Chapter 6: Blood Loyalties
The black glass house felt less like a home and more like a specimen jar, with me pinned inside. For three days, I was a ghost in its halls. Pace was absent, dealing with the fallout of Jace’s survival. I was left with silent staff, a locked-down lab wing I wasn’t granted access to, and the echoing memory of his imagined violation in the surgical suite.
It festered.
On the fourth evening, he returned. I heard the garage door rumble open below, the low growl of an engine, then silence. I stood in the minimalist living room, pretending to look at a shelf of archaic medical texts that felt like props.
He entered, and the air pressure changed. He wore the same suit from days ago, slightly rumpled, a shadow of stdarkening his jaw. He looked exhausted, and that exhaustion made him seem more dangerous, less polished.
“Get your coat,” he said, his voice rough.
“Where?”
“Now, Lina.”
The drive was silent. Vito drove, his eyes flicking to Pace in the rearview more than once. We descended into an underground garage beneath one of the Augustus family’s downtown holdings. It was a concrete cavern, dimly lit, the air cool and smelling of damp, oil, and expensive petrol. Our footsteps echoed as we got out.
Pace stopped beside a low-slung sports car, its paint gleaming like spilled ink. He leaned against the driver’s side door, finally looking at me directly. The fatigue in his eyes was a live wire.
“My brother will live,” he stated. “Your work was clean. The family is… realigned.”
I nodded, waiting for the other demand, the price for that service.
Vito had been standing a few paces back, a statue. But the tension in his shoulders was coiling too tight. He’d been the one to clean the blood, to stand guard, to watch this unpredictable dance. He finally broke.
“Christ, Pace,” Vito spat, the sound cracking through the cavernous space.
In two long strides, he closed the distance. He didn’t pull a gun. He used his hands. He grabbed Pace by the lapels of his expensive coat and slammed him back against the car door with a heavy, metallic thud.
Pace didn’t fight it. He just took the impact, his head snapping back, his eyes locking onto Vito’s furious face.
“Either you’re fucking her or you’re killing her,” Vito snarled, his voice low and vibrating with a decade of suppressed frustration. “Pick one. This fucking limbo is going to get you clipped. It’s going to get me clipped. She’s not a goddamn painting. She’s a variable. And you’re leaving her unsolved.”
His words hung in the oily air. Kill me or fuck me. A binary solution from a man who dealt in absolutes. I watched, that detached scientific fascination rising again, observing the power struggle over my fate as if it were a fascinatingly violent reaction in a petri dish.
Pace slowly brought his hands up, not to strike, but to carefully prise Vito’s fingers from his coat. His gaze was terrifyingly calm.
“Get in the car, Vito,” Pace said, his voice a soft, deadly whisper. “Drive the perimeter. Do not come back for twenty minutes.”
Vito’s jaw clenched. He looked from Pace to me, his expression a mask of conflict, then released his boss with a shove. He turned, got into the sedan, and revved the engine, the sound a roar of protest before he sped off into the maze of concrete pillars, leaving us alone.
The silence he left behind was profound. Pace adjusted his coat, his eyes never leaving me.
“A variable,” he echoed, pushing off from the car. He walked toward me, slowly. “He’s right. You are.”
I stood my ground, my back to a cold concrete pillar. “And which option did you pick?”
He was on me then, his body caging me against the pillar. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, the faint scent of gun oil, his own exhausted sweat. The raw, animal heat of him burned through the garage’s chill.
“You tell me,” he breathed against my lips.
Then his mouth was on mine, not with calculated seduction, but with a hungry, punishing claim. It was all teeth and tongue and the taste of decision. He kissed me like he was trying to consume the variable, to digest my complexity into something simple and his. My hands came up, pushing against his chest, but the strength there was immovable. The pillar ground into my spine.
He broke the kiss, his breath ragged. “You’ve been in my head since you stitched me up in that warehouse. That cold, clinical look in your eyes while your hands were saving my life.” He fisted a hand in my silver-blonde hair, tilting my head back sharply. “I want to see that look shatter.”
His free hand went to the waist of my trousers, popping the button, yanking the zipper down. The sound was obscenely loud. Cold air hit my skin. He shoved the fabric down my hips, just enough.
“Pace—” The word was half-protest, half something else entirely.
“Shut up,” he growled, his own belt already open, the rasp of his zipper a final, definitive sound. He was hard, his cock springing free, thick and ruddy and impatient. He spat into his palm, a crude, wet sound, and slicked himself roughly.
