Strain Read online

  “Good. Yeah . . .” Darius heard the strain in his own voice, could feel his patience unraveling. Jesus, the boy’s mouth felt amazing. His hand hovered next to Rhys’s head, hesitated, and then settled on his ragged hair. Rhys groaned at the hint of pressure, arching his back and offering his ass up higher as Darius’s fingers pushed in a little more. “Suck me, boy. Harder. Fuck . . . yeah . . .”

  The sound Rhys made when Darius’s hand gripped the boy’s hair vibrated along his nerves like shrill notes on violin strings. It damn sure wasn’t distress. Not even remotely. The efforts of Rhys’s mouth on his cock became downright enthusiastic as Rhys traced the veins with his tongue and slid the loose skin up and down with his lips, moaning when he dipped his tongue into the slit and wrenched an echoing groan from Darius.

  Did the kid like it rough? Was that what got him past his misgivings? Darius wasn’t sure he dared to cut loose without getting a better idea of Rhys’s responses. He didn’t want to traumatize the boy just because he’d misread a few noises.

  “Deeper.” Darius pushed on Rhys’s head as his hips shifted, thrusting into Rhys’s mouth. Rhys tried to flinch away, but Darius’s hand held him captive, insistent but not too forceful, testing his responses to the pressure. Rhys made a muffled sound of protest, but it didn’t seem urgent so Darius ignored him, repeating the jerky thrusts. A few more moments and Rhys’s noises dropped in pitch and tenor, becoming groans around Darius’s cock. The sound was almost enough to make Darius pop right there. He tore himself away before he lost control entirely and crawled behind Rhys, drawing his fingers out and positioning the head of his cock against Rhys’s hole.

  “Oh God. Please . . .” Rhys groaned, his head falling to the pillow. A shudder rippled along the bony ridges of his spine. Darius pressed forward, feeling the tension, the resistance. He’d barely worked the tip of his cock in before Rhys clamped down, crying out. “Stop! God, please, stop! Please, I don’t want—”

  “You know I can’t do that, boy.” Darius fought against himself for a few more moments of self-control, hearing the growl in his own voice. He stopped moving, but his hands shook where they gripped Rhys’s hips. He released his hold on the boy, stroking up and down his back, over his shoulders, and up and down his arms, trying to soothe him. His other hand crept around Rhys and grasped his cock, which had begun to deflate when the fear had taken hold. “Relax. Open up, and let me in. Let me make it good. Take it. I’ll force it if I have to. You know I will. Don’t make me do that to you. Just take it.”

  Rhys went limp beneath him with an abject sound as he surrendered, loosening the clench of his muscles on Darius’s cock. Darius pushed in slowly. Rhys quivered but didn’t protest again.

  The next sound he made couldn’t be mistaken for anything but pleasure, and that was when Darius’s fraying patience disintegrated. He began rocking into the boy, faster and harder with each stroke. Rhys’s voice rose, shouting incoherent words with each snap of Darius’s hips against his ass. For five days, Darius had watched from across camp as Rhys endured the pawing of other men in stoic near silence, but now he was melting down, damn near howling. The response pushed Darius right over the edge, and he gripped the boy hard, jerking and pulsing in the clenching heat of his ass.

  He whimpered when Darius withdrew, but a grope around Rhys’s hip made clear at least one cause for his distress.

  “Stay there.” Darius searched through their bags, and when he returned, Rhys’s arousal had begun to recede, his body tense again as he hovered there on his hands and knees. Darius lubed the plug and slid it inside Rhys’s wet, open ass before Rhys had a chance to protest. Then with a low, feral growl, Darius shoved him over onto his back. Before Rhys could do more than groan, Darius grasped his dick and began to jack it firmly, watching the boy’s reactions. He wanted to see Rhys come completely apart.

  Rhys screamed, a reedy cry of pleasure. His entire body seized, clenching, rising, thrusting. His fists twisted in the blankets as his thighs fell open, splaying him helplessly.

  “Please! Oh, God, please!” With a savage sense of triumph, Darius added a twist and a curl around the head of Rhys’s dick. He didn’t give the boy the option of resistance, determined to shred all that aloof distance he stubbornly maintained. Surrender wouldn’t be a choice he made; it would be the only possible response. With firm strokes, Darius sent Rhys tumbling into it, powerless before the onslaught.

