he cut in, voice sharp enough to leave marks. “Wanna cum so bad, but can’t even keep ya hands to yourself.”

You whimpered again, dragging your hand back to your side, focus breaking from the ache to the heat in his tone. But you didn’t stop touching yourself. You couldn’t. The pressure was too much.

“Daddy,” you whispered, desperate now, hoping the nickname might soften something, anything. “Please, Daddy—”

His face didn’t move. He didn’t show not even a flicker of sympathy. His jaw stayed tight, eyes fixed on your face like he saw through the plea and down into the part of you that was trying to manipulate him. “Oh now I’m Daddy again?” he asked, not amused. “You only call me that when you want somethin’.”

Stack held you there, folded and full, letting the words hang heavy while your body kept betraying you. You could feel it happening anyway, the way you clenched around him, the way your clit twitched beneath your fingers like it had a mind of its own. Heat spread and pooled, slick gathering faster than you could control. It leaked down, warm and shameless, making a soft sound every time he pressed deeper.

“There it is,” he said, voice cutting, eyes tracking the way your body responded. “Be a perfect lil’ slut an make a mess on me.” 

You bit down hard on your bottom lip, breath coming apart. “I—I—I—”

“Don’t tell me you can’t,” he cut in, rolling his hips just enough to make you gasp. “I can feel you. You grippin’ me like you scared I’m gon’ leave.”

He leaned in closer, one hand braced by your shoulder, the other steadying your thigh so you couldn’t close. His gaze never left your face as he spoke, like he wanted you to hear every word right as it landed. “Go on,” he taunted softly. “Rub it just like that. Small circles. Squeeze that pussy an cum for me.”

Your fingers obeyed, trembling, slick sounds filling the space between your bodies. The sensation climbed sharp and bright, making your toes curl and your back bow tighter. You could feel yourself leaking more now, heat spilling as the pressure built.

“That’s it,” he said. “See how wet you get when you stop arguin’?”

Your mouth opened on a sound you couldn’t stop, eyes squeezing shut as your hips jerked.

“Eyes open,” he ordered, tightening his grip. “I wanna see it.”

You forced them open, meeting his stare just as your body tipped closer to the edge. The look in his eyes was dark and intent, not cruel now, just focused, like he was guiding you through something inevitable.

“You right there,” he continued, voice steady, almost instructional. “That shake in your legs? That’s it comin’ on. Don’t fight it.”

Your breathing turned uneven, chest rising fast. “Stack, E-Elias— D-Daddy I—”

“Let it happen,” he said. “You leakin’ like that ‘cause you want it. ‘Cause ya body know where it belong.”

Stack watched you the whole time. He watched the way your brows knit, the way your mouth tried to hold back sound and failed, the way your thighs quivered against his forearms as he kept you folded and open.

“Mmmhmm,” he murmured, eyes narrowing as another shudder rolled through you. “There it is...”

You tried to speak again and couldn’t. Your fingers slick and shining kept moving just like he told you, small circles that tightened the pressure until it felt like your body was winding itself into a knot. The couch creaked as he drove in again, not harder, just deeper, making the fullness bloom and hold.

“Good,” he said, catching the hitch in your breath before it broke. “Stay with it. Don’t pull away now.”

Your head fell back against the cushion, eyes glassy as the heat climbed and hovered, bright and unbearable. The leaking turned into a steady spill, warmth spreading as your muscles constricted and grabbed without permission.

“That’s it,” he coached, tone unwavering. “You right on top of it. You ain’t gotta say nothin’. Just cum for me.”

The last sentence tipped you over. Your body seized and shook, legs drawing tight as the release tore through you in long, rolling waves. A sound finally escaped, broken and honest, as you rode it out, breath stuttering while he held you exactly where you were, steady and present through every tremor.

Stack stayed buried deep, letting you finish on him, letting your body milk every last aftershock without interruption. He watched your face as it happened, watched the way your jaw slackened and your eyes glazed, watched the way your fingers curled uselessly at his forearms like you needed something solid to keep from floating away.

When the shaking eased and your breath finally found a rhythm again, he shifted and the change pulled a startled sound from you, oversensitive and spent, and that’s when he finally let himself react. A low groan rolled out of his chest, rough and dragged straight from his gut as hips started to move again with intent that had nothing left to prove to you and everything to prove to himself.

“Ight,” he said, voice strained now, edges fraying. “My turn.”

He adjusted his stance, legs planting wider, muscles tightening as he set a pace meant for him. Each thrust was full and claiming, the kind that dragged sensation from your spine down to your toes even though you were already wrung out. You felt how hard he was, how slick he had made you both, how his control shifted from instruction to hunger.

His hand slid to your hip, fingers digging in possessively. “Look at you,” he taunted. “Two times an you still takin’ me like you ain’t tired.”

You tried to answer and couldn’t. Your body answered for you, soft and open and still welcoming every drive.

“That’s what get me,” he went on, breath uneven, jaw tight. “You talk all that shit but ain’t nobody else gettin’ this. Ain’t nobody else see you like this an live to tell it.”

His rhythm grew heavier, more insistent, the couch rocking beneath you both. He leaned in, forehead brushing yours, eyes locked on your face like he needed to see exactly who he was finishing with.

“You mine tonight,” he said, ego flaring as the pressure built. “Say it.”

You could barely form a thought, let alone a word, but that didn’t stop your lips from parting, voice raw and sweet from overuse. “I’m yours.”

That was all Stack needed to hear before a growl tore from his throat like it had been caged too long. His grip shifted, possessive hands dragging your hips down to meet every bruising thrust. The sound of your skin meeting and the sloshing of your wetness filled the room but he didn’t let up. He fucked you like it was the last time. Like someone might steal you if he didn’t leave his mark in every damn place they could reach. Like he had been starving for months and your body was the only meal worth waiting for.

“That’s right,” he gritted out, voice rough and strangled now. “Say it again. Say who this pussy belong to.”

You tried to speak again but all you managed was a broken moan and his name on a breath that sounded more like worship than surrender. Stack leaned over you, sweat dripping down the angle of his neck. His chest heaved, body strung tight with all that possessive rage simmering just beneath his skin.

He spat on his fingers before sliding them on your overworked clit again while he kept pounding into you, each stroke hitting deeper than the last, chasing his own high now with no regard for mercy.

“Say it.”

“Y-you—E-Elias, it’s yours—it’s always been—”

“Damn right,” he snapped, body trembling now. “Ain’t no other motherfucker ever gonna touch what’s mine. Not ever again!”

And then you felt it, that slight hitch in his movement, that drop in control, and that telltale sign that he was seconds away from losing every ounce of composure he had left.

Your legs gave out as you had finally reached your own limit for the third time tonight and were done fighting it. “D-DADDY—”

“I know,” he breathed, voice breaking. “I know, baby.”

He slammed into you one last time and stayed there, everything in him going rigid as he spilled inside you, warmth flooding your insides in waves. His jaw tensed, teeth bared, and his breathing became heavy as he heaved through flared nostrils while his orgasm tore through him. And he stayed buried in your pussy like it was his second home. Arms braced around your trembling thighs, eyes locked to yours even as they narrowed from the intensity.

Stack stayed buried deep, twitching inside you, body refusing to move even after the worst of it had passed. His breath came ragged now, chest rising like bellows, nostrils wide, jaw still locked like he didn’t trust what might come out if he opened his mouth too soon. Sweat beaded at his temples, rolled down the line of his neck, dripping onto your collarbone like proof that he had left every drop of himself inside you.

He moved, barely, but just enough to lean forward and press a kiss to your forehead, and even that felt like a threat wrapped in tenderness. His weight dipped, elbows framing your head as his palms flattened beside your shoulders. His hips jerked once, deep and involuntary, and it pulled a gasp from both of you. Yours was softer, stunned; his like he was mad sex with you still felt this good even after the fight, even after the mess.

Your fingers moved instinctively, trying to remold his damp waves back into place, trying to soften him, but he didn’t want soft from you. Not yet.

“Uh-uh,” he warned, grabbing your wrist and pinning it down to the cushion beside your head. “You don’t get to touch me all sweet and pretend like you ain’t start this shit.”

You squinted your eyes ready to rebuttal his claims, but he tilted his head, eyes sharp, daring you to test him again. “I said you mine,” he breathed. “You’ve been claimed. Ain’t no goin’ back. Not after this.”

He pulled back just enough to look between your bodies and see the creamy mess already starting to spill from where you were stretched around him, at the obscene mix of arousal and release that soaked both your thighs and glistened in the low light. He groaned under his breath, rough and pained.

Then without warning, he rolled his hips again, slow but deep, grinding his softening dick inside you like he wanted to push everything back in.

“Still fuckin’ twitchin’,” he said, eyes narrowing again. “Greedy ass pussy… We got two more rounds left before I forgive you. Turn over again, baby.”

.

.

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Author's Note: Let's just pretend I haven't been withholding these updates again *cough* I'll be back 🤸🏾‍♀️🤸🏾‍♀️🏃🏾‍♀️🏃🏾‍♀️

“Ain’t wrong though,” he said, leaning in close enough for you to feel the ghost of his breath on your neck. “You smell better than anything I ever ate when I was alive.”

You rolled your eyes, but your pulse betrayed you, thumping beneath your skin. He sensed it, of course, and his grin deepened, his fangs flashing for just a second.

“Watch out,” you murmured. “You lookin’ at me like I’m dinner.”

“Maybe dessert,” he said, voice dropping an octave. “But I promised I wouldn’t bite.”

You popped another piece of fruit into your mouth, chewed slowly, then said through a smirk, “What if I bite you instead?”

That pulled a rough laugh from his chest. “Yo ass play too damn much.”

“No,” you said, shifting to face him fully. “I think you like it when I do.”

He went very still. You could see the muscle in his jaw flex and the faint quiver at the corner of his mouth, the kind that meant he was this close to losing that distinguished vampire fortitude.

You leaned closer after placing the bowl on the table. His shining eyes followed every slow inch of your movement. When your mouth brushed the base of his throat, he let out a low, involuntary sound, half growl, half sigh.

“You really wanna test a nigga, huh?” he murmured.

“You said you won’t bite me,” you whispered back. “So what happens if I bite you?”

He laughed softly, though the sound came out a little shaky. “You think imma stop you?”

You caught his lower lip between your teeth, just hard enough to make him tense. The air between you changed; that faint, metallic note you’d come to recognize slid through the space.

“Damn,” he breathed, voice gone low. “You have no idea what that does to me.”

Oh, but you definitely did.

Your teeth grazed his skin again, this time at the curve where his neck met his shoulder. His hands tightened around your waist, just anchoring you there. He didn’t breathe for a long second.

“Stack?”

“I’m good,” he said quickly, voice shaking with restraint. “Just… keep doin’ whatever you’re doin’ while you sit on this dick.”

You giggled against his skin as you straddled him properly, the heat of his body contrasting with the unnatural cool that lingered beneath. It only took him three seconds to pull himself free from his sweatpants, already hard and aching. You hiked your skirt up and pushed your panties to the side before sinking on him. As always, the stretch stung so good.

Every small bite drew a different sound out of him—a sigh, a grunt, a low curse. Between your teeth scraping his skin and your pussy squeezing his dick he was closer and closer to losing all his composure. Still, he never once pulled away, just gripped your waist tighter.

“I like when you trust me,” you panted softly as you bounced a little harder.

“Ain’t all about trust,” he rasped, planting his feet against the rug as he bucked his hips, meeting your bounces. “It’s about how you make a nigga feel like I’m alive again.”

When your orgasm finally ripped through you, you sank your teeth into his shoulder, biting down harder than usual.  He groaned deeply as he spilled inside you.

When you finally pulled back, there were teeth marks, deep and perfect against his skin.

“You’re bruisin’, baby,” you gasped curiously. Usually a mark or scratch never stayed longer than a few seconds before he healed supernaturally.

Stack brushed it with his fingertips, grinning like it didn’t even hurt. “Good. I want it to stay for a minute.”

“Why?”

“So I remember what it’s like to be human.”

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. 

.

.

.

.

.

.

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:

The first light that spilled through the apartment curtains were weak and yellow as the city sky danced with a distant haze. It filtered across the bed in long soft bands that glowed against the bronze of Smoke and Stack’s skin, turning old scars silver and making Sera’s freckles look like someone had sprinkled cinnamon down the bridge of her nose. The sheets smelled like sweat, cologne, soap, and the sharp ghost of whiskey, all tangled up with the lingering sweetness of her own skin.

Sera wrinkled her nose and rubbed a sleep heavy fist against one eye. Her eyelashes stuck together, still damp from whatever little dreams had been drifting through her head. She shifted to roll onto her left side and bumped straight into a wall of heat. Elias “Stack” Moore was sprawled there, taking up more than his share like always. He was stretched out on his stomach with one arm tucked under the pillow and the other flung aimless across the mattress. The sheet barely covered the dip of his lower back. His mouth hung open around a snore deep enough to rattle the headboard as a slick crescent of drool soaked into the linen beneath his cheek.

She blinked, let out a tiny baffled huff, and tried the other side.

Rolling onto her right only pushed her into another wall of sleeping muscle. Elijah “Smoke” Moore lay on his back, one hand resting heavy against his chest with his thick forearm cutting a dark line across the white sheet. The other arm had somehow hooked around her waist during the night, which was why she couldn’t move more than a few inches in either direction without bumping into him.

Hemmed in on both sides, she wriggled anyway. A little squirm against Stack’s hip. A slow push back into Smoke’s ribs. She tried to slip down under Smoke’s arm, then up over it but the mattress dipped and whispered loudly beneath her as she moved.

On the third shift to the left and the second wiggle to the right, Smoke’s lashes finally cracked apart. He stared down at the woman trapped beneath him and his brother, his woman… his wife. His pupils were curious and heavy with sleep while the rest of him woke up fast. Morning light slid over Sera’s face and turned the brown of her irises into warm amber when she glanced up at him, and her tangled ginger curls were wild around her head like she had been fighting angels in her dreams.

To him she looked like something pulled down out of a stained glass window and laid beside him. An ethereal thing with sleep swollen lips and a faint purple mark peeking at the curve of her throat where Stack’s teeth had marked the night before. She was a little miracle he felt compelled to guard until the day he died.

That old feeling, the one that sat in his chest like a rusted lock, clicked open a fraction and let memories flood in unguarded. Taking his eyes off his wife momentarily, his gaze drifted past her to Stack.

His brother was fully gone, knocked out cold, bare back rising and falling in a slow stubborn rhythm. The rumble of his snoring sounded like a train coming through the room. Nothing about the man looked careful in sleep. He took up space and air, with his limbs thrown wide, jaw slack, and the faintest suggestion of a little boy still there when he was unconscious and not pulling knives on people.

Unlike Stack, Smoke had forgotten how to sleep deep. He had taught himself not to when they were still boys in that leaning little shack that passed for a home. Back when the wind used to whistle through the cracks in the boards and their father’s boots used to stagger up the steps in the middle of the night. 

Smoke could still see it if he let himself.

He saw the way the door had slammed open with a crack that rattled the loose nails. He could still smell the liquor, sweat, and old tobacco. And he could still see their father’s shadow that lurched across the floorboards, thick and mean, before those heavy hands went for the wrong bed.

Stack, nine years old with his little afro smashed flat on one side from the pillow, had been yanked into the air before he even woke up. Their father’s fist had crashed into his face while he shouted that he had killed his woman by being born second and stubborn. Blows rained down, wild and vicious, and while Stack choked on sobs and a nosebleed, Smoke was deep in his slumber and didn’t even know the attack happened.

By morning, when the sun bled through the slats, Smoke had been the one dabbing at Stack’s split lip with a damp rag and whispering clumsy reassurances to a brother who tried not to cry and failed. In that hour, with the taste of iron still in the air and the echo of his father’s boots fading, he made himself a vow. As long as he lived he would never be caught sleeping that deep again.

Their father had tried the same stunt twice more, stumbling in with rage in his jaw and someone else’s sins on his tongue, but each time Smoke was already awake before the first creak of the floorboard in the hall. He would sit himself at the edge of Stack’s cot with a rusted blade hidden in his palm and his eyes fixed on the door. It was silent, that promise. Silent and solid. If the man took one more step toward his brother’s bed, Smoke would slit him open and live with whatever hell came next.

He had carried that vow into other nights. Into German trenches where the air tasted like mud and gunpowder. Into French cities where the beds were strange and the women were stranger. He once had gone five nights without sleep, body swaying on his feet, just to keep watch over his brother when the shells fell too close and men cried out in the dark.

He had kept his promise in juke joints and hotel rooms too. No matter what he would keep one eye open whenever a woman they barely knew lay close, his mind counting exits and weapons even as his body took what it wanted for the evening.

Now there were two people he couldn’t afford to sleep on. Stack, who was loud and reckless but loyal to the grave. And the precious gem wedged between them, the one he would burn down a city for if somebody looked at her wrong.

Something in his chest tightened at the realization and then softened when Sera wiggled again then made a little frustrated sound, like a trapped kitten.

“Go back to sleep, my love.” Smoke’s morning voice came out quiet and rough. “Sun barely yawnin’ in the sky. Get some moe’ rest.”

The pet name rolled over her skin like a glass of whiskey on a chilly winter night. Sera stilled under his arm and looked up at him, vision still glossed at the edges. His face was so close, eyes heavily lidded and mouth relaxed. An old scar that cut through his brow caught the thin light against the deep brown of his skin. Her heart did a slow and uneasy flip.

Instead of obeying, she scooted closer until her front pressed against his side, her fingers splaying over the wide plane of his chest like they belonged there. The cotton of his undershirt was thin, almost useless, and the heat of him seeped straight through.

“We in a new city,” she whined, fighting a yawn, her words dragging but stubborn. “I don’t wanna sleep the day away.”

Her gaze caught on the mark at his throat. The slash Annie had left there was healing but still angry, an ugly red line against the column of his neck. The sight pulled last night’s chaos up in her mind. Sera’s stomach tightened, but something else flared underneath it. She reached out gently and brushed her fingertips along the edge of the wound. The skin there was warmer than the rest of him and tender under her touch.

A smile tugged at her mouth, quick and mean before she bit her bottom lip to chase away the sarcastic giggle that tried to escape. “You need a new bandage, Elijah,” she murmured.

Smoke watched the path of her hand like it was a weapon she didn’t know how to use yet. Her fingers slid from his neck down to his collarbone, tracing the line where skin met fabric. Before she could travel further he caught her wrist. His grip was firm but not punishing and his thumb pressed against the flutter at the inside of her pulse. He lifted her hand and turned it, dark eyes never leaving her face as he brought the thin underside of her wrist to his mouth.

The first brush of his lips there was hardly more than a breath, a warm press against a fragile place. Sera’s lungs forgot how to work.

“First mornin’ after breakin’ you in,” he drawled, voice a shade darker now, “an you worried ‘bout my damn neck?”

The words dragged claws down her spine and another flash of last night broke open behind her eyes. The way he had held her down while she learned what it meant to take him. The way Stack had laughed low in her ear, then soothed and taunted in the same breath. The sting, the stretch, the way her own voice had sounded, desperate and wrecked, echoing off unfamiliar walls.

Heat flooded her face and her thighs clenched instinctively around nothing before a familiar small ache between them tugged up into something bright and needy.

She swallowed a whimper and failed. It came out anyway, soft and helpless as her eyes flicked away from him like she could hide under his watchful gaze. “You my husband,” she said quietly. The words felt strange and brave on her tongue. “I’m ‘posed to be worried ‘bout you.”

Something raw and unguarded flickered across Smoke’s face so fast she almost missed it. His expression sharpened, then immediately softened. He studied her like a man weighing treasure, eyes traveling from the undefined ginger curls around her face to the faint marks on her throat and the place where the sheet dipped over her hips. His hand still cradled her wrist, thumb stroking once over the jump of her pulse.

He wouldn’t say it out loud, not yet, not when their life in this city balanced on so many unfinished plans and ugly promises. But hearing her stake that claim, even tucked in between a frown and bedhead, it did something to him that felt permanent.

“Yeah,” he grunted, voice dropping even lower, the corner of his mouth tilting almost, almost into a smile. “Guess I am ya husband, little wife”

The nickname settled over her like a shawl. His eyes drifted to her mouth and stayed there, still and intent. The apartment outside their bedroom hummed with distant city sounds. A car backfired. Somewhere below, somebody shouted and laughed. In their little nest of rumpled sheets and heat, none of it quite reached them.

Between them the air thickened, and with Sera’s wrist still caught in his hand, she became acutely aware of how big his fingers were around her, how easy it would be for him to push her onto her back again, pull the sheet away and show her all over what belonged to who. Her body remembered the rhythm of his hips, the scrape of his stubble against her inner thigh and the way his voice had sounded when he lost that tight control for a heartbeat.

He, in turn, felt the tremor in her pulse and watched the way her throat moved when she swallowed. Watched her knees inch together like she was trying to hold in the memory of him. The possessive urge that lived inside him stretched, long and satisfied, and then coiled tight.

Behind them, Stack snored louder, completely oblivious with his foot twitching like he was running down some poor bastard in his dreams.

Smoke shifted, just enough that his thigh brushed higher against Sera’s, just enough that the curve of her hip slotted closer to his. “You keep lookin’ at me like that,” he said softly, his mouth so close to her wrist that each word warmed her skin, “an we ain’t leavin’ this bed ‘til it’s time for me an Stack to go to work.”

Her heart lurched in her chest. Desire tangled with nervous excitement and the faint, stubborn curiosity that had gotten her into trouble since the first day she saw him standing in her father’s kitchen. The city outside called to her, new and glittering and unknown, but the man beside her glowed like his own kind of danger.

She wet her lips, eyes flicking from his mouth to his throat and back up. “I… I wanna see the city,” she whispered, bravery and shyness braided together. “With my husbands...”

Smoke’s eyes narrowed, not in anger but in thought, the way they always did when he was considering a move in a game somebody else didn’t even realize they were playing. “I can make that happen, my love,” he promised, quiet, and leaned in just enough to let his nose brush hers. “But you gon’ learn somethin’ first, Seraphim Moore.”

Her name in his mouth made her toes curl.

“What’s that?” she breathed.

His thumb dragged another slow circle over the throb in her wrist. He didn’t kiss her just yet, instead he simply hovered there, letting the want sharpen between them until it bordered on painful.

“That bein’ my wife,” he said, voice a low rumble that vibrated straight through her, “mean you ain’t never gotta wonder where my eyes at… or who I am ready to bleed for.”

Her answer lodged somewhere behind her ribs. The ache in her body and the weight of his vow pressed in from both sides, heady and terrifyingly sweet. For a second, she forgot all about the city beyond the walls, about the ghosts they had dragged with them from Mississippi, about the woman who had carved his neck seventy-two hours ago. There was only this bed, this man, and the new life that had come for her whether she was ready or not.

Smoke watched her for one long heartbeat, then another, like he was deciding something heavy in that quiet space between one breath and the next.

Then his hand slid from her wrist to her waist and he moved. His movements weren’t rough or hurried. He simply shifted his weight and drew her with him while turning her onto her back with an ease that reminded her exactly how much stronger he was. The sheet twisted between them as he came over her, caging her beneath his chest and forearms as his knees braced on either side of her hips.

The world tipped and for a moment all she could see was him. Dark eyes. Dark mouth. The line of his shoulders blocking out the weak morning light.

Her fingers twitched up out of habit, brushing his ribs, then dropped when his gaze slid lower.

“Hold still,” he said, voice soft but brooking no argument.

Sera’s breath settled in her throat. “Why… what you doin’?”

“Checkin’ my work.”

He started with her throat. His fingertips stroked along the elegant column of her neck, tracing the faint red crescent his teeth had left the night before. He hummed low in his chest, thumb pausing at a spot that made her swallow.

“This one mine,” he whispered, almost to himself. There was a note of pride tucked into the words he didn’t bother to hide.

He followed the edge of her jaw, then drifted lower. The top of the sheet had slipped down to the swell of her chest, baring the high slope of her collarbones and the upper curve of her breasts. His palm flattened there then he eased the linen a fraction further just so he could see what else was riddled on her body. Purpled shadows bloomed along the side of one breast where his grip had been a shade too firm in the heat of everything. His thumb brushed the darkest spot, the slight roughness of his skin dragging lightly over her.

“This one me too,” he said quietly. “Got heavy handed right here.”

He bent his head and kissed the bruise, mouth warm like an apology and a claim at the same time. Her fingers slid into his hair without permission, curls soft against her knuckles.

