Page 7 of These Family Ties
I let my nose wrinkle, my upper lip peeling back over my teeth. “I’ll give you a tip: this isn’t a place you should ever utter words like ‘discount’.” I slip off my seat and leave, wishing the man might grab my arm as if he has a right to me. The wash of revulsion and hope twining together along my nerves isn’t new, but watching this guy get discretely escorted out while he ratchets up and causes a scene might provide a nugget of entertainment I can revisit the next time Mother decides punishment is in order.
I turn toward the door. In the corner of my eye, I see her reach back and brush his knee. It’s a silent warning. Ah. The money isn’t his. It’s hers. She makes it, not him. His resentment boils up, but he takes one more look at me, weighing his life of luxury and ease against the wisp of sin and pleasure slipping out of his grasp.
There is no contest. He’ll escort his wife back to their room and drink half a bottle of something that costs more than what she deposits in his account every month. He’ll be forced to be a gentleman and act like he enjoys watching Webber easily take his wife to a height he’s never reached. The crass cuckold I’ve just sneered at won’t understand that the impetus to his wife’s pleasure isn’t Webber’s skillful manipulation of her body. The sex is only a candy-coated tool, one she uses to chip away at her husband’s antiquated ideal of his own worth.
I bet her eyes are as dead as Mother’s. Poor Webber. He hates that. I prefer it. I find myself humming as I reach the door, where the concierge slips a note into my hand.
“You’ll make an exact copy and get it to him?” I ask, my eyes sliding to Webber.
“Yes, miss. Your car is out front.”
I nod my head in thanks and step back into the night.
Chapter Seven
Arryn
She’s a ghost. Her pale skin shines, the nacreous glow of her inner fire casting color across the white satin clinging to her succulent flesh.
How I long to add deep purple and red to her.
She thinks she moves silently, slipping like a wraith as she weaves through the elite, siphoning the glittering gold life blood of her victims. She believes her walls are impenetrable, that’s she battened down like an iron hatch, that her will and desires are buried so deeply they can never be mined.
But I see her.
She longs for choice. Every pulpy, bleeding breath she draws over the razors of her mother’s control is stoically inhaled, the pain of her existence suffered without examination, as her eyes remain locked on her end goal.
That focus is what drew me to her. The old cliché of like recognizing like. Failure is not an option. Exhaustion does not exist. She’ll suffer unending torment and abuse, because there is only one path for her to walk. The road that leads to her freedom from Vivienne.
She slips through my open door, gliding through the dark room, her hand up to accept the glass of white wine I hand her. Her eyebrows lift in surprise as she takes a healthy swallow of the surprisingly sweet Moscato.
“It tastes like—”
“You,” I finish her sentence. “When your cunt weeps for me, I taste the heat of the sun rising from rich soil, fruit at the peak of ripeness, and the vitality of nature untouched by human hands. I taste the woman that waits inside of you.”
She laughs. The sound is low, husky, thrumming with an ache that I alone cannot soothe.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, not angry in the least. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard her laugh. I reach over the island, picking up the sweating wine bottle, tipping it over the rim of her glass as she extends her slim arm. Pouring a healthy measure into her glass, I savor the lightness her chuckle brings. Is this levity? This bubble of existence that is so easy to breathe in when she’s near? I’ve always classified any sort of happiness as a distraction, but being in the radius of Vivienne’s ‘daughter’ only sharpens the bite of what I’ve never had.
Is this how Stark felt when Vivienne was near? Could he truly have felt something like this, with the same depth and breadth that I feel for this unblemished goddess with an ancient soul, for that venomous snake that raised her?
“Can I shower?” she asks, abruptly draining her glass and setting it on the marble counter with the tiniest of clinks.
“Of course. Would you like company?” My cock fills and my mouth waters at the thought of rivulets of water sluicing her. Images of my hand wrapped around her neck, my elbow locked and her back bowed as I bend her backward over my bed and pound her tight, slick cunt raw. My tongue darts out, wetting my lower lip before I can stop myself, as I think of the whites of her eyes, bursting with tiny pinpricks of blood. I hear the scrape of her nails digging the script that will break her free of Vivienne’s control into my flesh, as if my body is her grimoire, and my cum, harvested in the field of swollen sex, the last ingredient she needs before she’s free.
“No,” she answers decisively. She refuses me, but her eyes drop, lingering over every inch of skin exposed by my unbuttoned shirt. She’d come to my door so quickly I hadn’t had time to finish changing. Her hand lifts, her slender fingers rubbing the neckline of her dress. She isn’t consciously trying to be seductive, but the gesture causes another surge of blood that presses the length of my cock into the pants so hard that the bite of pain makes my hips flex. Quickly, I shift my weight, embarrassed that she wrought such a reaction. “I do not want you to shower with me. I wish to scrub the filth of that cesspool and its patrons off my skin.” She lets go of her dress and reaches for my arm, curling her fingers around the muscle I had just fantasized about her shredding to ribbons. “I want to be cleansed. And then I want you to debase me. I want you to choke me with that monster cock you’ve hidden behind your expertly tailored pants. I want you to pull out after I swallow the first spurt, then paint my face and breasts until my skin burns like I’ve been branded. And then I want you to fuck my ass, so that when my brother gets here, you can take him the same way. When you’re fucking him, while he fucks me, I want you both staring at me so I can see him worship me while you try to decide which one of us is Heaven and which one is Hell.”
Fucking hell. Should I tell her I already live in Hell and the only ticket to Heaven I can imagine is the last wheeze of evil that will ever pass Vivienne’s lips? She stares at me as if she can see my neurons firing, as if my indecision is blatantly obvious, even though I haven’t even twitched. Her eyes bore into mine as her hand slips down my arm and her fingers twine between mine. “Whatever you’re debating…” She taps the side of my head with her other hand. “You’re wrong. You don’t owe me any explanations. And there is nothing you’ve done that I would think less of you for.”
“You play with fire,” I breathe. I should contradict her. She doesn’t know anything about me. Like glaciers immune to time or temperature, her irises gleam in the low light of the kitchen, sucking in the light until, like her judgment, it disappears into the black depths of her pupils. She has no idea what my purpose is, but she, too, has made a deal with the devil.
“There’s a selection of things in the third drawer of the armoire you can wear.” I grip the edge of the counter as she turns. An intense urge grips me, to forgo the sex and just take her in my arms. I want her to baptize herself in my shower. An image of her slathering my soap over her skin arrests my brain. My nostrils flare as she slips one hand down her abdomen and hooks two fingers into her slick pussy. She works herself as my soaps slides down her body. And when she’s done, she sucks herself off her fingers. She doesn’t open her mouth again until she slips under my sheets and lines her naked body up to mine and immerses every sense I possess in the heady scent and taste of her heat.
She cocks an eyebrow as I swallow hard. And then she disappears into my bedroom.
***
“Come here.” While she showered, I stripped. As soon as the water shut off, and the heady rush of her hot, wet, skin, coated in my cedar and citrus soap, rolls out of the doorway, I command her to come to me.