  When it was over, he gently released Rhys’s still-twitching cock, licking a splash of cum from his hand. The boy even tasted sweet. If Rhys had been able to do anything but stare up at the darkened ceiling, shell-shocked, he might have noticed Darius’s slightly smug smile.

  Now maybe Rhys would understand there was nothing bad here, nothing he had to fight against.

  “See, boy? Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.” Patting Rhys’s hip again, Darius sank onto the pallet beside him. Panting, Rhys fumbled for something to wipe himself off with, finally using a dusty old shirt from one of the piles of laundry, and crawled under the blanket.

  Rhys lay there almost expectantly, and Darius had to quash the impulse to wrap his arms around the kid. Dammit, there was no way he was letting a civvie he’d probably have to kill get under his skin. He didn’t let himself dwell on how nice it might feel to touch him, not for sex or because they had a job to do but for comfort and contact.

  At least he tried not to dwell on it. The effort was made more difficult by that vulnerable, needy look in Rhys’s eyes. Shit, how long had it been since the kid had had something as simple as a hug? His mom had been dead for years, and if Xolani’s intimations were to be believed, life probably had been pretty grim for Rhys at the monastery.

  After a long, laden silence, in which Darius felt Rhys’s eyes upon him, he spoke. “I can just about hear you thinking, boy. Spit it out so I can sleep before it’s my shift at watch.”

  Rhys rolled to his side. His jawline was taking on that mulish set that boded no good. He gave Darius an earnest, frustrated stare. “Look. I know there isn’t anything to be ashamed of. God, I know Father Maurice and Jacob were full of crap with all that stuff.” He bit his lip as if second-guessing his decision to speak, but then he plunged onward. “But everything I’ve ever known says this isn’t right.” He drew away in a tight ball, as far from Darius’s body as he could. Almost as if he was expecting some sort of retribution for his temerity. “Don’t try to take that away from me. It’s all I’ve got.”

  A tense silence settled between them, and finally, Darius sighed. “Have it your way, kid.”

  Darius rolled and gave Rhys his back. Despite his exhaustion, he lay there a long while, aware of Rhys lying wakeful next to him. The kid was still chewing on that when Darius finally fell asleep.

  “You okay, sweetie?”

  “Sure, Mom.” Rhys pelted the trunk of a tree with another acorn.

  “You did the right thing, walking away back there.” She put herself between Rhys and the oak, forcing him to drop the handful of acorns he’d gathered. Her face was drawn with pain and seemed to be aging by the day. She flinched when she tried to cross her arms over her chest.

  He rubbed his hand over the fine, uneven fuzz on his sixteen-year-old face. “You don’t think he’s right, do you?”

  “You know I don’t. I never have.” She scowled, and Rhys knew it was because she lacked the energy to defend him from Jacob the way she had before she’d started to get sick. “Since Maurice declared himself Grand High Fucking Poobah around here, Jacob’s decided that makes him the right hand of God.”

  Rhys shrugged. “It’s no problem. I’ll just keep ignoring him. Jacob’s just a dick. It’s not worth making yourself sicker.”

  “It is if I can stop him from hurting you.”

  “I told you, I can ignore him.”

  “I know it’s easy to say that, Rhys, but having a message drilled into your head every day for years . . . even if you try not to listen, even if you know it’s wrong, sooner or later it takes root and makes
you question and doubt yourself. I don’t want you buying into it.”

  Rhys rolled his eyes. “Please. I’m smarter than that. With any luck, someday soon the old fart will yell himself into an aneurysm and keel over and no one will be there to back Jacob up when he tries to make trouble. Then everything will be fine around here. Maybe Gabe will even come back.”

  She tried to smile, but it came off sad. They were humoring each other, offering false hope, of course. “It’s not just you I worry about.” She glanced toward the garden where Cadence worked beside Mrs. Merkle. Cady never left Rhys or the side of another woman these days, not since she’d begun menstruating last winter. “If he corners Cady one more time to lecture her on the proper duty of women to bear children, I’ll stab him in his sleep.”

  “You rest. I’ll keep an eye on her, Mom. He won’t get to her with the rest of us looking out for her.”