He moved on, methodically across the line of her ribs where another small mark rested like a thumbprint. Down to the gentle dip of her waist, where the sheet no longer hid the shadows at the flare of her hips. Red and violet marks dotted the tender skin there in the shape of fingers.

Smoke huffed, a single amused breath. “Any muthafucka’ lookin’ at you gon’ know you spoken for now,” he said, voice turning lazy. He tapped one of the hand shaped bruises, light enough not to hurt. “Every time you step outta this bed ya dress sittin’ over our fingerprints.”

Heat climbed into Sera’s face, but she didn’t look away. Something shameless and fierce thrilled through her at the thought.

His hand slid to her thigh and he lifted the sheet until the morning light washed over the length of her leg. Small mottled marks bloomed along the soft inside of one thigh, some faint and some darker where teeth had threatened.

Smoke’s expression shifted. “These here,” he said, tracing the arc of neat oval marks along the meat of her thigh, “Stack.”

He didn’t sound angry, just certain. His thumb rested beside one of the bites, measuring the width and he smirked. “Little bastard always been greedy ‘bout leavin’ teeth.”

Sera’s stomach dipped and she remembered the curl of Stack’s smile against her skin and how he had laughed, breathless and pleased, when she had yelped and grabbed at his hair.

Smoke kept going as he nudged her other thigh open with his palm, careful and unrelenting, widening the space between her legs so he could see the back of one tender knee where another bruise hid, high and almost secret. “That one mine again,” he mused, fingers brushing the spot. “Pinned you there.”

The memory took her breath. Her mind supplied the sensation of her leg hooked over his hip, the way the bed had creaked, the way his voice had sounded when he had told her to take a breath and give him all of it.

He went back up, attention returning to the cradle where her thighs met and the sheet bunched.

Sera could feel her pulse there, embarrassing and insistent. She squeezed her knees together on instinct, but Smoke was already between them, his broad shoulders nudging them apart again with quiet efficiency.

“Elijah…” Her voice came out airy. “You finished yet?”

“Not quite.” His gaze had gone focused, all lazy humor tucked away. “This the part I really need to see.”

His palm stroked along the inside of her left thigh, then the right, slow enough to make her toes curl. His thumb skated just shy of the place that still felt tender and strange and wonderfully wrong. Even without looking, he could feel the faint heat.

“You still a little swollen down here,” he said, tone gentle. “Body took a lot last night, my love.”

Embarrassment flared hot and sharp. She caught his wrist, fingers clutching. “I feel fine,” she protested, even as her cheeks burned. “I promise. I feel… good.”

“That so?” He raised one brow, unconvinced.

“Yes.” She tried to close her legs again and ended up simply rubbing her knees against his ribs. “I can handle more. I want…”

She trailed off, teeth sinking into her bottom lip as she realized what she was about to ask for, what she was already asking without the words.

Smoke’s jaw clicked and he dragged in a slow breath through his nose, the muscles in his shoulders flexing above her. “We ain’t rushin’ this,” he said finally. “You gon’ be with us a long time. Ain’t ‘bout to break you tryin’ to prove somethin’ in one night.”

The firmness in his voice cut clean through the air. On the surface it sounded like a boundary. Underneath it was a protectiveness that made her chest ache.

“We gon’ give you another full body rub down tonight,” he continued, thumb drawing idle circles just above the place he was refusing to touch. “Get some moe’ oil. Work all this tension out. Let them muscles know we care 'bout ‘em.”

The mention of his hands and oil sliding over her sore limbs made her stomach swoop. Her mind flashed to the night before, when he and Stack had taken turns massaging her calves, back, and shoulders.

“But it’s mornin’ now,” she whispered. “Tonight a long way away.”

He exhaled, a rough little sound that might have been a laugh if it didn’t sound so pained. “You need rest, Seraphim.” His thumb finally stilled. “Ya body screamin’ at me an you too stubborn to listen.”

She frowned. “It ain’t screamin’… It just talkin’ kinda loud.”

His mouth twitched despite himself. “Don’t start with me, little girl.” He shook his head, eyes closing for a second like he was gathering himself. “I mean it. We take it easy today. Let you soak. Let you breathe. We ain’t gon hurt you.”

“But you not hurtin’ me,” she insisted. Her legs, traitorous things, shifted wider around his hips, giving him more room… more access. The sheet slipped higher, baring more coco brown skin and the faint shadow of her curls beneath.

His breath stuttered and she felt his gaze drag over her, slow and heavy. She could feel the air itself change and how it was charged now with something raw and hungry.

“Smoke,” she tried again, a little whine curling into his name. “Please… I want you. Right now. I don’t wanna wait ‘til tonight.”

Smoke stared at her, eyes dark as his past, and for a long moment he did nothing. Inside, he was counting, the way he used to count breaths in the trenches. One, two, three. He told himself he would move away on four, kiss her forehead, tuck the sheet back up and go into the kitchen to cook breakfast.

He reached four and didn’t move.

Sera’s hands slid up his sides, palms gliding over muscle and scars. Her nails scratched lightly at the back of his neck, just under his hairline, and a tremor chased down his spine. Her thighs flexed again, opening even further, and the soft needy sound that left her throat hit him low and mean.

“Hard for you to tell me no,” she whispered, almost like she understood exactly where the crack in him was.

The last of his restraint groaned. Smoke dropped his head, forehead pressing to hers, his breath hot against her mouth. “You gon’ make me regret this,” he muttered, though there was no real warning in it, only rough affection and a good man’s surrender.

“No I won’t,” she shot back, breathless. “I promise I’ll be real grateful.”

He huffed, a broken laugh that turned into a growl halfway through. One of his hands slid up, catching her smaller one, fingers weaving between hers above her head against the pillow. The other hand stayed between her thighs as his broad palm cupped her core feeling the tenderness, the heat,  and the way her body seemed to lean into his touch despite his caution.

“Listen here,” he said, voice low and serious, even as he shifted his hips closer. “You tell me if anythin’ feel wrong. Anythin’ hurt in the wrong way. You say it an I stop. I don’t care how close I am, you hear me?”

Her eyes locked onto his. “Yes sir,” she breathed. “I hear you.”

He searched her face a second longer, looking for doubt, fear, or some sign she was just chasing the high without understanding the cost. All he saw was trust. Nervous, trembling, hungry trust.

He sighed, defeat and desire tangled together. “Ight then,” he murmured, mouth finally claiming hers in a deep kiss that pulled a tiny sound out of her chest. “C’mere.”

The city went on buzzing outside their window, horns and footsteps and the distant call of a world that had no idea what was happening in that bed. Inside, between tangled sheets and careful hands, the morning thinned and blurred, swallowed up by the heat building once again between them.

Sera’s thighs were parted, one knee hiked lazily up on a pillow, the other draped over Smoke’s broad shoulder. He knelt at the foot of the bed with his mouth buried between her shaking legs, one hand gripping her plush hip to steady her twitching, the other working slowly between the cleft of her ass while his fingers curled inward to stretch her tightest, most private place with care.

His tongue lapped in careful patterns against her clit, tender but exacting, like he was tracing scripture he already knew by heart. His teeth grazed the sensitive skin every now and then, just enough to make her arch her back and sob his name into the sheets.

“So puffy,” Smoke groaned against her. His Delta accent was thick, syllables dragging from the pit of his chest. “We really put you through it last night.”

Sera whimpered, her toes curling, her fingers clawing at the linens. “I feel fine,” she whispered hoarsely, blinking up at the ceiling with dewy eyes. “I want more…”

He grunted, brows tightening as he fought his own instincts. “You always want more, don’t you?” he muttered, though his lips returned to her clit without hesitation.

She cried out when he resumed, spreading her thighs wider in invitation, hips rolling up in search of his mouth like she couldn’t bear to be empty for long. Smoke’s fingers pressed deeper into her backside, coaxing her to take more than just his tongue.

“Gone need to plug you again when I’m done,” he said with a low growl, tongue flattening against her clit before flicking it in tight, merciless strokes. “Keep you stretched an ready ‘til it’s time to fill you there. Ain’t no point trainin’ you if you tighten right back up.”

Sera’s thighs were trembling now, body slick with a sheen of sweat as her climax began to build. She reached for Smoke blindly, voice caught in the back of her throat—

—and then came the sound… A long, obnoxious yawn.

“Damn, y’all started without me?” Stack’s voice was hoarse with sleep, but his toothy grin was unmistakably sharp.

Sera barely had time to glance towards him before he moved. His weight shifted across the bed as he closed the distance between them. In the blink of an eye his hands were on her flushed cheeks as he leaned down and kissed her like she was his most prized possession. Tongue first and lips second, as though he intended to taste every unspoken desire left on the tip of her tongue. She moaned against him as her body still quivered from Smoke’s ministrations below, caught between the two of them with no reprieve.

When Stack finally pulled back, his eyes dropped to her lips. “How’s ya throat feelin’, baby?” he asked as his thumb dragged across her bottom lip, pausing where she had bitten it red and swollen.

Smoke’s eyes snapped up, brows drawn low in warning. “Stack.”

Stack didn’t even bother to look his way. He was busy palming the thick print of his manhood through his linen boxers, fingers flexing around it like he was already imagining her wrapped around him again. “I done asked how ya throat feels,” he repeated, his voice a rasp edged with arousal.

Sera blinked up at him, lips parted and breath ragged. “Fine…”

He grinned and leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Wanna taste me again, doll? Like how you did last night?”

She didn’t answer with words. Instead her mouth fell open instinctively with her eyes soft and glassy as she waited.

Smoke pulled back from between her legs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, visibly irritated. “Y’all don’t listen worth a fuckin’ damn,” he grumbled before swatting her bare ass with the flat of his palm.

Sera gasped, body jerking slightly as the sting bloomed across her skin.

“You,” Smoke pointed at Stack, “gone keep actin’ like we ain’t had conversations ‘bout bein’ patient?”

Stack shrugged lazily and unconcerned before thumbing Sera’s bottom lip again. “Our woman still got an untouched asshole. Think I’m bein’ real damn patient.”

Smoke’s jaw flexed before he grabbed a pillow and tossed it at Stack’s head. “You always do this shit. Always gotta jump in like you ain’t got no discipline.”

Stack caught the pillow mid air and tossed it back. “Whenever I gotta wait on you, I end up bored or blue-balled. I ain’t built like you, nigga. I like enjoyin’ things while they still warm.”

Smoke rose from his spot, bare chest heaving as he glared down at his twin. “Every time you ignore what I say, you end up lookin’ stupid. Like last night. You damn near nutted ‘fore you even got all the way inside.”

Stack’s jaw ticked, the insult settling into his bones like splinters beneath the skin. His nostrils flared, and for a beat it seemed like they would be at each other’s throats again. But Smoke didn’t bark another word.

His eyes shifted down to Sera, and his voice came quiet but edged with possession and care wrapped in command. “Seraphim,” he rumbled, deep enough that her lashes twitched at the sound. “If it get to be too much… say ya word.”

Sera’s gaze, dazed but obedient, met his. She nodded once, throat tight and lips glossy with the mess of Stack’s kiss. Smoke studied her expression for a heartbeat longer, then dropped back down between her legs like he never left.

No more warnings. No more arguments. His mouth reclaimed her with a hunger that bordered on obsession, lips parting to drag the entire weight of his tongue from the bottom of her slit all the way to her clit. The moan that cracked from her chest was breathless and strangled, like it punched its way up from her stomach. Her knees jerked, muscles flexing around his shoulders, but he held her firm with his mouth locked to her flesh like a man starved.

Stack tilted her chin toward him, his fingers coasting over her jaw. “That’s it,” he cooed, voice gritty with lust. “Open up for me, baby.”

Sera didn’t speak as her mouth obediently fell open again, while her tongue rested low and submissive as her lashes drooped. The wet sound of Smoke feasting between her thighs filled the room, obscene and constant, while Stack pushed his boxers down his hips and let his dick spring free. It was a sight to see, thick, flushed and already glistening at the tip.

He fisted it twice at the base, hissing softly through clenched teeth. “Damn, you look so pretty like this…”

His fingers threaded into her curls, anchoring her as he pressed the head of his dick against her waiting lips. Sera blinked up at him, needy and unfocused, her mouth still slack as he fed her the tip. Once her jaw muscles loosened he fed her the first inch, then another. Her throat worked to adjust, but she didn’t gag and she definitely didn’t flinch.

Stack groaned. “You ‘member how to breathe through ya nose, huh? Sucha good fuckin’ doll.”

Below, Smoke was relentless. He had slipped two fingers back inside Sera’s ass, twisting them in tandem with his tongue movements on her clit. The combination had her squirming, spine arching off the mattress as her voice broke into a whimper and her throat clenched around Stack’s dick.

“She squeezin’ up on me,” Stack said, voice strained. “Like her mouth missin’ me.”

“Usin’ that throat got her soakin’ me,” Smoke muttered darkly, though he didn’t stop.

Sera’s eyes rolled back slightly as Stack rocked forward, deeper this time, inch by inch until the weight of him pressed into her throat and her lips were kissing the base. He held her there, not cruel or fast, just long enough to watch the tears bead in the corners of her eyes. His thumb wiped one away with a gentleness that contrasted the way he groaned above her.

“Fuuuuck, this mouth was made for meeee.”

Smoke’s grip on her thighs tightened. His tongue flicked mercilessly, then he sucked her overworked bundle of nerves into his mouth with a pull that made her body convulse. Her throat clenched again, and Stack hissed out a curse.

“Better not make me cum first,” he growled under his breath, pulling out slightly and thrusting back in with more pressure this time, guided by her spit and the sheer slickness of her devotion.

“You keep nuttin’ quick like you the virgin,” Smoke taunted into her pussy, the words muffled by flesh and tongue.

Stack ignored him, but his pace didn’t slow down. He kept it just shy of fast, a steady invasion that filled her throat, then let her breathe, then fed her more. His free hand wrapped under her chin, guiding her, keeping her exactly where he wanted her.

Sera moaned around him, the vibrations traveled through his length and down into his gut.

Smoke’s tongue flattened and licked a lazy stripe up the middle of her folds before it circled again and again. His fingers crooked inside her ass with the same rhythm, bringing her toward the edge.

“She startin’ to throb,” Smoke warned, voice hoarse. “She gon’ cum."

Sera’s hands fisted the sheets beside her head, every nerve lit up like a wire pressed to flame. She didn’t know where she was anymore, only that Smoke was dragging orgasm after orgasm from her body, and Stack was stuffing her throat with praise and possession like it was his only purpose. And she loved it.

Smoke lifted his mouth only once to taunt, “You close, little wife?”

She nodded against Stack’s pecker, unable to speak with tears streaking down her face and her thighs trembling violently as her orgasm threatened to shatter her in half.

“Good,” Smoke growled. “Cum for me. I wanna feel it spill down my chin.”

And she did as she was told just as Stack pushed in again, his grip tightening in her hair while her mouth stretched to the limit as her climax finally took her under. Her body seized like she was frozen in time before her orgasm wrecked through her in vicious waves. Her thighs clamped around Smoke’s head, toes curling tight as if trying to grip the very air. Every nerve was on fire, overstimulated and singing, as if her body couldn’t tell if it wanted to run from the pleasure or drown in it.

Stack groaned low, hips jerking as her throat convulsed around him. “Shit… she suckin’ me back in like she starved.”

His hand flexed against the back of her head, fingers tight in her messy curls. He watched her expression closely. How the tears spilled from her eyes and how her lashes fluttered as her body trembled with delight. Her mouth stretched wide around his thick dick, lips glossy and ringed with saliva and desire. She was a mess, their mess, and neither of them could look away.

Smoke was soaked from chin to neck, his face buried between her thighs as her release coated his mouth and cheeks. He licked her through the aftershocks, tongue working in messy, devouring circles, not caring how sensitive she just became. Her body jerked again, breath catching around Stack’s rod, her fingers digging into the sheets like they were the only thing anchoring her to the earth.

“Don’t lock up on me now,” Stack rasped. “Take it, baby. Breathe through it. Just like that.”

She gagged once around him and he pulled back, just enough to give her air. His meat glistened with spit and arousal, veins bulging and jumping up and down with excitement. Her lips followed the retreat instinctively, mouth still open, like she didn’t know how to stop asking for more.

Stack’s thumb smeared a line of tears across her cheekbone. “Look at me,” he said. “You good?”

She blinked up at him, throat working, then nodded. Her tongue flicked out to lick at his tip, like an answer. A plea.

Smoke finally eased back, his mouth shiny with her juices. He exhaled like he had just taken communion and sat up, wiping his beard with the back of his forearm. “She gone pass the fuck out if you don’t pace yaself.”

“Nigga, I am pacin’ myself,” Stack shot back, guiding himself back toward her mouth, voice dipping into a darker register. “Ain’t even gave her half of what she swallowed last night.”

Sera moaned low in her throat as he eased forward again, filling her inch by inch, her head angled just right to take him deeper without choking. Stack’s hips rolled steady and deep enough to press against the limit of her throat and hold there, watching the flutter behind her eyes as she adjusted. Her hands rose on their own, clutching at his thighs like he was her lifeline.

Smoke’s eyes tracked every movement, the tremble in her inner thighs, the faint contractions that hadn’t stopped since she’d climaxed. He leaned in again, kissed the inside of her thigh, then dragged two fingers up her slit and slipped them inside. She gasped around Stack’s dick and the muscles in her abdomen jumped.

“Still twitchin’,” Smoke said, voice dark with satisfaction. “You cummin’ again an you ain’t even know it.”

Stack looked down at her, lips curled in a grin that was more wolf than man. “Mmm, greedy lil’ thing. We broke somethin’ open in her last night. Now she don’t know how to stop.”

Sera couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, and could barely think. All she could do was take. Take Stack in her throat, take Smoke’s fingers inside of her, take the wet sounds of her own body being used as if she were built for this exact thing.

Stack fucked her mouth a little deeper now, hips moving in a possessive rhythm while his hand gripped her curls tighter with every thrust. “You want me to nut in ya mouth, baby?” he asked between clenched teeth. “Wanna swallow it like you did last night? Or you want me to paint that pretty face?”

Smoke pressed deeper into her, fingers crooking to catch the spot that made her legs spasm. “She can’t answer,” he said, smirking as her hips bucked. “She too busy drownin’.”

“Then I’ll decide for her,” Stack growled, hips jerking forward again. “She earned it.”

Sera choked slightly as he slid all the way to the base again, her lips wrapped around him and her fluttered shut. Stack’s breath caught, thick and guttural, as her throat clenched around him again. He looked down at her one more time and groaned at how her mouth was stretched wide, tears streaked her flushed cheeks and spit dribbled from the corners of her lips. That was all it took.

“FUCK,” he groaned, voice hoarse and breaking. “Here it come, dollface. Hold still.”

He pulled out with a sharp inhale, hand gripping the base of his dick as his release spilled across her face in heavy, twitching ropes. One thick line landed across her cheekbone, the next across her lips, and the last just beneath her chin. It was messy, hot and claiming. Sera gasped, blinking through the haze, her tongue slipping out to taste what she could reach. She looked wrecked and radiant, like something that had been ruined with purpose.

Stack stared down at her for a long second, chest rising like a man catching his breath after a fight, then exhaled with a shaky laugh. “Damn near lost my soul in that throat.”

Smoke had already pulled back from between her legs, wiping his slick-coated fingers on the discarded sheet. His jaw was set tight, expression unreadable save for the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth. “You done makin’ a mess of our woman?” His voice was dry as bone.

Stack chuckled, still high off the tension, and stroked Sera’s cheek with two fingers, smearing his cum against her skin like paint. “She wanted it.”

“Mmhm.” Smoke’s eyes dropped to Sera’s soaked thighs, still twitching with aftershocks, lips swollen and glistening from the feast she barely survived. “Well, since you turned her into a damn mess, you clean her up.”

Stack arched a brow. “That an order?”

“That’s me bein’ generous,” Smoke said, standing fully and stretching out his shoulders. His tone never shifted, but there was a glint behind his eyes. “You get her washed up. I’ll fix somethin’ to eat.”

“Gladly,” Stack chimed as he bent to scoop her into his arms.

Sera whimpered softly, the tension in her limbs melting the moment Stack’s hands slid beneath her thighs and back. Her head lolled against his chest, face still streaked with his seed and eyes dazed with lust.

“I got you,” he whispered, voice husky with something softer now. “Let’s go get you clean, baby.”

Stack carried her towards the bathroom, her bare body limp in his arms. Just before stepping through the doorway, he paused and glanced over his shoulder, eyes narrowing. “Wait,” he said. “Why the fuck you ain’t get one off?”

Smoke looked back at his twin and gave a smile that was crooked, wolfish, and so ice-cold it didn’t reach his eyes. “Oh, I’m gon’ get mine,” he said, voice slick with unspoken intent. “After she clean. After she fed. Got a few things I need to address.”

Stack’s brow arched. “Yeah? Like what?”

Smoke rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck, the motion smooth and unhurried. “First one,” he drawled, “is her thinkin’ she can keep disobeyin’ me when I give an order.”

Stack’s grin faltered.

Smoke’s smile deepened, but the air around him shifted. It turned heavier, darker and tinged with something too quiet to be safe. “She gone learn,” he said softly, eyes never leaving Stack’s. “Real gentle first. Then however I feel like.”

And just like that, the air in the room changed again. Stack swallowed, then nodded once before stepping into the bathroom with Sera still cradled against his chest, her breath feathering over his collarbone.

Steam curled up the bathroom walls as the water filled the tub, the sound was low and constant, a hush that wrapped the room in privacy. Stack set Seraphim down gently, easing her onto the porcelain edge before guiding her into the water. It lapped at her thighs first, then her hips and finally her stomach as she sank with a soft sigh.

“Easy,” Stack murmured, bracing her with a hand at her waist as she settled back. He reached for the soap, working it between his palms until it frothed thick and white. “Just relax, sunshine. I got you.”

At first, his touch was exactly what he promised. Careful. Thorough. He washed her face with his thumbs, tracing beneath her eyes where tears had dried, wiping away the last streaks of his mess with tender swipes. He rinsed her curly hairline, cupped water over her shoulders, and cleaned between her fingers like he was undoing every moment of strain she had just endured.

Seraphim leaned into him without thinking, her back pressing against his chest as he reached around her. His forearms caged her in, broad and warm, soap sliding down her arms and breasts as his hands worked.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

She nodded, eyelids heavy. “Yeah. Just… floaty.”

He smiled at that, a pleased sound leaving him as he dipped the cloth again and dragged it down her stomach. His knuckles brushed the underside of her breasts by accident at first… Then again, less accidental.

The water sloshed as he stepped one foot into the tub. Then the other.

“Oh,” she breathed, realizing too late.

“Can’t reach you proper from out there,” Stack said easily, settling behind her. The tub creaked slightly under his weight, water spilling over the rim in thin sheets. He pulled her back against him, her spine fitting flush to his chest and his thighs bracketing her hips.

The cloth disappeared and his hands took its place. Soap slicked his palms as they traveled over her shoulders, down her arms, then lower. His thumbs circled her breasts with a languid confidence, washing, squeezing and pulling soft sounds from her throat.

Sera melted into Stack again, head tipping back to rest against his shoulder. Her body still felt sensitive, but not fragile. Touched raw, yes, but craving closeness more than distance. Stack kissed the side of her head, then her temple, then her neck. His lips lingered there, mouth warm and breath grazing skin that jumped at the contact.

They sat like that for a few seconds, water rocking gently around them. Then Seraphim spoke.

“What did Smoke mean,” she asked softly, “‘bout me bein’ disobedient?”

Stack let out a short laugh, surprised enough that it escaped him before he could stop it. “You serious?”

She shifted slightly, turning her head just enough to look at him. Her brows knit together, confusion plain on her face. “Yeah. I don’t… I don’t get it.”

He studied her for a moment, waiting for the punchline that didn’t come. When it didn’t, his grin widened into something incredulous. “Oh, you precious,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought you was bein’ slick.”

Her frown deepened. “I wasn’t.”

“Well,” he sighed, settling back against the tub. “Guess that means I gotta explain.” His hands resumed their path, washing down her sides, over her ribs and grounding her while he talked. “Ight. First one,” he started. “You askin’ ‘bout lettin’ other men flirt with you. Not once. Twice.”

Her lips parted. “That was just a question.”

“Mm,” Stack hummed. “An we ain’t gonna dig into that one too deep. Still a sore spot.”

She swallowed, nodding.

“Second,” he continued, “that car ride. When we went to see Annie.”

