Three Kinds of Trouble by Anne Malcom

Chapter Seventeen

“So can we agree that you’re not going to try to push me away again?” I mumbled into his chest. It was later. Much later. Hades had made love to me.

Made. Love.

I was sure that’s what it had been. Before, I’d been absolutely certain that the only thing Hades was capable of was fucking me. And I was more than okay with that. I loved the way he fucked me, loved how I felt owned, every inch of me. Loved that he branded me with his touch, with his lips, with the bruises on my hips from him grasping them so tightly, the red marks on my ass from him slapping it. The sensitivity in between my legs after he’d fucked me hard.

Yeah, I was more than okay with the fucking. The whole ‘making love’ thing had always grossed me out. That had to do with my past, no doubt, and the unhealthy way I was introduced to sex. It also had to do with the fact that when he—I refused to let myself think his name, it gave him too much power—touched me, he did it slowly. Gently. Lovingly. So whenever someone, especially a man but even a woman, tried to touch me in that warm, casual way, I recoiled.

Aunt V hadn’t been able to hug me until I was twenty-five, and even then, I’d had to grit my teeth to hide my disgust at the intimacy of it all. At the way my insides felt filthy and wrong, willing to do anything to escape my skin.

Even after all the therapy I’d had, after all the healing, I’d made peace with the fact that I’d never able to be touched like that without that rancid, horrible feeling. That I’d have to fake intimacy with men. That I could only orgasm while a man fucked me hard and dirty. For years, I hadn’t even been able to come without shame and filth washing over me before the aftershocks had even subsided. For a long time, my sexuality had been a wrong, filthy thing.

Until Hades.

After I spilled my guts, he made me come twice, both times with a gentle touch. First with his mouth, his lips worshipping my skin, my pussy. My hands had fisted the sheets of my bed and my back had arched off the bed with the power of my orgasm. It had felt clean, wonderful, beautiful.

Then he crawled slowly up my body, his eyes on me the entire ascent. His warmth was overwhelming, the weight of his body on mine overpowering in the best possible way. As soon as he poised himself at my entrance, his lips hovering over mine, seconds away from filling me, he shifted us. He turned us so I was on top of him, his hands tight on my hips, positioning me above him so his cock was brushing against the sensitive skin he’d just devoured.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his, could barely breathe under the weight of the emotions enveloping me, of what the simple gesture meant. Hades was not able to read my mind, of course. But he could read me. He understood my pain and trauma because I’d laid it out for him, all of it. And he’d realized what this might be doing to me, with everything so close to the surface. So he gave me control. All of it. Giving me agency over something intimate and carnal, he gave me his submission.

And I loved it. I moved against him slowly, my palms on his chest, the ink seeming to reach out and swallow me. His hands were on my hips, tight, but not guiding, not pulling me. They were just holding as I rode him, as I brought us both to earth-shattering climaxes.

Now, I was laying on his chest, absolutely exhausted, both emotionally and physically. I’d never felt so raw, so exposed. Every single corner of my body and soul had been exposed, I no longer harbored any secrets. It felt freeing yet terrifying. Now that I’d given him everything, I needed to know he wasn’t going to take it all away.

Hades didn’t reply to my question right away, drawing circles on my naked back.

“You gave me somethin’ tonight, Freya,” he finally said. “Something that you ripped out from inside you. You gave it to me despite the pain it caused you because you didn’t want me leaving you.”

I didn’t say anything because I was too busy trying not to cry.

“I’m gonna do the same,” he continued, his voice rough and low. “And then, you’re gonna decide whether you want me to go or stay.”

Dread washed over me. “I’m going to want you to stay no matter what.”

Hades didn’t try to argue with me, just continued to draw circles on my back in silence, working toward what he was going to tell me. What he was going to expose.

I waited, hungry, desperate to peer into the darkest corners of his life, to feast on his mysterious past.

“Monsters are not born, they’re made,” he stated after we’d been marinating in silence for minutes.

I turned my head to stare at him, not liking where this was going. “You’re not a monster,” I disagreed, my voice tight.

“You don’t know enough about me to make that statement.”

I pouted at the coolness in his tone, refusing to back down from his practiced bad guy stare. He was trying to scare me, with all that brooding intensity. Sure, it was a touch scary before I’d gotten to know him, and it would definitely be scary if I was someone who had gotten on his bad side, but I was on Hades’s good side. Despite what he was implying here, he had a good side. A wonderful side. But he was making it clear that I wasn’t going to be able to change his mind. At least not right at that moment. I would change his mind, though. With time. Hopefully we had time.

