Lies & Lullabies (23 page)

 
I clung to him tighter, wanting him to move and slam inside me until he broke me.

“Say it,” he charged, his lips toying with mine. He took my mouth violently then apologized with the gentle caresses and suckling kisses, cycling over and over again. Biting and sucking, sucking and biting until he drew blood and sucked my lips clean. I opened my mouth to him, stressing the agony over being unfulfilled.
 

His tongue darted between my lips and ran up the roof of my mouth. Both of his hands found their way to the side of my neck and pressed in.
 

“My pussy was made for your cock,” I confessed, digging my nails into the back of his head.
 

“And?”

“I was made for you.”

He withdrew, and slowly slid into me. The motion increased the sloshing sounds of my pussy, soaking wet for him, and spread to the crux of my thighs. He pumped inside me, filling me, and withdrew in shallow strokes. The tip of his erection rubbed against a place inside me that shocked my body with tingling pulses. I shuddered like a cube of ice slid down my spine. His rhythm picked up and began a pace that dissolved every stitch of rebellion. Fucking me harder than a machine and pushing deeper, he touched places no man had ever been able to grasp. I’d never wanted someone so badly—to break me into a million pieces with one word, one thrust, and one look.
 

My sex clenched around his cock as he took me harder. The headboard shuddered against the wall, clanging with the symphony of our bodies crashing into each other.

I was stuck in the energy syphoning cyclone held in his eyes. His thumb angled up my jaw and opened my mouth. I sucked it like it was his cock.
 

My body was awash in everything Catch made me feel, leaving me dazed. I cried out to the ceiling, nothing that made much sense but something between a mewl and groan.

The brink promised a high I’d never felt. Sliding out of me, he kneeled back on the bed. With a rough handle on my waist, he flipped me over on the mattress with my ass up and my breasts pressed against the surface as though I weighed nothing. The swell of my ass was clutched in his hands as he opened me and slid easily inside my pussy, tearing into me like he meant to break me.
 

The strong grip he held on my hips began to ache as he forced me to meet his brutal pounding. I cried against the mattress as my body vibrated and sung at a drugged out pitch.
 

Shuddering against him, I succumbed to the high. I couldn’t stop coming. I lost control of my body completely. Every piece of flesh took only a simple touch to reap pleasure, and my pussy was the hot button that led to the greatest explosion of ecstasy above all.
 

He fucked me in every position he possibly could on the bed: on my stomach, on my back with my legs over his shoulders, and the most lethal position—my legs pushed to my chest as he penetrated me deeply and pinned me against the headboard fucking me until the pleasure was too much and my eyes watered.
 

Every part of me hurt and felt good at the same time. I let him consume me, and he reveled in my stupor. He worked me over until neither of us could come anymore, and I was so full of his arousal it pooled out onto the bed, and saturated the sheets down to the mattress.

When he leaned forward, staring down at me with a different look on his face, I gladly made myself comfortable in his trap and opened my mouth for him to kiss me.

Instead of hoping to unravel myself from his control, I swathed myself in it from head to toe.

-16-

A
UTHORITY
F
IGURES

Catch holed himself up in the basement most of the day, and I was left to wander around the house. I made my own meals, using the gourmet goods stocked in the refrigerator. It had been a long time since I was able to cook a decent meal for myself. I went overboard at dinner time, hoping he’d surface from the basement and join me.

It was a silly notion to think I could find safety with Catch, and eventually see my sister again without the threat of Michael standing in the way. I wanted to believe it so fiercely. I wanted to believe since he opened up to me, it meant I had a better chance with him and his psychopathic tendencies than anywhere else.

Acutely aware of how lovesick my inner thoughts had become, I rummaged through the wine rack for something to drown them out.
 

A commotion in the dining room and Catch’s signature hoarse baritone voice made me smile.
 

Smoothing out my white dress and primping my hair—straightened with a blow dryer, and later, a flat iron—I approached the siting room, leading to the foyer.
 

Without thinking, I placed my arms around him and tipped up on my toes to kiss him. When he didn’t react, I slowly opened my eyes. “I missed you,” I told him, maintaining my hopeful smile.

Grinning brightly, he looped his arms around my body, alleviating my fears. “I hope you caught every second.” He threw his voice as though we had company.

My attention trailed to the far side of the table. Michael was bloodied, and his mouth was secured with duct tape. His hands and feet were bound to the arms and legs of the chair by several layers of tape.
 

In an abrupt and stunned reaction, I removed my arms from Catch.

“Did you make enough for three?” Catch asked, unwilling to let me go. “As you can see, we have a special guest.” With his ethereal blue eyes glittering at me, he extended his hand to me as though he was going to seat me.
 

My position was frozen in place. The smell of the food I once hungered for left me feeling queasy.
 

“Excuse me.” Jory announced her presence, appearing behind me. She skipped down the length of the table and plopped herself down on Michael’s lap. “That food smells too good to pass up.” She crouched over the table and began to paw at the food, spooning portions into a plate with her fingers. She fluttered her dark eyelashes at me. “Are you going to get dessert out of the oven, or are you going to burn it? Smells done.”

Catch led me to the table, stopping my movements absent my brain, and pulled out a chair for me. “Sit, sweetheart. You worked hard on the meal. Rest your feet.”

The moment Catch left, Michael turned to me. Exhaustion marked his eyes with red streaks of irritation. His face was tinged with a sickly pale green shade. Beads of sweat decorated parts of his face. The pressure of his stare pushed down against me, forcing me to remain immobile.
 

I thought Catch was kidding about the last animal in the basement. I never—ever—completely believed he had Michael the entire time. There wasn’t a viable way he could’ve bypassed the protection Michael had to get to him. I was wrong.
 