  “I hope you’re right, sweetie.” Her voice sounded raspy, pained. The courtyard orchard became the dark walls of her bedroom. She lay on her narrow bed, gasping for each breath. Her eyes were yellow and sunken in as they rolled madly in the delirious panic of pain. The bones of her emaciated face and arms bulged through her paper-thin skin, and her flesh was mottled with the dark, oozing patches of the Rot, like bruised fruit gone bad.

  “You killed her, freak,” Jacob taunted over his shoulder. “You and your sick ways. Just like you tried to kill me.”

  “Repent, son,” Father Maurice intoned severely beside him as his mother reached a skeletal hand toward him. The man towered over Rhys where he knelt by her bedside. Chunks fell from the ceiling as an earthquake shook the monastery.

  “Rhys, don’t leave me.” Her breath rattled in her lungs, her voice cracking on the plea. He reached for her, but hard arms wrapped around him from behind, dragging him away.

  “This is your fault, you perverted shit!” Jacob’s face was rotting, too, and he glared hatefully at Rhys.

  Somewhere out of sight, Cadence called to him. “Rhys, help me!”

  He struggled to free himself of the arms encircling him, crushing the breath from his lungs. “Let me go!”

  “They’re gone, boy,” a rich voice murmured in his ear.

  “Fornicators! Sodomites! Perverts! Your fault! Repent!” Father Maurice thundered. The earth shook again.

  “Rhys!” Cadence screamed, now standing beside the bed where their mother lay limp and motionless, the life gone from her sunken eyes. Jacob’s rotten arms held Cady, pulling her away from him, just as the unseen arms held Rhys. Blood poured from her torn-out throat and splattered the front of her shirt. “Please! Rhys! Come back!”

  “Give it up to me, boy,” the voice near his ear entreated, dark and seductive. “Let it go. Let it go.” The imprisoning arms dragged him further away as Cadence cried out. “Let it go.”

  “CADY!”

  He awoke with a breathless shout. A sizzling pain at the base of his throat followed. His eyes flew open to see Darius looming over him. He struggled in a blind panic, his throat constricted, cutting off his air. Then he realized Darius had him pinned to the mattress with one hand on his larynx and a knife poised to slit his throat.

  Awareness flooded Darius’s eyes, and he tossed the blade aside and removed his hand, allowing Rhys a breath just as his vision was going black.

  “Shit!” Darius grabbed the edge of a blanket and swabbed at Rhys’s throat. It came away flecked with blood, and Rhys felt dizzy for a moment as he realized just how close he’d come to death for the second time in less than a week.

  The wound burned, and Darius’s weight pressed down against Rhys’s morning erection. The thick ridge of Darius’s cock lay alongside it, jabbing Rhys’s belly. Rhys stared at Darius’s mouth, mesmerized by his full lips, parted and panting. Rhys’s lifted his head without any deliberate intent as he curled a hand around the back of Darius’s neck. Then he pressed their lips together.

  A shocked heartbeat passed as a shudder rippled through Darius. Then another. His powerful hands seized either side of Rhys’s head, and his mouth angled, grinding down hard.

  Rhys groaned as Darius’s tongue plunged past his lips, insinuating itself against his own. It thrust and explored while Rhys’s hands grappled with Darius’s muscled arms, trying to find purchase to pull him closer.

  Rhys strained and writhed, seeking a way under Darius’s confining weight to press harder against him. His nerves sang an electric chorus of awareness and wanting. God, he wanted. He wanted the sucking tugs and nipping pulls of Darius’s lips and teeth, wanted the weight pressing him down, wanted the cock sliding against his own with each push of Darius’s hips. His thighs opened, and his ankles hooked around Darius’s legs. His hands moved down Darius’s back, grabbing his flexing ass.

  Darius tore his mouth from Rhys’s, glaring down at him, looking angry and confused. Then Darius dipped his head to Rhys’s neck. His tongue stroked across the cut still stinging at the base of Rhys’s throat.

  Rhys’s body surged with arousal despite the shudder of shock and revulsion. He clutched Darius to him, urging him on.

  Within moments, Rhys found himself facedown, his ass in the air, pushing and bearing down while Darius worked the plug out. He was tender from the night before—God, yes—but not nearly as bad as he had been that first day. He wriggled impatiently as Darius slicked his cock, then pushed in.

