Page 17 of Choke

This is where I bend so that Atlas doesn’t break. Our little game soothes his resentment and allows me to feel like I’m taking care of him.

I back up until I hit the wall, allowing Atlas to see that I’m trapped. Shrugging, I flash him my most sincere smile. It won’t work on him because he knows what I truly am, but he enjoys these games where he has the upper hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s probably still at work.”

Atlas’s body covers mine as he reaches for his tie and tugs it off his neck. He doesn’t say a word as he wraps the silk around my throat. I cough, and my hand automatically moves to the restrictive silk.

Atlas shoves two fingers between the silk and my flesh. “Not too tight, but tight enough to make sure you know your place.”

My lips twitch at his brazen words—words I’ve said to him in the past. I never thought I’d bend for someone like this, allow them to control me, but here we are.

It didn’t start like this. Atlas and I found each other amid violence and resentment. Two broken people, abandoned and alone, needing a place to feel safe and angry.

“Will you ever say no to him?” Atlas asked as he plopped down beside me on the concrete steps, puffing away on his cigarette.

Fuckin’ entitled jerk.

While sneering at his father’s underlings, the kingdom’s prince refused to soil his delicate hands. I knew what I was—asoldier for Marcus Meyer. I knew I was serving the devil, but I resented his son sitting at our table when he knew nothing of the life we led.

I glanced at the green pasture before me, relishing the serenity of the Meyer country estate. “It’s a job. Gotta eat.”

“Plenty of jobs out there that don’t require getting your hands bloody.”

“None that pay as well.”

“Money isn’t everything.”

I laughed. “The only people who say that are those who have it.”

That seemed to shut Atlas up. He didn’t have a quick answer to deny a fundamental truth. I appreciated that he wasn’t trying to deny our stations in life to feel better. So many times, people wanted to believe they were better. They cozied up to the lesser mortals to improve their reflection when they gazed into the mirror. Atlas wasn’t trying to pull that shit on me. Good thing for him he didn’t because it would be the quickest way to get his pretty boy face bashed in.

We sat in silence—it unnerved me how comfortable it was. I couldn’t do this with others. I would need to fill the void of silence with mindless chatter.

“I hate my life,” Atlas whispered, but those four words were so loud that they shattered the silence. “All the money, top-tier education, and villas in the Riviera are worthless when all you can think about is burning it all down.”

“What’s so horrible about your life, Atlas? Did Daddy not buy you the car you wanted?”

“My father is a monster, Callum. A vicious, selfish piece of human trash. He’s a weak man. A small man. A man who knows he can’t wield power of any value, so he cheats, lies, manipulates, abuses, and kills to feel. My life, the life you covetand see as some sort of fairytale, is nothing but a simmering nightmare, ready to pull me under and suffocate me.”

I chuckle. “I slit the throats of people who trash talk Marcus Meyer.”

Atlas’s warm hand enveloped my cold one, and he pressed a wooden handle into my palm, pulling my arm toward his throat. “That’s why I told you.”

A vast emptiness spread through my chest at the broken plea in his voice. Each word he uttered was a piercing shard of glass cutting into my already mangled heart. Sadness saturated Atlas’s eyes, a bone-deep pain encapsulating his soul in a fiery inferno destined for destruction.

“Atlas,” I said, my voice low and steady, “I might be a murderer, but I’m not killing you.”

“You’d be providing me with mercy.” Atlas pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons before showing me the screen. “It’s fifty million. My mother left it to me. It’s all yours. You could leave here. Start a life. A good life free from all this insanity. It’s all yours if you do this one thing.”

I let his words linger between us, allowing their poison to fester and suffocate me as they permeate my ears. Fifty million was a lot of money. But a small voice in my mind was shouting at me, repeating the same two words on a loop.Save him.At that moment, I understood my purpose in life. My reason for being there was to save Atlas Meyer.

“What are you thinking about, Callum?”

Atlas’s voice pulls me back from the past. I stare into his eyes and feel the sense of peace that always overcomes me when I’m with him. Then the guilt hits. The guilt that I can’t give him what he wants. What he craves. Stability.

“How I’ve betrayed all the things I promised to give you.”

Atlas smiles, and I swear all the air abandons my lungs at his sheer beauty. Atlas puts up with a lot from me. More than anyother man would. When we met, I thought he’d be my world, the only thing I’d ever need. For years, Atlas was my only reason for breathing. The day I refused to kill him was the day he saved me. He gave me back a shred of humanity when all I knew was brutality.

Atlas leans forward and brushes his lips to the tip of my nose. “Why are you still hiding from me? I’ll never turn my back on you, Cal.”

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