There was no preamble, no gentleness, not even the dark, theatrical artistry of his surgical fantasy. This was raw utility. He hooked one of my legs over his hip, hoisting me up against the pillar. The rough concrete scraped my back through my shirt. He positioned himself, the blunt head of his cock pressing against my entrance. I was dry, terrified, buzzing with a terrifying electric anticipation.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his face inches from mine.
I forced my violet eyes to his dark ones. He pushed in.
A ragged cry tore from my throat. It was a brutal, burning stretch, a violation as stark and unadorned as the concrete around us. He didn’t stop. He buried himself to the hilt in one relentless, searing thrust, seating himself deep inside me with a grunt that was pure animal effort.
“Fuck,” he hissed, his body shuddering against mine. “Fucking hell, Lina.”
He began to move. Short, deep, punishing strokes that knocked the air from my lungs with every impact. The friction was intense, a scalding heat that blurred the line between agony and a pleasure so dark it felt like falling into a void. He fucked me with a single-minded desperation, as if he could purge his brother’s betrayal, his own fatigue, and Vito’s ultimatum by hammering it all into my body.
“This,” he panted, his hips pistoning, “is the solution. You feel that? That’s me choosing. Every fucking inch.”
I was fracturing. My clinical detachment shattered like glass under a hammer. Sensation overwhelmed analysis. The smell of him, the sound of our bodies slamming together, the wet, filthy sound of him driving into my unwilling, now-achingly responsive flesh. A coil of pure, desperate heat tightened low in my belly.
“Come on,” he goaded, his voice guttural. “Let me see it. Come on that brilliant, icy fucking mind of yours. Come on my cock while I’m fucking you in a dirty garage.”
His words, filthy and direct, were the final catalyst. The coil snapped. A wave of orgasm crashed through me, brutal and unconvincing, wracking my body with spasms that clenched violently around his driving length. I cried out, a sound I didn’t recognize, my head falling back against the pillar.
He swore again, a string of obscenities. My climax tipped him over the edge. His rhythm broke, became erratic, frantic. He drove deep one last time and held, his body rigid against mine as he emptied himself inside me with a low, shuddering groan, hot and possessive.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of our ragged breathing mixing with the distant drip of water. He stayed inside me, his forehead damp against my shoulder, his body weight pinning me.
Slowly, he softened. He slipped out, and a trickle of his release followed, a warm, intimate leakage down my thigh. He lowered my leg, his hands rough as he pulled my trousers back up over the evidence. He tucked himself away, zipped his fly with a cold finality.
He stepped back, looking at me. My hair was wild, my lips swollen, my eyes wide and vacant of anything but shock. The variable had been solved, violently.
The sound of the returning sedan echoed through the garage. Headlights swept across us.
Pace reached out, his thumb wiping a stray tear from my cheek I hadn’t even felt fall. His touch was almost gentle now, which was worse.
“Clean slate,” he whispered, the words now carrying the weight of sweat, and concrete, and spent desire.
Vito pulled up, his face impassive. The choice had been made, demonstrated, and concluded. Pace opened the back door for me, his hand a guiding pressure on my back. I moved mechanically, my body humming with the brutal imprint of his.
As the car climbed out of the dark garage into the city’s indifferent night, I knew Vito was wrong. Pace hadn’t chosen just one. In a way, he’d done both. He’d killed the woman I was before.
The thought crystallized, cold and sharp, cutting through the post-coital haze that clung to me like his sweat. He’d killed the woman I was before. The one who observed. The one who calculated. The one who allowed herself to be a variable in someone else’s equation.
Good.
Fuck him.
The silent drive back to the glass house was a petri dish, and I was cultivating a new strain of myself. Vito’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Pace stared out his window, the streetlights painting fleeting stripes across his profile, his expression unreadable. The ghost of his release was still warm between my thighs, a biological fact. I cataloged it. Heart rate: elevated. Respiration: shallow. Emotional state: volatile, transmuting.
When the car slid into the garage beneath the house, Vito killed the engine. The silence was total. Pace moved to get out.
“Vito,” Pace said, his voice carrying a final warning as he opened his door.
Vito didn’t look at him. He just sat there, gripping the wheel, a tendon in his jaw jumping. Then he exploded. He slammed his fist into the dashboard, a single, shocking crack of violence against the polished wood.
