Chapter 73: The women find Bruce under the waterfall, his body radiating untamed power that threatens to consume him. They join him, using their bodies to ground and soothe his raging energy through intense physical connection.
The next morning, the breakfast table felt off-kilter. Bruce’s empty chair was a conspicuous void. The usual clatter of plates and morning chatter was subdued. Susannah pushed eggs around her plate, avoiding Jake’s gaze. He kept his eyes fixed on his coffee, the memory of the previous night a living, palpable thing between them.
By lunch, when his seat remained unfilled, a quiet worry had taken root. Ketut, who had been unusually silent, finally stood. Her dark eyes, which saw too much, found Lena’s across the room.
“He needs us,” Ketut said, her voice low. “Come on.”
Lena didn’t question it. She turned to Susannah, who was bouncing Rafael on her knee. “Camille, can you watch Rafael for a little while?”
Susannah nodded, her own thoughts a tangled knot. “Of course. Take your time.”
The two women left the house, taking the hidden trail that wound down the exterior of the mountain. It was a narrow, treacherous path, known only to the three of them. Bruce had shown it to them months ago, his voice grave. If you can’t find me, he’d said, know that I need you to find me here.
The air grew warmer, damper, as they descended into the jungle’s embrace. The sound of rushing water grew from a whisper to a roar. They pushed aside a thick curtain of hanging vines, revealing the entrance to the grotto.
Inside, the world changed. It was a cavern of slick, moss-draped stone, the ceiling lost in shadow. Mist from the waterfall hung in the air, a permanent, warm breath. The geothermal pool steamed in the center, its waters a milky, mineral-rich blue.
And there he was. Bruce was submerged to his chest in the pool, his powerful arms resting on the rocky edge. A cigarette smoldered between his fingers, and a glass of bourbon sat within reach. The cigarette-and-bourbon combination was his tell, a signal they all recognized—his thoughts were heavy, tangled in a place they couldn’t easily reach.
As they walked in, Lena opened her mouth to speak, but the words died.
Both women stopped cold.
On the smooth, curved wall behind the pool, illuminated by a stray shaft of sunlight filtering through a crack above, were two gigantic carvings. They were breathtaking in their scale and detail, etched deep into the living stone.
To the left was Lena. Her likeness was captured perfectly—the playful smirk, the cascade of dark hair, the bold curve of her hip. Beneath it, a single word was carved in elegant, sweeping script: SOMBRA.
To the right was Ketut. Her serene, beautiful features were rendered with ethereal precision, her long hair seeming to flow in a stone wind. The eyes, even in rock, held that deep, knowing stillness. Beneath her image was the word: ATMAN.
Lena’s hand flew to her mouth. A choked sound escaped her. Tears welled in her eyes instantly, spilling over. “Bruce… How did you make this? When?”
He took a slow drag of his cigarette, his hazel eyes watching them through the steam. His voice was a rough scrape. “I made it with my hands. Here and there. When the house was quiet. When I couldn’t sleep.” He swirled the bourbon in his glass. “Do you like them?”
Ketut was trembling. She stepped closer to the wall, her fingers hovering just before the carved image of her own face, as if afraid to touch its sacred beauty. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she whispered, her voice thick with awe and emotion.
Bruce stubbed out his cigarette on the rock and set his glass aside. He stood, water sluicing off his body. His nakedness was unselfconscious, powerful. The 14-inch length of him hung heavy and thick between his legs, already stirring.
“They’re not just pictures,” he said, his gaze intense. “They’re anchors. They’re promises. Sombra. My shadow, my constant. Atman. The true self, the soul. You two… you are the foundations. After last night… I needed to remember what’s real. What I’ve built.”
He held out a hand to each of them. “Come here.”
They didn’t hesitate. Lena peeled her sundress off over her head, her body lush and eager. Ketut untied her sarong, letting it puddle at her feet, her lithe form graceful as a heron. They stepped into the warm, enveloping water, wading toward him.
He pulled Lena to him first, kissing her deeply, a claim of pure possession. His hands cupped her ass, squeezing the full cheeks. “My Sombra,” he murmured against her lips. “Always with me.”
He turned to Ketut, his kiss for her different—softer, searching, a communion. She met it with equal depth, her small hands framing his face, reading him through the touch. “My Atman,” he breathed. “You see me.”
Then his hands were on both of them, guiding, commanding. He turned Lena around, bending her forward so her hands braced on the rocky pool edge, her perfect ass breaking the surface of the water. He positioned himself behind her.
“Watch, Ketut,” he said, his voice dropping to a guttural register. “See what she is to me.”
