MasukChapter 5
"Hold on, kitten," he murmured against my ear. Then he slammed back inside me. The new angle made him hit even deeper, and I cried out, my nails digging into his shoulders. He held me up effortlessly, one arm banded around my waist, the other gripping my thigh. His strength was inhuman, and despite the roughness, I realized he was supporting all my weight, making sure I wouldn't fall. He fucked me against the wall with brutal force, each thrust rattling the pictures hanging nearby. My head fell back against the wall, and immediately his hand came up, cradling the back of my skull. "Can't have you hurting yourself," he growled, and the gesture was so protective, so at odds with the savage way he was taking me, that fresh tears spilled down my cheeks. He adjusted his grip, shifting me slightly, and the movement made his cock drag against that perfect spot inside me. My eighth orgasm built impossibly fast, and when it hit, I screamed so loud I was sure the entire manor could hear. Cassian groaned, his thrusts becoming erratic. "Again," he demanded. "Come for me again." "I can't... Cassian, please... I can't..." But my body didn't listen. The ninth orgasm followed the eighth, smaller but no less intense, and I felt Cassian finally lose control. He buried himself deep and came with a roar, his cock pulsing as he filled me with his release. We stayed like that for a long moment, both of us breathing hard, my body trembling in his arms. Then, gently—so gently it shocked me—he carried me back to the bed and laid me down. I thought it was over. I prayed it was over. But Cassian's eyes glinted with dark promise as he looked down at me. "We're not done yet, kitten," he said, his voice rough with renewed hunger. "Not even close." He grabbed my hips and flipped me over onto my stomach, then dragged me back toward him until I was on my hands and knees. "No... please... Cassian..." I begged, my arms shaking, barely able to hold me up. "You can beg all you want," he said, positioning himself behind me. "It only makes me harder." He entered me from behind in one brutal thrust, and I collapsed forward, my face pressing into the pillows. But Cassian wasn't having it. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled my head back, arching my spine. "No hiding from me," he growled in my ear. "I want to hear every sound you make." He set a punishing pace, his hips slapping against my ass, the sound obscene in the quiet room. His free hand came down on my ass in a sharp slap that made me yelp. "Count them," he ordered. "Wh-what?" Another slap, harder this time. "I said count them." "One," I gasped out. Slap. "Two!" He spanked me over and over, each strike sending jolts of pain-pleasure through me. But between the slaps, his hand would stroke my hip, almost soothing, before delivering another punishing blow. The contrast was maddening, the brutality mixed with gentleness that he tried to hide. By the time he reached ten, my ass was burning, and I was sobbing into the pillows. But I was also shamefully close to another orgasm."She stays in the dark for now," Roman said, final, the way he said everything, like the conversation was over whether or not everyone else agreed with him. "Until we know more ourselves. Agreed?"A pause. Then Silas: "Agreed. For now."Another pause, longer, and I realized with a lurch that they were waiting on Ezra."Fine," he said finally, and there was nothing fine about the way he said it at all.Footsteps, moving toward the door.I didn't wait to see who was coming out first. I turned and went back up the stairs two at a time, silent as I could manage on legs that were shaking again, this time for a different reason than the one they'd left me shaking for last night. I made it back into the bedroom and pushed the door shut behind me just as I heard the sound of the study door opening properly down below, voices spilling out into the hall, footsteps crossing the marble.I stood there with my back against the door, my heart going too fast, my mind turning over everything I'd just
I pressed my back against the wall at the base of the stairs, my heart slamming so hard I was sure they'd hear it through the door."The mother," Roman said, quieter now, almost like he didn't want to say it out loud even in a room he thought was private. "If she finds out who her mother actually was before we're ready to tell her—""Then she finds out." Silas cut him off. "Better from us than from someone outside this house who won't care what it does to her."There was a silence then, long enough that I thought maybe they were finished, maybe I could still slip back upstairs and pretend I'd never come down at all. Then a third voice, quieter than the other two, cut in for the first time.Ezra."None of this matters if she never finds out we knew," he said. "The second she does, she's going to understand exactly what we are. Not brothers who won an auction. Men who tracked a girl for months and let her think it was chance."Nobody answered that right away. I stood frozen against the
I woke to sunlight and silence, and for one confused second I didn't remember where I was.Then my body reminded me. Every part of me ached — my hips, my thighs, the raw spot on my throat where Magnus— no. Not Magnus. I wasn't in that world. My mind was stitching the wrong story into the wrong morning, exhaustion blurring the edges of what was real. Roman. Silas. Ezra. The Kade estate. The auction. It all came back at once, heavy and cold, and I lay still for a long moment just breathing through it.The room was empty. No sign that anyone had checked on me in the night, though I remembered — or thought I remembered — a door somewhere in the dark house, opening and closing soft, like someone hadn't wanted to be caught doing it.There was a robe draped over the chair by the window that hadn't been there before. Someone had come in while I slept. The thought made my skin crawl and, underneath the crawling, something quieter and more confused that I didn't want to look at directly.I got
I couldn't answer. I was gasping, my vision going spotty at the edges, and for one long second neither of us moved at all."Look at me." His voice had changed completely — no roughness left in it, nothing performative, just something close to alarm. He turned me, carefully, onto my side, one hand coming up to my face. "Breathe. In through your nose. Look at me and breathe."I did, shaking, and he stayed like that, still inside me, utterly motionless, his thumb moving once — just once — across my cheekbone to catch a tear I hadn't realized had fallen.He didn't say anything about it. He didn't ask if I was okay in words, didn't apologize, didn't do anything that would have let me file this moment away as proof of something. He just waited, silent, until my breathing evened out, his thumb resting against my cheek like he'd forgotten to move it.Then, the second my breathing steadied, his expression closed back over, fast, like a door shutting."Better?" he asked, flat again, all the ala
Ezra didn't touch me right away.He stood at the edge of the bed for a long moment, looking at me the way he'd looked at me in the auction house — like he was checking for cracks — except this time there was something else underneath it, something hungrier, something he'd clearly been holding back all night and had run out of reasons to keep holding."Say something," he said."What do you want me to say?""I don't know." His voice was low, rougher than it had been in the car, in the meeting room. "Something that isn't a lie."I didn't have anything that wasn't a lie. I was exhausted, marked, shaking, and the only true thing left in me was fear, and I didn't think that was what he was asking for.He climbed onto the bed and I flinched back instinctively, and something tightened in his jaw when I did — not anger, not quite, something closer to a man absorbing a hit he'd expected and still didn't like taking. He didn't stop moving toward me. He just reached out, slow, and pushed a piece
"Don't mistake care for softness," he said, voice rough now, his other hand gripping my hip hard enough to bruise exactly the way Roman's had. "I said I wouldn't damage you unnecessarily. I didn't say I'd be gentle."The whiplash of it — kindness and cruelty in the same five minutes, from the same hands — left me more disoriented than anything Roman had done, because at least Roman had never pretended to be anything other than what he was.He fucked me like that for a long time, controlled even in his roughness, never once losing the rhythm he'd set, watching my face the entire time like he was still checking, still measuring, still deciding something about me with every reaction he pulled out of my body. My third orgasm of the night crested slow and then broke all at once, and I heard myself say his name without meaning to, and something crossed his face when I did — quick, unreadable, gone before I could name it."Again," he said, voice tight now, his own control finally starting to







