Page 34 of Liar's Heart
I’m fisting the blanket beneath us in an effort to keep my hands to myself. I know that if I get my hands in her hair, I won’t be able to stop myself from taking control from her and fucking her face, and that’s not what this is about. So into the blanket they go, clutching the fabric so tightly I wouldn't besurprised if it tears. And since I’m already committed to gentlemanly manners, I give Merrick a warning. “I’m close, baby. Fuck.”
She hums, then reaches for one of my hands. I’m not sure what she’s trying to do—hold my hand? But then she opens my palm and brings it to the front of her throat, wrapping my fingers around her neck. I groan, and she looks up at me, holding my gaze as she relaxes her throat and takes me deep. The muscles in her throat work around me, squeezing hard as she fights her survival instincts and lets herself choke. I can feel her throat expanding and contracting under my palm, the way my cock distorts her larynx as she struggles. She bobs up and down, tears running down her face, and I feel my dick pushing in and out of her throat from the outside.
I’m about to lose my mindandmy load. I manage to grunt out a final warning through gritted teeth, only to watch my wife double down on her enthusiasm. A few more strokes of her silky, hot mouth, and I spill into it with a roar. My vision goes white around the edges, ears ringing while I die a small death at the mercy of my magnificent reaper. Merrick steadily works me through it all, taking everything I give her like my cum is a well-earned prize.
My wife finishes and releases me, coming up while licking her lips. She looks so much like the cat that got the cream, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear her start purring. I pull her into me and kiss her deeply, needing to express my gratitude. She opens for me, and the taste of myself on her combined with her swollen lips and tear-streaked cheeks is so fucking erotic, I’m about to beg my dick to miraculously rally for round three. I end the kiss and rest my forehead against hers. “You’re perfect,” I tell her. “You’re so fucking perfect. And all fucking mine.”
She pulls back, and unease begins clouding her features before she says, “I need to talk to you about something.”
I was wondering if we were going to do this today. Orever. But after yesterday, I hoped things had changed enough between us that we might be able to finally start putting some of our cards on the table soon. And then after today…
Jules is a competent enough hacker; I’ll give her that. She disrupted the camera feed in here long enough to loop back video of Merrick standing in front of the filing cabinet, reading something. Merrick moved around enough for it to appear like a live feed still, but not enough to make the looped footage noticeable. If I hadn't gotten an alert about the disruption to the feed and just happened to log in and pull it up, it might’ve taken me a while to figure it out and dig deeper. I could have remotely reset the feed and taken my cameras back easily, but then Jules would have known and called Merrick off. And I really wanted to know what my clever little fox was up to.
Growing up under the heavy thumb of Alec Sinclair taught me a lot about misdirection. Show someone what they want to see—what they think they should see—and more often than not, they’ll stop looking entirely. Why keep searching for something you’ve already found? Why look for a different cameranotconnected to the house’s CCTV when you’re staring at a sufficiently robust system? I let Jules keep the two cameras she knew about while watching Merrick from a third.
I know what she found in that file. And it killed me to sit in my office and watch the color drain from her face while she read. To not run home and tell her everything, holding her hands steady so they’d stop shaking. That paperwork has been sitting there, waiting for her to find it, since the day after our wedding when she asked for some space and I gave it to her. I sat in my study, toying with the dagger she’d just given me, and decided then that I wasn’t going to hide those documents from her. My original plan was to wait until our relationship felt less tenuous before telling her about the will, but that didn’t feel right. It shouldn't be completely up to me, andthe decision shouldn't hinge on my feelings alone. So I moved the file from a safe to the unlocked cabinet and updated Merrick’s biometric access to include the study. If she found them before we had that talk, then so be it.
I still hated sitting back and watching it happen. Hated watching her cram the file back into the drawer and take off out of the room, face screwed up, trying to hold herself together long enough to get somewhere safe to fall apart. And as much as I feel we need to have this conversation, I needed her to initiate it. To take her time processing and come to me when she was ready. I don’t think she’d listen to what I have to say otherwise.
I just hope it ends with my heart in her hands, metaphorically and not literally.
My thumb strokes her cheek, offering reassurance and comfort. “What is it?”