“Must be really uncomfortable.” Jory turned around and ripped the tape from Michael’s mouth with one jerk. “I’m sure a talkative man like you has a million things to say.”
 

Michael wouldn’t speak. Despite his circumstances, he carried his pride on his shoulders. Giving me a nonverbal command, he darted his eyes toward the pitcher of water on the table.

Dutiful for reasons I couldn’t explain, I poured a glass of water for Michael and walked over to serve him.
 

Catch, back from the kitchen, was there to stop me. He snatched the glass from my hand and forced me to sit back down. He shoved my chair in, making my chest meet with the edge of the table.

As Catch sauntered toward Michael, he gave Jory a look that made her sit in her own seat. “He’s been quiet since he arrived here.” Catch sat on the edge of the table, facing Michael, and gave me his back to view.
 

Turning toward the centerpiece, Catch plucked up the only apple left inside the glass bowl. The crunching sounds of his first bite suffused the air. He set the ripe red apple down in front of Michael as though it was some sort of message. “He won’t say a single word to me. Not even when I severed his hands.”

It was then I took note of the bandages on Michael’s wrists, and he was missing what came after them.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Catch looked over his shoulder at me and beamed. “The monster who had his hands in everything, no longer has hands.”

“W-we have to get him to the h-hospital.” My words made less and less sense to me. My eyes were on the table and not Catch. Anything but Catch. I was drowning in a hazy pool and couldn’t tell the bottom from the surface.

“You know where the next hospital over is?” Jory piped in. “Takes forever to get there. Better to go ahead and kill him.”
 

“You fuckin’ betraying me?” Michael’s voice cracked, sounding dry enough to soak up the water from an ocean. “Deceitful
puttana
,” he spat at me. “You’re gonna kill me for this fucker? Huh? After all I’ve done for you, you have no goddamn respect for me?”

Catch picked up a fork from the table and turned to Michael. “You never learned how to properly treat a woman—even your own flesh and blood.” He slid off the table and stalked behind Michael. With one hand gripping Michael’s forehead, he forced his head to tilt back and implanted a fork with more strength than I thought possible into Michael’s ear.
 

Michael gurgled back his complaint. Panting and weary, he settled his eyes back on me. “Speak to me, you goddamn cunt,” he hissed, caring little for the lesson Catch taught him earlier. “Explain yourself.”

“She can’t,” Catch yanked the fork out of Michael’s ear, making him spit curses. “She’s understandably shocked.” Catch’s eyelids grew heavy as he approached me. Taking my hand above the table, he kissed the back of it. “Do you need time to digest this? I want you to be at your best when you do what you promised.”

My blinking slowed. My head was so full of noise it rendered me dizzy. A burn in my stomach made me feel sick to the core.

Catch smoothed his hand down the back of my head and left his arm to drape on the back of my chair. “I’m deeply invested in the woman you failed to raise. I’m thinking about adding another ring to her hand.”

My neck snapped to Catch in time with Michael’s. I wasn’t the only one in shock. Jory rose from her seat and seemed awestruck over what Catch had said.

“What the fuck do you want?” Michael asked. “Huh? What the fuck is it you want, you little shit?”

“You ever wonder how I was able to get to you and transport you here?” Catch threw out his question with a smugness so dense, it thickened the air. “You can’t buy the kind of disloyalty that led you to this very spot. Maybe it’s the missing women in your
family
. Maybe it’s your complete mishandling and sullying of an organization you killed to get the reins of many years ago. Maybe you’re an unintelligent yokel with a sick deficiency who was born into the wrong family. You should’ve been given to evangelicals. Maybe they would’ve beaten the sickness out of you with their bibles and turned you into a better man.”
 

Catch leisurely picked up a bottle of wine and filled my glass only a quarter of the way. He ran the back of his finger down my cheek. “I can’t wish for these things because it would erase the present, and I would live this all over again to have her.” Sincerity was wrapped around his confession.

“Your question about what I want?” Catch asked, dipping into this cold way of addressing people. “That’s not a very good question, Michael. What you should really be questioning is why I have so much power. What you really should ask me is who I am.”

“I know who you are,” Michael admitted. “I don’t forget a fuckin’ face, especially one that belongs to the shit who stupidly crossed me. I don’t care how you got to a place you didn’t deserve. I’m going to kill you when I get my hands on you. I should’ve done it the first time.”

“You no longer have any hands.” Catch threw his head back and laughed. “You don’t know who I really am. You've stared at two faces and even now can’t tell one from the other?”

Behaving like a maniac, Jory began to cackle. “They fucking believed us. They really think you’re Marcin Di Stefano, my brother? Idiots.”

Blinking back the shock, I set my eyes on Catch.

“It’s a name,” he explained to me. “A name I used to get what I wanted. There’s power in a name. Knowing it. Using it. The real Marcin Di Stefano killed himself after he failed to get his revenge on your father for what he
thought
your father had done to his family. I took over two months after he died and assumed his identity for as long as it suited me. With backing from a couple of key people it was simple to do.”

“Then, who are you?” I asked under Jory’s raucous laughter.

“I told you.” His fingers flirted with my hair. “My name is Catch, and I’m an extractor of information. And to get that information, I use everything at my disposal.”

“Can I tell it?” Jory asked, humming with frenzied energy. “Please, please let me tell?”

Catch sighed and gestured toward Jory to go on with her story.

Jory popped out of her chair as though she was a toy surprise. Folding her arms behind her, she took baby steps toward me. “My father was supposed to have been killed by your father. Marcin did everything he could to get close to Michael and make him pay. He had a chance. And this fucker,” she snapped her head at Michael and pointed a finger at him, “beats him and tells him he’s going to torture him by taking away the people he loves until he dies.