Chapter 10: Desperation
Thorne’s breath hitched. The words—metal sound, urethra, weeks—landed not as a threat, but as a revelation. They crystalized the humming, unbearable tension into a single, sharp point of need. The idea of that prolonged, engineered denial was horror. It was also, in this feverish moment, the most erotic thing he’d ever conceived.
His control, painstakingly reassembled in the shower, shattered into clean, decisive pieces.
He didn’t speak. His hand, still wrapped around Reese’s wrist, became a vise. He used his body, a wall of solid muscle, to drive Reese backwards. Three stumbling steps, and the back of Reese’s knees hit the low, uncompromising line of the sofa. He buckled, falling back into the deep cushions with a muffled oof.
Thorne was on him, a study in ruthless efficiency. He flipped Reese over onto his stomach with a single brutal yank. One hand planted between Reese’s shoulder blades, pinning him down. The other tore at the loose linen pants Reese wore, wrenching them down to mid-thigh in one frantic pull.
“You want me desperate?” Thorne growled, his voice scraped raw. “Look at you. Offering yourself up like a fucking sacrament. This was always the destination, wasn’t it?”
Reese pushed up on his elbows, a retort forming on his lips. Thorne’s spit landed, warm and wet, between his ass cheeks. He froze.
“No,” Thorne commanded, his palm grinding Reese’s spine. “No magic. No tricks. Just this. You stretched raw on me. You take it.”
He fumbled with his own trousers, freeing his cock. It was angry, purpled, weeping. He used his own pre-come and another rough gob of spit, slicking himself with a hurried, violent friction. He notched the broad, leaking head against Reese’s entrance.
Reese clenched instinctively. It was too much, too fast, too dry. “Thorne, wait—“
“No.”
Thorne shoved forward.
It was a brutal, tearing invasion. Reese cried out, a sharp, bitten-off sound of pure shock. The stretch was blinding, a white-hot seam of pain splitting him open. He dropped his forehead to the cool leather, gasping, his body locked in rigid protest. Thorne was huge, and he was forcing his way in with a single-minded, piston-like drive.
“Fucking… hell…” Reese gritted out, his fingers clawing at the cushions.
Thorne paused, buried to the hilt, his own breath coming in ragged, open-mouthed gusts against Reese’s neck. The feeling was catastrophic. The tight, clenching heat was a vise of live wires, a friction so intense it bordered on agony. It was perfect. It was all he could think about.
“Now,” Thorne panted, his voice thick with a triumph that felt like damnation. “Now you feel it.”
He pulled back, almost all the way out, and slammed home again.
Reese saw stars. The pain crested and, with the brutal, repeated stroke, began to transmute. A deep, internal spark flared, fed by the ruthless friction, by the sheer enormity of the intrusion. A broken moan escaped him.
Thorne set a punishing pace. No finesse, no artistry. Just ownership. Each thrust drove the air from Reese’s lungs, shoved him up the cushions. The wet, filthy slap of skin on skin filled the twilight room, a rhythmic counterpoint to their ragged breathing. Thorne’s hand left his back, snaking around his hip, fingers digging into the flesh of Reese’s abdomen before finding his cock.
Reese’s own erection, neglected and trapped beneath him, was hard and leaking. Thorne’s grip was rough, his strokes perfectly synchronized with his thrusts. It was too much sensation, a feedback loop of overwhelming input. The deep, splitting fullness. The rough, calloused hand jerking him. Thorne’s hot mouth on the juncture of his neck and shoulder, biting, not enough to break skin, but enough to brand.
“That’s it,” Thorne grunted into his skin, his rhythm becoming erratic, desperate. “Come for me. Show me what I take from you.”
The command unlocked something. Reese’s body, wired and overloaded, surrendered. His orgasm ripped through him with no warning, a violent seizure of pleasure that tore a scream from his throat. His back arched violently, his channel clamping down on Thorne’s cock in a series of helpless, pulsing spasms. White heat poured from him, splattering onto the leather and his own stomach.
But Thorne didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow.
As Reese convulsed, Thorne fucked him through it, his thrusts becoming shallower, sharper, grinding into the sensitized, trembling flesh. “Yes,” he hissed, a predator feeling its prey go limp. “Give it up.”
And Reese did. The power, the strange energy he’d feasted on, it had a conduit. With each clenching pulse of his climax, a thread of it—violet-bright and ozone-sharp—was siphoned out of him. It traveled the connection of their joined bodies, a visible, shimmering cord in the dim light, and poured into Thorne.