Her shoulders stiffened. “I already apologized for that.”

“You did,” Stack agreed easily. “Your way.”

She turned more fully toward him now. “What’s that ‘posed to mean?”

“It mean,” he said patiently, “you apologized how you felt comfortable. You ain’t apologize how Smoke needed.”

Her mouth opened, then closed again. “What’s Smoke’s way of apologizin’?”

Stack chuckled, low and knowing, and shook his head. “We’ll get to that another time.”

She scowled at him, clearly unsatisfied, but he kept going.

“Third one,” he said, voice dropping a notch. “Last night an this mornin’. Every time Smoke told you we needed to ease up, an you chose not to listen.”

“I was listenin’,” she argued quickly. “I was listenin’ to you.”

Stack tilted his head, eyes sharp now but not unkind. “That’s the problem, baby. It don’t matter that you listened to me. You still didn’t listen to him.”

That stopped her cold and her brows pulled together again, this time slower, deeper. “So… if I listen to one of you, I’m still wrong?”

“If you ignore the other,” Stack said simply. “Yeah.”

She stared down at the water, lips pressed tight. “So I’m always gonna get in trouble for pickin’ one of you over the other?”

Stack’s hands slid to her back, washing there now, long strokes that soothed even as his words complicated everything. “Let me ask you somethin’,” he said. “If I tell you not to do somethin’, an Smoke encourages it, you think I’m just ‘posed to shrug an smile?”

She hesitated. “No…”

“Exactly,” he said. “You don’t listen to me, I’m gonna need my own apology too.”

Her head snapped back toward him. “That ain’t fair.”

He laughed again, softer this time, and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck, lingering there as his hands finished washing her back. “Fair ain’t really the point,” he said gently. “We spoil you rotten. You know that. We love you hard. You know that too. But you ain’t lovin’ one man. You lovin’ two.”

His lips brushed her skin again, affectionate and grounding. “An more than once,” he continued, “you done been disobedient to one of ya husbands.”

The water drained in a low, steady pull, leaving the room quieter than before. Sera shifted in Stack’s arms, her fingers curling against his forearm as that sentence settled in her chest. She was still trying to untangle it all when she lifted her chin just enough to look back at him.

“So,” she asked carefully, voice small but curious, “how would you make me apologize?”

For a moment, Stack didn’t answer. Something in him shifted instead. It wasn’t loud or explosive. It was subtle. The playful edge dulled and his smile thinned. His eyes darkened in a way that had nothing to do with lust alone. Old instincts stirred, ones that Smoke tried to force him to keep buried around her. Ones forged long before softness ever entered his world.

His hands slid from her shoulders to her hips, firm now, grounding. “You askin’ real questions today,” he said quietly.

Sera swallowed, but she didn’t pull away. “I wanna understand.”

That honesty was what made his jaw tighten. Stack exhaled slowly and leaned her forward in the tub, guiding her with a hand between her shoulder blades. The lowering water sloshed softly as she braced herself on the porcelain edge. His touch never hurt but it carried a weight that made her breath hitch anyway.

His palms spread over her hips, then lower, fingers sinking into the plush curve of her ass. He squeezed once, testing and feeling her respond to him even now. Then his thumbs pressed inward, parting her just enough to expose the place that still made her shiver when she remembered their conversation earlier.

“See this?” he murmured, not cruel, but honest. “This right here still untouched. Still tight. Still yours… for now…”

Her breath stuttered.

“I ain’t like Smoke,” Stack continued, voice dropping. “He corrects with structure. Rules. Order. All that proper bullshit. Me?” He huffed a quiet laugh. “I correct with pressure.”

His fingers spread her a little more, not invading, just revealing and reminding. She whimpered softly, thighs drawing inward before she forced herself to relax again.

“You never wanna disobey me, doll,” he said, not threatening, but real. “‘Cause I can be tougher than I mean to be. Sometimes I don’t stop when I should. Sometimes I get carried away.”

He released her just as gently as he had taken hold, angling her deeper before she could spiral. Then he slid down the tub, kneeling between her thighs. “Which is why,” he added, softer now, “If you gotta disobey one of us… it’d be better for you to disobey Smoke...”

His lips pressed a line of kisses along her inner thigh, feather-light at first. She gasped, body tensing, every nerve already oversensitive from earlier. His mouth traced closer, kisses lingering and dripped in devotion in their own dangerous way. When his tongue finally touched her, it wasn’t to take. It was to tease. A painfully slow stroke along her slit. A soft flick against her swollen clit that made her cry out despite herself. Her hands flew to the edge of the tub, grip slipping as her hips twitched.

“Still too sensitive,” he hummed against her skin, almost amused. “Smoke did a number on you.”

His tongue circled her clit, barely there, just enough to remind her of how close pleasure still hovered beneath her skin. Her thighs trembled, trying to close, but he held them apart with a steady grip.

“That,” Stack said quietly, lifting his mouth just long enough for her to hear him, “is why I let him handle most of the discipline.”

Stack stayed between her thighs far longer than he had any right to. He didn’t take her over the edge again, no, that would’ve been too merciful. Instead, he hovered just beneath the line, circling her swollen bundle of nerves with his tongue and retreating just as she began to shake. Then he would pause, kiss the inside of her thigh again, hum against her heat like she was his favorite melody, and start all over.

By the third time her hips bucked backward, desperate for more than teasing, she whimpered his name like it was the only word she remembered how to say.

He finally pulled back with a grin, satisfied by the sight of her trembling, wet, and flushed. “Told you,” he said with a wink, “I get carried away.”

Sera barely had the strength to glare at him. Her legs wouldn’t stop twitching. Stack stood, drained the last of the water from the tub, and helped her out carefully, cradling her body like she was something precious. He grabbed one of the thick cotton towels from the warmer rack and began drying her with those big, unhurried hands. Once she was dry, he pulled a nightgown from the dresser drawer. Deep blue silk satin, so light it felt like water when he unfolded it. He slipped it over her head and smoothed it down her waist, fingers grazing every inch of skin on the way down. The fabric clung to her curves, catching the light with every step she took.

“You look like a dream,” he murmured, eyes hooded.

“Then stop teasing me like a nightmare,” she whispered back.

He barked a laugh, kissed her temple, and opened the door. They padded barefoot down the hallway, the air cooler now outside the humid warmth of the bathroom. As soon as they stepped into the living room, Stack stopped short and threw a hand to his chest with a dramatic gasp.

“Goddamn!” he said, voice rising like he had been hit with the Holy Ghost. “Is that sausage I smell? Real pork? Ooh, that nigga done put his soul in the skillet this mornin’!”

Sera giggled as Stack fanned himself and strutted into the kitchen with mock reverence. The table was already set. Sausage links glistening with just the right char. A steaming pot of grits thickened to perfection. Buttered toast stacked high beside a pitcher of cold orange juice.

Smoke didn’t so much as blink. He stood near the stove, his back still partially turned to his brother’s foolishness, spatula laid down, apron now folded neatly on the counter. But his eyes? They were locked on his woman. Watching her. Studying her.

She paused beneath the weight of that stare.

Smoke moved before she could even lower hers. He closed the space between them with quiet, measured steps. His eyes roamed her body, from the blue silk clinging to her hardened nipples, along the soft slope of her hips, the hem brushing her thighs and then back up to her flushed cheeks and parted lips.

He cupped her face gently and inspected her like a man inspecting the edge of a blade that belonged to him. Then leaned in and placed a soft kiss on her lips. Barely there. More a promise than a greeting. “You sittin’ with me,” he said quietly against her mouth, “for breakfast.”

Before she could answer, his hand slid around her waist, guiding her toward the chair he had already pulled out for himself.

Stack was already two sausage links deep and halfway through his toast. “She gettin’ extra princess treatment today, huh?”

“She always gets that,” Smoke said without looking at him. His voice had dropped an octave, all velvet and warning. “But she still got a lesson comin’.”

Sera’s breath lingered in her throat as Smoke sat down and pulled her gently into his lap. His arms wrapped around her waist, anchoring her, while the scent of sausage and buttered toast hung warm and heavy in the air.

“Eat up, little wife,” he whispered in her ear. “You gon’ need the strength.”

Stack tore into a second plate of food like a man who had earned every bite. Sausage snapped between his teeth and grease shined on his fingers as he leaned back in the chair with a satisfied groan. He shoveled grits onto his fork next, thick and steaming, the butter melting into glossy pools across the surface.

“Lord,” he muttered. “This some stay alive food.”

Across the table, Sera sat tucked into Smoke’s lap like she belonged there by design. Her back rested fully against his chest, her spine fitting the hard plane of him as if it had been carved for that purpose. Smoke’s toned legs were spread slightly, solid and unmoving, creating a cradle she couldn’t escape even if she tried. One of his arms wrapped around her waist, forearm warm and heavy across her stomach, while the other rested along the table edge, fingers flexing like they were impatient for something.

She lifted her spoon carefully, the sweet grits clinging to it in a soft mound, brown sugar and cinnamon scent curling upward. She blew on it once and took the bite, humming faintly as it hit her tongue.

Stack froze mid chew. “Sweet grits,” he said slowly, disbelief dripping from every syllable. “You lucky you our woman, ‘cause any other day I’d curse you for that.”

She turned her head just enough to look at him, eyes narrowing. “They good.”

Smoke’s chest shifted behind her with a quiet laugh. “They real good when they made right,” he said calmly. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with sweet grits.”

Stack scoffed. “That shit is blasphemy.”

Sera opened her mouth, ready to defend herself, but before a word could leave her lips Smoke’s hand slid beneath the hem of her silk nightgown. His palm met bare skin. No lace. No cotton. Nothing. 

He sucked in a sharp breath, his fingers flexing against the soft curve of her thigh. “Mm,” he murmured low in her ear. “Didn’t even bother with underwear.”

Her spoon trembled.

“You learnin’,” Smoke continued quietly, voice roughened with approval. “But you still green. Got so much left to teach you.”

His mouth found her neck, kisses pressed slow and possessive along the column of her throat. His lips lingered there, teeth grazing just enough to make her shiver. His hand drifted higher, fingers sliding through the slick warmth between her thighs until his thumb found her button.

Sera gasped and the spoon in her hand nearly tipped.

Smoke’s other hand came down fast and hard against her ass, the sound sharp in the quiet room. She yelped, body jolting against him. “Don’t you drop that spoon,” he said firmly. “Eat.”

Her breath stuttered as she scrambled to steady herself, fingers tightening around the handle. She glanced across the table, eyes wide and pleading, looking for mercy.

Stack just chuckled, shaking his head as he reached for another piece of toast. His grin was all teeth and trouble. “Ain’t nobody savin’ you,” he said lightly. “Lesson already started, doll.”

Smoke’s thumb resumed its work, pressing, circling and drawing soft broken sounds from her throat while his hand at her waist held her exactly where he wanted her.

“Keep eatin’,” Smoke murmured against her ear, voice thick as syrup.

Seraphim’s thoughts scattered the moment Smoke’s grip tightened at her waist. At first, she tried to focus on the bowl in front of her. The weight of it. The ceramic warmth against her palms. The faint sweetness of sugar melting into the grits. She told herself to chew, swallow, and lift the spoon again. Simple things. Normal things. Things she could still control.

But Smoke made control feel like sand slipping through her fingers. His hand kept moving. Always moving. Thumb dragging teasing circles that never quite gave her what she needed. Every time her body leaned into it, chasing relief, he shifted just enough to deny her. Her nightgown crept higher with each restless movement until fabric bunched around her hips, useless and forgotten.

Her cheeks burned where his palm had landed again and again, the sting blooming hot and bright before melting into something heavier. Something deeper. Her skin felt swollen and hypersensitive, like even the air brushing against her would make her cry out.

Her mind fractured under it. Part of her wanted to obey perfectly. To sit still. To eat. To prove she could listen. Another part of her was unraveling, desperate, aching, and furious at herself for wanting more when she had already been warned.

Smoke kept talking in her ear, his voice steady and almost calm, which somehow made this punishment worse. “Told you I wanted to take it easy today,” Smoke said quietly, fingers spreading her slick with unapologetic ownership. “But you don’t hear warnings. You test ‘em.”

Her stomach flipped.

“You listen to Stack when I tell you slow down,” he continued, letting a finger slide inside her just enough to make her gasp. “You push past ya limits like they don’t fuckin’ matter.”

Her spoon clinked faintly against the bowl as her hand shook.

“E-Elijah,” she whimpered, the sound thin and wrecked.

The smack came fast. Her ass burned as she cried out, the noise sharp enough to echo off the walls. Tears stung her eyes instantly, frustration and pleasure tangling so tightly she couldn’t tell them apart.

“Eat,” he ordered.

Sera’s thighs trembled and sitting still started to feel like an impossible task. Every shift rubbed her raw, puffy heat against Smoke’s hand, against his thigh, against nothing and everything all at once. Pain pulled her in one direction and pleasure yanked her another. Her mind couldn’t decide which to follow, so it fractured again.

Half a bowl in, her body felt like it was screaming from the inside out. She tried to look back at him, twisting her neck just enough to catch his gaze, lips trembling. Words spilled out, messy and unformed. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—I’ll listen—I promise—”

None of it landed.

Smoke’s hand slid up her spine and guided her head forward again. “Eyes on that nigga ‘cross the table you love listenin’ to.”

Sera’s breath hitched as she looked up. Stack was already watching her like a man watching his favorite show. His elbow rested casually on the table, hand palming himself through his boxers, eyes dark and unblinking. He didn’t hide his interest. Didn’t soften it. That look made her chest tighten.

He grinned slowly. “She got that look, Smoke,” he said, voice low and pleased. “The one right ‘fore she get to cryin’.”

Smoke hummed in agreement. “Mean she ain’t learned yet.”

She felt it before she fully understood it. The thick head of Smoke’s dick pressed against her entrance, warm and unrelenting. He didn’t push in, he just rested there. Teased. Let her feel exactly what she was being denied and her hips jerked involuntarily.

“Still got half that bowl, doll.” Smoke said calmly. “Finish it.”

Then he pushed inside. The stretch hit her all at once, deep and overwhelming, her body clamping down around him like it had been waiting for this exact pressure. Her vision blurred at the edges. Her brain short-circuited completely, pleasure detonating so suddenly she couldn’t stop the sound that tore from her throat.

Sera’s body tightened too tight and too soon. Smoke felt it instantly and landed a slap to her clit that was sharp enough to steal the air from her lungs. She sobbed as her orgasm shattered before it could crest, leaving her trembling and ruined in his lap.

“I’m tired of repeatin’ myself,” Smoke said flatly. “Finish. Eatin’.”

Her hands shook so badly she nearly dropped the spoon again. Tears slipped down her cheeks now, silent and helpless, as she forced herself to lift another bite to her mouth. Her body throbbed around him, aching and denied, every nerve lit and screaming.

“You gon’ keep me warm ‘til you finish,” he said quietly near her ear, his voice steady even as his body betrayed him. “That’s all you doin’ right now. Holdin’ me. Nothin’ else.”

Her breath shuddered as she nodded, lips brushing the spoon as she forced another bite of grits into her mouth. Sweet and buttery turned cloying on her tongue and her stomach knotted too tight for hunger. She chewed because he told her to. Because the alternative felt unimaginable.

“You don’t get to finish,” Smoke continued, one hand firm at her waist, the other hovering just close enough to her clit to make her flinch. “Not ‘til that bowl empty an not ‘til you apologize proper for not listenin’ to me this mornin’.”

Her chest tightened. She swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”

Inside, Smoke was fighting a war. He could feel how wet she was. How her body kept pulling him in, clenching in small, helpless pulses that made his jaw lock and his breath turn shallow. Every instinct in him screamed to take her, to rock up into her until her words dissolved into sound and her eyes went glassy with pleasure. But this wasn’t about release. This was about patience and discipline. This was about teaching his woman that his warnings meant something.

He took a deep breath and lifted his eyes before meeting Stack’s across the table. Stack took one look at Smoke’s face and barked out a laugh. A sharp vein stood out along Smoke’s forehead, his control was stretched thin as wire. Stack’s shoulders shook as he tried to contain it, lips pressed together like he was savoring the moment.

Smoke’s gaze snapped hard and lethal towards his twin.

Don’t.

Stack raised his hands in mock surrender, still grinning, but wisely shut his mouth.

Sera shifted again without meaning to, the movement instinctive as her body sought friction. Her walls clenched around Smoke, tight and needy.

The next smack came fast. Her clit stung sharply as Smoke’s palm snapped against it, the sensation electric and punishing. She cried out, thighs jerking.

“Don’t do that,” he warned.

Another involuntary clench. This time, his hand cracked against her ass, the sound loud in the kitchen. Her mahogany skin burned, already tender from earlier, the sting layering over itself until it felt like fire beneath her skin.

She whimpered, tears blurring her vision.

“Eat,” Smoke reminded her, voice firm but not raised. He said he was tired of repeating himself, but he kept doing it anyway, like a mantra he needed just as much as she did.

Her frustration finally bubbled over. “I am tryin’,” she snapped weakly, tears streaking down her cheeks. “You just— you bein’ unreasonable!”

The room froze and Smoke’s brow furrowed, his grip tightening on her hips until she gasped. The muscle in his jaw flexed, restraint cracking audibly in the silence.

Stack lost it before he leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. “Unreasonable?” he wheezed. “Baby, Sera… you don’t even know how merciful he’s actin’ right now.”

Smoke inhaled slowly through his nose, trying to steady himself. It didn’t work. “Fuck it,” he grunted.

Before either of them could react, he grabbed a fabric napkin from the table. His hands were sure, practiced, as he tore it into long strips with a sharp rip. He caught Sera’s wrist gently but firmly, then the other, guiding her arms behind her back. The fabric tightened, binding just enough to restrain without cutting off circulation.

Her breath hitched. “E-Elijah—”

He lifted her effortlessly, repositioning her with a quiet authority that stole the air from her lungs. Her upper body was bent over the kitchen table, exposed skin braced against the wood, nightgown pushed up, her ass lifted and exposed. She felt impossibly open like this. Vulnerable in a way that made her pulse race.

Smoke stepped in close behind her and fisted her hair, tilting her head back just enough that his mouth brushed her ear. “If you can’t take no more,” he whispered, voice low and deadly calm, “use ya word.”

She nodded frantically, heart hammering. Without another syllable, he drove into her. No warning. No easing. He slammed into her soaked pussy with a force that knocked the breath from her as the table rattled beneath her weight. A broken cry tore from her throat as her body stretched around him, the sensation overwhelming and consuming all at once.

He stayed buried to the hilt, his chest pressed against her back, one hand cinched tight in her hair, the other gripping her bound wrists like reins. His breath thundered against the side of her neck, heavy and ragged, every exhale branding her skin. The only sounds in the kitchen were the tick of the clock, the soft drip of sausage grease cooling on the pan, and the uneven panting of two people locked in a dangerous rhythm.

Sera’s mind splintered the moment he entered her. The stretch had been brutal and deep. There was no gentle lead-in, no warning tap or whispered promise. Smoke had filled her in one merciless stroke and her swollen walls strained to take him all over again after being teased to madness.

She felt every inch. Every pulse. Every twitch of restrained fury that rippled beneath his skin. “S-S-Smoke,” she gasped, voice already wrecked.

His hand curled tighter around her hair and yanked her head back, forcing her spine into an arch. Her bound wrists strained behind her. “You don’t get to say my name like that,” he growled against her ear. “Not after what you pulled this mornin’.”

She whimpered, legs shaking.

“You got the nerve to tell me I’m bein’ unreasonable,” he bit out, punctuating the sentence by pulling halfway out and slamming back into her, making her cry out again. “When I been tryin’ all goddamn mornin’ to go easy on you.”

Her eyes slammed shut.

“Tryin’ to let you rest. Tryin’ to feed you first. Let Stack take care of you. But you? You kept pushin’. Kept mouthin’ off. Kept thinkin’ you ain’t gotta follow my word.”

Another deep stroke, punishing and deliberate. She screamed into the wood of the table, tears slipping down her cheeks as her body clamped around him. He groaned, long and guttural, forehead pressed to her shoulder as he barely held himself together. His dick throbbed deep inside her, wrapped in tight heat that was slick like velvet and honey.

Across from them, Stack was no longer laughing. His eyes had darkened again and the humor drained from his face as he watched Smoke discipline their woman. His hand stroked lazily over the bulge in his boxers, slow and appreciative, but his eyes never left Seraphim’s face. The way her mouth hung open, lips trembling, cheeks streaked with tears she couldn’t stop.

“You okay, baby?” Stack asked softly, voice laced with sarcasm knowing this punishment was all his fault. “You still with us?”

She nodded quickly, too afraid to speak, her body trembling like a fever had taken hold of her.

Smoke’s hand trailed from her wrists down to her lower back, then lower, until he gripped her hip in a bruising hold. “Say the words,” he demanded. “You know what I’m waitin’ on.”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” she gasped, barely able to form the words. “I should’ve listened—I didn’t mean to—”

“That ain’t good enough.”

He thrusted into her again, harder until her knees nearly gave out. She choked on a sob, her mouth barely finding words now.

“I’m sorry for not listenin’,” she cried. “I should’ve done what you said. I’m sorry! Please…”

The sound of her breaking undid something inside him. His grip tightened. His strokes turned sharp, brutal, relentless. Wet sounds filled the room. Her pussy gushed around him, puffy and wrecked, taking every punishing inch. Her cries dissolved into moans that were no longer pleading, but high, ragged and confused by how good the pain felt.

Her thighs quaked.

Smoke’s voice dropped to a growl. “Don’t you dare cum.”

“I—I can’t—” she sobbed. “I can’t hold it—”

“You will,” he snarled. “Or I’ll stop right now an make you sit on my pecker ‘til supper.”

Stack leaned forward on his elbows, eyes low and hooded as he watched her fall apart. “She gettin’ real close,” he chimed in. “That little twitch she do when she hold her breath… yeah… there it go.”

Smoke didn’t even glance at him. His focus was entirely on the woman folded over the table in front of him, arms bound behind her, nightgown wrinkled around her waist, tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

He grabbed her ass in both hands, spreading her wide, the pads of his fingers sinking into her sore flesh. Her pussy stretched around him gripping his length like it didn’t want to let go. He fucked into her with a rhythm that was cruel in its precision—deep, steady, devastating. Not rushed. Not chaotic. Just brutal truth in motion. Every stroke landed in the spot that made her toes curl. Every retreat had her body sucking him back in like she needed him to breathe.

Sera’s vision blurred, her lashes were damp and her lips trembled against the polished wood of the table. Her aching bud pulsed with need, but Smoke’s hands stayed on her hips, his dick did the talking, and she felt herself rising far too fast again.

“E-Elijah—” she whispered, or tried to. It came out like a sob, raw and shaking.

“You holdin’ ya breath again,” he warned, voice pitched low, just behind her ear. “That same damn twitch… That same cry... I just told you—”

His hips snapped forward harder, and she screamed. “—you don’t cum ‘til I say you can.”

Her thighs buckled. Her whole body shuddered, inching on the edge of collapse.

Stack leaned back in his chair again, watching with lazy fascination, the kind a man might show when watching fireworks right before the finale. His expression was still fixed on Sera’s face, like it was the most beautiful portrait of agony he’d ever seen. “You gon’ break her,” he muttered, voice thick with amusement and arousal. “An she gon’ love you for it.”

Sera’s mouth fell open, but no words came. Just a strangled cry and a tremor that ripped through her spine. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t plead. Her mind felt fractured, held together by nothing but the pressure of Smoke’s dick and the promise of a release that stayed just out of reach.

She clenched again. Smoke’s hand came down hard on her ass. Then again on her clit and she screamed.

“Stop clenchin’,” he growled. “Every time you do it, you gettin’ punished.”

Her sob hitched in her throat. “I—I can’t help it…”

“Yes you can,” he snapped. “You just don’t wanna. You think this still a game. You think Stack laughin’ means I’ma let you off easy. I ain’t.”

He dragged out the next stroke, slow and maddening, hips grinding deep until she felt the weight of him settle inside her like a curse. “You wanna cum?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper. “You need to cum?”

“Yes—yes, please—Sir, please—”

“Then prove you know who you belong to.”

Smack.

His hand connected with her clit again, and Seraphim’s scream caught halfway through her throat, unraveling into a ragged sob that echoed off the walls of their apartment. Her body trembled and she couldn’t take it anymore. One more stroke, one more word, one more push would split her open completely. Her pussy tightened around him, slick and swollen, so sensitive it felt like every breath she took rubbed her raw from the inside out. And still he didn’t let her finish..

