#thirddeadlysin

Pero Tovar may not have the love of a good woman to return to, but there is something special about going home. He has been on the road for a long time and the journey is almost over, for this time. Night has fallen and he was loath to make a stop one town over, but it would have been too risky to press on in the dark night. So he gets a room for the night at an inn he knows from before. The food is good, the ale is strong, the serving wenches pretty, and for the right price the innkeeper is not opposed to having them visit a guest’s room for an hour.

Having enjoyed that good food and strong ale, Pero is now watching the brash girl who served him, and she is smiling back at him as she pours drinks for another guest. As soon as she is free, she comes over to Pero’s table. A quick exchange, and they go upstairs to his room.

There is someone waiting there. A woman, dressed for travel, dark hair spilling down her shoulders in waves, wearing a similar cross-body bundle to the one he has.

“Soledad.”

The woman he has known since he was a young man in the soldier barracks of his hometown. She was a scout back then, a spy, and a pickpocket. As far as Pero knows from more recent encounters with her, she has not made any career changes.

“Pero,” she nods, an amused smile on her lips when she sees the wench. “I seem to be interrupting.”

“You are,” Pero tells her gruffly. “If you wanted to see me, you could have done so downstairs. No need to break into my room.”

“It’s a lot more fun this way, isn’t it?” Soledad chuckles as she comes up to Pero and the girl. She scrutinized Pero’s choice and nods her approval.

“Very nice. Would you mind if I joined you?” Her hand is on the girl’s bright red cheek and she leans in against the girl, inhaling her scent, eyes fixed on Pero.

“I do mind. We can catch up later.” Pero is not in the mood to play Soledad’s games, and it is always a game with her.

“Too bad.” Soledad sighs dramatically. “We could have had a lot of fun.”

“Sorry to miss it,” Pero says without even looking at her. He walks up to the bed, relieves himself of his bundle bag and throws it along with his cloak on the bed, then turns to Soledad to tell her to leave.

“So I am.”

More or less throwing herself at him, Soledad surprises him with a full bodied, hungry kiss. Her hand is behind his neck, roughly bringing him to her, and her tongue is rudely invading his mouth. By the time he has managed to collect himself and is debating whether to kiss her back or push her away, she lets go of him with a small shove of her own.

“See you soon,” she grins, and with a wink to the girl, she’s gone.

It is not until later, when Pero has fucked the girl whose name he doesn’t even remember and is about to go downstairs to pay for her services that he notices that his bundle has been switched.

Soledad has all of his hard-earned money.

“Fuck!”

Before the innkeeper can start to argue with him, Pero is out in the dark street, looking in both directions, wondering where to start.

He realizes soon that it doesn’t matter. Soledad will follow him. He can go wherever he wants to and she will show up.

Brows knitted in irritation, Pero begins to walk up the narrow street towards the edge of town. He had hoped for a good night’s sleep and an early start tomorrow but clearly he was reaching for the stars. Damn that woman, and damn him for not realizing what she was up to. Now he’s dancing to her tune whether he wants to or not.

He definitely does not. And he definitely hates being followed, which he knows he is.

Soledad makes herself known in the alley behind a brothel. Pero is not even surprised: it’s just like her to confront him in the darkness behind a house of debauchery. He did, however, not expect to find himself slammed against the wall with a long, sharp dagger pressed against his crotch. A blade at his throat, yes, but almost piercing through the leather of his pants? Not fair.

“Can we get this over and done with?” he asks wearily. “You try to seduce me, when you can’t you taunt me, then you steal another kiss from me, and then you give me my money back so that we can go our separate ways and I can finally get some sleep.”

“You make us sound like an old married couple,” Soledad smiles, her teeth glinting in the moonlight. “Where is the excitement?”

“It stopped being exciting when you almost took my eye,” Pero reminds her and sees her gaze move to the scar over his left eye. Her free hand moves up to lightly trace the rough, embossed strike that cuts his eyebrow in half. His eye remains steadily open when her fingers pass over it, brushing delicately over his lashes.