Thorne threw his head back, a guttural shout tearing from him. It wasn’t an orgasm. It was an infusion. The stolen energy hit his system like a bolt of lightning, supercharging his nerves, amplifying every sensation a thousandfold. The feel of Reese’s tight heat became an exquisite, impossible torture. The pleasure was so intense it crossed into pain, a white-noise scream in his blood.
He was more desperate than ever.
“Again,” he demanded, his voice shattered with need. His hand on Reese’s cock worked ruthlessly, even as Reese whimpered, oversensitive and spent. “You don’t get to be empty. You feed me.”
Reese was sobbing, broken sounds muffled by the leather. His body was trying to refuse, to go numb, but Thorne’s stolen energy was in him too, a feedback loop forcing his betrayed nerves back online. The relentless, grinding thrusts hit his prostate with deadening accuracy. A second climax, weaker but wider, a deep, aching throb, was forced from him. Another silvery-violet thread snapped from his spine into Thorne’s.
Thorne drank it in with a shudder that racked his entire frame. He was vibrating with it, a live wire jammed into a socket. “More,” he slurred, fucking into Reese with jackhammer intensity. Reese’s body was pliant now, a used, well-fucked thing taking what was given. A third orgasm was coaxed out, a pathetic, dribbling thing that left Reese shaking and slack-jawed. Another thread of power transferred.
Thorne was incandescent. Energy crackled around him, in the air. His eyes, when Reese managed to twist his head to see, glowed with a faint, unholy light. He was desperate, insane with it, but stronger, more potent.
“You see?” Thorne gasped, bending over Reese’s back, his lips against his ear. “This is what you are. A battery. A vessel. You are not empty. You are a fucking well, and I will drink you dry.”
The fourth climax was a dry heave, a silent, full-body convulsion that ripped a soundless scream from Reese. The fifth was merely a fluttering pulse, a final surrender. Each one bled another shimmering strand of his essence into the man destroying him.
With the fifth, Thorne finally came.
It was less an orgasm than a catastrophic release of accumulated energy. He slammed deep and locked there, his roar echoing off the marble and glass. His cock erupted inside Reese, hot and endless, a flood that seemed to go on for minutes. But alongside the physical release, the stolen power—Reese’s power, now volatile and mixed with Thorne’s own—detonated outwards.
A wave of force slammed out from their joined bodies. It didn’t break things. It displaced them. The heavy, low sofa slid back three feet with a screech of tortured wood on zebrawood. A vase of calla lilies on a side table simply vanished, reappearing with a soft pop on the kitchen island twenty feet away. The air itself shimmered, pressurized, then sighed back to normal.
Silence, heavy and punctured only by their desperate, gulping breaths.
Thorne collapsed onto Reese’s back, his weight a solid, suffocating blanket. He was still inside him, still twitching with aftershocks. Reese felt utterly hollowed out. Not just physically spent, but spiritually ransacked. The reservoir he’d topped up at the club was gone, and then some. A deep, familiar exhaustion—the old, mortal exhaustion he knew so well—was seeping back into his bones, cold and heavy.
But beneath it, underneath the ache and the sticky mess and the feeling of being turned inside out, something else flickered.
Thorne had seen him. Not the idol, not the fixer, not the desperate feeder. He’d seen the raw, screaming, overstimulated animal underneath and had, with devastating clarity, taken exactly what he wanted from it. He had looked into the heart of his power and his need and had not found him ‘not enough’. He had found him usable.
It was a grim, dark validation. It felt like truth.
After a long time, Thorne stirred. He pulled out slowly. The sensation made Reese hiss, a fresh, blunt ache. Thorne rolled off him, lying on his back on the floor beside the displaced sofa, one arm flung over his eyes. The glow in his eyes had faded. He looked spent, but energized, like a man after a feast.
“The sound,” Thorne said to the ceiling, his voice hoarse but calm, analytical. “A bluff. A good one. It would require a level of precision your particular… talents don’t lend themselves to. You’re about broad strokes. Catastrophic bursts. Not delicate, sustained internal manipulation.”
Reese pushed himself up on trembling arms. He looked down at Thorne. “You called my bluff.”
“I recognized the architecture of the lie.” Thorne lowered his arm, turning his head to look at Reese. His gaze was clear, calculating, but something new lived in its grey depths—a satiated, predatory warmth. “It was designed to provoke exactly this. You wanted to be conquered. To have your clever little game taken away and be shown your place.”