He guided his immense cock to Lena’s soaked entrance. He didn’t tease. He pushed the broad, mushroom-shaped head against her tight ring of muscle and shoved forward.
“Fuck, papi!” Lena cried out, her back arching as he breached her. The stretch was incredible, the warm water doing little to ease the sheer size of him. He fed his thickness into her inch by relentless inch, his hands gripping her hips, until his balls slapped against her skin.
“This cunt,” he grunted, beginning to move with long, deep strokes, “is home. It’s loyalty. It’s fire.” He fucked her with a steady, pounding rhythm, the water sloshing around them. Each thrust made Lena gasp, her tits swaying, her cries echoing off the stone. “You take all of me, don’t you, mi sombra?”
“Sí, sí, todo, always all of you!” she sobbed, pushing back against him, meeting every drive.
Bruce’s eyes, glowing with a faint, primal gold, found Ketut’s. He reached for her, pulling her close. He kissed her again, his tongue plunging into her mouth as his hips continued to piston into Lena. His hand left Lena’s hip and slid between Ketut’s thighs, his thick fingers finding her clit, already hard and needy.
“And this,” he said to Ketut, his voice ragged with dual sensations, “this sweet, wet pussy… is clarity. Is truth. You feel what I feel, don’t you? You feel how deep I am in her? You feel how much I need to be inside you, too?”
“Yes,” Ketut moaned, her head falling back as his fingers worked her. “I feel it all. The fullness. The possession. The love. It’s… it’s overwhelming.”
“Good,” he growled. He withdrew from Lena with a wet, sucking pop, turning the sobbing woman around to kiss her passionately, letting her taste her own arousal on his tongue.
He then lifted Ketut effortlessly, her legs wrapping around his waist. He guided himself to her entrance. Where Lena was a fiery, welcoming tightness, Ketut was a silken, grasping depth. He sank into her in one smooth, profound stroke, her channel accepting his monstrous girth with a breathy, shocked moan.
“Atman,” he whispered into her neck, beginning to move, each thrust lifting her slight body in the water. “You hold my soul. You see it.” He fucked her with a different intensity—deeper, more spiritual, a raw joining that was as mental as it was physical. Ketut clung to him, her nails scraping his shoulders, her dark eyes wide and locked on his, reading every surge of emotion, every flicker of doubt and devotion that powered his movements.
He was relentless, taking them in turn, again and again, a cycle of claiming and worship. He bent Lena over again, taking her from behind while his mouth was locked on Ketut’s, sharing their mingled tastes. Then he laid Ketut back on a submerged ledge, spreading her wide, pounding into her shuddering body as Lena knelt in the water beside them, kissing Bruce’s shoulder and stroking herself, whispering filth and devotion in Spanish.
The grotto filled with the symphony of their union: skin slapping water, choked cries, guttural commands, the raw, wet sounds of penetration. The scent of sex and mineral water and their sweat became one incense.
Bruce’s control finally frayed. He pulled Ketut close, driving into her ferociously. “Come with me,” he commanded, and she shattered, her inner muscles milking him as a high, keening wail was torn from her throat. He followed, a roar echoing off the carved faces of his lovers as he emptied himself deep inside her in hot, pulsing jets.
He held her, shuddering, for a long moment. Then, still hard, still impossibly ready, he turned to Lena. He pulled her onto his lap as he sat on a submerged rock, impaling her on his still-throbbing cock. She rode him fiercely, her own climax quick and violent, triggered by his renewed, tireless thrusts. He came again inside her, a second, seemingly endless release that had them both gasping and trembling.
Silence, then. Broken only by the waterfall and their ragged breathing. The three of them clung together in the warm water, a tangled, spent knot of limbs and emotion. Bruce looked over Lena’s shoulder at the carvings on the wall, their faces serene and eternal in the stone.
“No more doubts,” he said quietly, his voice hoarse but sure. “This is what’s real. This is what I chose. What we built.”
Lena nuzzled into his neck. Ketut traced the lines of his face, her eyes soft. The ghosts of the previous night, the sharp edges of Susannah’s grief and Jake’s pain, hadn’t disappeared. But here, in this hidden water, anchored by stone and sweat and seed, they felt distant. For now, this was enough. This was everything.
This was everything. For a long while, the only sounds were the water and their slowing breaths, the warmth seeping into exhausted muscles. Finally, they disentangled themselves and waded to the shallow edge where their clothes lay.
They sat on the slick stone, flanking Bruce. The damp fur beneath them smelled of moss and their own spent bodies. Bruce lit another cigarette, the match hissing, and took a long swallow directly from the bourbon bottle.
