Page 22 of Deathless
He did it again, harder, four parallel lines from my shoulder down across my pec. The welts rose immediately, angry and red, and the sting rolled through me in a wave that made my toes curl. I groaned before I could stop myself.
"That's it. Let me hear you." He repositioned himself, settling his weight lower, so he straddled my thighs, and set both hands on my ribcage, fingers spread, and dragged all ten nails down my sides in one long pull.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t human. My spine arched off the cot. The lines burned, and I wanted more.
"Harder," I whispered. "Diego. Harder."
He looked at me like I'd just handed him something precious and breakable and told him to squeeze. "You sure?"
"I'm sure."
He set his nails at the top of my chest and dragged down with real pressure. Skin broke. The sting sharpened into a bright, clean pain that sang through every nerve in my body, and the first thin lines of blood rose in the tracks of his nails.
"Jesus Christ, Jasper." His voice was hoarse. "You should see yourself right now."
He bent and dragged his tongue along one of the welts, and the wet heat against the raw, sensitized skin sent a full-body shudder through me. I grabbed the back of his head and held him there. He did it again, tracing the line with his tongue from my ribs to my collarbone, tasting the blood and the salt of my skin.
"More," I said against the top of his head. "Don't stop."
Diego shifted and straddled my hips. The rough fabric of his pants dragged against my bare cock and I hissed, grinding up into the friction without meaning to. He pressed his weight down, pinning me.
He set his nails against the inside of my thigh, close to the crease where leg met hip, and scored four slow lines into the tender skin.
I moaned and grabbed his shoulders, nails digging in, and he hissed but kept going. He did the other thigh, same pressure, same pace, and The cot rattled against the wall every time I moved. My knee caught the metal frame, and the pain was nothing, just another signal lost in the flood. I'd been cut before, stabbed, sliced open in training and in the field, and none of it had ever done this. But Diego's nails on my skin weren’t violence. They were something else entirely, something I had no word for yet.
"You gonna come from this?" Diego pressed both palms flat against my chest, over the marks, over the welts, and the broad pressure against all that raw skin made me cry out. "Twomonths of you flinching every time I touched your shoulder in that kitchen, and this is what you actually wanted." His voice dropped. "Dios mío, Jasper. If I'd known, I'd have scratched my name into you that first week."
I dug my fingers into his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
He leaned down and set his teeth against the curve of my neck, right over the mark he'd already left. Then he reached between us and dragged his nails down the length of my cock. The bright, stinging drag of his nails along the shaft sent every nerve in my body into freefall.
My whole body locked up, every muscle seizing at once. I came hard, pulsing against his hand, come streaking across the welts and scratches he'd left on my skin, mixing with the thin lines of blood. The sound I made echoed off the concrete walls, loud and raw, and I couldn’t muffle it because I had both hands locked on his shoulders and couldn’t let go.
Diego held me through it, his weight pressing me into the cot, his mouth still on my throat, his hands flat and warm against the marks he'd made. He ground down against me through each wave, giving me pressure, giving me something to push against.
When the aftershocks finally stopped and my muscles unlocked, I lay there wrecked, staring at the ceiling, lungs heaving. Diego pushed himself up on his arms and looked down at me.
"Mierda," he breathed. He traced one of the raised lines on my chest with a fingertip, so gently it almost tickled. "Jasper. That was..."
I couldn’t speak yet. My throat was raw and my brain had gone offline.
He pressed his forehead to mine. "You're incredible. You know that?"
I closed my eyes and breathed him in: sweat, copper, garlic from whatever he'd cooked this morning, the sharp tang of cum.The marks on my chest and ribs and stomach throbbed in time with my pulse.
I'd never come like that before. Not from hands or mouths, or anything else. I'd come from being marked. From Diego reading my body like a set of blueprints and following every signal it gave him until I broke.
I opened my eyes. He was still above me, hard in his pants, his cock pressing against my hip.
"Don't," he said when I reached for him. "This was about you."
I stared at him. Something behind my ribs gave way, quiet and permanent, like a lock turning.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I'd spent my whole life learning how to hurt people and how to stop them from hurting me, and nobody had ever covered this. No training manual, no handler, no dead-eyed instructor in a concrete room like this one had ever said here's what you do when a man takes you apart with his bare hands and then refuses to let you pay him back for it.
He lowered himself beside me on the cot and pulled me against his chest, careful to avoid the worst of the welts. I could feel his heartbeat thumping against my shoulder blade, steady where mine was still trying to find its rhythm. He pressed his mouth to the back of my neck and just breathed there, warm and even, while the aftershocks twitched through my muscles and faded.
But the quiet held for only a moment. My nerve endings were stripped raw, every point of contact between skin and air registering at a painful frequency. My body was sated, but my mind still buzzed, thoughts slipping in and out of focus like a radio caught between stations. I needed something to ground me, something to narrow the world back down to a single input I could manage.