“Goddamn it!” he roared, the sound swallowed by the confined space.
He shoved his door open, got out, and didn’t look back. His footsteps were loud, angry echoes that faded as he stomped toward the interior stairs, leaving us alone again in the car’s quiet tomb. He was furious. But he didn’t have any choice anyway.
Pace watched him go, a flicker of something—annoyance, understanding—in his dark eyes. Then he turned that gaze on me, expectant, assuming my compliance as I slid out of the car. My legs were unsteady, but the instability was fuel.
He led the way to the private elevator that rose to the main living suite. The doors sighed open to the vast, dark space. Moonlight poured through the glass walls, illuminating the sterile beauty. He walked toward the wet bar, his back to me, a king returning to his empty court.
“I’ll have Carlo bring you something to eat,” he said, his voice assuming the transaction was complete, the variable solved.
“No.”
The word was quiet, but it stopped him. He turned, a crystal decanter in his hand. I was already moving. Not toward the guest wing. Toward him. The soreness between my legs was a metronome, counting time to a new rhythm.
He saw the intent in my stride. A slow, curious smile touched his lips. “Lina.”
“You made your choice in the garage,” I said, my voice low, stripping away any residual chill. It was pure, focused heat. “Now it’s my turn.”
I closed the distance. He set the decanter down, ready for another fight, another brutal taking. I didn’t give him that. Instead of pushing him, I pulled him. I grabbed the front of his shirt, fisting the fine fabric, and yanked him forward as I stepped back, leading him away from the bar.
He chuckled, a dark, amused sound. “What are you doing?”
“Taking the wheel back.”
I turned and walked, pulling him along by his shirt. He followed, his amusement palpable, a predator humoring its prey’s last dash. I didn’t know the floor plan. I chose a door at random, shoving it open.
It was a kitchen. A vast, professional space of cold stainless steel and marble, moonlight glinting off hanging copper pans. Domestic. Normal. Absurd.
I pulled him inside.
“A kitchen?” he murmured, his smile widening, his body crowding me back against a central island. His hands came to my hips, his meaning clear. He was going to bend me over the cold marble.
I pulled myself out of his grasp before he could solidify his hold. I ducked under his arm, my body screaming in protest, and put the island’s width between us. His frustration was a physical emanation. He ran a hand through his hair, the charming facade cracking to show the raw, tired man beneath, the one who thought he’d already won.
“Enough games,” he said, his voice losing its patience.
“It’s not a game.” I lunged forward, not away, and grabbed his hand. I pulled him, not toward the bedroom, but deeper into the kitchen’s shadows, toward a wide pantry door. I flung it open. It was a walk-in, lined with shelves. Dark, confined, smelling of dried herbs and wood.
I shoved him inside. He went, surprise finally overtaking amusement. I followed, closing the door behind us, plunging us into near-total darkness. The only light was a thin sliver under the door.
I could hear his breathing. I could smell him—whiskey, concrete, sex, me. In the dark, my other senses mapped him. I stepped into his space. My hands found his chest, then pushed down, palming the hard plane of his abdomen, the buckle of his belt.
“Lina,” he warned, but the command was thinner now.
My fingers worked his belt, his zipper. I didn't fumble. I was a surgeon. I exposed him, his cock already half-hard, reacting to the aggression, the unpredictability. I wrapped my hand around him, feeling him swell and thicken at my touch. I stroked him, once, twice, a firm, clinical assessment.
Then I dropped to my knees on the hard pantry floor.
The sound he made was a sharp intake of breath, not a groan. I didn’t tease. I aimed my mouth for his cock and took him in, deep and immediate, swallowing him to the root. He was salt and skin and pure, potent male. I choked briefly, tears springing to my eyes, then relaxed my throat and took him deeper.
“Fuck,” he gasped, his hands tangling in my hair.
I didn’t let him set the pace. I pulled back until just the head rested on my tongue, then surged forward again, setting a ruthless, demanding rhythm. I used my mouth to command, each deep, sucking pull a demand for his surrender. My free hand cupped his balls, rolling the heavy weight, applying subtle pressure. I moaned around him, the vibration deliberate, a tool.
His hips jerked. He tried to thrust, to take back control. I pushed him firmly against the shelves behind him, a rattle of jars echoing in the dark. “Don’t,” I ordered, the word mangled around his girth but unmistakable. “You hold still.”