Reese had no retort. He looked away, toward the kitchen island where the displaced vase stood, ludicrous and out of place. A symbol of the chaos they generated.
Thorne sat up, movements fluid with recovered strength. He reached out, his fingers surprisingly gentle as they traced a bruise beginning to blossom on Reese’s hip. “You transfer power through orgasm. A vulnerability masquerading as a weapon.” He stood, offering a hand. “Get up. You need to clean up. And you look like you’re about to pass out.”
Reese stared at the offered hand. It was the hand that had pinned him, that had stroked him, that had taken everything. He took it. His own felt small, cold, mortal.
As Thorne pulled him to his feet, a wave of dizziness washed over him. The memory loss, the exhaustion—it was coming, and it would be worse than ever after such a total depletion. He swayed.
Thorne’s arm was instantly around his waist, holding him up. The support was firm, undeniable. “I’ve got you,” Thorne said, his voice low. It wasn’t a comfort. It was a statement of fact.
He guided Reese toward the bathroom, not with the cruelty of before, but with a terrifying, absolute certainty. Reese leaned into him, his body a map of aches and emptiness. The fear was there, the old fear of being seen and found lacking. But it was tangled now with a darker, more compelling thread.
He had been seen. He had been used. He had been shattered.
And he was, impossibly, still here. Held.
The silence in the penthouse the next evening was a tangible thing, thick and more loaded than any scream from the previous night. Reese moved through the clean lines of the living room, his body a symphony of dull aches and a hollow, whistling emptiness. The reservoir within him was a dry cistern, scraped clean by Thorne’s catastrophic taking. The mortal fatigue was a leaden suit he wore beneath his skin, familiar and hateful.
He dressed in the dark, choosing worn tactical gear that smelled of old nights and ozone. Thorne watched from a deep armchair, a cut-crystal glass of something amber in his hand, his expression unreadable. “You’re in no condition to work.”
“This is the condition,” Reese said, his voice flat, not looking at him as he checked a knife. “Empty. This is when the work gets done.” He needed the fear, the devotion, the raw energy of a crowd. He needed to be filled with something, anything, other than this hollowed-out feeling of having been perfectly used.
Thorne sipped his drink, the ice clicking. “The restaurant infestation is beneath you. A triviality.”
“It’s a paycheck. And I’m trivial right now.” Reese finally met his gaze. The validation of being used was still there, a dark coal in his gut, but it needed fuel to burn. “Don’t wait up.”
He left without another word. The club, Perdition, was its own kind of trap. He moved through the throbbing, smoky dark not as a patron, but as a phantom. He didn’t dance. He hunted. A press of his body against a reveler lost in ecstasy, a whispered suggestion in the ear of a minor vampyre showing off, a hand clasped too long on the shoulder of a grinning were-thing—each contact was a siphon. He drank their heedless joy, their chemical courage, their petty monstrous pride. The energy trickled in, dirty and bright, refilling the void. It wasn't the clean, terrifying transfer Thorne had forced; this was grainy, fragmented, like stuffing himself with broken glass. But it was power. It thrummed back into his veins, a chaotic symphony of borrowed intentions.
He felt capable again. Or at least, he felt the illusion of capability. It was enough to make him arrogant.
The old part of town smelled of wet brick and forgotten drains. The restaurant, La Lanterna, was boarded up, a cancerous quiet emanating from it. Reese shattered the chain on the service door with a silent kinetic pulse. The energy hummed in his palms, eager. The darkness inside was absolute, smelling of rot, stale grease, and something sharply chemical.
He took three steps in.
The door slammed shut behind him, not with a physical lock, but with the resonant thrum of a magical seal. Light flared—cold, witch-light orbs hanging in the air, illuminating the wrecked dining room. It wasn't just the skittering, chitinous forms of tunnel grubs he’d expected. Figures peeled from the shadows: two hulking stonekin with fists like paving slabs, a mage with hands already weaving intricate, glowing patterns in the air, and a willowy witch whose fingertips dripped a viscous green fluid. Behind them, more shapes shifted.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Reese muttered, the adrenaline spiking, turning the borrowed energy in his veins into something sharp and joyous.
He didn’t wait. He attacked.
