Page 43 of Devil May Lie
Madden had assumed and then discarded the notion that perhaps he’d meant the single female cadet who’d been huddled in the corner. But she hadn’t exactly come out of that encounter unscathed, and Berga hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction.
“A girl I used to know,” Berga replied.
“Someone you used to love?” That didn’t sit right with him. Madden rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand, staring at the Butcher, who continued to lay there and pretend.
He had to be pretending. After the way he’d acted, this topic couldn’t be easy for Berga.
“You could…say that.”
“So, you can feel love.”
“I think I used to,” Berga said. “In some ways, I still experience it. Flix—”
“We aren’t talking about Flix. Although, this seems like the perfect time to point out that he’s away on vacation. I was the one who was here for you when you needed someone the most, Butcher.”
Finally, Berga turned his head and opened his eyes. “What are you getting at, Madden?”
“Why didn’t you return my calls?”
He clicked his tongue. “I didn’t have anything to say to you.”
“We slept together.”
“We sleep with people randomly all the time.” Berga frowned at him, seriously seeming like he wasn’t connecting the dots. “I’m not sure why you’re making a big deal out of this. It was nothing.”
“Nothing?” His body stiffened, but Berga was already glancing away. “What about what happened in the bathroom?”
“Thank you for that,” Berga said, eyes slipping shut once more. “I needed the distraction.”
Distraction? Was that all Madden was to him? A distraction?
What did he think of Berga? Why was he here, in this man’s bed, in his apartment? They’d fucked and it’d been phenomenal, but the Butcher was right. It wasn’t the first time he’d had great sex.
That moment in the bathroom, however…
That was a first.
Madden didn’t know what to call them, but he knew he wanted more moments like that. Which meant he needed to turn this thing between them into something more than a mere distraction. He needed to make the Butcher yearn for him as intensely as he himself had been yearning this past week.
Their first time, Berga and he had both been drugged. It’d been sloppy and rough, but rushed. Madden hadn’t been at his best. For Berga, their coupling had been nothing more than scratching an itch caused by dosing himself with the wrong drug. A means to solving a problem.
That was all a person like Berga ever thought of. Problems and their solutions. His job within the Brumal was to create more creative ways to deal with prisoners and their enemies. He supposedly had an entire lab hidden at their bunker dedicated solely to his research. Even that magazine Madden had left in the bathroom had to do with his research into parasites and how to utilize them.
It was all becoming clearer to him now. If Madden didn’t want to be relegated to a distraction, forgotten and discarded come morning, he needed to make himself stand out to Berga.
He needed to make himself the type of problem the Butcher couldn’t get off his mind, no matter how hard he tried.
And he knew just the way to go about it.
Despite his comment about sleeping around, Madden recalled Berga’s statement about how he wouldn’t fuck strangers. Add that to the fact he’d never allowed anyone to spend the night with him, and it was obvious the Butcher didn’t have sex nearly as frequently as he was trying to let on.
He’d been resistant to Madden until he’d blown him in the car. Then he’d suddenly turned to putty in his hands and allowed him to come up to his apartment.
That was it.
Madden would show Berga exactly what he’d been missing out on by ignoring him all week.
And then, once he knew he had him addicted to his cock and the way he could make him feel, Madden would do the ghosting. Someone like Berga, someone who operated on logic, would wonder why he’d suddenly disappeared after hounding him so hard. The curiosity would no doubt drive him mad.