I felt him obey, the tension in his thighs trembling with the effort. I redoubled my efforts, my head bobbing, spit slicking the length of him, the filthy, wet sounds filling the dark pantry. I was dissecting his control, layer by layer. I didn’t care that he was an Augustus, a name that made hardened men pale. In this dark, he was just a man, and I had him on his knees in a way he’d never expected.
“You’re going to come,” I said, pulling off him with a slick pop, my voice hoarse. I was stating a fact, my thumb smearing pre-come over his swollen tip. “You’re going to come in my mouth because I want you to. Do you understand?”
For a heartbeat, there was only his ragged breathing. Then, a low, incredulous laugh rumbled from his chest.
In the sliver of light, I saw his smile. A real one, stripped of irony or menace. It was the smile of a man presented with a genuinely fascinating, dangerous puzzle.
He took the challenge.
“Yes,” he breathed, the word a surrender and a promise.
I took him back into my mouth, and this time, when his body tightened, when his release hit the back of my throat in hot, pulsing streaks, he didn’t try to dominate the moment. He gave it to me. His hands framed my face, tenderly, as he shook through it.
When he was spent, I stayed on my knees for a moment, in the dark, the taste of him a victory on my tongue. I rose. My legs ached. My jaw ached. I was utterly, completely in charge.
I opened the pantry door. The moonlight in the kitchen seemed brighter. I walked out, leaving him in the dark to compose himself. I went to the sink, ran the water, washed my hands and face with the same precise method I used in my lab.
He emerged after a minute, tucking himself away, his hair disheveled, his eyes holding a new, blazing kind of respect. He leaned against the doorframe, watching me.
“No one could topple me, Pace,” I said, drying my hands on a linen towel. I met his gaze. “Not even you.”
He nodded slowly, that smile still playing on his lips. The game had fundamentally changed.
The game had fundamentally changed. Pace didn’t speak. He just watched me dry my hands, his eyes tracking the deliberate, clinical motion. The respect in his gaze was laced with a fresh, predatory interest. I had turned the variable into an equation he no longer fully understood.
He pushed off the doorframe. “Come upstairs.”
It wasn’t a request, but it wasn’t the same command as before. It was an invitation to the next round. I followed him, my body a symphony of aches from the garage wall and the pantry floor. We didn’t take the elevator. We climbed a wide, floating staircase that led to the private wing of the glass house. The silence between us was charged, a live wire strung with everything we’d just done.
His bedroom was what I expected and nothing like it. Spartan. A vast platform bed framed in black steel. Floor-to-ceiling windows showed the city glittering like a spilled circuit board far below. No personal effects. No photos. It was a room for sleeping, or for strategizing. Or for this.
He turned to face me just inside the doorway. “That was a statement.”
“It was an observation,” I corrected, my voice steady. “Followed by a corrective action.”
He laughed, a short, sharp exhale. “You correct me again, Doctor Vesperine, and I’ll remind you what a purely physical correction feels like.”
“Promises,” I said, the word hanging in the cool, dark air.
He moved then, not with the frantic hunger of the garage, but with a deliberate, focused intensity. He closed the distance, his hands coming up to cradle my face. His thumbs stroked the high arcs of my cheekbones. The tenderness was more disarming than violence.
“You taste like me,” he murmured, his eyes searching mine.
“I do.”
His kiss was different. Deep, exploratory, a mapping of contested territory. He walked me backward, his mouth never leaving mine, until my knees hit the edge of the massive bed. He broke the kiss, his hands sliding down to the hem of my shirt. “Off.”
I raised my arms. He pulled the shirt over my head, tossing it aside. His followed, a swift, efficient motion that bared the powerful planes of his chest, the old scars, the new tension. He unfastened my trousers, pushed them down my hips along with my underwear, and knelt to help me step out of them. The sight of Pace Augustus on his knees before me, even in service, sent a violent thrill through my nerves.
He looked up, his dark eyes gleaming in the city light. “Lie back.”
I did, settling onto the cool, silken duvet. He didn’t join me immediately. He just looked, his gaze a physical touch tracing my nakedness—the silver-blonde hair fanned across the dark fabric, the pale skin marked faintly red from the concrete, the sharp angles of my hips, the vulnerable apex of my thighs, still glistening from him.
“Beautiful,” he said, the word stripped of poetry. It was a diagnosis.