“I had a good childhood,” he told me, obviously choosing not to debate with me over whether or not I knew him well enough to deem him human instead of a monster. “People meet me, they figure I was fucked from the beginning. Think that to be the person I am now, I must’ve never known true happiness. But the only way to truly create a monster is to give them love and happiness, so they know how it tastes, then snatch it away from them completely. Make it so that sweetness rots on your tongue and you have to live with that taste in your mouth for the rest of your life.”

He shifted slightly to trail the side of my face with his fingertip. No one had ever touched me that gently in my life, and I sure wasn’t expecting it from a man who had seemed incapable of tenderness.

“Some people are dealt shit from the day they’re born,” he murmured, searching my face as if he were committing me to memory. “Very fuckin’ few of those people manage to rid themselves of it. To rise above it and turn into something magnificent. In fact, I would’ve thought such a feat was impossible had I not met you.”

My heart jumped to my throat, warmth spreading to the very core of me.

“I had what you didn’t,” he continued. “I had a mother and a father who loved me, loved each other and gave me a safe and stable home. Until they didn’t. Car accident. On their way home from date night.”

He shook his head. “Yeah, can’t get any more cookie-cutter, American dream than people who have a ‘date night’ once a fuckin’ week. My parents, they came from shit, both of ‘em. Mom had a family who was bad news. Real bad fuckin’ news. To the point where she changed her name to escape ’em. Didn’t know that until later, of course. Dad had once had a family, but he was an only child. Parents had him later in life and both died within six months of each other before he turned five. No brothers or sisters, uncles, what the fuck ever on either side. No close friends either. Not close enough to take in a ten-year-old orphan anyway.”

I had to struggle to keep my tears at bay. I knew I couldn’t weep for Hades, not now when the story had only just begun. Not even after, when I’d heard the worst of it.

“Went into the system,” he continued, his hand once again tracing circles on my back as if he needed some kind of anchor.

“Again, not many adoptive parents want a ten-year-old boy who’s angry at the world, hating everyone for being strange and unfamiliar. So I went to group homes. Some were okay. Most weren’t. Problem was, I was too old to be adopted, too old to forget the life I’d had before. If my parents had died when I was much younger, growin’ up in that shit would’ve been much easier because I wouldn’t have known any better.”

He lingered in that ‘what if’ for a moment, the same way I’d lingered in the possibility of Aunt V taking me away from my life before the worst could happen. Then his eyes shuttered, and he shook it off.

“But I did. It turned me bitter. Angry. Fuckin’ furious. Made me decide that I would not care about another fuckin’ thing in this horrible world. When I was older, it made me want to hurt people. Fell into crowds lookin’ for someone exactly like me. Had nothin’ to lose, nothing to keep me human.” His eyes seared into mine. “I did some fuckin’ bad shit, Freya. I killed people. A lot of them. And I didn’t feel bad about it. I loved it. I still do.”

I shivered from the coldness of his voice, the truth in it. I was in the arms of a killer. He hadn’t hidden that from me, not once. He’d expected me to recoil, to banish him from my life. I’d expected it too. But I only held him tighter.

“I want you, Freya. More than I’ve wanted anything in my fuckin’ life. I can’t bring myself to leave you. But I’m not going to stay with you, pretendin’ that I’m something I’m not. I’m a monster. I know it. My brothers know it. There’s a reason I wear the patch I do. Because I do things even the worst of them couldn’t stomach.”

Hades was still gently drawing circles on my back. I was still tucked into his side. Warm. Safe. Satisfied.

“I don’t care.” I craned my neck to look into his eyes as I spoke, wanting him to feel the truth in my words. “I don’t care about what your patch means or what you have to do because of it. That you think yourself to be some kind of monster—”

“I am a monster,” he interrupted.

I gritted my teeth. Fucking alpha males.

“Fine, okay, you’re a monster,” I conceded with a pout. “But you’re my monster, Hades. Monsters need to be loved too.” I took a breath then repositioned my body so I could meet his eyes. “I love you, Hades. With blood on your hands, with death on your soul, with demons in your eyes, I love you.” My voice was barely a whisper, but the words came out heavy.

Hades’s face changed completely, contorting from what I assumed was shock. I wasn’t sure why he was surprised since I’d done a terrible job at hiding what I felt for him. Hades was shrewd, he could read my tiniest subtleties. He had to have known.

But maybe he hadn’t, maybe the hatred he’d felt for himself made him blind to the love anybody else felt for him.

He wasn’t going to say it back, I’d known that. I had expected his silence. To stop it from smothering us, I pressed my lips to his and climbed on top of him. He kissed me back immediately, with all of the words he couldn’t say, with everything he felt but was still trying to fight.

He then fucked me with passion, with need.

With love.