Smoke exhaled through his nose like a man straining to keep the devil at bay. Then, in one fluid, powerful motion, he pulled out of Sera, making her whimper from the emptiness. He gripped her hips and lifted her off the table, turning her pliant, shaking body in his arms until she was seated in his lap again facing the table, back flush against his chest, legs straddling his thighs.

His length slid back inside her with a thick, wet glide, and they both groaned, though for very different reasons. Sera felt it like a punch to the gut. It was full, deep and searing. Smoke felt it like a curse, like the weight of restraint collapsing against him. His jaw clenched, a vein rising again along his temple as her tight, wet pussy squeezed him from every angle.

He untied the napkin bindings from her wrists with fast, frustrated movements. The fabric was damp from sweat and the heat of her trembling body.

“You gon’ finish that damn bowl,” he gritted out, dragging the half-full dish toward her. “An you gon’ do it right.”

Sera blinked, still dizzy, the spoon barely registering in her hand as Smoke forced it back into her palm. “I can’t—” she whimpered, trying to gather her thoughts.

“You can,” he snapped, the grit in his voice fraying, his patience unraveling by the second. “I done gone outta my way to show you mercy this mornin’. Now I’m givin’ you one more chance to sit here an eat in peace.”

His dick twitched inside her, throbbing with a rhythm that matched the hard set of his jaw. Every second it sat inside her unmoving was a torment he forced himself to endure.

“Couple seconds ago you begged for more,” he continued, lips brushing her temple, “but now you wanna fall apart ‘fore earnin’ it?”

She whimpered again, trying to lift the spoon, but her hands were shaking too much. The grits were cold now. They were sticky, sweet and forgotten but she brought the bite to her lips anyway.

Behind her, Smoke’s fists clenched at her hips. He held her in place as she swallowed, each throb of her pussy making him want to growl. Her walls tightened involuntarily again, soft little clenches that gripped him like a mouth trying to suck him deeper.

He hissed in her ear low and dangerous. “You better stop grippin’ me like that,” he growled. “I swear to God, Sera, if you keep squeezin’ me like that I’ma fuck this chair through the floor.”

Her hips trembled. Another clench. Reflexive. Helpless. Smoke’s entire body went rigid beneath her, every thick vein in his arms standing out as he breathed through his nose.

Stack, still leaning in his chair with his arms crossed, barked a laugh. “Look at you,” he said to Smoke, amusement dripping from every word. “You the one givin’ the lesson an look like you the one ‘bout to tap out.”

Smoke shot him a death glare that could’ve stopped time. “Shut the fuck up an go find sum’ safe to do,” he bit out.

Stack raised his hands in surrender, chuckling as he walked away with a shake of his head, mumbling something about pride coming before the fall.

Sera managed another bite. Then another. Spoon trembling between her fingers. Smoke stayed inside her, twitching and full, like a devil caged and waiting for the final chain to snap. The last bite felt like climbing out of deep water. She swallowed it with a shaky breath, her hands finally lowering the spoon back to the table with a soft clink. Her shoulders sagged in relief before her body remembered everything else at once.

Smoke exhaled, long and controlled, as if he had been holding himself together by sheer will. “Good,” he said quietly. “Now turn around.”

His hands guided her with a firm gentleness, repositioning her until she was facing him, knees bracketing his hips and straddling him fully. The chair creaked under the shift. She could see his face now. How tight his jaw was, how his eyes were dark and focused, and the sheen of sweat along his temple that told the truth of how hard this had been for him too.

He slid his hands away from her hips on purpose. No grip. No guidance. “You gon’ ride me,” he said. “An you gon’ apologize.”

Her heart stuttered.

“I ain’t holdin’ you,” Smoke continued evenly. “You gotta do this yaself.”

Sera nodded, nervous and aching, and tried to move. The first attempt was awkward. She lifted her hips too high, lost the angle, and Smoke slipped free with a wet sound that made her gasp in embarrassment.

“Easy,” he said, steady and calm. “Don’t rush it.”

She tried again, hands braced on his shoulders this time. Still clumsy. Still unsure. She sank down, missed again and frustration twisting in her chest.

“That’s alright,” Smoke murmured. “You still learnin’. Look at me.”

She did, cheeks burning.

“Slow your hips,” he coached. “Think ‘bout sittin’ on me, not droppin’.”

On the third try, she found him again, her body easing down until he filled her properly. A broken sound slipped from her throat at the sensation, pleasure blooming sharp and bright now that she controlled the movement.

“There you go,” he said softly. “That’s it.”

She began to move, tentative at first. Small motions. Rocking more than riding. Her rhythm faltered, and once more she slipped free, a frustrated sob leaving her lips.

Smoke reached up then, just briefly, guiding her back down to reconnect them before pulling his hands away again. “Ain’t mad,” he said. “I got patience for you. Keep goin’.”

She nodded, breathing hard, and tried again. This time, something kind of clicked. She rolled her hips instead of lifting them, letting the motion come from her core. The friction changed instantly. Everything felt deeper and steadier with a rhythm that made her eyes roll and her mouth part.

“Oh,” she whispered.

Smoke’s chest rose sharply. “Yeah… find that spot.”

Encouraged, she kept going, movements growing more confident, pleasure building in waves instead of spikes. Smoke watched her closely, his expression softening even as his voice stayed firm.

“That’s my girl,” he said quietly. “You doin’ good.”

Her chest tightened at the praise.

“Now apologize,” he reminded her before landing another swat at her tender ass.

She swallowed, riding him as she spoke, words trembling but honest. “I’m s-s-sorry for n-not listenin’ to you this m-m-mornin’.”

He nodded once. “Mmhmm… Keep goin’.”

“I’m sorry for pushin’ p-p-past what you told me,” she continued, hips rocking, voice breaking. “I wasn’t tryin’ to d-disrespect you. I just— I wanted you...”

Smoke’s jaw clenched as her walls tightened around him, but his voice stayed steady. “Say it right.”

She leaned forward, forehead touching his, breath mingling. “I’m sorry, E-Elijah. I’ll listen to you. I won’t ignore you a-a-again.”

Silence stretched for a beat. Then Smoke’s hands came back to her hips, firm and grounding, finally taking control again. His thumbs pressed into her skin with possessive certainty.

“That’s it,” he said low. “You did good.”

Her body responded instantly, relief flooding her so hard she nearly cried.

“You can cum now,” he murmured, voice thick with promise. “Use this dick an ride me ‘til you can’t think no more.”

The permission hit her like a snapped wire. Seraphim cried out, body surging forward as her hips stuttered through the movement, rhythm breaking under the weight of too much sensation at once. Pleasure had her seeing sounds and hearing colors, making her limbs feel clumsy and uncoordinated again, like she was learning how to use her body for the first time.

Smoke felt it immediately. “Hey,” he comforted, steady even as she trembled. “Easy, baby. I got you.”

Without breaking their connection, he wrapped one arm around her back and stood, lifting her with an ease that made her gasp. She clung to him instinctively, arms winding around his neck as he carried her across the room. Every step dragged another soft sound from her throat, his dick still seated deep inside her, keeping her anchored to him.

He lowered himself onto the living room couch and guided her with practiced care, settling back into the cushions before positioning her again. This time, he angled her so her knees pressed into the couch on either side of his thighs, grounding her. He took her hands and placed them on his shoulders.

“Right there,” he instructed quietly. “Hold on.”

She obeyed, fingers digging into muscle as she rocked forward, tentative again until she felt it… that familiar, devastating pull low in her belly. Her breath caught.

“There it is,” Smoke said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “That sweet spot.”

Her hips began to move with more confidence now, guided by sensation instead of nerves. Smoke’s hands rested on her waist, thumbs digging in just enough to remind her he was there, that she wasn’t doing this alone.

He leaned forward, lips brushing her ear as he spoke, voice rough and unapologetic. “That’s it. You look so fuckin’ good ridin’ this dick. Just like that. You feel how you takin’ me now?”

She nodded frantically, words lost to the sounds spilling from her mouth. He spit into his palm, the sound sharp in the quiet room, and slid his thumb between her legs. When it touched her clit, she sobbed, head dropping forward as pleasure detonated anew. His thumb moved in slow, filthy circles, perfectly timed with the roll of her hips.

“Ya lesson is over,” he whispered. “Now you just mine.”

Her body responded instantly, tightening around him as her movements grew more desperate. Smoke’s praise poured over her in a low stream, grounding and wicked all at once.

“Good girl,” he murmured. “That’s my wife. Ridin’ me just how I like. You doin’ so damn good.”

Her world narrowed to the drag of his thumb, the fullness of him inside her and the sound of his voice. Her mind went hazy, thoughts dissolving into sensation until there was nothing left but the need to move, to chase the pleasure cresting higher and higher.

“Don’t stop,” he urged softly. “Stay right there. Let it take you.”

Her body was still trembling when the last waves eased, breath coming in uneven pulls as she sagged against him. Smoke kept her close, arms firm around her, his chest rising hard beneath her cheek. For a few heartbeats there was only the aftermath. The thud of her pulse. The drag of breath. The sticky heat between them.

Then she lifted her head.

Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, but the desire for more burned bright beneath it. She shifted her hips just enough to feel him still thick and pulsing inside her, still hard and waiting.

“Smoke,” she whined, voice wrecked and needy. “Please… feel good with me.”

He stilled and the muscles in his arms tightened while his jaw settled as he looked down at her. He was breathing hard now too as his desire roared through him unchecked. “Beg for it,” he grunted. “Beg me like a proper doll.”

Her lips parted. Her pride and inexperience wavered for half a second. Then she nodded. She slid her hands up his shoulders, fingers digging into him as she leaned in, forehead brushing his. Her voice came softer, shakier, and stripped bare of bravado. “Please,” she breathed. “Please fill me... I need you to. I need you to make a mess inside me… make me yours.”

Her hips rocked once, desperate and unsteady. “Please, Smoke,” she whispered. “I’ll take it. I’ll hold it. I’ll be good.”

That was the straw that broke the camel's back. Smoke growled and crushed Sera against him in a bear hug, arms locking around her torso as he took control completely. He surged up into her with no restraint left, driving into her from below with brutal, relentless power. The couch creaked beneath them as his hips snapped upward again and again, each thrust knocking the air from her lungs.

“Oh—oh—s-s-shit! Smoke!” she cried, the sound loud and unfiltered as her head fell back.

He didn’t slow down and he couldn’t even if he tried. He fucked her like a man claiming ground, like a storm that had finally been unleashed. The sound of skin slapping skin filled the room, obscene and wet. His balls smacked against her soaked folds with every hard thrust, slick sounds echoed as her body gushed around him, overstimulated and wrecked.

Sera’s moans grew louder, uncontrolled and tearing out of her as she clung to him. Her nails dug into his shoulders, sharp and desperate, and she sobbed into his neck, tears streaking down her face as pleasure overwhelmed her completely. Smoke’s head tipped back, eyes rolling as he drove into her harder, faster, every muscle straining. He was dimly aware of the noise, of how loud she was, of how anyone within a hundred miles could probably hear how thoroughly he was fucking his woman but he didn’t care.

“Mine,” he snarled, voice breaking as he buried himself deep. “Mine—FUCK—take it!”

Her body clamped down around him, convulsing as another orgasm tore through her, sharp and blinding. She screamed his name, voice cracking, nails raking down his back as she shattered. That was what pushed him over. Smoke groaned deep in his chest and slammed into her one final time, holding her there as he came hard, spilling inside her in thick pulses. He stayed buried, arms locked tight around her as he filled her completely, breath ragged, body shaking with the force of it.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The room rang with the echo of what they had just done. Then Smoke lowered his head, forehead pressing to her shoulder, breath finally slowing as he held her close. His grip softened just enough to be comforting instead of crushing.

“There,” he murmured hoarsely. “That’s it.”

Sera sagged against him, spent and shaking, mind blissfully empty as she clung to him and let herself be held. Smoke’s body had gone slack beneath her, the corded tension in his shoulders melting away with each ragged breath. He held her now like something precious, not breakable, but claimed. His calloused hands moved across her back in slow strokes, grounding her, tracing the ridges of her spine, and soothing her through the aftershocks of everything they just endured together.

And then came the kisses. Soft, loving and unrushed. Smoke pressed them everywhere he could reach, her cheeks, her forehead, her nose, her chin. His lips lingered at the corner of her mouth before returning to her brow, each one an echo of the worship he couldn’t put into words. Sera breathed through the haze as her fingers curled loosely at his nape while she floated down from her high.

Neither of them moved to separate. He stayed sheathed inside her, their bodies still connected as if to let go now would mean something sacred might come undone.

They were still wrapped in that hush when the cushions beside them dipped with a familiar weight.

Flop.

Stack dropped onto the couch with all the care of a man who hadn’t just watched his brother take their woman to the brink and back. He leaned over, lit a freshly rolled cigarette with a flick of his lighter, then held it out toward Smoke, eyes half-lidded. Smoke took it without a word and brought it to his lips.

Sera didn’t move. She was boneless, her breath coming in long, shaky exhales, arms still lazily slung around Smoke’s neck. Her thighs twitched now and then, the soreness between them blooming as awareness returned.

Stack sucked his teeth as he looked her over, then leaned back with a groan and poured himself a glass of whiskey from the bar cart. The ice clinked once before melting into the amber liquid. “We keep fuckin’ her til her damn brain turn smooth,” he complained, swirling his glass. “Gon’ be real hard to share her when she don’t 'member her name no more.”

Smoke exhaled a long stream of smoke, then turned his head just enough to blow it away from Sera’s face. His arm stayed wrapped around her waist, his other hand cradling the back of her head like she might drift off right there against his chest.

“Was worth it,” he said, voice rough and satisfied.

Sera cracked one eye open, lips swollen, eyes glazed but glinting with sass beneath the haze. “I can handle both of you,” she grumbled, her voice hoarse but defiant. “I’m stronger than I look.”

Stack choked on his drink and turned his head to stare at her like she had just challenged the sun. “Oh yeah?” he said, one brow cocked. “You ready to get that second hole filled up proper then?”

Smoke didn’t laugh. He took another long pull from the cigarette, smoke curling around his lashes. His hand absently stroked Sera’s lower back, slow and possessive. “I was gon’ put her jade back in,” he said mildly, thumb brushing the top of her ass, “but the mornin’ went another direction.”

Stack looked her up and down again, mouth twitching. “Sure did,” he muttered. “Poor thing look like a wind could knock her out.”

Sera pouted and nuzzled deeper into Smoke’s chest like she hadn’t just been ravaged into near silence moments ago. She was sore, stretched, and dripping full, but somewhere deep in her exhausted core… she wanted more.

Smoke took one last drag from the cigarette, the ember glowing orange in the dim light of the living room. The taste of tobacco mixed with the salt on Sera’s skin still lingered on his tongue, warm and grounding. With a quiet sigh, he leaned to the side and passed the cigarette to Stack, who plucked it from his fingers with an easy smirk, already tipping it to his lips.

He brushed a hand through Sera’s damp curls and let his fingers linger at her nape. “You got any energy left in that body?” he asked, his voice roughened by the edge of spent desire. “Or did I fuck them city plans clean outta you?”

Sera tilted her head up, eyes still half-lidded and dreamy, lips parted in the afterglow. “I need…” she paused. “A bath. An a nap… Then maybe the city.”

Stack huffed out a laugh through a stream of smoke, the cigarette perched lazily between his fingers now as he stretched his legs and let his head fall back on the couch. “She say that like she ain’t ‘bout to be walkin’ sideways,” he teased, voice thick with amusement.

Smoke ignored him, his focus still locked on her. “A bath an a nap,” he repeated, nodding slowly. “We can do that.”

His tone softened, the grit giving way to something deeper. “We’ll check it out tonight. See what this city life got to offer us. Take it all in when the sun drop. It’s livelier at night. More to see.”

He leaned in and kissed her temple, slow and tender, the scent of her skin sweeter now, like sweat and lavender mixed with surrender. “Remember, you ain’t gotta rush, little wife,” he added against her skin. “You got us for a lifetime.”

Sera exhaled, a small, contented sound leaving her lips. She melted against him, her arms still loosely wrapped around his shoulders as if she wasn’t quite ready to let go. Tonight, they would walk the city streets. But for now, the twins would carry her back to the bath. And hold her, again and again, like something they never planned to release.

Author's Note: Damn thats crazy... Ya'll finally have an update after I was gone for like two days *cough*.

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When the train doors slid and the platform air rushed in with its mixture of coal, perfume, and lake wind, the twins stepped down first and then turned as one, reaching up for Sera. Smoke’s hand found her waist and Stack’s palm bracketed her elbow as she came down between them, light as a sunflower lifted from a field. The station crowded around them with collars, traveling trunks and greetings pitched high to be heard over the engines. Smoke felt the patterns of it as if he could read the routes by sound alone, and then his gaze cut through the movement and found their men waiting beyond the ticket windows. Two cars idling at the curb, engines ticking and their drivers standing at an alert angle that said they belonged to him. He counted faces without letting his eyes harden. Six… there should have been six. Four watched him with shoulders squared. Two were missing. He said nothing. Stack said nothing. The knowledge passed between them as naturally as breath.

They moved like a small procession out to the street, Sera in the center, her fingers wrapped around the strap of her travel bag while she turned in a soft circle to take in the city. The cars waited deep green and polished, city grit floating in their shine, and the men opened the doors with a brisk nod to Smoke and a brief, respectful smile for Sera. She settled into the back seat between the twins and looked out as the driver pulled into the stream of South Side traffic. The neighborhoods unfolded like chapters. Corner men with papers. Women with church hats held low against the wind. Brass from somewhere down a cross street. Boys running with shoelaces trailing and a bark of laughter that rose up and vanished under the car’s rumble.

Bronzeville announced itself not with a sign but with the feeling of it. A pride in the stoops, a carefulness in the curtains, a perfume of onions frying and old wood. The driver turned onto 35th and then onto South Parkway, and Sera’s hand found Smoke’s sleeve and squeezed there, a quiet little anchor, as she craned her neck to see the neighborhood she would call home. Smoke had chosen the building for the view and the vantage. Eight floors up meant a horizon, and it meant lines of sight. It meant that a man could protect what was his.

They climbed from the car and Sera’s shoes tapped a rhythm on the lobby tile as she lifted her head to the ceiling with its painted garlands and its round lamp that glowed like a winter moon. The elevator yawned open and swallowed them with a hum, and Sera pressed closer to Smoke’s side as the floor numbers lifted one by one. When the door slid again on eight, the hallway breathed polish and lemon oil, and a city breeze found them under the door like a curious cat.

The apartment opened on two tall windows and a sweep of afternoon that made everything look faintly gilded. From here the avenues drew straight lines and the roofs laid out like quiet fields. Sera took one step in, then two, then five… and then she did that little half-run she always does when excitement tugged her forward like a ribbon. Smoke watched the set of her shoulders ease, watched the amazement settle and deepen into something tender. His men filed in behind, careful, waiting, the way men do when they carry news that must be delivered but will ruin the air.

“Go on,” Stack said, his voice warm, his chin lifting toward the interior rooms. “Go see it, little dove. See what suits you.”

Sera looked at him, then at Smoke, and when Smoke tipped his head once she darted away on soft steps, calling back with a bubbling laugh as doors opened and light fell across carpets and the city poured in from every window. She reached a balcony door and went very still, and then she glanced back over her shoulder, remembering that they were high up, and hesitation crossed her features like a small cloud skimming a bright sky. She returned on quick feet and caught Stack’s jacket sleeve, not tugging so much as holding. Stack read the tension in her, the way she hid nerves behind delight, and he bent over close enough to kiss the center of her forehead with a quiet press that felt like a promise. His hand landed in a playful pat on the curve of her backside as if to nudge courage into her. “A heaven sent woman like you,” he told her, eyes warm, “ought to wake up in the clouds every day.”

She exhaled a soft breath that sounded like a laugh trying to escape a whisper, and then she was off again, shoes brushing across the rug as she wandered. Smoke let his attention return to the men gathered near the door. Randal stood a half step ahead, shoulders squared, cap tucked under his arm.

“Where they at?” Smoke asked, the words even, the temperature of the room dropping without any need for a raised tone. Randal’s gaze flickered, just enough, and that was the answer before letting his mouth speak for him.

“Junebug an Tony,” Randal said quietly, careful with each word. “They went out last night. Got too bold with white women that laugh just like trouble. They flirted where they shouldn’t have. Two white men followed ‘em to the alley off Thirty Third. Found ‘em beaten an cut up this mornin’.”

The room went still at the edges. Stack’s jaw set, a hard piece of stone under skin, and he stared past the men for a breath that seemed to have anger intertwined with it. Smoke looked at the far window and then back to the faces in front of him. He didn’t swear or pace. He let the fury sort itself into clean lines the way a soldier lays out ammunition on a table.

“Send flowers,” he said, the words quiet and shaped. “Every color those mothers ever liked, an the envelopes signed by my hand. Make sure the pastor say their names twice.” He shifted his attention to Randal. “Did you pick up the package?”

Randal reached into his coat and produced a small wooden box, the kind a man could hide in his palm and still move his fingers. He handed it to Smoke without flourish. Smoke flipped the lid and both twins leaned in. The ring sat on velvet like a small sun that had decided to be kind. A gold band, a modest diamond with a clean eye, and tiny stones around it, red and blue, the colors catching the light as if someone had painted a flame and a river around a promise. Smoke felt the shape of what came next settle into him, as inevitable as rain after heavy clouds. He closed the box. It vanished into his pocket.

“Capone sent word,” Randal said. “Requests y’all presence in four days. Same place he like to talk when he wanna be seen, not heard.”

Smoke didn’t blink at the name, he didn’t like the thought of working with a white man, but he liked opportunity and leverage, and Chicago wrote its laws in a kind of ink that demanded a steady hand. “We gon’ be there,” he said. “Not before.”

Randal lifted a suitcase from beside his boot and offered it. Smoke didn’t look inside as he passed it to Stack, who carried it to a hall table and set it down with a quiet thud. The twins traded a look that carried whole sentences. The men understood that they were dismissed. Smoke gave them a nod that carried both condolence and command. Randal touched two fingers to the brim of his cap and they filed out, shoes barely whispering against the floor.

Silence returned like a visitor who never quite leaves. Smoke loosened his tie, the fabric sliding through the knot with a soft hiss, and he shrugged out of his jacket, laying it across the arm of a chair with the same precision he gave a map. He followed the sound of Sera’s laughter down the hall, a bright little stream that drew him past a doorway lined with books, another with a faint scent of cedar, until he reached the room with the long window and the mirrored wardrobe. Stack came after him with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders eased for the first time since the news. They paused on the threshold and found her at the closet, fingers skating over hangers that held a neat miracle. Dresses in colors she loved. Blouses with the right darts. Skirts that would swish when she walked. Everything measured to her exactly, the way a song fits a voice.

Sera turned and saw them and let out a delighted little noise that belonged to her alone. She ran the few steps between and into Stack first because he stood closest, and he scooped her up without thinking, joy passing through him like a spark. He kissed her face the way a man might kiss a handful of summer rain, quick and greedy and smiling between each press, and his hands slid under her skirt to anchor her against him, palms warm against the back of her thighs. She squealed and covered his cheeks with her hands, which only made him laugh into her skin.

Smoke stood back and watched, counting the windows, noting the angle of the street below, the places where shadow pooled, the places where a man might hide on a night he meant harm. He traced the path from bedroom to bath in his head and listened to the pipes sing somewhere in the walls. It pleased him that the water sounded strong.

When the pieces in his mind aligned in the way a lock receives a key, he stepped forward and peeled Stack’s hands from Sera with a patience that still carried ownership. “Need to borrow our woman,” he said, and Stack, content for the moment, let her pass into Smoke’s orbit.

Smoke lifted her thick frame as if she weighed no more than his shirt, set her feet back down so that her toes kissed the tile of the little passage, and guided her into the en-suite. A room with glossy white tile and a bath that could have floated on the lake if given the chance. Light fell in through glass textured like water, and a faint scent of vanilla rose from a glass bottle that waited on a shelf like a promise that someone had made on their behalf.

“We can wash you proper now,” Smoke said as he rolled his sleeves and bent to turn the taps. Water came in a steady pour, a shining ribbon that struck the porcelain with a bright sound. “No more of that back woods bathin’ you was accustomed to. Not when we got a tub fit for a Queen.”

