CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ATLAS

It was close, Jasiel knew what he was doing, and he shouldn't have gone out on his own like that. I knew he could handle himself, but this wasn't like before when we were top of the food chain. Of course, we were still at the top of that food chain, but now, there were more people coming for our blood.

There was one way to get things into Jasiel's head, and that was to drill it into him. Drilling was one word for it. Laid in bed together, I took his clothes off him and inspected his skin as he would do with me, time and time again, looking over every part of me to see if there were any new marks.

"Are you going to kill them?" he asked, quickly moving his hand to cover his nipples. "They're all hard like little frozen peas."

Now, he was just teasing. I peeled back his fingers to look at the hard nipple nubs. They were one of my favorite parts on his body. Rubbing a thumb across the hardness of the nipple got him giddy and excited, wiggling around beneath me on the bed.

He wrestled with me, pulling at the collar of my shirt to tear my clothes. My shirts weren't cheap, but I didn't care about him ruining them. Once he found a little leverage in my shirt, he'd abuse it and make sure it was completely torn to shreds.

"Fuck me," he said. "Now." He stuck out his tongue at me, his bright blue tongue in my face. I pushed my head to his face and took his tongue inside my mouth.

This was Jasiel's most fluent language, alongside English and Spanish, body language and sex was a language filled with nuance and pleasure. A language the two of us knew well, and we only spoke it together.

As I got him naked, I went down his body, placing gentle kisses across his skin. I didn't want to stop. I couldn't let him go. Each kiss was a moment I wanted to be with him, but it had been stolen from us. My lips longed for his skin, pressing deeply as I wished for our skin to fuse together and attach.

I never wanted to leave him again, grabbing his hands at the wrist and pinning them above his head. He wrapped his legs around my waist, like we were trying to have and hold each other still.

It didn't take long before we were fucking, all the foreplay teasing was nice, but after a while, we needed to be inside each other. I was inside his tight hole, and his tongue was inside my mouth. Between us, he had his teddy, pressed to our chests like it was a space divider to keep us apart.

Time didn't exist when we were together, slow, passionate sex as I gave gentle hips swaying action and he clawed at my back in languid finger strokes like he was itchy at a scratch I never knew I had.

The relief we both needed was within each other, in bed. He wouldn't let go of me, his arms around my back, and I wasn't going to let go of him, my hands coming together around his back. With a light, gentle tug, his back let out a gentle sighing crack. He moaned into my ear, letting out a gentle beg for me to go harder.

It was a never-ending supply of dopamine, rushing throughout my body, like watching two people in black silhouettes becoming one.

We went for over an hour before I finished inside him. He'd already made a mess on his stomach, right before he'd threw his teddy across the room, so he didn't contaminate it with any of his body fluids.

Laid in bed, naked, Jasiel hugged my body like a baby koala. "I've missed this," he let out in a soft voice. "My big Daddy, I hope you haven't been practicing with anyone while I was away."

I stroked a hand through the sweat in his hair. "My hand," I told him. It was true. The only thing I'd been practicing with was my hand, and even then, I didn't know what use that was. I barely touched myself because I knew I didn't want to feel any amount of pleasure if I didn't have my baby beside me to experience pleasure with me.

We'd already discussed it. He'd touched himself in prison, and I didn't like the idea of that. I didn't want him to mention it again. The idea that I wasn't there to take over and give him everything he needed turned my blood molten in my veins. I never wanted him to need for anything ever again.

"It's ok," I whispered. "This time, in a couple of weeks, we'll never have to think about anything else. We're staying together, forever." I took his head to see the ring, the gorgeous sparkle of the diamond glittered in the stray beam of light from the window. "I've been thinking about our honeymoon."

"I want to travel the world," he said, pushing a single finger through the hair on my chest. He was drawing swirls around my nipples.

"We can do that," I told him. "But I also want to get you something special. Something you've always wanted."

"Oh?"

I was expecting for him to tell me what he'd always wanted. We'd been together for years, and in that time, we'd only ever told each other we wanted each other. We completed each other, like broken ceramic that were rebuilt together with gold, and together, we were rebuilt stronger.

"What do you want?" I asked.

He went quiet. I knew he wanted a lot. He wanted his mom and grandma, but I couldn't bring people back from the dead. He wanted his own slushie machine, and I'd get him one of those, obviously. And together, we both wanted freedom, we both wanted to kill the people who tried to take our freedom from us.

When I was a child, my freedom was taken from me. My parents were both killed. I was sent to live with an uncle in England. A wealthy man in Mayfair, he sent me away to a training school. I didn't know it at the time, but that school turned me into an assassin. I didn't blame my uncle for what he did, he told me it gave me the skills to turn myself into a business, and it had.

"Baby?" I asked, giving him a gentle nudge.

"I'm thinking," he said.

"What do you want the most in the entire world?" I wasn't making the question any easier on him. "But something I could give you."

Snuggling him closer, latching onto my arm, he looked up at me. "If I have you, I don't think I'd ever want anything else."

"You don't think?" I asked.

"You satisfy me, so far." He let out a giggle. "But as you know, I'm not easy to please."

That was a lie. Jasiel was easy to please, all you had to do was know him, intimately. I was Daddy and he was my boy, it wasn't exactly a dynamic everyone could get behind. I cared for him on a level I'd never cared for anyone else before, and he'd never had someone to admire.

I reached out around him and grabbed a handful of his ass. "I'm pretty sure I've pleased you enough for one lifetime."

"You might've pleased me, but you have to be working at it," he said. "I need round-the-clock pleasing."

I knew he wasn't kidding about that either. He needed to be cared for, and I knew how to care for him unlike anyone else.

As we laid together, our fingers intertwined, I felt myself slipping into sleep. It was difficult for me to sleep sometimes, especially with everything swimming around in my mind. Sleep never came for me in the same way it did for him. He could sleep easily, sometimes at the drop of a hat. I was always on alert; it's how I knew to follow him when he went out earlier. I stalked him like I would if he was about to be assassinated. From rooftop to rooftop, I watched, able to pull my sniper out at a moment's notice.

Having Jasiel beside me was infectious in a way, he gave me the ability to fall asleep like he would. And when I woke, the room was dark. A cold spot at the side of the bed where he'd been. The bedroom door was ajar, and the canned laugh track from the TV seeped through, alongside the bold splashes of bright color against the darkness.

I didn't think anything of it, except Jasiel usually watched cartoons. He didn't watch sitcoms.

Jumping out of bed. I knew something was wrong.