“Did I ever apologize for this?” Her voice has dropped so low he can hardly hear her.

“Yes. And you didn’t mean it.”

The excited cries of a whore coupling with a client whose loud grunts of “take it, take it” cut through the night from an open window above them. Soledad’s dark, veiled eyes turn a little glassy.

“Do you ever think about that night?” she whispers.

“Only with regret.” Pero’s reply is delivered with a wintery chill but Soledad seems unperturbed. So he cuts her where he knows she will bleed.

“How is our son?”

She blinks, and the blade sinks a breath deeper.

“Alive and well, no thanks to you.”

“Take the blade away, Soledad,” he tells her sharply, his patience wearing thin. “If you go deeper you will cut away the only reason we keep having these little encounters.”

“That would be an awful shame, wouldn’t it?” she tuts.

“I’m tempted to do it myself,” he tells her darkly. Soledad sighs, and the dagger stays were it is.

“Do you hate me so much?” Something sorrowful flashes by in her eyes, so quickly Pero cannot be sure he even saw it.

“Soledad.” His bark finally makes her withdraw the blade and the second he feels the absence of pressure against him, he catches her wrist with one hand and her shoulder with the other. Fast and forceful, he turns her around and throws her against the wall, beating her wrist to the rough bricks until the dagger clatters to the ground.

A scream from above tells him that the whore has either reached her climax or is pretending, most likely the latter. The sound is unsettling, as are Soledad’s full, parted lips so close to his face.

“You used to make me sound like that,” she breathes, a small line between her eyebrows the only sign that he is hurting her arm. “Do you remember?”

“Where is my money, Soledad?”

“Don’t you want to make me sound like that again?” It’s like she doesn’t even hear him. He moves one hand to her throat and, almost tenderly, closes his large fingers around it. Her pupils dilate.

“Or did that serving wench take everything from you?”

“Jealousy becomes you,” Pero grunts with some mirth, satisfied about having her reveal her weakness. Soledad was always possessive. “Can you even fathom how many whores I’ve fucked since I last saw you? How they all moaned when I gave them my cock?”

“And yet, can a single one of them make you feel as good as I can?” she retorts confidently but he can see that she is shaken. The echo of her quick heartbeats pulse against his palm and her neck muscles move when she swallows.

Pero wishes fervently he didn’t know what he knows about her, but he knows her signs of arousal so intimately. He knows that should he reach up under her skirts right now, he would find her ready for him. And if he were to humor her, he knows precisely what she would feel like, how welcoming and ravenous her cunt would be.

He’s getting hard. He may hate her but he can’t not want her. He has wanted her since he was a youngling who fell for her innocent smiles and devilish winks. Even when she almost gouged his eye out for accusing her with bedding others when she told him she was with child, he still wants her. First love never dies.

Love? Hardly. Attraction. Maybe the illusion of love. Witchcraft, even, for there’s nothing natural about her obsession with him, his weakness for her.

Moving up to her, Pero presses the entire length of himself against Soledad, letting her feel his stiffness, tormenting her with the promise of it.

“Pero,” she whines in a choked moan, her eyes fixed on his, pleading, alluring. It drives him crazy and Soledad, of course, knows it. With his free hand, he quickly pulls up her skirts, gathering the fabric in his fist to expose her legs all the way up to the apex of her thighs.

“Hold,” he grunts, and Soledad complies immediately. With her skirts out of his way Pero can easily reach her slick desire, slide his fingers inside her, smear her arousal over her little nub. The mewls he draws out of her are helpless, succumbing, obscene, and they give him impure thoughts about all the ways he could ruin her.

He willruin her.

She is now hanging on to his arm with one hand, the other still holding up her skirts. Her heavy-lidded eyes are unfocused and moans spill out of her open mouth. She is at his mercy, like she was that night a long time ago.

His cock, wedged between his body and hers, is throbbing, craving her wet heat, but he needs her on her knees first. She needs to give him what he wants. So he fucks her with his fingers, hard and fast, relentless until her moans intensify into cries and her hips move against him. Her release soaks his fingers and he hears dripping on the ground.

