The winding stops, the shimmering tension burns, and then I’m fully imploding, contracting down on those cocks so hard it hurts, so hard I can feel my own stomach muscles bunching and jerking, electricity sparking along my scalp, sizzling across my skin.

“Fuck, I can’t stop,” Embry says as I writhe and moan underneath him. “I gotta—I have to—”

“Do it,” Ash says roughly. “Show me how much you like using my wife. Show me how grateful you are.”

Embry obliges, every muscle standing out in sharp, tense lines as he mumbles a shit holy shit and begins filling me full of his cum. “Oh Greer, oh fuck, baby, that feels so good.” He fucks through his climax, drawing it out with more deep strokes, throbbing hard enough I can feel it even as my own orgasm lingers on.

“Yeah,” he groans, pulling up a little and using the new angle to milk the last of his climax into me. “That is so good, baby. So fucking good.”

He withdraws with a noise that can only be described as wounded wonder, and then I feel what he’s left in me, the warm wet of his seed as it slowly drips out. Embry watches it with hungry eyes, watches as Ash reaches down to see what Embry was able to give me. Ash makes a growl of approval, the evidence that his friend has used me to his completion stirring up some deep animal lust in him.

“My turn,” he rasps into my ear. He moves his hips underneath me, his powerful torso and thighs hard at work to drive his cock in and out of my ass, and I’m surprised to find that it doesn’t hurt at all now. It only feels, a different kind of feel from my pussy, but just as intense, just as powerful. Maybe even more so for how much vulnerability and surrender are needed for it. With a hand on my cum-wet pussy and another hand on my arched throat, it only takes my husband ten or fifteen strokes to reach his tipping point. His body is a solid slab of sweaty, grunting muscle underneath me, his hands like the best kind of chains, and his erection so big and wedged so deep. I feel that big cock get impossibly bigger, those hard muscles even harder, and then he says in a tight voice, “Here it comes, princess. Here it comes.”

There are no words for feeling my husband come inside me. After everything I’ve been through: my abduction, fucking his prince, his discipline, his pleasure, the harmony the three of us reached together, so like our wedding night. The vulnerable and delicious noises he makes now, and the hot pulse of his ejaculating in a place no one else has been, and the close and sweaty embrace—I realize I’m crying, and it’s more than the release a good scene can give me, it’s deeper and more important than that. It’s the reassurance that nothing can rupture the love this man feels for me, no matter how far I am taken or how far I run, no matter what I’ve done with Embry. It’s the reassurance that no amount of violence or cruelty can rupture my faith in myself, my agency and ability to choose and to love.

This is marriage, I think dizzily. Joy and pain, exposed and exchanged.

Joy and pain, shared.

And as I cry, as Ash drains himself into me with long, vicious exhales, as Embry watches us both with his curious prince’s mix of torture and desire, I can still faintly taste apples in my mouth, no longer bitter but sweet. And I know that what happened won’t ever leave me—not really. Not in the way I’d like for it to. But it won’t define me, it won’t spoil me for marriage or fucking or love or forgiveness.

Ash was right—I thought I was weak. Even if I hadn’t articulated it to myself, the fear was there, that I was guilty or complicit somehow, and if not those things, then fear that I wouldn’t have strength to endure pain or roughness from the man I’d married—the man I married precisely because I wanted pain and roughness from him. Ash proved me wrong on every front.

That man.

That smart, cruel, kingly man.

And there’s a moment, after the shower, after he and Embry spend a delicious hour between my legs eating me and making out with each other, after Embry falls asleep. Ash rolls me over and slides into my pussy without preamble or permission—because when we’re in private, I’m his and he requires neither of those things. And he looks into my face and asks, “Whose pain is it?”

The answer comes without thought, without struggle.

“Yours, Mr. President. It’s all yours.”

18

Embry

after

Two days later and I’m in Vivienne Moore’s mansion, drinking gin and looking out over the lake. The summer wind in Washington is still cool, still accompanied by clouds and drizzle, and I’m thankful for the roofed balcony and my light jacket as I watch rain dimple the lake. I check my phone, fire off a couple short emails. I’m technically on a family trip, a vacation, and so my chief of staff has been limiting how much she sends my way, but I crave work more than I crave leisure. It’s a welcome distraction after the rescue and the reunion. The forced separation.

But Merlin was clear on that, and as much as I resent it, I agree with him.

“This,” he said at Camp David the second day after we rescued Greer, “can’t be obvious.”

Ash had set the tone when Merlin walked in, tucking Greer into his side and clasping my hand unabashedly in his own. I clasped tightly back. After the abduction, everything felt so fragile, so tenuous, that we needed to cling to each other. More than that, it felt strangely nice to stand together so openly in front of someone, to face someone with honesty, to say I love two people and they love me.

Besides, Merlin knew the history between Ash and me. It wasn’t paranoia to think he’d deduce our unconventional arrangement eventually.