A lateral burst of kinetic force, broad and concussive, slammed into the stonekin, buying him a second. He pivoted, focusing his will into a crushing column of gravity that flattened a charging grub into a wet pulp. He was a whirlwind of stolen power, pulsing with the club’s chaotic light. He broke a table leg and used it to cave in a skull. He sent a waiter’s stand flying into the mage, disrupting a spell. He was winning.
The witch’s dart was almost elegant. A flick of her wrist. A sliver of darkness he mistook for shadow. It punched into the meat of his thigh, a cold sting.
For a moment, nothing. He ripped it out, a thorn of black crystal. Then the world tilted. The vibrant energy in his veins turned to sludge, then to acid. A deep, insidious cold began radiating from the wound, leaching strength, coherency. Poison. Not just for the body, but for the magic. His reservoir was being plugged, contaminated.
“Fuck,” he gasped, stumbling back.
“Take him alive,” the mage intoned. “The energy-thief is worth more intact.”
Panic, cold and pure, cut through the gathering fog in his mind. He bolted for the front door. His own kinetic punch, which should have blown it off its hinges, sputtered against a shimmering barrier, barely cracking the wood. The back entrance. Sealed. The kitchen pass-through. Sealed. They’d turned the place into a magical suitcase, and he was the trapped rat.
The fight changed. It was no longer an assault. It was a desperate, deteriorating evasion. He knocked over shelves, flung cutlery, used the last clean dregs of power to create minor distractions—a flash of light, a sonorous boom. The poison was a tide of numbness, rising. A stonekin backhand caught his ribs, and he felt them give with a sickening crunch. He tasted blood. His movements grew sloppy, his magical shields flickering and failing. A claw raked his back. A glancing spell-bolt seared his arm.
He saw a service staircase, narrow and pitch-black. He took it, stumbling upwards, his breath a wet, ragged thing. They were below, methodical, confident. He burst onto the roof. The clean, cold shock of pre-dawn air was a slap.
The sky was bleeding from black to indigo. On the roof, one last creature waited, a sinewy thing with too many joints, saliva dripping from a serrated maw. It lunged. Reese’s power was a guttering candle. He caught it with a half-formed gravity well, slowing it, and finished it with his knife, sawing through its tough hide in a frenzy of revulsion and fear.
The door to the stairs burst open. The first stonekin emerged.
The first sliver of true sunlight broke over the city’s skyline. It touched Reese’s hand.
It was not the warmth of dawn. It was the sear of a brand. His skin blistered, smoking, the flesh turning grey and necrotic in an instant. A scream tore from him, hoarse and utterly shocked. His new nature, born in the club’s perpetual night, rejected the sun with violent, cellular horror. The pain was absolute, erasing the poison, erasing everything but white-hot agony.
The stonekin advanced, shielding its eyes. The witch and mage emerged behind it. They were not sun-sensitive.
Reese looked at the alley below, three stories down. He looked at the advancing enemies. At the spreading, weakened flesh on his hands. His bones felt like brittle chalk.
He jumped.
The fall was a silent eternity. The impact was not. He hit the stacked plastic dumpsters. His left leg snapped with a sound like a gunshot. His right ankle gave. Ribs collapsed. He lay in the garbage, smelling of rot and his own burned flesh, the sun creeping inexorably down the alley wall towards him.
Get up.
The command came from a place deeper than thought. He poured every shred of will, every contaminated drop of power left, into a single, sustained kinetic lift. It wasn't flight. It was a crude force that shoved against the ground, against walls, propelling his broken body forward in a grotesque, floating stagger.
He turned a corner, out of the sun’s direct reach. The magic sputtered and died. His legs, broken and useless, gave out. He crumpled against a graffiti-tagged utility box, weeping from the pain, from the sunlight burns, from the poison’s chill, from the sheer, annihilating failure.
He fumbled his phone. His fingers, blistered and trembling, found the contact labeled Car. It rang once.
A smooth, professional voice answered. “Sir.”
Reese drew a wet, rattling breath. He forced his voice into a flat, conversational tone, every word a knife-twist. “Hey. Need a pick-up. Corner of Dufferin and the alley behind Lanterna.” A cough bubbled up, blood warm on his lips. He swallowed it. “Job didn’t go as well as hoped.”
There was the briefest pause. “Coordinates received. Five minutes.”
The line went dead. Reese let his head fall back against the metal box. He stared at the strip of dirty morning sky above the alley, listening to the distant sounds of the city waking up to a day that had no place for him. The click of approaching dress shoes on asphalt was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.