Ketut watched the smoke curl toward the carved faces on the wall. “She loves you, Bruce,” she said, her voice quiet but clear in the cavern. “She wasn’t lying last night. I felt it when I touched her hand this morning. It’s a wounded love, but it’s real.”
Bruce exhaled a gray plume, his eyes on the opposite wall. “I know.”
“Did you consider,” Ketut pressed, turning to study his profile, “that it’s you who feels guilty about her leaving Eddie?”
He was silent for a full minute. The bourbon bottle dangled from his fingers. He took another drink, then another drag, the ember glowing bright. “Yes, Ketut,” he finally admitted, the words raw. “I feel guilty about it every day.”
Lena rested her head on his shoulder, her wet hair darkening his skin.
“We had sex when we set out to defeat the Crimson King,” he continued, his voice flat, reciting a painful history. “We all did. It was a release. A way to feel alive before we marched into the fucking darkness.” He shook his head slowly. “Then it became more. Unwanted by either of us, at first. It just… grew.”
He turned the bottle in his hands, watching the amber liquid catch the light. “I loved Eddie too. His quick humor. His undying devotion to her, to Roland, to the ka-tet. And I stole his wife from him. I left him alone in that dying place.” He looked at Ketut, his hazel eyes clouded with a pain no power could heal. “And now I’m constantly doubting her motives because I feel guilty. I pick at it. I look for reasons her love isn’t pure, because if it isn’t, then maybe what I did wasn’t so wrong.”
He finished the bourbon in one go and set the empty bottle down with a definitive click. “I know it’s not fair to her. I don’t know how to excise these thoughts. They’re in the bedrock.”
Ketut placed her hand over his heart. She could feel the strong, steady beat, the echo of that ingrained guilt like a second, fainter rhythm. “You don’t excise bedrock,” she said softly. “You build on top of it. You anchor yourself to it.” She gestured with her chin toward the carvings. “Like you did here.”
Lena lifted her head. “He was your brother, Bruce. And she is your wife. Your ife. The mother of your son. The guilt is a rock in your pocket. You can carry it, or you can let it weigh you down until you drown.”
Bruce stubbed the cigarette out on the stone. He looked from Lena’s fierce, loyal face to Ketut’s serene, knowing one. The raw, physical certainty of their bodies still hummed in his veins, a temporary balm. But the conversation had scraped the wound clean.
“She’s with Jake now,” he stated, not as an accusation, but as a fact. “Tending to that. That’s its own wound.”
“Yes,” Ketut said.
Bruce stood, water streaming from him. He offered a hand to each woman, pulling them up. “Then I suppose I should go tend to mine.”
He found her in the nursery. The late afternoon light sliced through the slatted blinds, painting bars of gold across the rocking chair and the woman in it. Susannah was curled into the worn cushion, their son Roland cradled against her chest, his tiny head a perfect dark dome under her chin. Her eyes were closed, but the tightness around them spoke of wakefulness, of thoughts chasing their own tails in the dark.
Bruce stood in the doorway, the scent of the grotto—mineral water, sex, wet stone—still clinging to his skin like a second layer. He watched the slow, steady rise and fall of her shoulders, the protective curve of her body around their child. The carved words, Sombra and Atman, felt like fresh tattoos on his soul, anchoring him to the truth he’d been fingering like a bad coin.
He crossed the room, the floorboards silent under his feet. He knelt beside the rocking chair. She opened her eyes then, deep brown pools holding a universe of fatigue and wary apprehension. He smiled, a small, tired thing, and bent his head. He pressed his lips to the soft fuzz on Roland’s head, breathing in the clean, milky scent of him.
“I’m sorry about what I said last night, Suze.”
His voice was gravel, worn smooth by bourbon and confession. She didn’t move, but her gaze sharpened, locked onto his face.
“It wasn’t fair,” he continued, the words coming slow, dredged up from a deep, shameful place. “And it doesn’t reflect how I feel. I feel guilty about what happened. A wife of a friend. A man I love, that I’d die for. And she’s now my wife, sitting in my home, holding our son.” He swallowed, his throat working. “And he’s lost in a world that’s dying everywhere. I should’ve just told you. But until I spoke with Ketut and Lena, I didn’t truly understand what was clouding my vision.”
Susannah’s breath hitched. A single tear escaped, tracing a hot path down her cheek before disappearing into the collar of her shirt.
“I want you to know I don’t doubt you,” he said, his hand coming up to gently wipe the trail of that tear with his thumb. “Your love, or what we have, whatsoever. And I will never say anything like that to you again.” He leaned closer, until his forehead nearly touched hers, his hazel eyes holding hers with a brutal, open honesty. “I love you, Suze.”