She stood beside him and watched the steam reach. Then she squinted at him in that playful way she had when she wanted to be teasing and grateful at once, the corners of her eyes gathering with what might have been mischief if mischief wore a church hat. “So y’all wasn’t exaggeratin’,” she said, eyeing the broad rim and the elegant fixtures and the way the room gave them space to breathe.

Smoke turned toward her and the teasing on his mouth softened into something that felt heavier and sweeter. He touched her chin with two fingers and guided her look back to his. The kiss he gave her arrived like an oath and tasted like city wind. It wasn’t urgent or rushed… but it was certain… the way a sunrise is certain even on a winter morning. He didn’t crowd her, instead he surrounded her with an intention that could be read with his hands. His breath touched her cheek and his words sank low and steady against her mouth. “We plan on givin’ you the moon,” he told her, voice quiet enough that the water nearly kept it for itself. “An the stars if you want them. An if you ask for somethin’ past that, we gon’ find a way to give you that too.”

Smoke’s words hung between them like a vow carved into stone, and Sera felt the warmth of it bloom along her skin. The steady run of water behind them filled the silence, steam coiling upward and wrapping around the three of them like a veil. Stack shifted against the doorframe, his eyes tracing over Sera with a hungry patience, the kind that made her feel both worshipped and undone at once.

Smoke’s hands fell from her face and went to his shirt, fingers working at the buttons with a measured rhythm that drew her attention downward. Each slide of fabric away from his chest revealed hard planes and the faint gleam of scars that spoke of stories she hadn’t yet asked to hear. Sera’s eyes shifted to the going away present Annie gave him that bloomed on his neck, then she watched closely as he shrugged his shirt from his shoulders and draped it over the rail. He then reached for his belt, the leather sliding free with a quiet hiss that carried through the room. His trousers followed, heavy wool pooling at his feet before he stepped out of them.

Stack let out a low hum as he pushed from the frame and came closer, already tugging his suspenders down his broad shoulders. His shirt came loose in one motion, and he balled it in his fist before tossing it aside, the muscles of his chest and arms catching the haze of the light. He worked the rest of his clothes off with less restraint than his brother, his grin crooked as his trousers fell and he stood unabashed, the faintest glint of gold from his tooth catching the steam-softened glow.

Sera’s gaze darted between them, her breath trembling as if she couldn’t quite decide where to look. She twisted the hem of her dress in her fingers, eyes wide, soft lips pressing together before curving into the beginnings of a shy smile. Smoke noticed the small struggle in her posture, that blend of curiosity and nerves, and stepped forward to ease her hands away from the fabric. His palms smoothed down her arms until they reached her wrists, steady and grounding, as Stack circled to her other side, his fingers brushing against the back of her neck in a touch meant to soothe.

“You still trust us?” Smoke asked, his voice even, his eyes steady on hers.

She nodded, small but certain, and Smoke rewarded her with another kiss, deeper this time, while his hands found the buttons at her bodice. He undid them one by one, not tearing, not rushing, just loosening her from the confines of fabric until the dress slackened around her shoulders. Stack caught the fabric before it could fall too roughly and guided it down her body, peeling it away as if she were something delicate wrapped in too much cloth. The slip beneath clung faintly from the heat of her skin, and when Stack lifted it, his knuckles grazed the underside of her breast, drawing a gasp from her throat.

She tried to step back but Smoke’s hands steadied her, his voice quiet against her ear. “Ain’t nothin’ you need to hide. We done seen everythin’ an from now on we gon’ see you right.”

Stack eased the slip down her thighs and let it pool at her ankles, his grin softer now. He bent, one hand at her calf, lifting her foot free from the fabric as if she were royalty stepping out of robes. Then he repeated with the other until she stood bare between them, her skin kissed by the heat of the bathwater rising and the beaming sun spilling through the frosted window.

The tub steamed behind them, full now, the surface trembling each time a drop fell from the faucet. Smoke took her hand, guiding her toward it, while Stack slipped behind to place a steadying palm at the small of her back. She climbed carefully, toes dipping into the water first, the warmth making her shiver as it curled around her ankles. Smoke stepped in beside her, his tall frame bending with practiced ease as he lowered himself into the bath, the water rushing against porcelain and sloshing up around his thighs.

Stack followed, bracing a hand on the rim as he slid in, his larger-than-life presence making the water rise further. They formed a circle around her without even meaning to, her body held between them, their knees brushing hers beneath the surface. She sank lower, sighing at the warmth that engulfed her, until she sat with her back pressed lightly against Smoke’s chest, his arms folding around her with a possessive ease. Stack stretched his arm across the rim, his fingers dipping into the water to trail idle lines along her leg, watching her tremble with every brush.

The steam curled tighter, beads of water forming along the curve of her collarbone and sliding downward in slow, gleaming trails. Smoke bent, his lips finding the damp skin of her shoulder, each kiss steady, unhurried but heavy with meaning. Stack leaned closer, his breath fanning across her face before his mouth found her temple, then the corner of her jaw, his hand cupping her chin to turn her slightly so he could taste her smile.

She was surrounded, enveloped, every sense filled with them. From the strength of their bodies framing hers, to the water lapping rhythmically, the city outside humming its song far below while here, high in the clouds, they made a new world of their own.

The water rose and fell in gentle waves around them, the tub creaking faintly as the twins shifted closer, their bodies bracketing Sera on either side. Smoke reached for the bar of soap first, his hand working it into a lather that gleamed across his palms before he set it against her skin. He started with her shoulders, smoothing slow, circular strokes that loosened the tension from her frame, while Stack dipped his hands beneath the water and traced along her calves, thumbs pressing tenderly into the arches of her feet before gliding upward in long, purposeful sweeps.

Sera’s lashes lowered as warmth and touch mingled, her body yielding to the rhythm of their care. The water carried their movements, tiny ripples running across her stomach as Smoke’s hands traveled down her arms, fingers spreading over her wrists before lifting them gently from the water to wash each one. Stack leaned forward, brushing her knee with the back of his hand before sliding higher, his touch careful but not innocent, leaving a trail of heat in its wake.

Their hands grew bolder as the minutes stretched. Soap foamed in pale ribbons that clung to her skin before the water stole it away. Smoke’s thumb swept the curve of her breast as if by accident, lingering just long enough to steal her breath, while Stack’s palm pressed against the outside of her thigh, sliding upward until the water trembled around his wrist. She let them, her lips parting slightly before she caught them together and bit down, as though that small restraint could keep her from spilling the sounds gathering in her throat.

It was when she felt them both hardening beneath the water… thick, insistent, pressing against her hips and thighs… that she let out the faintest sigh and tilted her head back. The realization pulsed through her, sharp and intoxicating. She bit her lip harder, the gesture half-innocent and half-knowing, before whispering into the charged space between them.

“Lemme… clean you too.” Her voice trembled with a blend of shyness and boldness, as though she had only just realized the daring nature of her words. “Teach me how to do it the way you like.”

Smoke’s hand froze against her ribcage. Stack’s thumb halted its circling on her thigh. They both tilted their heads at the same moment, dark eyes narrowing, studying her with the kind of silence that felt heavier than any words. The steam wrapped tighter around the three of them, and for a long, weighted breath, the only sound was the quiet slap of water against porcelain.

When neither man immediately answered, Sera shifted. Her fingers reached for the soap, coating her hands until the lather shone slick and white against her brown skin. Then, with a breath that made her chest rise and fall, she slid her palms beneath the water.

Her touch found them both. One hand curved around Smoke, the other around Stack, her gentle hands wrapping as best they could, soap slipping between her fingers as she held their growing lengths. They were hot, solid, alive beneath her touch, and her stomach twisted with both nervousness and delight as she looked up at them, waiting for some sign of approval.

Smoke’s jaw flexed, his mouth set in a hard line as he stared down at her with disbelief that she would dare take initiative like this. Stack, for once, had no easy grin; his expression darkened into that primal darkness she was learning not to fear.

Sera swallowed and kept her hold steady. “Y’all do so much for me… have already done so much,” she whispered, her voice hushed, tender, meant only for them. “I want to take care of you too.” Her hands faltered slightly under the weight of her own boldness, but she did not pull away. Instead, she lifted her chin a little higher, gazing between them with wide, searching eyes, waiting… pleading… for instruction.

Smoke’s hips betrayed him first. The moment her soapy fingers tightened around him, his body answered with a subtle jerk, his chest rumbling with a sound that broke free before he could swallow it down. The grunt that escaped was low and weighted, the kind of sound that made the bathwater ripple in rhythm with his breath. For a fraction of a second, he gave into it, the sheer boldness of her touch tugging him toward the edge of something he wasn’t ready to give.

He drew in a sharp breath through his nose and forced his body to still, shoulders tightening as his hand caught the rim of the tub. He exhaled slow, dragging the control back into his bones. Then he shook his head, a firm and measured no, not with words, but with the slight shift of his chin and the steadying weight of his eyes locked on hers.

Sitting next to him, Stack wasn’t as restrained. The corners of his mouth curled with something feral, the kind of grin that promised mischief, lust swimming in his gaze as though he was already halfway to encouraging her. Smoke saw it instantly, the hunger swirling like exaggerated cartoon smoke rings in his twin’s expression, and he didn’t waste a breath before lifting his hand out of the water and flicking a wet finger hard against Stack’s skull.

Stack hissed and tilted his head, caught between amusement and annoyance, rubbing the spot as if Smoke had brought him back to earth by force. “Yeah… yeah… I know…” he muttered, though his eyes still lingered on Sera with that restless desire.

Smoke ignored his twin and shifted his focus back to the woman between them, his palm rising to cup the side of her head. His thumb traced lightly against her damp temple, steady and grounding, as he tilted her chin upward so she would look directly at him. His voice came quiet, but the strength in it left no room for misunderstanding.

“‘Fore we cross that line, my love,” he said, his tone like steel wrapped in velvet, “there’s one more thing we gotta put on the table.”

The weight of his words hung between them, the bath suddenly too small to hold all of it. Stack’s jaw flexed, his shoulders rolling with a restless energy. He let out another grumble beneath his breath, the sound more frustration than speech, before pushing Sera’s hand away from where she still held him. With a groan of effort, he rose from the water, streams cascading down his skin as he climbed out. He didn’t look back right away, grabbing at the pile of towels instead, snapping one open with a sharp flick before tossing another across his shoulder.

Smoke guided Sera’s curious hands away from him and pressed a kiss against the crown of her frizzy curls before standing himself. He moved slower, carefully, like every motion was being measured against the control it took not to fold under the temptation of her boldness. He accepted a towel from Stack, who was already rubbing briskly at his arms, and dried himself down with a soldier’s precision.

Sera stood shivering in the bath, steam curling around her bare shoulders, cheeks warm and pout beginning to form on her lips as she watched them cover themselves. Stack crouched, towel in hand, and helped pat the water from her skin. He wrapped one around her with a kind of rough tenderness, securing it at her chest before lifting her against him. Smoke came beside him, securing the edges, before Smoke carried her back to the bedroom.

The bed was wide, the frame heavy oak, the quilt pulled tight and waiting. They set her down gently at the edge, the mattress dipping under her weight as she clutched the towel tighter around herself. Both men moved around her, drying themselves further, wrapping towels low around their waists, their bare torsos gleaming in the dim light of the room.

For a moment, she only watched them, squinting through damp lashes, her pout deepening as she crossed her arms over her chest. “It ain’t fair,” she muttered, voice edged with complaint. “I can’t even touch you.”

Stack turned first, his smile sly and shameless. He mirrored her pout with one of his own, exaggerating it until it almost looked comical. He leaned close enough that the scent of soap and heat carried across the narrow space, his golden tooth glinting as he spoke. “You can touch me, sunshine,” he teased, “if you call it what it is. Not no ‘thingy.’ Call it a dick.”

Her eyes widened, scandal flickering across her face, and then narrowed into a glare sharp enough to slice. She wasn’t in the mood to have this conversation again and twisted her head to the side, defiantly turning away from him, the ends of her damp hair sticking against her cheek.

Stack chuckled under his breath, smug at her resistance. But when she finally turned her gaze back, it wasn’t to him. Her eyes lifted past his shoulder, locking onto Smoke as he stepped back into the room. He had his hands behind his back, posture straight, his expression unreadable. Sera’s pout softened instantly into something more uncertain, her brows furrowing as her gaze followed him.

“Elijah,” she said softly, voice tilting upward in a question, “whatchu’ hidin’?” And she leaned forward just slightly, towel slipping a fraction lower at her chest, as if daring him to finally show her.

Smoke stood just inside the doorway, shoulders squared as if bracing against a storm, though the weight pressing down on him was not an enemy in the street but the fragile moment in this room. His jaw tightened once, then loosened as he took a careful breath, forcing himself to keep his face as still as stone. Yet when he moved toward Sera, the stiffness in his steps betrayed the nerves clawing at his chest.

He stopped before her, then lowered himself down onto one knee, his towel secured at his hips, his broad frame bending with a solemnity rare for him. The boards creaked faintly under his weight. For a long heartbeat he stayed there, eyes fixed on hers, his mouth pressing into a thin line.

Stack let out a low sound, part sigh and part laugh, then dropped down beside his brother with a thud, his knees hitting the floor at the same height. He mirrored Smoke’s posture, resting his forearms on his thighs, his grin crooked but his eyes shining with a seriousness that did not come often to him.

Smoke cleared his throat, his large hand slipping from behind his back, fingers tight around a small wooden box. He held it steady even though his pulse raced like a train on iron rails. He exhaled, then opened his mouth. “We want to make an honest woman outta you, Seraphim,” he said, voice rougher than usual, words carrying the tremor of sincerity. “You ain’t just sum’ warm for us to hold. An we know what we got ain’t what folks call normal… but we love you. Ain’t no denyin’ that.”

Before his breath had fully faded, Stack leaned closer, his arm brushing Smoke’s as if their twin bond demanded it. “He’s right,” he said, his tone unusually level, though his smile tugged faintly at the corner of his mouth. “He love you an I love you, Seraphim. Never felt this way ‘bout a woman before. I don’t want no one else by my side. Not now. Not ever.”

Smoke glanced at him, half-irritated by the interruption, but Stack only smirked and nudged his shoulder before looking back at Sera. They began to speak over each other, back and forth in a rhythm like a song only they could play. Smoke insisting that she was theirs. Stack promising her the world. Smoke declaring he wanted her name tied to theirs. Stack vowing he would never let her slip away. The air filled with their confessions until it grew thick with heat and devotion, their voices weaving into one steady plea.

Sera’s eyes widened as tears swelled, spilling until they slid hot down her cheeks. Her mouth quivered before breaking into a radiant smile, and then she let out a squeal of joy so pure it filled every corner of the room.

Smoke opened the box, and the ring inside caught the light. A simple gold band cradling a diamond, the edges rimmed with a tiny red and blue stone that shimmered like fire and water locked in embrace. Sera gasped louder, the tears falling faster as her hand flew to her mouth. She didn’t need to ask what the colors meant… she knew. They were her men, she was theirs, and the whole world would see it in the sparkle of that band.

Stack reached out with hands steadier than they had ever been and slid the ring onto her finger. For a heartbeat, the smile on her face wavered, and she stared down at her hand as if the weight of it brought a new reality crashing down. Her voice rushed forward in a flurry of words, spilling faster than she could catch them.

“I’ll need a dress, won’t I? Somethin’ real pretty, somethin’ white maybe… or cream… an where will we do it? A church? No, maybe outside, though the weather… what if it rains? An the guests, we’ll need guests, but—” Her words cut off, strangled by the silence that dropped on her shoulders all at once. Her smile crumbled, the joy sliding away as her thoughts struck the raw truth. Her father was gone. The house she once knew was no longer hers. She had no friends, no familiar faces, no one to invite to witness what should have been the most holy, joyous moment of her life.

Her lips trembled. Her eyes fell to the ring again, and the tears that had once sparkled with joy now spilled with a quieter grief.

Smoke moved fast. He wouldn’t let this moment rot. His hand cupped her face, large palm firm and warm against her damp cheek, tilting her gaze back to him. His thumb brushed away the tears before they could trail down further. “Hey… Hey… Don’t worry ‘bout none of that right now,” he said, his voice steady, commanding but gentle. “Ceremony can wait. We can work out the details later. You hear me?”

She blinked at him, eyes wide and wet.

Smoke leaned closer, his forehead brushing hers, his voice lowering until it wrapped around her like a promise. “You in a new city now. Ya father’s shadow ain’t over you no more. Religion can’t cage you. You got a chance to live. To make friends. To build somethin’ for yaself. An you got us… that’s enough for today.”

Stack grabbed her wrist and placed kisses on it as if he was grounding her in his devotion. His grin softened, no mockery in it, only reassurance. “He’s right, sunshine. You got family now. Us.”

And for the first time since the tears fell, Sera let out a shaky laugh, her hand flying up to cover her eyes as though she couldn’t believe the life she now lived.

Stack leaned in close, the mattress dipping beneath his weight as he slid himself between Smoke and Sera. His lips brushed along the curve of her damp neck, soft at first, then firmer as he pressed kisses down her skin, tasting the salt of her tears mingled with the heat of her body. His voice came husky against her throat, threaded with rough affection. “You hear me, little dove?” he whispered, his mouth dragging lower toward her collarbone. “Only tears of joy ‘round us. That’s all we gon’ allow.”

Before she could answer, his hands tugged at the knot of her towel. The fabric loosened and fell away, pooling in a forgotten heap beside her on the bed. A startled giggle slipped from her lips as Stack maneuvered her, positioning her at the very center of the mattress. He loomed above her on his knees, shoulders squared, gaze raking over every inch of her bare frame.

Even though she had been exposed to them countless times before—bathing her, dressing her… fingers exploring her… tongues teasing her—something about Stack’s stare still sent a flush racing over her skin. Her chest rose and fell faster beneath the weight of it, cheeks warming, lashes lowering as though she could hide from the intensity burning in his eyes.

Stack caught it instantly, the way her ebony skin colored with embarrassment, and his grin stretched, wolfish and pleased. He let his head tilt, golden tooth flashing as he spoke. “Can’t get enough of it. You always blush like a sinner caught prayin’, an I’m addicted to watchin’ it bloom.”

His hand followed his words, finger tracing lightly from her collarbone down the flat of her stomach, slow enough that her body quivered beneath the touch. When he reached just above her mound, he paused, lips parting, tongue dragging briefly over his bottom lip as if he were already savoring her taste in his mind.

Then, with a deliberate slowness that made her thighs twitch, he parted her folds with two fingers. The sight of her glistening heat stole the grin from his mouth, replacing it with something darker, heavier. He bent his head slightly, eyes fixed unblinking on the twitching nub revealed to him.

“An down here,” he said, voice low, words laced with hunger. “I love it most when you blush down here for me…”

The air thickened, the room shrinking to nothing but the three of them and the steady hum of desire that seemed to climb the walls and seep into the very boards beneath the bed.

Stack’s fingers moved slow at first, two knuckles gliding along the seam of her heat before easing inside, the water-slick sound of her body greeting him with a noise that sent his own breath stuttering. His head dipped lower, gaze locked on the way her folds welcomed him, shining under the fading sunlight. His thumb teased the pear of sensitivity he exposed, rubbing small circles until her thighs quivered against the bedspread. A deep groan crawled from his chest, guttural and unrestrained.

“Fuck, sunshine,” he muttered, eyes fixed below. “Soft as butter, wet as a summer storm… tight like we ain’t been stretchin’ you out with our fingers everyday.” His finger curled and her body clamped around him, making him bite down on his lip with a hiss. He forced his eyes up just long enough to catch hers, his grin wicked. “You drink that tea today?”

“Yes sir,” she whispered, quick and obedient, the blush deepening across her cheeks as she squirmed.

Stack cut his eyes sideways toward Smoke, who had moved from his place on the floor. The older twin now sat stretched against the headboard, the towel gone from his waist, his muscular shoulders sinking into the wood. He slid his hands down and caught Sera’s thighs, spreading her open with an ease that made her breath catch, angling her just right for Stack’s eager inspection.

Stack’s grin widened, his attention dropping back to her trembling center. “We safe to keep goin’?”

Smoke didn’t waste words. His jaw flexed once, his gaze darkened as it burned over Sera’s bare form. Then he gave a single, steady nod, hands tightening against the back of her thighs until her knees drew closer to her chest.

That was all Stack needed. He returned his full focus to her core, watching his fingers disappear into her. His thumb toyed with her nub again, a wet smack sounding in the quiet as his palm pressed firm against her mound. His voice dropped to a gravelly drawl. “List ‘em for me, doll. Every filthy thing we done to you so far.”

Her breath hitched, lashes fluttering. She shook her head faintly, lips parting but no words coming. Her eyes flicked up to Smoke, pleading for reprieve.

Smoke didn’t waver. His face softened at the edges, but his voice carried weight when it cut across the room. “Say it, little wife. Ya husband asked you somethin’. Don’t hold back.”

Her body shook under their combined stares. She whined, the sound thin and needy, then stammered, “Y-you touched me… down there… an ya mouths… ya hands—”

Stack’s brow arched. “That all?”

She pressed her lips together, trying to dodge the vulgar truth, offering only the vague shell of it.

Smoke’s gaze sharpened. He caught her face in his line of sight, studying the defiance in her quivering mouth. His tone turned deceptively gentle. “You remember ya safe word, baby?”

Her nervous eyes darted back up to him and she gave a tiny nod.

Without warning, his palm cracked against her drenched heat, the sound sharp, her juices splashing against her skin. She jolted, a strangled cry tumbling free, the sting blooming hot between her thighs. Smoke’s voice was low, firm, the edge of command unmistakable. “Then answer the fuckin’ question, doll.”

The room tightened with sexual tension, her chest rising in uneven waves as her eyes glossed with both embarrassment and desire. Stack’s fingers never stopped their slow, tormenting strokes, his smile curved with satisfaction as he waited for her to finally give in and put words to her shame. His laugh rolled out low and amused, the kind of sound that vibrated in his chest before spilling into the space between them. His eyes stayed locked on her glistening heat, his fingers still spreading her folds as he spoke, his voice cutting through the tension with raw, unflinching filth.

“Ight, sunshine, since you strugglin’ to find ya tongue, I’ll help you remember.” His grin sharpened, his thumb circling her clit just enough to make her back arch. “Our fingers been inside this sweet pussy, stretchin’ you open. We stuffed that pretty ass with a gem, keepin’ you plugged like you belong to us. Our tongues been deep in ya cooze, lickin’ you raw ‘til you cried our names.”

The words dripped like honey mixed with sin, and her face flamed with color, her body trembling under the weight of his vulgar truth.

“Now,” Stack grunted, his hunger deepening, his eyes burning with a dangerous kind of delight, “repeat it.”

Sera’s lips parted, her voice stammering, uncertain. “I… I can’t—”

Smoke’s hand cut through the air, landing with another sharp smack against her dripping core. The sound cracked like lightning, her thighs jolting as slick water coated her inner thighs. A high whine tore from her throat, her body twitching with both pain and arousal.

Stack’s chuckle returned, darker this time. “Look at that, Elijah. Our little wife drippin’ more from gettin’ spanked. Maybe she likes the sting as much as the sweet.”

His fingers slipped free, leaving her fluttering and empty, and he brought his palm down again with a wet slap that echoed through the room. Her hips bucked helplessly, the mix of sting and want coursing through her veins like fire.

Stack leaned lower, his broad shoulders dipping until his head hovered just above her entrance. His breath fanned hot across her swollen folds as he dragged a finger down, teasing her slit before pressing lightly against the jade gem still snug in her backside. The faint tap sent a shiver racing up her spine.

“You want Daddy to make you cum?” he asked, voice thick, teasing, but deadly serious beneath the surface.

Sera’s chest heaved, her lashes fluttering, and she gave the smallest, shyest nod, her heat spreading down her chest like spilled wine.

Stack clicked his tongue, not satisfied. His palm tapped the gem again, gentle but firm, a reminder of their control over every part of her.

Smoke reached from behind her, his hand cupping her jaw, thumb brushing away the lone tear that had escaped down her cheek. His eyes softened, but his tone carried an edge that left no room for evasion. “Don’t just nod, little wife,” he murmured, voice sweet but laced with dominance. “Tell us what you want.”

Her body quivered, caught between shame, need, and obedience, the weight of their combined stares pressing her into the mattress until she could hardly breathe.

Smoke peeped and his voice went extra soft, that rare sweetness laced into his tone as his hands steadied Sera’s trembling thighs. His thumb brushed tender circles against her skin, his words coaxing without the sharp edge he so often carried. “Don’t fight it, love,” he whispered, dipping his head so his forehead nearly touched hers. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with sayin’ the truth. You can be free with us.” His tone promised sanctuary, but his grip never loosened, pinning her open for his brother’s hungrier work.