He climbed onto the bed, crawling over me with a feline grace. He lowered his weight, not onto me, but beside me, propped on one elbow. His free hand began to tour my body. Not groping. Studying. He traced my collarbone, the shallow valley between my breasts, the tight peak of one nipple. He circled my navel, his calloused fingertips whispering over my skin.
“You’re in my head,” he said again, his voice low. “A fucking relentless algorithm. I close my eyes, I see your hands suturing. I see your mouth on me in the dark.” He dipped his head, his tongue following the path his finger had taken around my nipple before taking the peak into his mouth. He sucked, deep and slow.
A gasp tore from me. My back arched off the bed. The sensation was electric, a direct current to my core. He switched to the other breast, giving it the same lavish, meticulous attention. His hand drifted lower, over the quivering flat of my stomach, through the coarse silk of my pubic hair.
“You were so tight in that garage,” he breathed against my wet skin. “Tighter than anything. Fighting me every inch. I felt your cunt clenching like a fist.”
His crude language, delivered in that intimate, ruminative tone, made me wetter. I could feel the slick heat gathering. His fingers found it, sliding through my folds, not entering, just spreading the moisture, painting me with my own arousal.
“Now look at you,” he whispered. “Soaking for me. After you just took your pound of flesh. You’re greedy, Lina. A brilliant, greedy little thing.”
He finally pushed a single finger inside me, a slow, torturous penetration. I cried out. I was swollen, sensitive, unbearably full from just that. He crooked his finger, finding a spot that made my vision blur. “Is this it?” he asked, relentlessly gentle. “The corrective action?”
“Pace…” It was a plea. I hated it.
He added a second finger. The stretch was exquisite. He began to move them in a slow, curling rhythm, his palm grinding against my clit with each thrust. The building pleasure was a wave, higher and darker than anything in the garage, because he was making me wait for it, making me watch him watch me come apart.
“I want to hear you,” he said, his eyes locked on mine. “I want to hear that brilliant mind go silent. Beg for it.”
I shook my head, biting my lip. He twisted his wrist, changing the angle, hitting a deeper, richer spot. A broken sob escaped me. My hips rocked against his hand, seeking more pressure, more friction, more of him.
“Please,” I whispered. The word was a surrender I hadn’t planned.
“Please what?”
“Please, let me come.”
He smiled, a victor’s smile. “Come on my fingers, then. Show me.”
He increased his pace, his thumb pinning my clit in a firm, circular grind. The orgasm ripped through me, catastrophic and overwhelming. My body bowed, a silent scream on my lips as the spasms gripped his fingers, milking them. He kept moving through it, prolonging the shocks until I was trembling, oversensitive, pushing weakly at his wrist.
He withdrew his glistening fingers. He brought them to his mouth, his eyes holding mine, and sucked them clean. “Perfect,” he said.
Then his demeanor shifted. The tenderness evaporated, replaced by the raw hunger I’d first met in the garage. The correction was over. The reminder was due.
“My turn,” he growled.
In one fluid, powerful motion, he rolled me onto my stomach. He draped his heavy body over mine, his heat sealing me to the bed. One hand wound into my hair, fisting it tight against my scalp. The other arm hooked under my hip, lifting my ass into the air. He positioned himself at my entrance, the broad, slick head of his cock pressing insistently against me.
“You want to be in control?” he hissed in my ear, his breath hot. “Control this.”
He shoved into me, a deep, brutal reclamation. I screamed into the duvet, the filling stretch bordering on pain. He didn’t pause. He set a punishing, relentless pace, each thrust slamming my hips into the mattress. The angle was different, deeper, hitting places that made stars burst behind my eyelids. The sound was obscene: the wet slap of skin, his guttural grunts, the creak of the bed.
“This is what happens,” he panted, driving into me with jackhammer force. “You get under my skin. I get inside you. We’re even.”
He was everywhere. His weight pinned me completely. The hand in my hair held my head down. His chest was a sweaty, immovable wall against my back. I was trapped, impaled, subsumed by his physicality. And yet, the pleasure built again, a coiling, masochistic wire pulled tight from my clit to my gut.
“Fuck, your cunt is gripping me like a vise,” he groaned. “You love this. Don’t you? You love getting fucked stupid after you try to play boss.”
I did. God help me, I did. The admission shattered my last pretense. A second, harder orgasm detonated inside me, tearing a ragged scream from my throat. My inner muscles clamped around his driving cock in violent, rhythmic pulses.
He cursed, his rhythm faltering. “That’s it. Squeeze me.