  Rhys yelled into the mattress, his fingers clawing at the blankets. Caught at the dangerous edge where intensity could tip over into agony, his feet slid uselessly on the bedding, unable to escape.

  “Oh, no you don’t, boy.” Darius grabbed him and jerked him back into the thrust. Rhys yelled again when Darius’s hips smacked his ass, and Darius’s heavy balls swung, knocking against his own. As he paused, Darius bit the back of Rhys’s shoulder, adding just a little more pain before licking the spot he’d bitten. Rhys went boneless beneath him, moaning into the pillow.

  The rocking push of Darius’s hips that was shoving his cock deeper into Rhys faltered for a moment.

  “You like that, boy? Is that what it takes? You like it when I force you?”

  Rhys shuddered, unable to reply. The admission stuck in his throat, choking him. For the first time, everything felt right. No shame. No fear of what anyone else might say or think of him. No worry about how Jacob would use this to make his life hell or echoes of Father Maurice’s indictments and condemnations.

  But he couldn’t confess that. He had to be better than this.

  He groaned, shaking his head in useless denial.

  “The fuck you don’t.” Darius withdrew and rammed back in, driving a shout from Rhys’s throat. Darius grabbed his wrist, twisting his arm behind his back hard enough to put stress on the joint. Darius’s other arm hooked around the front of Rhys’s throat, threatening a choke hold if only it tightened a bit more.

  Darius’s weight bore down on Rhys, trapping him and threatening to break him. Inhumanly powerful muscles drove Darius’s hips forward, slamming him into Rhys.

  Between breathless cries and half-sobbing gasps, Rhys clawed at the arm across his throat with his free hand until it tightened in warning. He moaned each time Darius’s cock stroked past the swollen knot inside his ass. The blanket beneath him grew wet. Denied any opportunity to struggle without risking injury, he could only give in.

  It was even better when he did. Each thudding impact of Darius’s hips rocked him, jolting his balls and cock, and wringing another shout from his raw throat. And it was good, so good. God, the stretch of Darius’s cock reaming him open and the pressure of it running past his prostate over and over . . . Each pass took him to the edge of orgasm and held him there, rising and falling in surges. Trapped, helpless, defenseless.

  Darius’s teeth pressed into the fleshy part of his shoulder again. Between the pain and the pounding of Darius’s cock and the brushes of his own dick against the sheets, the heat and pressure behind his balls searing along the base of his spine, became a full-scale nuclear event.
It overloaded his senses and melted down his synapses with blinding, white-hot shockwaves exploding through his body. Rhys rode the waves, shuddering, seizing, groaning into the pillow as he clamped down hard on Darius. A moment later, Darius slammed into him for the final time, pulsing balls-deep in Rhys’s clenching ass.

  Darius released his wrist and moved the arm from across Rhys’s throat, and the boy collapsed, moaning. His ass twitched and spasmed as Darius pulled out of him and replaced the plug almost in a single motion. Rhys lay motionless, stunned and trying to gather the ragged tatters of his composure.

  Darius rolled off to the side, his dark skin shining with sweat, panting. Rhys began to curl toward him and then stopped himself, all the questions flooding back. Darius’s hand rose as it had the night before, hovering for a moment before it stopped mid-reach, falling onto the hard ridges of his stomach. Rhys restrained the urge to close the distance between them.

  “You okay, boy?”

  Why had he kissed Darius?

  “Fine.” He turned his face away before he yielded to the stupid impulse to try to snuggle. He wasn’t sure where it had come from; that first time in the shower, all he’d wanted after Darius had fucked him was to get away. And he’d certainly never felt any yearning for closeness with the other Jugs. Why did he now feel like he would burst into tears if he couldn’t have a stupid hug?

  This wasn’t about that. They weren’t about that. Darius fucked him because it was necessary. They weren’t lovers, and Darius sure as hell had no interest in offering him comfort or affection. And Rhys couldn’t let himself be weak enough to ask for it even if Darius did. He had to be strong, had to prove he was worth the effort they were investing in him, that he wouldn’t be a burden or a drain on precious resources.

  “Did I hurt you?” He felt Darius’s finger touch the side of his neck, not far from the place the knife had nicked him.