Stack, on the other hand, played no part in gentleness. He spread kisses down the insides of her thighs, his mouth dragging wet paths that made her legs twitch. When his teeth sank into the tender flesh, her squeal filled the air, cut off by a moan when his tongue soothed the sting. He worked his way closer, until his mouth latched onto her nub, sucking it deep between his lips with a sound that rattled through her chest.

At the same time, his hand twisted against the jade buried in her backside, tugging it just enough to make her gasp and then pushing it back in with pressure that forced a cry from her throat. He repeated it again and again, pulling, pushing, each shift stopping just shy of slipping it all the way free. Between licks he let words spill directly into her heat, the vibrations shuddering through her core.

“This pretty toy? Ain’t gon’ be in there long. Sooner or later, doll, it’s gettin’ replaced with somethin’ thicker. Somethin’ that makes you scream.”

Sera writhed, her eyes rolling back, her voice tangled between whimpers and gasps. Her hands clawed uselessly at the sheets as if she could steady herself, but there was no escape. She tried to close her thighs, tried to twist away from the overwhelming flood of sensation, but Smoke wouldn’t allow it. He shifted, rising onto his knees, leaning his weight forward as he spread her wide again, his face hovering close enough to watch every flick of Stack’s tongue, every twitch of her soaked folds.

Sera moaned loudly when her gaze tilted upward and landed on Smoke’s heavy length dangling just above her face. It was the closest she had ever been allowed to see him like this with no interruption, the sight was both terrifying and intoxicating. Her breath caught in her throat as she took in every thick inch, the way the chocolate head gleamed with a clear pearl of arousal already pebbled at the tip.

Her fingers shook, but boldness overcame hesitation. She reached upward and wrapped her hand around him, stroking him softly, carefully, like she was learning a sacred secret. Smoke groaned above her, his body going rigid, but she didn’t stop. Instead, she leaned her head up the slightest inch and let her tongue dart out, lapping across the bead of wetness that crowned him.

The reaction was immediate. Smoke stilled, his whole frame locking up like a deer startled in a clearing. His hands slipped from her thighs, pressing instead into the mattress on either side of her body as he fought for control, his chest heaving with the force of restraint. The sudden release gave Sera the chance she needed. She clamped her thick thighs closed, trembling, desperate for reprieve.

Stack lifted his head, irritation flashing in his eyes as he wiped her wetness from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nigga,” he growled, brows furrowed, “I’m tryna eat our woman. Fuck is you doin’ lettin’ her shut them legs?”

Smoke’s eyes were squeezed shut, his knuckles whitening against the sheets. His jaw flexed hard enough to ache as a guttural sound rumbled from deep in his chest. “She’s…” he grunted, teeth gritted, “she… fuck… she’s… lickin’ me.”

Stack blinked, confused, his brows knitting tighter. “What? Can’t hear you with all that stutterin’. Speak the fuck up.”

Smoke’s eyes cracked open, blazing uncontrolled lust as he cut Stack a glare sharp enough to slice through lava. His voice came out rough, cracked with disbelief and hunger. “Shut the fuck up,” he hissed, “’cause she’s lickin’ me right now.”

Smoke let out another guttural groan when Sera’s tongue slid along the sensitive head of his dick, his hips jerking against her palm before he caught himself. He let her stroke and lick for a moment longer, savoring the trembling curiosity in her touch, then growled low in his chest and flipped their bodies with practiced strength.

The mattress groaned as he rolled them, his large frame settling beneath hers, Sera now perched on top of his chest with her thighs spread wide across his face. He wasted no time as his mouth latched onto her pussy, tongue plunging deep, lips sealing against her folds as he devoured her with a hunger that had been building since the first day he laid eyes on her. The wet sounds of him feasting filled the room, each lap pulling louder moans from her lips.

“Keep explorin’, doll,” he rumbled between licks, the vibrations sending shocks through her core. “Don’t stop what you started.”

Stack shifted in front of her, his hand tangling into the back of her frizzy ginger curls. He tugged her head up, forcing her gaze to him as his own towel hit the floor, revealing his thick length standing tall in the low light. He smirked down at her, voice filthy but edged with amusement.

“You still ain’t repeated what I said,” he reminded her, rubbing the head of his length against her lips. “But… if you put that pretty mouth to better use, I’ll let you get a pass. Just this once.”

Her lust filled eyes flicked between her two husbands, the steady, overwhelming rhythm of Smoke’s mouth at her core, and the heavy, veined shaft Stack held inches from her mouth. She moaned helplessly, torn between sensation and curiosity, before leaning forward and letting her lips part.

Her tongue flicked out, tasting him cautiously at first, while her hand wrapped around Smoke’s dick beneath her, stroking him in long, tentative pulls. Stack groaned above her, eyes fluttering half-shut, but his voice stayed steady, instructive.

“Use ya hand tighter, baby… yeah, like that. Now twist, not too much. That’s it. Keep them pretty eyes on me.”

Sera followed, switching between licking his tip, taking him shallow into her mouth, then pulling back to pump him with her slick hands. Stack clenched his jaw, trying to keep patient, but his hunger grew too strong. He pressed her head forward, guiding her down his length.

“Relax ya throat,” he murmured through gritted teeth, “just breathe through ya nose.”

To his shock, she obeyed with ease, her throat opening far smoother than he expected. He slid deeper, nearly five inches of his nine-inch length disappearing past her lips. His brows furrowed, a look of disbelief flashing across his face as he quickly pulled her back.

Holding her jaw open, Stack squinted down her throat, his face twisted with curiosity like a doctor examining something rare. “Smoke,” he barked, his voice sharp.

Smoke groaned against Sera’s cunt, annoyed at the interruption, his mouth pulling back wet and glistening. “Nigga, I’m busy.”

Stack tugged on Sera’s jaw again, grinning like a man who had found buried treasure. “Nah, you gotta see this. Cmere. Right now!”

Smoke growled under his breath, slapped Sera’s jiggly ass hard enough to make her yelp, then shifted her off of him and sat up. “What the fuck do you want?” he snapped, annoyance thick like his Mississippi accent.

Stack’s grin widened as he angled Sera’s face up between them. “She ain’t got no gag reflex.”

Smoke froze, narrowing his eyes. “You lyin’.”

“Swear to God.” Stack’s voice dripped with mischief as he tilted her chin higher, keeping her mouth open for inspection.

Both men loomed over her now, shadows heavy across her flushed face as they bent low. Their eyes scanned the back of her throat, and almost in unison, they let out deep, guttural grunts of delight.

Sera’s brows furrowed, her voice breaking timidly. “What’s… what’s wrong with me? Why y’all lookin’ at me like that?”

Smoke’s eyes softened instantly. He reached out, brushing a coily curl behind her ear, his large palm warm against her cheek. He tilted her face until she was forced to look directly into his coffee brown eyes. “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with you, Seraphim,” he whispered, his voice steady and full of adoration. “You ain’t lie ‘bout rememberin’ that word right?” he asked, his gaze fixed on hers. “Mercy. You give it if it’s too much. You hear me?”

She gave a quick nod, lips trembling, but Smoke wasn’t satisfied with only that. He tilted her chin higher, forcing her to keep his stare, his thumb dragging across her bottom lip. “Say it.”

“Mercy,” she whispered, her voice faint but clear, and both brothers exhaled like the sound anchored them.

“Good girl,” Smoke said, his mouth curling faintly. “Long as you know you safe, we gon’ keep pushin’.”

Stack hummed low in his chest and reached down, curling her delicate hand around his manhood, guiding her fingers until they wrapped firm around him. Smoke followed suit, taking her other hand and pressing it to himself, both men looming tall over her as if they were twin shadows cast by the same flame.

“Now, keep goin’,” Stack urged, his grin flashing wicked. “Show us what that pretty throat can do.”

Sera licked her lips nervously, eyes darting between them, then leaned forward and took Stack first, her mouth closing around his crown. He groaned deep, the sound vibrating through his chest, as she worked down further, inch by inch, her hand stroking what her throat couldn’t yet manage. When she finally gagged faintly at six inches, she pulled back with a wet gasp, eyes watering, lips slick, and Smoke’s chest rumbled with approval. “That’s it,” he praised, voice sharp but rich with heat. “You doin’ so good for us.”

She turned to him next, sliding her mouth over his dick, her hand stroking Stack in rhythm as her lips stretched around Smoke’s girth. His head tilted back, eyes half-closed, his hand brushing down her back in rare gentleness. “You tryna’ make ya husband lose his composure on night one?”

They traded her back and forth, letting her throat each of them in turn, her mouth glistening, her hands working, the air heavy with their mingled groans. Every time she managed six inches, they felt their own control unraveling, her untrained throat working like she was made for this. The mattress dipped as she shifted, her hips unconsciously grinding against the sheets, thighs squeezing together as if her body betrayed what her lips refused to say.

Both men noticed instantly.

Stack’s eyes light up with mischief, his grin turning dangerous as he watched her hips move. “Look at her, Smoke,” he drawled. “Pussy twitchin’ just from servicin’ us… Suckin’ dick got you blushin’ ‘tween them thighs, doll?”

Sera whimpered, eyes glassy as she looked up at them, her gaze pleading, begging them to see what she couldn’t bring herself to say.

Smoke’s gaze sharpened. “She thinkin’ we gon’ read her mind,” he said, gripping her jaw lightly to force her eyes on him. “But she know better. She gon’ use that mouth for more than lickin’. She gon’ tell us what she wants.”

Her lips parted as if to speak, but no words came. Instead, she let her instincts take over. She held Stack’s rod in her hand and pressed it flat against her tongue, slapping it there with wet sounds that made his breath falter. She sucked him deep again, whimpering between gulps, her hand twisting around Smoke’s at the same time.

“I… I want more,” she whispered hoarsely when she pulled back, her voice breaking with desperation. “I need it… I need you inside.”

Stack bit down hard on his bottom lip. The sight of his woman wrecked and begging nearly undid him. He almost gave in right then, his body already leaning forward, ready to press her back and bury himself inside her tight heat. But Smoke’s arm shot out, his hand bracing hard against Stack’s heaving chest, halting him with a shove.

“Not yet,” Smoke growled, his calculated gaze cutting between his brother and the trembling girl below them. He turned back to Sera, his thumb brushing her swollen bottom lip, his expression unyielding. “You may get a pass on that other shit Stack wanted you to say, but not this one. If you want this dick, you gon’ say it plain. You tell us that you want us to take ya virginity. Out loud.”

Sera’s breath hitched, her body shivering beneath their looming frames, caught between her shy defiance and the weight of her own need. The silence pressed thick around them, waiting for her to break. Her lashes lowered as she tilted her head, cutting her eyes at Smoke in a way that carried more defiance than fear. Her pout returned, lips tugged into a bratty frown that made her look every bit the spoiled little wife she knew she was becoming under their roof.

Smoke caught it instantly. His jaw ticked as he arched one challenging brow, the sharp gleam in his eyes promising consequences. He didn’t call her out right then, but he filed it away, the laundry list of bratty infractions she owed punishment for already longer than she could handle. This little look, this sharp cut of her eyes, would be added to it.

Sera’s mind drifted briefly, Annie’s voice threading through the haze of desire and tension. Your pleasure belongs to you. Don’t let nobody convince you otherwise. The words pushed her spine against the pillows at the head of the bed, her small rebellion sparking to life in a way Smoke had not anticipated. She dragged herself back on the mattress, shoulders sinking into the mountain of cushions, and shifted her attention to Stack, who was already hovering close and clearly not interested in following Smoke’s strict command.

Her fingers trembled, but she set them to her thighs anyway, spreading herself open with a shy, daring movement that sent both brothers’ attention narrowing on her. Her voice came small, pleading, almost broken. “Elias… please?”

The name itself burned through the room like incense. Stack froze, the sound of his own name—his real name, the one so few dared to use—rushing through him like whiskey in his veins. Flashbacks tore through his mind unbidden: the first time she whispered Elias in the dark, the first time she begged him to use his mouth on her, the night she passed out from his tongue. Every memory hit him at once, thick and heavy, and his dick throbbed with such force that he whined. His body moved on instinct, half a second from climbing into the bed and claiming her.

Smoke let out a long, annoyed sigh, his patience thinning to threads. His voice rumbled across the room, low and irritated. “Stack. Don’t you fuckin’ do it. Don’t give her nothin’ ‘til she say what’s asked of her.”

Stack clicked his tongue, his grin sharp and dismissive, eyes still locked on Sera’s trembling body. “Tch. We can worry ‘bout trainin’ her proper later, nigga. Pussy callin’ me right now.”

Smoke huffed deep in his throat, but Stack had already leaned forward, pressing his mouth against Sera’s damp skin. He kissed a hot, greedy path up her trembling stomach, over the soft curves of her breasts, until his lips crashed into hers. The kiss was messy, passionate, tongues colliding as if he wanted to taste every ounce of defiance spilling from her.

His hand forced her legs wider, spreading her beneath him, his length nudging insistently against her tight entrance. He grounded forward just enough for her body to feel the hard press of him, teasing her with what she was begging for without giving it fully. His teeth grazed her bottom lip as he spoke into her mouth, the words rough, almost lost in the wet heat of their kiss. “Say it, baby,” he demanded against her tongue, his hips grinding again. “Keep sayin’ please. Beg me, doll. Say it ‘til I can’t hear nothin’ else.”

Her whimper melted into his mouth, and her hands flew to his shoulders, pulling him closer, her thighs trembling wide open as she gasped his name again, desperate, needy, wrecked.

Smoke stayed where he was for a long moment with a narrowed expression as he watched Stack and Sera tangle themselves in that fevered kiss. Her hands clawed at his shoulders, his bigger frame pressing her deeper into the pillows, their tongues locked, her muffled whimpers breaking against his mouth. Smoke could’ve stepped in. He could’ve dragged Stack back by his short curls and put a stop to it. But instead, he leaned back a fraction and made a mental note: I’ll punch that nigga in the chest later for givin’ in so easy.

He let the heat between them burn unchecked while he turned and strode purposeful across the room. One of their suitcases sat half-open at the foot of the bed, clothes and tools of their trade spilling inside. Smoke crouched, broad hand digging through until he found what he was looking for: a small glass bottle, dark and stoppered tight, its label worn from travel. Bo’s handwriting scrawled across it crooked and bold, the man’s mark of authenticity.

Smoke clicked his tongue against his teeth as he stood again, giving the bottle a quick shake before tossing it onto the mattress beside Stack’s hip. The glass thudded softly into the sheets, catching Sera’s attention for just a heartbeat before Stack’s mouth reclaimed hers.

“Don’t matter how wet she is,” Smoke said, his voice carrying that steady weight, that sharp authority that made the air shift. He dropped down into the nearby chair, the wood creaking under his frame as he reached for the decanter resting on the dresser. He poured himself a heavy glass of whiskey, the amber liquid catching the glow of the lamp as it slid into the crystal.

He lifted it to his lips, took one measured swallow, and then pointed the rim of the glass toward the bed. “Use that oil on her. An’ pull that plug out ‘fore divin’ in. She ain’t ready to be filled like that yet.”

His tone left no room for argument. Smoke’s eyes lingered on Sera’s trembling body, her thighs spread wide, Stack’s length still teasing at her entrance. The command wasn’t for her, it was for his twin. Stack might’ve been reckless, ready to drown himself in her without thought, but Smoke made sure the rules were laid down before that happened.

And as he settled deeper into his chair, swirling the brown liquor in his glass, his gaze sharpened, the faintest smirk tugging at his lips. He would let Stack indulge and he would let Sera push her bratty luck. But every second of it, he was watching, planning, filing away punishments and promises for later.

Stack finally tore his mouth from Sera’s, his lips wet and swollen, his grin glinting faint with that dangerous gold. He let her catch one shaky breath before he slid down her body, his kisses trailing messily across her stomach, her hips twitching beneath him until he settled between her thighs. His big hands pressed her knees wider, his hungry eyes settling on the sight of her swollen, needy core glistening with want.

Without hesitation, he latched onto her, tongue dragging flat from her entrance to her button of sensitivity, circling and sucking until she jolted against the pillows. His fingers found the jade plug, pressing and twisting it inside her until the rounded gem nudged right against her sweet spot. The combination made her cry out, a muffled little sound she tried to bury behind her hand.

Stack’s palm cracked hard against her ass, the sting echoing sharp in the room. “Don’t you dare hide from us, little dove,” he growled against her flesh, his breath hot over her mound. “Let us hear every bit of it.”

Sera whimpered, biting her lip, but still she tried to keep her voice restrained, her body shuddering under the assault of sensation.

Smoke’s voice cut through, calm but commanding, carried on the slow swirl of his whiskey glass. “Ain’t no need to be quiet, love. This is ya home now. You can be as loud as you damn well please.”

Stack hummed his agreement, the vibration buzzing through her clit as he sucked harder. His hand smacked her ass again, rougher this time, leaving her gasping as her thighs trembled open wider. Her hands flew down, clawing at his shoulders, fingernails scraping red marks into his back as her body convulsed.

Her eyes dilated and went unfocused, her head tipping back as she felt it… the sharp climb, that unmistakable pull in her belly. She knew what was coming, that type of release she dreaded and craved, the one that would break her in half and drown her in pleasure. She cried his name, a desperate plea, as her whole body arched. Stack only smirked against her skin, his tongue never faltering. He flicked her clit mercilessly, pressing the plug deeper against her sweet spot, dragging his lips back and forth across her slit until the inevitable snapped.

Her orgasm tore through her violently, her body jerking as liquid rushed free, spraying against his mouth, his chin, his chest. The sheets beneath her dampened instantly, but Stack only groaned his approval, holding her thighs open wider as he lapped greedily at the mess she made.

“Fuck yes,” he rasped, eyes closing as he slurped her nectar down, the lewd sound filling the room. “That’s it, doll, give it all to me.” He shifted his focus from her clit to her entrance, thrusting his tongue deep inside, fucking her with wet strokes as his nose pressed hard against her clit. Every sound she made, every whimper and wail, he swallowed down with her sweetness, licking and drinking like a man starved.

Sera sobbed from overstimulation, nails dragging across his back, legs trembling uncontrollably as Stack drank from her like she was the only thing in the world that could quench his thirst.

When her sensitivity became unbearable, Stack reluctantly pulled his mouth away from her soaked folds with a groan, lips shining with the mess he made her give to him. He pressed one more kiss against her quivering thigh before reaching for the jade still nestled inside her. His expert fingers wrapped around it, and with a slow twist and tug he drew it free, slick and glistening. Sera whined, her hips jerking from the sensation, her whole body still shivering from the force of her release.

He grabbed the bottle of oil Smoke had tossed earlier, his hand steady despite the tremors still rippling through her. He drizzled a stream across her convulsing core, the warm sheen catching the glow as he rubbed it in with wide, careful circles. His touch softened, turning worshipful, pressing kisses up her stomach, across her ribs, up the valley of her breasts as if he could calm her trembling flesh with reverence alone. Her gasps eased from sharp cries to light panting, her thighs still twitching but no longer seizing uncontrollably beneath him.

Stack leaned back onto his knees, his dick rigid and throbbing against his stomach. He poured oil into his palm and coated himself, long strokes leaving his shaft glistening, the scent of it mingling with her sweetness. He looked down at her through heavy lashes, his grin faint but his voice low, coaxing.

“Take a deep breath, beautiful.”

Sera’s lip quivered as she nodded, nervously biting down on the soft flesh before her gaze flicked up to meet his. She inhaled shakily, her chest rising and falling in uneven waves. Stack angled himself at her entrance and pressed forward, the thick head of his shaft stretching her inch by inch. She gasped, nails digging into the sheets, her eyes squeezing shut as the sharp sting of being filled for the first time spread through her.

“One inch,” Stack whispered against her cheek, his thumb brushing over her clit in a soft circle. “That’s it, baby. Just breathe. You takin’ me so good already.”

She whimpered, her thighs twitching against his sides. When she began to relax, he eased in further, slow and steady, giving her another inch. His breath stuttered in his throat at the heat of her, his thumb never stopping its gentle rhythm.

“That’s two,” he praised, kissing the corner of her mouth. “You can do it, sweetheart. You ours… You was made for this… Made for us...”

By the time he pushed in four inches, her body locked tight, her nails dragging red lines down his stomach. Her head tipped back against the pillows, a strangled cry escaping her as her body convulsed. The pleasure and pain tangled until it broke, another orgasm ripping from her prematurely, leaving her trembling and gasping in shock.

Stack cursed low, his jaw locking as her walls seized around him, clamping down so tightly he nearly lost control right there. Her pussy fluttered and squeezed, convulsions wringing every nerve in his body, milking him as if begging for his seed.

“FUCKKK…” he groaned, his voice rough, desperate. “Baby, relax! P-Please relax—‘fore I lose it—”

But she only tightened further, her spasms shoving him out as her release drenched his shaft. He fell back slightly, dick bobbing violently as a hot spurt of precum escaped, smearing across her folds. His hand flew to his base, gripping himself tight, strangling the urge to spill the rest inside her too soon. His chest heaved, breath ragged, his whole body quaking as he fought his primal need.

Every nerve screamed at him to dive back in, to split her open and take her like one of the dolls he once ruined in the past. But Sera wasn’t a toy. She wasn’t a slut to be used and discarded. She was their wife, and their first time with her had to be careful, no matter how badly his dick ached to break that rule.

Stack squeezed his eyes shut, his face twisted in torment, before finally cutting his gaze toward his brother. Smoke sat smugly in his chair, glass still in hand as he tipped back the last swallow of whiskey. He chuckled, low and knowing, the sound carrying that arrogant bite only he could manage. “Should’ve known better than to play with her button after makin’ her gush in ya mouth. She too sensitive now, fool.”

Stack glared, still panting, his hand white-knuckled around his dick.

Smoke leaned forward, setting the glass down with a soft clink. His gaze flicked over Sera’s twitching body sprawled across the bed, then down to the way Stack trembled. He hummed in amusement, slow and drawn out, before palming himself. “Ya’ll think I put rules in place just for the hell of it? Now you see why I do things the way I do. You need me to step in?” he asked, voice low and taunting. “‘Fore you nut inside her like sum’ teenager that ain’t never touched pussy before?”

Stack’s teeth bared, his chest still heaving. “Ain’t my fault,” he snapped, his voice raw, desperate. “Her cooze got a tight grip!”

Smoke’s smirk deepened as he finally pushed up from his chair, his broad frame casting shadow over them both. His dick stood thick and heavy, still rock hard and glistening at the tip. His hand wrapped around it as he gave it one long, slow stroke. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know,” he muttered with sarcasm, his eyes lingering on Sera’s wrecked body. He hummed again, this time darker, hungrier, as he stepped toward the bed with the confidence of a man who had no intention of spilling too early.

Stack’s shoulders heaved as he grumbled beneath his breath, his pride stung and his body still quaking from the edge he had nearly tumbled over. He shifted to the side of the bed, jaw working, teeth grinding faintly as he made space. His eyes followed Smoke’s every move, sharp with irritation, but there was no real fight left in him. He knew better than to argue when his brother slipped into command.

Smoke tilted his head as he looked down at Sera’s twitching frame sprawled across the sheets. Her chest still fluttered with uneven breaths, her thighs damp and bucking from overstimulation. He ran his broad hands down her body, fingers spreading over her hips, her stomach, her ribs, as if reacquainting himself with every inch that was theirs. A small tsk rolled from his tongue, soft but full of meaning, as though he disapproved of how wrecked she already looked.

With a steady motion, he grabbed a pillow and slid it beneath her hips, angling her just so, perfecting the position with the precision of a craftsman adjusting his finest work. He reached for the bottle of oil, uncorked it with one hand, and poured a generous amount into his palm. His manhood stood thick and demanding, nine inches of veined heat, and he stroked himself slowly, coating every inch until it gleamed slick in the lamplight.

Bending low, Smoke pressed his forehead to Sera’s, his eyes locked on hers, his voice dropping into a tone both adorning and commanding. “Breathe with me, my love. You gon’ take me, but you gon’ do it calm. You still remember ya word?”

Her lips trembled. She gave the smallest nod, her hands clutching at his arms as if anchoring herself.

“Good girl,” he whispered, brushing his mouth over her temple as he guided the broad crown of his length against her entrance. He eased forward, pressing slow, the first stretch pulling a whine from her throat. “Don’t fight it,” Smoke murmured, his voice steady, his breath fanning across her lips. “Mimic me.”

