Chapter 146: MAKE ME CUM
COLE
Nia’s bed had been made since yesterday morning and that was the problem.
She never made her bed. Not once in the years I had known her, had Nia woken up and tucked in her own sheets, it was a running thing between us, I had given up mentioning it and she had given up pretending she was going to change.
So when I pushed her door open before sunrise and saw the bed made and the room empty and the perfume in the air already hours old, I stood there for a moment and felt an unfamiliar chill run down my spine and it was odd considering how much I said I didn’t care for Nia.
I checked the kitchens. The garden. The east wing common room. Two pack members gave me the same answer about her taking trips sometimes and I smiled at both of them and walked away.
Nia did not take trips. Not without telling me first.
I had been through every corridor twice and was starting on a third pass when Rowan’s door flew open and Lila came out of it.
She slammed it.
The frame shook. A painting on the opposite wall tilted slightly.
I stopped walking.
She was moving fast, bag in hand, jaw set, not looking at anything in the hallway so much as through it, the kind of furious that had somewhere specific to go.
"What happened?" I stepped into her path.
"None of your fucking business, Cole."
She was past me before I finished processing it. I turned back toward Nia’s wing and got three steps before I heard her stop.
"Cole." She called out my name in a different voice. The other one. The one she kept behind the first one for when she needed something.
I turned around.
She was looking at me with her head tilted. "Have you been avoiding me? You never came to my full moon party."
"I had a lot going on." I kept my hands loose at my sides.
She started back toward me, slow, no rush, and stopped close enough that I could smell her perfume and feel the pull of it. I tried to keep myself in check and not reach for her knowing we were in the Gravemoon pack and anyone could see us.
"A lot going on." Her eyes moved across my face the way hands moved, they gazed at me for a moment like she was scrutinizing me. "By a lot, do you mean your sister?"
My heart slammed once or maybe twice. I think it actually skipped a beat or two.
I kept my face still. "What sister? What are you talking about?" I held her gaze without blinking.
I knew what she was talking about? Just wanted to be sure she knew
"Freya." She smiled saying it. Wide and certain and watching every millimetre of my expression as it landed.
I grabbed her arm.
"Ouch, Cole—easy—"
I pulled her down the hall, shoulder of her into the nearest empty room, got the door open and moved her through it and turned the lock behind us.
She hadn’t fought me once on the way there. I registered that a second too late because while I was turning the lock her hand had already found the front of my trousers, palm pressing flat and then fingers curling, and I turned back around and she was right there, close, looking up at me.
"You missed me," she said, her lips coiled up in a smile.
I got my hand around her wrist. "Don’t." My voice came out lower than I intended.
She turned her face up to mine. Her wrist stayed loose in my grip. "Tell me you. mean it then."
I didn’t tell her, because I didn’t mean it.
She smiled and her wrist turned and her fingers found the waistband and got underneath it and I put my free hand flat on the wall next to her head and kept myself where I was while she worked.
She was slow about it, deliberately slow, the way she did everything when she wanted to take something apart piece by piece. My jaw tightened. My grip on her wrist had gone loose somewhere without me choosing that and she had already used it, her hand moving steadily now.
"What do you mean you know about Freya?" I pressed my palm harder against the wall.
She laughed low, her grip tightening slightly. "You really thought that secret was going to hold forever?"
"How did you find out?" I kept my eyes on hers even though every other part of me was focused elsewhere.
"You underestimate me." Upward stroke, slow. "You always have."
I closed both hands around her wrist and held it properly. "Nobody can know. Especially not Rowan." I dropped my voice.
Her eyes came up to mine, perfectly calm. "If I wanted to tell Rowan I would have told him already."
I held her gaze and let out a slow breath. "Thank you." The word came out rough.
She said it with her hand still exactly where it was, which was deliberate, which I knew was deliberate, which did not help me the way knowing it should have.
"With what." My voice came out rougher than I intended.
She stepped back, took my hand from the wall and walked me backward until my legs hit the desk behind me. She stood between my knees and reached up and pulled my head down to hers, her mouth finding my jaw, my neck, working slowly downward while her hands moved to my belt.
"Lila."
"Quiet." She got the belt open. Got the rest of it open. Dropped to her knees in front of me and looked up and said, "Don’t move," and then took me into her mouth.
My hand went to the desk behind me and I gripped the edge of it and stared at the ceiling and stopped thinking about Nia and Freya and everything else entirely for the next two minutes.
She pulled back before I finished. Stood up, wiped the corner of her mouth with one finger, and looked at me like none of that had just happened.
"I need you to get Nia out of my underground," she said.
I stared at her. "What."
"She came looking for you the night of my party." She straightened her dress casually. "She walked into my orgy. I couldn’t exactly let her walk back out again after that."
"Lila." I pushed off the desk. "You have Nia locked up?"
"She is perfectly fine." Her voice stayed even. "A little shaken, a little angry, but fine. I need you to go down there, get her out, act like you rescued her, and make sure she keeps her mouth shut about everything she saw."
"She won’t just—"
"She is in love with you, Cole." She picked up her bag from the floor. "She told me things she should not have told me because she was trying to find you. That kind of love does not think clearly." She smoothed her hair back. "You go down there, you get her out, you keep her quiet. That is all I am asking."
"What did she tell you?" I turned back to face her.
"I won’t be telling you that." Sharp, quick, the warmth pulled back for a second. "So you can go straight to your sister with it."
"I wouldn’t tell Freya." I held her gaze steady.
"I cannot trust your loyalty right now." She stepped back, removed her hand, looked at me properly for the first time since we walked in here. "You kept something that massive from everyone in this pack. From me specifically."
"You have your own secrets." I crossed my arms.
"Not from you." No heat in it. Just flat and certain and sitting there. "Not once, Cole. Not one secret from you."
She moved past me and sat on the edge of the desk, crossing one leg over the other, looking at me from there.
"I need you to flip her." She picked up a pen from the desk and turned it between her fingers. "Not rescue her. Turn her. Make her report to me."
"Nia is completely loyal to Amaris." I shook my head. "You won’t move her."
"She is in love with you." Lila set the pen down. "Love moves people off things that loyalty holds them to forever. You know that." She tilted her head. "Who are you loyal to, Cole?"
I didn’t answer right away.
I thought about Freya, wherever she was sitting right now, waiting on a plan that had my silence baked into it. I thought about Nia underground because she came looking for me and found the wrong room. I thought about what it actually meant to be loyal to Lila in a world where Freya was no longer hidden and the whole board was shifting under everyone’s feet.
I thought about Lila’s hand and the way my thinking had gone when she used it, and how she knew that, and how she had used it on purpose from the second I grabbed her arm in that corridor.
I knew all of that.
"You." I looked at her directly. "I’m loyal to you."
"Even with your sister back."
I made myself sit in it. Actually sit in it and turn it over and come out the other side with something real, because she would know the difference.
"Yes." I held her gaze without flinching. "Even with her."
She looked at me for a long moment, reading my face, deciding whether to spend something.
Then she leaned back on the desk slowly, uncrossed her legs, and let her knees fall open, her skirt riding up, her eyes steady on mine.
"Good," she said. "Now make me cum."