For a long moment, she just stared at him, as if deciphering a code in the lines of his face. The silence was thick, full of the baby’s soft snores and the hum of the house. Then, a shudder went through her. She carefully, slowly, shifted Roland into the crook of one arm and reached out with her free hand. Her fingers, calloused from a lifetime of pulling triggers, touched his cheek, his jaw, as if confirming he was real.
“You stupid man,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “You magnificent, stupid man.”
She pulled his face to hers and kissed him. It was nothing like the night before. It was salt from her tears and the bourbon on his tongue, a profound and weary collision of forgiveness and grief. It was a sealing of the rupture.
When they parted, she nodded toward the crib. “Put him down. Gently.”
He did, his large hands impossibly tender as he lifted the sleeping infant from her arms and settled him into the waiting nest of blankets. Roland sighed, a tiny fist curling by his ear. Bruce turned back to her.
She was already standing, her body a silhouette against the barred light. She took his hand, her grip fierce, and led him from the nursery, down the hall, past the closed door of Jake’s room. She didn’t stop until they were in their own bedroom. She closed the door and leaned against it, her chest rising and falling.
“The guilt is yours,” she said, her voice low and direct. “You carry it. I can’t take it from you. But don’t you ever use it as a weapon against me again. Don’t you ever make me pay for a choice we both made.”
“I won’t.”
“Prove it.”
She yanked her soft tank top over her head, her full breasts swaying with the motion. She shoved her shorts and panties down her hips, stepping out of them, leaving them in a pool on the floor. The afternoon light gilded her skin, the powerful curves of her thighs, the dark thatch of hair between them. She was still slick from Jake, from Bruce’s earlier claiming, a mingled wetness that gleamed.
“Right now,” she said, her eyes challenging, desperate. “No magic. No 14 inches. Just you. The you that’s guilty. The you that’s sorry. The you that’s mine. Fuck me with that.”
A raw sound escaped him. He shucked his damp trousers, his cock springing free, thick and heavy and already fully hard. It was just his own substantial length, no power-induced augmentation, and in that moment it felt more intimate than any supernatural transformation ever could.
He crossed the room in two strides, his hands grasping her hips, lifting her. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms locking around his neck. He turned and carried her to the bed, falling with her onto the rumpled covers. He didn’t guide himself. He just pushed upward, and she took him, sinking down onto his shaft with a gasp that was part relief, part agony.
He was deep, so deep, filling the raw, empty ache the night had carved in her. This wasn’t about domination or punishment. It was about presence. About being so completely inside her that no ghost, no memory, no guilt could fit between them.
“This is what’s real,” she panted into his mouth, her hips grinding against him. “Right here. Your cock in my cunt. Our son in the next room. This house. Us.”
“Suze,” was all he could manage, a broken syllable as he began to move.
He fucked her with a slow, devastating intensity. Each withdrawal was a torture, each deep, rolling thrust a homecoming. The pace was agonizing, a deliberate savoring of the connection. He watched her face, every flicker of feeling, as he filled her again and again.
“Tell me,” he grunted, sweat beading on his brow.
“I love you,” she gasped, her back arching. “I chose you. I’d choose you again. Even with the guilt. Even with the ghosts.”
He drove into her harder, the bedframe knocking a dull rhythm against the wall. The slow burn ignited into a blaze. He slid a hand between their bodies, his thumb finding her clit, a rough, perfect circle. Her breath fractured into sharp, pleading cries.
“Come on,” he urged, his own control fraying, the primal need to mark this reconciliation overtaking the solemn pace. “Let go. Soak me. Let me feel it.”
His words, filthy and direct, shattered her. Her orgasm ripped through her with a silent, convulsive violence, her cunt clamping around his driving cock in rhythmic, milk-hard spasms. The sensation tore a ragged groan from his chest. He plunged into her one last, deep time, burying himself to the root as his own release erupted, a hot, pulse-racking flood that seemed to scour the last of the poisonous doubt from his veins.
He collapsed atop her, his weight a crushing, welcome anchor. They were a mess of sweat and come and spent passion, glued together in the fading light. His face was buried in the curve of her neck, his breathing harsh in her ear.
Her legs, still wrapped around him, slowly loosened. Her hands, which had been clutching his back, moved to stroke the shaved planes of his head. They lay there for a long time, joined, as the day bled away. No ghosts whispered. No guilt throbbed. There was only the weight of him, the smell of them, and the faint, sure sound of their son breathing safely down the hall.
Something broken had been reset, not perfectly, but strongly. A foundation, like carved stone in a hidden grotto, had been reaffirmed. It would have to be enough. For now, in the quiet aftermath, it was everything.