He inhaled deep, exhaled steady, guiding her through it, his eyes never leaving hers. She followed, shaky at first, but her body softened with each synchronized breath. Inch by inch, he sank into her. Past the point where Stack had stopped. Past the four-inch barrier that had broken her resolve. Her walls fluttered around him, but her body obeyed his command to relax.

“Perfect,” he muttered, voice rough with the strain of control. “That’s perfect. Keep breathin’ with me.”

He pressed deeper still, each breath drawing him further into her until at last he was fully seated, buried to the hilt in her untouched heat. His poker face slipped then, his eyes squeezing shut for a second, his jaw slackening as the perfection of her cunt wrapped around him like she had been crafted solely for his pleasure. His stomach trembled with restraint, the dominant urge to drill her into the mattress roaring through his blood, but he caged it down.

Sera’s face pinched, her thighs shaking, her hands clutching tighter. “So full,” she whined, her voice high and shaky. She pointed weakly to the top of her stomach, just below her ribs. “E-Elijahhhhh… it’s up here. I feel you-u… all the way up here.”

Smoke twitched hard inside her, his control tested by the innocence of her words. He ground his teeth together and forced a shallow stroke, pulling back and pressing forward with careful precision. “You takin’ it,” he rasped, “an you takin’ it good.”

Her voice grew breathy, broken with moans. “Feels so good… y’all make me feel so good… My head’s—” she moaned louder, squirming beneath him, “—it’s gettin’ fuzzy again.”

The sound alone nearly undid him. Smoke’s grip tightened on her thighs, his dick throbbing deep inside as he pressed his forehead against hers harder, using his soldier restraint to keep himself from losing control. “Quiet now,” he growled, though his voice cracked with need. “If you don’t want me losin’ it like Stack, I need you to hush for a minute.”

Beside them, Stack’s eyes darkened as he watched the scene unfold. His hand stroked his own excitement as his gaze fixed on the sight of Sera writhing beneath his brother. He pumped himself in rhythm with her moans, each sound driving his hunger higher. His grin was gone now, replaced with a heavy, feral hunger. He waited, patient but straining, for his turn to feel her heat again.

Smoke kept himself steady inside her, every movement exacting and controlled, the kind of restraint that set his muscles tumbling from the inside out. Each time he eased in she made a small, helpless sound, and every time he drew back her channel tightened around him as if she wanted to trap him there forever. He pressed a wet kiss to the soft skin at her temple and his voice came out roughened.

Sera’s eyes were blown wide with a kind of stunned rapture, and she instinctively rolled her hips against him, letting her body find the rhythm even when her mind hadn’t. The motion made her grip him harder, and that tightening stole his breath for a beat; it made him want to bury himself and forget his rules. She wanted more with a hunger that trembled through her fingers, wanted so badly that it sounded like a small prayer when she sighed it. Her mouth worked around a bitten bottom lip and, almost without thinking, one hand slid down to seek the place that had been made raw and bright by Stack’s attention.

He caught her wrist before she could touch herself, his palm closing over it and holding it pinned above her head with a firmness that was both possession and protection. The catch in her exhalation was small but telling, needy and thin like a thread that might snap if pulled too hard.

“More,” she breathed, the single word trembling on her tongue, the want in it bleeding clean and raw. “Moree… I want… I want more…”

Smoke let out a sound that was part warning and part longing, a low rasp against her skin. He rocked his hips in a shallow, careful arc that kept his depth measured, keeping the pressure and not surrendering to the urge that wanted to bury him deeper and never stop. “You don’t know what you askin’ for, Seraphim,” he said, voice thick but steady. “If I give you more, I ain’t gon’ stop till I fuck you like a whore. Right now we bein’ patient… bein’ gentle, ‘cause we love you… we care ‘bout you.”

But Sera was too far gone to hear reason, her voice cracking as she writhed beneath him, nails digging crescents into his wrist and shoulders. Her head lifted, eyes glassy with lust and need, her lips quivering as she pleaded. “I can take it… please… Elijahhhh, I can take more-e-e... G-Gimme more!”

Smoke grounded his teeth together so hard his temples throbbed, and a sharp line cut deep between his brows. He pulled back just enough to glare down into her eyes. He wanted to believe her, wanted to drown himself in the raw want she was spilling, but his gut clenched with the knowledge that if he gave her what she begged for, he would unleash something she wasn’t ready to survive… yet.

Then Stack’s voice slithered in, slick and venomous. “Let me back inside her cooze,” he rasped, stroking his dick lazily in his fist, his eyes burning with hunger. “You take her ass, brother. We fill her together.”

Smoke’s head snapped to him, the movement sharp, his gaze slicing like steel. “I already told you she ain’t ready to be stuffed like that her first night.” His voice was edged, each word clipped, vibrating with irritation barely leashed.

Sera’s pout came back instantly, bratty defiance slipping free of the haze that blurred her better judgment. Her thighs twitched against his hips as she whined, “I’m a grown woman! I-I can take both of you.”

Smoke barked out a laugh, but it was no sound of amusement. It was sharp, dry, and cruel. His eyes narrowed as his lips curled in frustration. “You almost passed out from four fuckin’ inches. You think you gettin’ double filled tonight? Not a goddamn chance.”

Her frown deepened, her whines rolling out of her like spoiled prayers that grated against his ears. Stack leaned closer, that wicked grin flashing as he played the devil to her angel act. “She beggin’ for it, nigga. Let her try. She tougher than you think.”

Smoke’s nostrils flared as his patience finally cracked apart. His whole frame tightened, the muscles in his arms bulging as he pressed her harder into the mattress. His voice broke out in a growl, each word slammed like a hammer, heavy and deliberate. “Both of you… shut… the… fuck… UP.”

He was fed up as he pulled out of her in one motion and flipped her over onto her stomach, the mattress bouncing under the force. Sera gasped, her cheek pressing into the pillows, her body scrambling to adjust as his hands manhandled her like a doll. He angled her hips up with rough precision, shoving the pillow back beneath her until her ass tilted perfectly for him. His neck cracked as he rolled his head once, spreading her cheeks apart with his broad hands, his breath hot against her ear.

“Careful what you ask for, doll,” he rasped, the menace in his voice sending a tremor through the air. “I’ll give you more, but you only gettin’ five percent. That’s it.”

Sera’s muffled whimpering poured into the pillow. “I can take it all. A hunnid percent! Both of you.”

Stack threw his head back and laughed, the sound sharp and wild. He crawled toward the headboard and leaned forward, rubbing his thumb over her swollen bottom lip, smearing the spit and tears already gathering there. “Sunshine, you got a mouth on you tonight. You wanna test that request? Then listen close… tap my thigh three times if you can’t say ya safe word. Understand?”

Confusion flickered across her face, brows knitting as if she didn’t fully grasp what he meant. She opened her mouth to ask but Smoke’s palm cracked hard across her ass, the sting blooming hot across her skin. She yelped, her protest cut off as Stack seized the chance, gripping her curls tight and shoving his dick past her lips. Half his length slid into her throat, thick and unforgiving, muffling her cries into wet gags that vibrated along his shaft.

Smoke groaned deep from his chest as he shoved himself back into her heat, the oil-slick stretch forcing another scream that was swallowed down around Stack’s shaft. Her body seized, convulsing, her walls gripping Smoke like a vice, her throat tightening around Stack as she tried to keep up with both.

The twins groaned in unison, the sound raw and guttural, filling the room like thunder.

They wasted no time. Smoke’s hips ground forward, his pipe drilling into her walls with more force than before, testing the edges of her stretched heat. Stack tightened his grip in her hair, guiding her mouth up and down his length, fucking her throat with rough thrusts that made his own eyes roll back.

Their wife, quivering and soaked between them, had finally given them the excuse they had both been waiting for… to test what she had to offer.

The room filled with the symphony of flesh and breath. The slap of thighs against ass, the throaty groans of men holding themselves just barely in check, and the wet, obscene sounds spilling from Sera’s body. Smoke’s dick drove into her soaked pussy with a rhythm that left no doubt of his control, each thrust pulling from her a wet gush that echoed in the air like the smack of spilled water. His voice broke through the haze, low and erotic, threaded with rare slips of praise.

“Fuck, baby… you feel like heaven an hell all at once. Tight as a fist, slick as sin. You wringin’ me dry.”

Above her, Stack groaned with equal abandon. His hips snapped forward, stuffing her throat full of his meat, testing how deep she could take him. Her untrained mouth drooled uncontrollably, saliva spilling in sloppy strings down her chin, sliding over his shaft as he guided her head with both hands. He tilted his head back, his voice raw, eyes closing in pleasure.

“Fuckkk, doll… You a natural… You sloppy as hell an’ I fuckin’ love it. Look at this mess you makin’ all over me.” Stack’s voice cracked through the haze as strings of drool slid down her chin, dripping over his shaft, her muffled whimpers vibrating along his length until his hips jerked like he had been shocked. The sensation nearly broke him.

Smoke, buried in her gummy walls, felt her grip him hard enough as though she was trying to push him out even as she spasmed around him. His glare flicked upward, sharp and commanding. With a jerk of his chin, he cut the air. “Let her breathe,” he barked, voice edged with impatience.

Stack groaned low, reluctant but obedient, pulling back. His dick slid free of her throat with a wet pop, spit clinging to her swollen lips and stretched chin. She gasped desperately, chest heaving, sucking in ragged air.

Smoke wasn’t about to let her float too long. His palm pressed firm against the small of her back, grinding her spine into a deeper arch, lifting her hips until her reddened mocha ass tilted high and her needy pussy was spread open for him. His other hand slid between her slick thighs, finding her overworked clit with practiced precision. He circled it, cruel and steady, as he drilled back into her with brutal strokes that echoed wet through the room.

Her body jolted violently, her orgasm tearing through her like a dam that broke without warning. She screamed into the sheets, her pussy spasming hard, juices gushing around Smoke as though her body was desperate to keep him inside and kick him out simultaneously.

He groaned deep, refusing to let go, burying himself deeper, holding steady against the waves of her trembling body. His chest rumbled with satisfaction, his lips curling into a cruel smirk as he watched her writhe. “That’s it,” he growled, his voice low and dangerous. “Cum for us, just like a good little slut should.”

Her sobs twisted into cries of pleasure, raw and broken, her body shaking so hard her knees slipped on the soaked mattress. Still Smoke’s rhythm never faltered, his control terrifying, each thrust exact, each push more punishing than the last. He bent low, his chest flattening against her back, his mouth hot at her ear, the words spilling in a jagged whisper. “An’ you best remember somethin’, baby—” he slammed his hips forward, the slap wet and obscene, “—this right here? This is only five fuckin’ percent.”

Sera’s body was a euphoric mess beneath them, her face buried into the sheets as drool pooled beneath her chin, her sobs and cries tangled with the broken little moans that betrayed how much she enjoyed being used. Smoke carved into her from behind, each thrust wetter than the last, the sound of her gushing pussy filling the room. Stack still gripped her hair and returned to rutting into her throat, groaning every time her lips stretched wide around him and her spit slicked his shaft.

Both men were close… too close.

Smoke’s jaw flexed as his rhythm faltered for the first time, the edge of his release pressing hard against his control. He was seconds away from spilling deep inside her, painting her walls white, when Stack’s voice cut through his haze. “Look at her…” Stack groaned, his eyes wild as he stared down at Sera’s ruined face. “Cryin’ like the prettiest little doll… You want me to make ya soul leave ya body again? Yeahhh… You don’t wanna think anymore, huh? You want Daddy to fix you, huh?”

The words snapped something in Smoke. As much as he wanted to give in, he felt the danger in how close they were to pushing her too far. His chest rumbled, his voice breaking harshly from his throat.

“Cain!”

The word, sacred between them and meant only for when things went too far, hung heavy in the room. Stack froze mid-thrust, his grip on Sera’s curls loosening immediately. He raised his head, breathing hard, his eyes cutting sharply toward his twin.

Smoke’s hips stuttered, though he stayed buried deep inside her, his glare was hard and focused. “She needs air,” he growled.

Stack wiped drool from his chin with the back of his hand, his smirk slipping but not gone. “An she needs a break from ya pecker poundin’ her swollen pussy raw.”

They locked eyes, the air tight with tension. Both of them were right, both of them unwilling to give up the sweetness of her body completely.

“She too good,” Smoke muttered, voice cracking with restraint.

“Damn right she too good,” Stack shot back, his grin twisting into something sharp. “That’s why I don’t wanna stop.”

For a long moment it seemed neither would budge, the air vibrating with their ragged breathing and Sera’s whimpers. Then Smoke exhaled through his nose, dragging his tongue over his teeth. “Switch.”

Stack’s brows furrowed, reluctant, but when Smoke’s eyes narrowed, he let out a frustrated groan and pulled himself from Sera’s throat. Her head lolled forward, gasping for breath, strings of spit still dangling from her lips. Smoke pulled free from her wet heat at the same time, his length dripping with her slick and his own precum, her swollen folds twitching as they were left empty. They switched positions with a silent understanding, both of them moving with a sharp, restless hunger.

Smoke knelt at the head of the bed, his dick still rock-hard, and tilted Sera’s head back with one large hand. His eyes drank in the sight of her face—her chin wet, her cheeks streaked with tears, Stack’s precum glistening at the corners of her mouth. She looked wrecked, ruined, beautiful… Their perfect little doll...

Stack slid behind her, gripping her hips possessively as he gazed down at her core. Swollen. Wet. Covered in a glossy mix of her release and Smoke’s precum. He hissed through his teeth, the sound filthy. “Shit… look at her. Look at the mess you done made outta her.” His hands spread her open, groaning in delight at the way her folds glistened, her entrance still fluttering like it was begging to be filled again.

Both men, dripping with need, drank in the sight of their wife’s body and the evidence of how completely she belonged to them.

Smoke’s hand tightened at the back of Sera’s head, guiding her chin up until her watery eyes met his. His rod nudged at her spit-slick lips, the swollen crown heavy against her mouth. “Open,” he ordered, voice low but vibrating with need. Her lips parted obediently, still trembling from the stretch of Stack’s length, and Smoke pushed forward, filling her mouth and sliding deep into her throat with one steady thrust. Her gag reflex never flinched, her throat hugging him tight as drool immediately spilled down her chin.

Behind her, Stack lined himself up again, his pipe already slick with her spit and juices. His rough hands gripped her hips, thumbs spreading her swollen folds apart. “That’s it, little wife,” he rasped, his grin twisted with pleasure as he pressed inside. Her cunt yielded to him inch by inch, still fluttering from being stretched by his twin. The wet, obscene sound of his manhood driving into her echoed through the room, loud and messy, her slick rained down her thighs as he bottomed out.

The twins groaned together, two deep raw sounds that vibrated against her body. Smoke tipped his head back, eyes squeezed shut, as her throat milked him. “Fuck… baby girl… ya mouth was made for me,” he moaned, his hips rocking, the muscles in his stomach tightening as he fucked her throat in slow, punishing thrusts. “Church girl, huh? Not no more. You takin’ me like our perfect slut.”

Stack’s voice cut in, rough and ragged as he fucked her pussy with hard, steady strokes. His hips slapped against her ass, each impact wet and heavy. “Fuck… you still squeezin’ me like you don’t ever wanna let go. This pussy somethin’ else. Perfect fuckin’ pussy.” He groaned again, his voice dropping to a growl. “You ours now. We ain’t never lettin’ you go… Gonna turn you into our perfect slut.”

Sera’s body writhed between them, her muffled cries vibrating around Smoke while she continued to leak around Stack. Her thighs trembled, her hips stuttered, and her walls clenched tight, signaling another orgasm building fast. Smoke felt her throat convulsing around him, drool running freely down her chin, and he pressed deeper, groaning loud. Stack felt her cunt lock around him again, the wet gush spilling hot over his dick Dwayne “THE CAWK” Johnson.

“Shit! She ‘bout to cum again,” Stack barked, his grin manic as he drilled harder, the wet sound deafening.

Smoke’s hand tightened in her curls as he shoved deeper into her throat, his groan breaking raw from his chest. “Let go for us, Seraphim. Cum while we fill you… Show us how much you fuckin’ love this.”

Her eyes rolled back, her body shuddering violently, and she broke apart with another orgasm that tore through her like lightning. Stack cursed as her walls milked him brutally, his thrusts turning ragged. “I’m fuckin’ there,” he whined, teeth bared. “I’m right fuckin’ there.”

Smoke’s composure finally cracked as her throat fluttered around him, sucking his release from him as if her body had been made for it. He grunted hard, his voice broken with pleasure. “Take it, my love. Swallow all of it.”

Stack slammed deep, burying himself as he spilled hot inside her, his groan animalistic as his seed spilled into her swollen pussy. Smoke followed, pressing deep into her throat as his length throbbed, his own hot release spilling down her gullet, forcing her to gulp as he held her head firm against him.

The twins moaned in unison, their sounds layered over the wet mess of her body, as they came undone inside their wife… her pussy and her throat claimed at once.

The room was thick with the scent of sex, sweat, and oil, the air humming with the echoes of their ragged groans and Sera’s muffled cries. For a long moment, no one moved. Just the sound of their heavy breathing and the faint creak of the bed beneath their bodies.

Smoke was the first to stir. He eased his softening meat from her swollen throat, his hand immediately cupping her jaw, thumb brushing tenderly over her spit-slick lips. He leaned down, covering her face in soft, grounding kisses, trailing them from her damp cheeks to her temple, then back to her mouth. “Perfect,” he whispered against her skin, his voice low but certain, the kind of tone that left no room for doubt. “You so fuckin’ perfect, my love. Ours. Always ours.”

Stack pressed one last deep thrust into her before sighing and pulling out carefully. He bent over her back, pressing a trail of kisses along her shoulder, his lips soft and full of worship where moments ago his words had been filthy and sharp. “Mrs. Moore,” he rasped against her damp skin, “you did so damn good.” He lingered there for a moment, breathing her in, before reluctantly crawling off the bed. With uncharacteristic gentleness, he grabbed a towel to wipe himself down and moved to the bathroom, his scratched up shoulders flexing as he bent over the tub to run warm water.

Sera lay collapsed against the pillows, her body quivering faintly, her breath uneven. She felt lightheaded, almost dizzy, as if the world had tipped her into a new sky. She was on cloud nine, floating in the warmth of being filled and used and worshipped… but with that bliss came a hollow ache, a sudden emptiness where their dicks had been. The ache of being stretched, used, then left open and wanting.

Smoke recognized it instantly. He’d seen it before in dolls who shook and cried after being taken too far, their minds unraveling from too much pleasure without the anchor of care afterward. That was why he had fought so hard to keep it at “five percent.” He knew if they gave her the full weight of what they could do too soon, she would shatter in ways she wouldn’t come back from.

He gathered her against his chest, wrapping his arms around her delicate frame. “Shhh,” he soothed, smothering her in kisses against her damp curls, her forehead and the soft curve of her cheek. “I got you. We got you. You did so good for us, my love.” His body stayed locked around hers, holding her tight against the solid wall of his chest so she could feel anchored.

By the time Stack returned, the bath steamed and ready, Smoke was still lavishing her with kisses, whispering praise into her hair, rocking her slightly against him. Stack’s typical grin was gone, replaced with something softer, steadier. He placed a kiss on her damp temple before brushing his knuckles against her cheek. “Bath’s ready for you, sweetheart,” he said gently.

Together, the twins lifted her, cradling her overstimulated body as if she weighed nothing. They carried her into the bathroom, the warm air wrapping around them. Smoke stepped into the tub first, lowering her carefully into the water while Stack steadied her with his hands. Both of them sank in beside her, their broad frames flanking her body, turning the bath into a cocoon of heat and muscle.

They worked together to wash her, their touches gentle and full of love. Stack took her arm and massaged soap into her skin with soft circles, pressing occasional kisses against her damp shoulder. Smoke tilted her chin up, rinsing her face with a careful hand before kissing her forehead again. Every touch was matched with words of praise, their voices layered low and steady.

“You ours now, little wife,” Smoke murmured. “Ain’t nothin’ you could do that would make us love you less.”

“Never seen anyone take us like you just did,” Stack added, his grin small but full of awe. “You somethin’ special, sunshine. One of a kind.”

They asked her, between their kisses and strokes of soap, where she was sore.

“Here?” Smoke pressed a palm against her thigh.

“Or here?” Stack traced her hip with his thumb.

They wanted to know if her chest hurt from crying, if her throat burned from being stretched, if her mind still felt too fuzzy or if she was drifting back to herself. Every answer she gave—whether whispered, nodded, or gasped—was met with more kisses, more praise and more grounding touches.

The bath wasn’t just for cleaning her body. It was for wrapping her in love, in ownership, in the reminder that even when they pushed her to the edge, they would always bring her back.

By the time they lifted her out, her head had grown heavy against Smoke’s chest, her arms draped loosely around his neck. Stack had the towel ready, drying her carefully, his lips brushing her shoulder before each new section of skin he tended to. When she was dressed in one of her slips, soft fabric clinging to her damp body, they carried her back to the bedroom.

The sheets were ruined, soaked through from sweat and her release, so the men stripped the bed down together, their broad frames working in practiced rhythm. Fresh linens stretched tight across the mattress, pillows fluffed, the bed remade into something clean and inviting. Smoke laid her gently against the center, Stack immediately climbing in beside her.

For an hour, they massaged her body from head to toe, their strong hands kneading away every ache. Stack started at her calves, working up her thighs, kissing the inside of her knee as he went. Smoke focused on her shoulders, her arms, rubbing deep into her tense muscles before bending low to kiss the slope of her neck. They met in the middle, their lips covering her in soft, relentless affection until she lay loose, boneless, drifting.

Her sighs grew softer, her lashes fluttered closed, and soon she melted fully into sleep, her chest rising in slow, steady rhythm. The twins lay on either side of her, watching her until they were sure she was deeply gone to dreams. Then, with quiet care, they slipped from the bed, leaving her bundled in blankets.

In the living room, the world looked different. The sun was setting, painting the city skyline outside their tall windows in bruised shades of orange and purple. The glass clinked faintly as Stack poured himself water, while Smoke dropped onto the couch, shirtless, a cigarette already between his lips. Both men wore only their pajama bottoms, their bare chests, shoulders, and arms tingling where Sera dug her nails into them.

For a moment, silence. Just the faint hum of the city far below, the crackle of Smoke’s lighter as he drew the first burn. “We don’t have to work,” He said finally, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. “We got enough tucked away. Could retire here. Live quiet. Enjoy bein’ married.”

Stack sat back in his chair, water glass resting on his knee. He didn’t answer right away. His gaze drifted to the hallway, to the bedroom where their woman slept soundly, wrapped up in their scent. His throat bobbed, his eyes lingering before sliding back to his brother.

“We got too much devil blood in us to sit around playin’ house twenty-four-seven,” Stack muttered. “We don’t deserve that life… Not yet… Ain’t done enough good to earn it.” He shook his head slowly, his grin gone, his voice bare. “Still tryin’ to figure out what the fuck we did right to get her.”

Smoke chuckled, but there was no true joy behind it, only smoke spilling past his lips like a sigh. “I wonder the same.” His tired eyes dimmed, the weight of memory shadowing them. “She’s perfect. But us? We monsters. Blood all over our hands.”

Stack leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, his voice cutting sharp with honesty. “I don’t feel worthy enough to fully call myself her husband. Least not right now... But I do know I don’t want no other woman. Pissed me off at first, leavin’ behind the brothel. But I’d trade every one of them dolls for her. A hunnid whores ain’t worth what she is. For the first time, one woman’s enough. She more than enough. An I don’t wanna fuck this up.”

Smoke hummed, his cigarette ember glowing as he drew another drag. “I hear you.” He let the tainted air curl into the dim light. “I wasn’t a good husband to Annie. Fucked that all to hell. But I’ll be damned if I don’t do right by Sera. She gon’ get all the good I got left in me.” He paused, his gaze drifting, the weight of reality cutting through his haze. His lips curled into a faint, crooked smile. “Shit. You realize what this is?”

Stack raised a brow.

Smoke tapped ash into the tray. “This technically our honeymoon.”

The word hung heavy between them, absurd and true all at once. Stack blinked, then huffed out a laugh, the sound short but real.

Smoke leaned back, his gaze sharp again. “Once this job with Capone’s done, we give her the wedding of her dreams. Even if it’s just the three of us in the room. She deserve that. She deserve more than what we been.”