He pulls out his fingers, lets go of her throat, and as he wipes his digits on her skirt he notes that there is bruising forming on the skin of her neck. Part of him feels remorseful but he bears a much larger scar by her, he cannot be bothered by blemishes that will diminish within the week.

Her eyes blink open and her lower lip is caught between her teeth.

“Pero…” she moans quietly, a rosy blush on her cheekbones.

“The money,” he tells her tightly. He needs his coin purse more than he needs to fuck her.

Soledad rolls her eyes and wets her lips, then sticks two fingers into her mouth and gives a shrill, short whistle, followed by two long ones. Within moments, Pero sees his coin bag tossed out of the window on the second floor, and land heavily clinking on the street. Immediately snatching it to him, he glowers at Soledad.

“I own half of this brothel,” she shrugs. “My associate kept your precious coins safe.”

She returns his scowl. “I have to have a steady income, for my son.” She nods to his coin purse. “It’s clear that what you bring home is not enough for his keep.”

“You were the one who put him in a convent instead of taking care of him yourself,” Pero reminds her nastily. Soledad shakes her head as if she has been telling herself not to get involved, but Pero can see the anger in her dark eyes.

“We can argue about this yet again or we can finish what we started,” she tells him, her voice hard but with a smooth edge to it. “Fuck me and we can go our separate ways.”

The way she says those two words, fuck me, sets off a desperate pull in his groin that makes his cock twitch. She smiles at him like she knows.

“I know you want to. We can go upstairs, get a bed, and you can do whatever you want with me.”

“A bed’s too good for you.” Pero’s heartless comment barely registers in her face. “I’ll have you here.”

There is a stone bench next to the brothel’s back door and that’s where he has her bend over before hitching up her skirts again. He can’t hold back a sigh of relief when he finally gets to release his hard cock from its clothed prison. Lining up against her slick entrance, he pushes inside with a quick snap of his hips, making her cry out. Holding on to her hips, he fucks her hard and fast, his huffed breaths the only sounds he allows himself. He doesn’t want to be like that man upstairs with his filthy speech. To both his horror and satisfaction, Soledad sounds nothing like the whore feigning her climax. She is thoroughly enjoying his brutal assault on her and it makes him feral. He ruts into her even harder, sweat breaking out of every pore on his body, her greedy wet cunt swallowing him, gripping, pulsating. This is not going to take long.

She shakes, wails, bucks her way through another triumphant peak and as Pero’s own climax approaches, he pulls out of her after a split second’s deliberation. Pumping his cock a few times, he curses at how paltry his own hand feels in comparison to that tight, wet hole he still has in front of him, but he sticks to his principles and decorates her backside with thick strings of his seed. Trying to catch his breath and calm down the palpitations of his heart, he feels a fierce kind of satisfaction when Soledad, legs shaking, stands up, the skirt falling down over his seed. He hopes it dries on her skin and leaves a crust that she can feel when she walks. He wants her to feel him when she walks.

She turns around and her face is glowing, glorious, rejuvenated. For a moment, she’s the girl she used to be and Pero is a young soldier who can’t stop looking at her. It makes him want to kiss her softly, explore her mouth, bite her lip...

“Was that so bad?” she smirks through her sated haze, and the spell is broken. Pero glares at her and adjusts his clothes.

“Are we done or are you going to demand money from me as well?”

The blush on her cheeks deepens, but now it is from anger.

“I don’t take money from you for this, I never have and I never will!”

“I mean for the boy.” He enjoys seeing her momentary confusion.

“I don’t want your money and he doesn’t need it,” she finally says, a hard edge to her voice. She straightens her clothing and hair, and Pero finds himself unable to leave. There is a question that’s been gnawing on his mind.

“Does he ask about me?” he finally asks, not looking at her. If the question surprises her it’s nothing compared to his shock at her answer.

“No. He thinks you’re dead.”