Stack’s jaw flexed, but his eyes softened as he glanced once more at the hallway. “Yeah,” he said finally, his voice low. “She does.”

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Author’s Note: Boy oh boy… This has been a wild ride 🤭 Now it’s time to dive into their marriage, the twins working, Sera finding herself, and of course them doing the freaky nasty 24/7

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It was 7:55 p.m. The ceremony was set to begin at nine and the Moore twins were already on their way to collect what was owed. And Zora, five foot six and carved for the stage, beautiful enough that fashion houses had once pressed cards into her palm at parties, stood barefoot in a robe she tied in a furious knot. Her hair, abundant and wavy, hung in black ribbons down her shoulders because she had refused to sit for the stylist. Pins glittered on the carpet like thrown coins. Curling irons and hot combs cooled on the vanity beside a smashed perfume bottle that fogged the air with a sweet, bitter scent. The silk dress on the mannequin looked like a hostage.

“Zora,” Charles said, using the kind of gentleness that made everything worse, “you turned thirty last week. And I know you don’t wanna hear it, but it matters. Your blood changed. It reached its season. It’s heavy in the air now. Vampires can scent it from three thousand damn miles out. Women, men, all of ’em. It’s a beacon. You marry Smoke, or you spend the rest of your days fighting off creatures who will not ASK your permission.”

She flung the crystal hair brush she was holding. It struck the wall beside him and fell into the shag with a muffled chime. “So your answer is to gift me to the very beasts you say I should fear?! Brilliant.”

“I secured your protection,” he said. “And I bought us an empire.”

“You bought yourself an empire,” she said. “You bought me a fucking cage.”

The room looked like the aftermath of a storm. Feathers from a torn pillow drifted in the current of the ceiling fan. A hand mirror lay face down in a nest of stockings. A silver tray sat on the vanity, pearls slithering off its edge like a spill of moonlight. The stylist had retreated to the hall with her kit hugged to her chest, whispering apologies to no one. Zora’s robe swished around her thighs as she paced. Every step had the memory of a tendu, a held line, a discipline that only heightened the chaos. Ballet had taught her to make fury look like elegance, and right now her rage wore satin.

“Babygirl, listen,” Charles tried again, and the nickname landed like ash. “Smoke is the oldest. Tradition says he stands as husband because the Obsidian Court wants order. That man and his brother can keep you safer than I ever could. Their clan’s money older than any bank up here. They got laws, they got codes. And with your blood smelling like… like sun on copper, you ain’t got time to—”

“Stop telling me what I smell like!” she bit out. “You’re the one who’s putting me in danger. You did that. Don’t try to sugarcoat this.”

“Or I kept you from being hunted in the street,” he said, and there was that steel he carried into every back room where men signed papers that made others disappear. “I know what those things do when they want something… I been in those rooms… This is me keeping you alive.”

“By selling me,” she said.

He didn’t flinch. He stood there with his hands still in his pockets and his jaw working once, then stilling, and he wore his ruthlessness like another layer of wool. “I’ll admit, I sold a piece of my soul when I made that deal,” he said, voice even. “And I’ll do it again, and again, and again, if it means they have to go through the Moores and the Obsidian Court before they get to you.”

The grandfather clock in the hall struck the quarter hour. Zora’s spine thrummed with a dozen impulses at once. Run. Rip the gown. Throw the dress form over the balcony. Scream until the chandeliers trembled. But then the air shifted as if the house had drawn in a careful breath, and a new scent threaded the wrecked perfume… rain over clay… Bourbon breathed over cedar.

They finally arrived.

Footsteps padded over marble. Quiet, but not timid. The kind of footfalls that kept time with something older than clocks. Two silhouettes crossed the threshold, a pair of tall men in black, tailored like sins disguised as tuxedos. Smoke entered first. Elijah Moore, the oldest. He had the stillness of a judge and the face of a man carved to carry it. Broad shoulders. A mouth that seldom smiled and, when it did, counted as thunder. Skin the color of dark mahogany polished to a soft sheen. He wore his hair close, and he wore his authority closer.

Stack followed a step behind, a mirror remade, lighter around the eyes but no less dangerous, a glint of wicked humor tucked into the corner of his mouth like a spare knife. Where Smoke’s presence landed like a verdict, Stack’s slid in like a promise you would regret, but against better judgment ask for again. Both men spoke with heavy Southern drawls that warmed the room and warned it at once, as if Mississippi had put its hand on Harlem’s shoulder and squeezed.

Smoke’s gaze took the room in with a sweep that counted every broken thing. Feathers in the air. Glass on the rug. The dress untouched. The bride untamed. He didn’t look at Zora. He looked at her father.

“Mr. Huntington,” he said, accent thick as sorghum. “It eight. Why she ain’t ready?”

Zora felt heat climb her throat. He had the audacity to ignore her. To talk over her in her own room. To act like she was luggage. She reached for the nearest object, a silver perfume bottle with a glass stopper shaped like a teardrop, and her fingers closed around it.

“Don’t,” Smoke said, and he didn’t raise his voice. One syllable, low and clean, as if the word itself knew how to stand its ground.

She held his stare. The bottle felt weighty and perfect in her palm. “Watch me.”

She hurled it. The thing cut the air with a bright arc, and in that breath the world seemed to tilt. Smoke easily moved his head by a fraction. The bottle skimmed past his temple and shattered against the doorframe behind him, splashing his shoulder with a sheen of scent and diamonds of glass. He didn’t blink. He set his gaze fully on her and the attention hit like a hand on the small of her back. Not possessive. Just a notice served: I see you.

Stack lifted both brows, and he let out a soft, appreciative sound. “Well now,” he said, with a slanted smile that shouldn’t have pleased her. “She got an arm.”

“She got five minutes,” Smoke replied without looking away from Zora. “An she already used ’em.”

Zora squared her shoulders and frowned. “I am not going anywhere with you, Mr. Moore… or you Mr. Moore.”

Smoke’s eyes, a shade you couldn’t name until you stood too close, flicked once to the wrecked room and back to her face. “You think this ‘bout where you go,” he said, accent smoothing each word into something heavy. “It ain’t. This ‘bout whether you walk out that door or I carry you out. Either way, you leavin’.”

Charles cleared his throat as if he had been holding it this whole time. “Zora, put on the dress.”

She ignored him. “You talk like you own this house,” she told Smoke. “Vampire or not, you don’t scare me and you don’t own a damn thing here.”

Smoke tipped his chin a hair. “I don’t need to own a house to take what’s owed to my clan,” he said. “Your father inked papers. He spilled intention. The Obsidian Court heard it. We here to make good.”

“The Court can rot,” she said, and there was an unwise satisfaction in saying it out loud.

Stack’s playful smile thinned into something sharper. “Sweetheart, folks who say that tend to find out rot ain’t the worst of it,” he said, and the sugar in his tone didn’t sweeten a thing. “You ain’t safe with nobody but us. That scent of yours, it’s ringin’ like supper bells from here to Havana.”

Zora’s stomach turned, not with fear, and not exactly with shame, but with a brand of fury that had weight. She could feel it under her skin. One week ago… one birthday cake, one wish, one midnight later… something inside her had shifted. Healers in her mother’s line had whispered about ripeness as a season, not an age. She hadn’t believed them. Now the air itself seemed to lean toward her. Vampires would smell her from a continent away and walk until their shoes burned to find her. It wasn’t romance. It was a hunt.

Smoke took a step farther into the room, and the temperature changed by a degree you could count. He still didn’t touch anything. He didn’t need to. Authority tended to move the furniture for him. “I ain’t here to flatter you,” he said, and the drawl laid down over his words like velvet covering steel. “I’m here to keep you from bein’ dragged out your own bed by a clan that don’t respect courts or deals or daddies with money. You mad at him. I hear it. Keep it. But you comin’ with me.”

“Say please,” she said, and she lifted her chin because ballet teaches you how to make a crown with your spine.

Something like a smile threatened one corner of Smoke’s mouth and died there. “No.”

Charles exhaled through his nose. He looked older all of a sudden. Not weaker, just used. “Zora, I ain’t askin’,” he said. “I did what I did because I know monsters, and the Moores are the only monsters that answer to law. Put on the damn dress.”

She crossed to the mannequin and ripped the veil from its pins. The tulle hissed in her hands like a chorus of tiny voices. “I’ll wear this…” she said, and she flung the veil over the headboard so it slid down and hung like a ghost. “…I’ll wear it to mop the floor of the Court.”

Stack’s laughter was quiet and bright. “Lord, she a handful,” he said, and he leaned a shoulder against the doorframe with a familiarity that made the stylist gasp from the hall. “You sure you the husband, Eli? ’Cause I ain’t never seen a bride look a man in the eye like that an live to tell it.”

Smoke didn’t move. He kept his attention on Zora the way a storm keeps its attention on a field. “You finished?” he asked her, not unkindly. “Or you got one more thing you wanna throw?”

She reached for the porcelain jewelry dish. She held it up and contemplated throwing it before setting it down and meeting his eyes. “I have one more thing to say,” she answered. “I don’t belong to you.”

He nodded once. “Then I reckon we teach each other what belong means,” he said. “Do you want to walk out with dignity or do you want me to carry you out kickin’ an screamin’? Choose.”

Zora’s breath came steady because years at the barre had taught her how to breathe through fire. She could feel the edges of her choices and none of them looked like freedom. The dress glimmered in the corner like a stranger. The clock in the hall began to strike past eight, each tone landing in the room like a footstep.

“Your five minutes are long gone,” Smoke said, and the words sat on the carpet beside all the broken things. “An I’m all outta patience.”

Stack straightened, the charm dimming as he measured Charles with a glance that held knives. “Mr. Huntington,” he drawled, “if you got any men downstairs who may feel brave when a woman hollers. Tell ’em stand down. We gon’ take her through the front like she a queen, not a prize.”

Charles nodded once, pride and fear fighting a war along his cheekbones. “They’ll clear the steps,” he said.

Zora looked at the two vampires in the doorway. Old money in their cuffs. Older law in their stares. Men turned in a century that ate empires, men who had learned to eat back. She thought of the Daywalkers’ Vein… her mother’s whispered legacy, the curse dressed as a gift, the sun bottled for a price. She thought of Harlem glittering beyond the windows with a thousand bright sins. She thought of the Obsidian Court, obsessed with order, hungry for her blood’s alchemy, waiting to fold her into a ritual and call it mercy.

She lifted her chin. “I’m not a prize. I’m not a Queen. I’ll walk on my own,” she said, and her voice did not shake, and she hated that the words sounded like a confession and a challenge at once.

Smoke’s eyes didn’t soften. They acknowledged. He turned his head toward the hall and spoke without looking away from her. “Bring the car,” he said, and the command went downstairs like a scent.

Stack stepped aside and offered the doorway with a little flourish, that wicked humor back on his face. “After you, fireball,” he said, accent syrupy and lethal. “An we gon’ talk about that arm later.”

Zora passed them both, robe sashing around her legs, hair wild, bare feet silent on the runner. She did not look at her father. She did not look at the dress. She kept her gaze on the staircase and the grand foyer below, where men waited with caps in their hands and eyes studiously averted. Smoke fell in behind her like a shadow that had decided it belonged to her. Stack drifted to her other side with a half-smile that promised mischief and war.

At the landing, she paused because the chandelier threw a net of light across the marble and, for a heartbeat, she could see herself in the reflection, a woman walking into a future that did not ask her consent. She squared her shoulders and descended as if the stairs were a stage and the audience owed her their breath.

Behind her, Smoke said nothing. Beside her, Stack hummed a tune that sounded like thunder flirting with a train whistle. Ahead of her, the front doors opened onto night, and Harlem waited like a cat with gold eyes.

The night air outside the Huntington estate was heavy with jazz carried from the clubs down Lenox, a faint echo of horns and drums spilling into the dark like mischief itself. A row of polished black cars waited at the curb, engines idling low, a convoy that belonged less to mortals and more to ceremony. Men in pressed coats stood along the steps, their caps pulled low, eyes trained anywhere but on the woman their employer had just sold into eternity.

Zora stalked forward, each step a defiance against the marble beneath her feet. She told herself she would make it to the car on her own terms, that she would not be dragged like some caged thing. She would climb in barefoot and disheveled and let the entire Obsidian Court see her rage written plain across her body. If they wanted a bride, they would have to take her as she was.

But the instant her hand hovered toward the sleek door handle, a sharp snap cracked the air. Smoke hadn’t raised his voice. He hadn’t even glanced at her. His long fingers flicked once, the sound cutting through the night like the crack of a whip. From the second vehicle behind, four men stepped out in unison, their movements too practiced to belong to simple drivers. They closed on her before she could twist away.

“Don’t you—!” Her words strangled into a cry as two caught her arms, another seized her waist, the last plucked the sash of her robe when she tried to claw free. She fought like a feral thing, legs kicking, hair thrashing about her shoulders. Her shriek ripped into the Harlem night, loud enough that strangers might have stopped in any other neighborhood. But here, under the Moores’ shadow, men on corners folded newspapers and turned their faces the other way.

“You think you can put hands on me?” she spat, nails digging into one servant’s sleeve. “Let me go, I’ll—”

“Ma’am,” one of them grunted through gritted teeth, “we are under orders.”

They dragged her across the gravel, robe slipping from one shoulder as she twisted like she might tear herself in half before conceding. The rear door of the second car yawned open, lamplight from the interior spilling onto the steps. Two women waited inside—seamstresses or attendants… she wasn’t sure… armed not with weapons but with needles, pins, and the pale shimmer of satin.

“No!” Zora cried, heels scraping stone. “Don’t you dare—” Her words dissolved into another scream as they forced her inside, the door shutting like the lid of a coffin. The car rocked once as her fight carried on behind glass. Silhouettes shifted, arms tugged, fabric lifted. Her voice rose in ragged protest until it thinned against the sound of the engine.

Smoke stood at the curb and adjusted the cuff of his jacket as if nothing unusual had taken place. His face was unreadable and only the faint crease between his brows betrayed the irritation pulsing under his stillness. Stack leaned against the open door of their own car with a sly whistle.

“Well, hell,” Stack drawled, a sharp gold tooth glinting when the streetlight hit his grin. “She bite like she already got fangs of her own.”

Smoke cut his brother a look, sharp as glass. “A woman who walk out her daddy’s house in a robe thinkin’ she gon’ stand before the Court lookin’ like that?” His jaw tightened, words heavy with disapproval. “That ain’t a bride. That’s a motherfuckin’ disgrace.”

Stack shrugged, unbothered. “Or that’s a woman who know she ain’t nobody’s property, Eli. Can’t say I don’t admire the gall.”

“Gall don’t mean nothin’ when the Court sittin’ there watchin’,” Smoke replied. He climbed into the waiting vehicle, the interior smelling faintly of leather and cigar smoke, order pressed into every line. “Presentation is law. She walk in that hall half-naked, it don’t matter who her blood belong to. She’ll shame me, shame us, shame the clan. That woman playin’ with fire that’s hotter than the sun.”

Stack slid into the seat beside him, one arm tossed over the backrest with casual irreverence. “Mm,” he said, eyes on the window where Zora’s car rattled ahead, her shadow flaring against the curtains as attendants tried to tame her. “Or maybe she is the fire. You ever think of that?”

Smoke didn’t answer. His jaw was stone, his gaze fixed on the darkness beyond the windshield. The convoy pulled away from the Huntington estate, engines growling low as a beast’s throat, the night swallowing them whole.

Inside the second car, Zora’s screams tangled with the ripping sound of fabric, pins clinking into porcelain trays, and the low, urgent voices of women who had been paid to prepare her. Every tug of satin, every pull of a lace string was another theft of her will. And still she fought, her fury echoing against the velvet seats, until her voice carried forward to the Moores’ car.

Smoke closed his eyes for a moment, irritation knifing under his skin, order slipping like sand between his fingers. “This ceremony was meant to be seamless,” he muttered, voice weighted with authority. “Instead it already reeks of chaos.”

Stack chuckled, low and dangerous. “Maybe chaos exactly what we need, Eli’… We’ve been ‘round the world an been alive over 330 years. Court been too quiet...”

Smoke’s eyes opened again, dark as stormwater, and for the first time since stepping into the Huntington house, he allowed the truth to sit heavy in his chest. He had never despised disorder more. And he had never wanted a woman more for daring to create it…

The convoy slowed as the iron gates of the Obsidian Court opened like jaws parting. Gaslight lamps burned in precise intervals along the drive, their glow catching the sleek bodies of the black cars as they rolled up the long, tree-lined lane. At the end of it stood the Moores’ ancestral estate. Black stone, towering columns and a fortress that looked less like it was built and more like it was carved from the night itself. The windows burned faint gold against the velvet dark, every light a sentinel, every shadow a witness. This was where she would live now. This was where she would be bound.

The second car door opened first. A servant stepped aside, and Zora emerged. Satin and lace whispered over the cobblestones as if mocking her rebellion. They had pinned her hair in a crown of dark waves and tucked a veil behind jeweled combs. Pearls glimmered at her throat, her ballerina frame wrapped in silk that fit her like it was sculpted to perfection. Even when she had tried to sabotage her own appearance, she looked like a vision lifted straight from the Court’s ancient paintings. A bride of rare blood and rarer beauty.

Her eyes burned like amber coals above it all.

Smoke’s gaze swept her once. No softness, no admiration, only judgment weighing every detail. “Better,” he said.

Zora cocked her head to the side and her chest heaved. “Better? Is that all you have to say after your dogs dragged me into a car like livestock? Better?” Her voice climbed sharp as glass. “You cold-eyed, uptight bastard, struttin’ around like the world oughta bow to your shadow. You think I’m impressed by your suits and frightened by your abilities, Mr. Moore? My mama raised me to be fearless and you ain’t nothin’ but a bloodsuckin’ parasite with a stick shoved so far up your—”

Gasps fluttered through the row of servants flanking the Court steps. Eyebrows raised and a murmur rippled like wind through grass. That was the moment Smoke’s patience split.

In a blink, his hand wrapped around her throat, fingers firm and measured, lifting her chin without crushing it, but letting the threat of doing so linger in the air. His grip was iron and fire, a claim laid in flesh. His eyes bore down into hers, and his sharp fangs slid into view, white and gleaming against the dusk. He leaned close, his voice low enough to tangle the veins in her blood.

“You watch your tongue,” he said, each word a brand. “Me an my brother… we can be the very monsters you already call us. We can show you what it means when men like us stop following rules. You don’t want that, little girl. You best remember it. An when we step in front of them elders, you keep that venom sealed behind those pretty lips, or you gon’ learn real fast how cruel eternity can be.”

Zora’s eyes widened, fury trembling against a sudden, unwelcome shiver at the threat in his voice.

Stack, who had been leaning idly against the car, shifted forward. His easy grin was gone. His eyes were sharper now, colder, and when he spoke the charm had bled out of his tone, leaving something harder, hungrier. “She’s entertainin’ but talk like that again, Eli, I might not be so polite,” Stack said, his voice gone dark. He stepped closer, his height shadowing her from the left, and for a brief moment the mask slipped… his gaze went feral and his smile twisted into something not quite sane. “Ain’t no servant here gon’ get the idea they can talk slick because the bride can’t keep her mouth shut. I’ll cut that out quick. Don’t test me, little flame.”

The servants stood straighter, glances flicking down, fear and reverence mingling like smoke. The new bride’s temper might have been entertaining back at the mansion, but here in the Court, Zora’s mouth was a liability neither twin could allow… at least not right now.

Smoke loosened his grip just enough for Zora to breathe without breaking her gaze. Stack moved to her left, Smoke to her right. Their arms linked tightly with hers, not as escort but as bind. Two ancient predators walking her into the lion’s den. “Walk,” Smoke ordered, his tone final, the word carrying into her bones.

And together they climbed the long stone steps of the Obsidian Court, a perfect tableau of order: the bride in white, glowing with defiant fury, and the twin shadows on either side holding her fast.

The great doors of the Obsidian Court swung open with a creak that seemed older than Harlem itself, a sound that carried the weight of centuries. Inside, the hall stretched wide and cathedral-like, its vaulted ceiling lost in darkness except where iron chandeliers glowed with candlelight. The stone was black as onyx, veined with silver that caught each flame and sent it scattering across the room like shards of ice. The air was dense with incense and blood, the metallic tang undercutting the perfume of roses arranged in vases taller than men. Every pew was filled, every figure draped in finery cut from silks, velvets, and jewels collected across centuries. Eyes gleamed in the dim, some human, some something older, all of them fastening to the woman being led down the aisle.

Zora held her chin high because to bow it would feel like surrender. Her robe was gone, stripped from her body by women with quick fingers, replaced with one of the twenty gowns Smoke had commissioned weeks ago without her knowledge. Satin hugged her waist, lace traced her shoulders, pearls dotted her bodice like tears frozen mid-fall. She hated every stitch, but as she stepped forward with Smoke on her right and Stack on her left, she knew that hate made her radiant. Every eye followed her because she was not merely beautiful, she was rare, and rarity was worth more than diamonds in this room.

Inside her head she cursed them all. She cursed the women whose lips curled into jealous smirks. She cursed the men who let their stares linger on the soft line of her collarbone. She cursed the elders perched like vultures on the dais, their hands folded, their eyes like chips of obsidian weighing her as if she were a jewel to be bartered. Every step screamed with profanity in her mind. Parasites. Bastards. Lechers. Every last one of you can burn. Her mouth stayed shut, though, her father’s warning echoed through her memory along with Smoke’s grip around her throat, his fangs flashing, the low command that had frozen the blood in her veins. She knew better now than to give her fury sound.

The hall stretched before her like a gauntlet, pews packed with rival clans who had traveled from coasts, mountains and islands. She felt their hunger like heat against her skin. Some eyes glimmered with admiration, others with lust, others with envy, and a few with naked malice. They knew who she was and what her blood meant. They knew that if she belonged to the Moores, then her bloodline would be sealed away under their rule, its power locked from any other clan’s grasp. She was a prize and a weapon all at once.

She cut her eyes sideways, sharp as the slice of a dancer’s turn towards the center pew on the left. Her father sat like a king among his own men, twenty strong, each in dark suits with their hands resting near the hidden holsters at their hips. They were mortals among immortals, and yet they held their ground with the arrogance of loyalty paid in blood. Charles looked immovable, back straight, jaw proud, every inch the ruthless kingpin who had brokered this deal. But for the briefest second, when her gaze collided with his, she thought she saw a crack. A shadow in his eyes, something that whispered of regret. It was gone as quickly as it came, replaced with the steel of a man unwilling to bend under the weight of what he had done.

Her chest tightened. Was it guilt? Was it pity? Or was it simply her imagination clawing for mercy that did not exist? She looked away before her own expression betrayed the storm inside her.

Smoke’s arm pressed firm against hers, a reminder that escape was no more than a dream. His posture was rigid, shoulders squared, his gaze locked forward as though this ceremony were nothing more than law carried out. His silence was a wall, and behind that wall was a man who despised disorder as much as he despised desire. Stack’s arm was looped through her left, his stride casual, but his eyes had completely lost their playfulness. They flicked across the room, cataloging faces and measuring threats. The smile was gone, replaced with the sharp edge of a man who knew when to laugh and when to bare teeth.

The trio moved as one down the aisle, the echo of their steps swallowed by the hushed murmurs of the clans. Servants trailed behind, carrying the long train of Zora’s gown so it floated like spilled milk. The chandeliers swayed faintly, casting fractured light over her face, and for a moment she thought she might suffocate under the sheer weight of expectation pressing down from every direction.

At the end of the aisle, the elders of the Court sat in a semicircle. Ancient men and women, their skin gleaming like dark marble, their eyes ageless and hungry. Some wore gowns that had graced royal courts centuries ago, others tailored suits that spoke of modern wealth. Together they were timeless, and together they were judge and jury. They leaned forward ever so slightly as she approached, their gazes pricking her skin.

Zora kept her head high. She would not stumble, she would not show fear, and she would not give them the satisfaction of tears. But in her mind she cursed them still, a litany of fury woven between every measured step: Rot in the ground. Choke on your riches. May the sun eat you alive when my blood runs dry.

The hall narrowed as she drew closer to the dais, the world funnelling into the sight of her father behind her, the twins beside her, and the elders ahead. She was trapped in a triangle of betrayal, possession, and power, and no amount of rage could unmake the truth… she was already theirs.

Smoke and Stack walked her forward, and the doors groaned shut behind them with a finality that echoed through the hall like the sound of fate closing its grip.

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Y’all: “Update your other series!”

Me enjoying the chaos while I start a new series:

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