She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, like she's either trying to find the words or work up the courage. Maybe both. Then with a heavy sigh, she stands up, gestures at me to wait, and walks to the cabinet. She goes right to the file, pulling it out and closing the drawer before returning to our spot in front of the fire. Sitting down across from me, she opens the folder, removes Ox's will, and sets both down on the floor between us. Almost in sync, we lift our eyes from the piece of paper that initiated our marriage eight years ago to each other's faces. Swallowing, I ask, “What do you want to know?”
“I…”I don't know what I thought Ender’s reaction to being confronted with Ox's will would be, but I wasn't expecting this. “I want to know everything, but I don't even know where to start.” I swallow, lick my lips, and mull it over for a moment. There are so many questions, and they all tangle together. Trying to suss out which one constitutes the beginning isn't getting me anywhere, so I go with the one that clangs the loudest in my head: “Eight years?”
He clears his throat and nods. “Eight years.”
“Why didn't you say something? You had to have known where I lived or been able to get my phone number. Email. Something.Anything.”
My husband’s eyes soften, the little guardedness they held fading. “Would you have listened if I’d tried? Would you have even met with me?”
My head shakes of its own accord. “No.” As soon as the word comes out, I know it's wrong, so I amend. “I might have met with you, but it would have been to try to kill you.”
A wry smile overtakes his face. “That's what I thought.” He pauses, weighing his next words before quietly confessing, “I went to see you once.”
It feels like someone just dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. Before I can recover enough to ask any of the new questions that statement brought with it, he continues. “I went to Ox's funeral. I knew I wouldn't have been welcomed there, so I stayed back and hidden. I had every intention of going to you a few days after that and trying to talk to you. I wasn't planning to tell you about this”—he taps the will with a finger—“yet, but I wasn't going to wait long before I did. I just wanted to soften the blow a little first before dropping that bomb on you.”
“But you didn't.”
“No,” he agrees. “I didn't.”
Shifting his weight, he reaches a tentative hand toward me, giving me plenty of time to reject his touch if I want to. I can't tell if he's seeking to comfort me or himself, but it warms my heart anyway. I close the distance between us and sit down beside him, but that's not close enough for my husband. Tugging my hand to get me to follow him, he moves us to the couch he'd had his back against, sitting down first and then pulling me on top of him so I’m straddling his lap. He wraps his arms around my torso and pulls me tight to him, burying his nose in my neck and breathing deeply. I watch his shoulders slowly begin to drop as he does, the tension visibly leaving his body now that our hearts are pressed together.
With a bracing breath, he begins. “A Sinclair has held the title of Charon basically as long as the position has existed. I grew up knowing that my family's legacy is death and violence, and that it was going to be mine too. That when I grew up, I'd become a Ferryman, and then, eventually, Charon. There were no other routes in life for me. My father made that very clear.
“He never hid his business from me, what being Charon means. He thought exposing me to it early would help me take to it better in the long run. Pain was his favorite motivator,and if he thought I was too soft, he’d do his best to carve it out of me. The sooner, the better.”
Ender takes one of my hands and guides it to his upper arm before gently running my fingers across the tattooed skin. At first, I’m not sure what I’m feeling for, but it doesn’t take long to piece together what he’s trying to show me. Underneath the skulls and hourglasses and flowers, hidden by the black ink, are scars. I don’t know how I’ve missed them before now. He has scarring in other places—maybe a bit more than average, but not bad considering his former line of work—but they’reeverywhereon his upper arms. Some are wider and flatter, like burns, but most are thin cuts layered on top of each other. Deliberate, precise cuts that were carved into a child’s skin. The more of them I feel, the higher the bile rises in my stomach.
Rotating his arm, I examine the inside of his bicep, and it’s somehow worse than the outside on this arm. A black crow obscures a sunken area about the length and width of three of my fingers. I trace the edges of it now that I’ve found it, feeling for the rippled scar tissue to guide me. “That one was particularly bad,” Ender says, his voice hollow. “I’m sure you’d be surprised to learn that one of his favorite pastimes was beating the shit out of my mom. But that day, Mom was hysterical, sobbing and screaming about how she was going to tell someone something, and they deserved to know… told Alec orphaning me might be worth it. He was eerily calm, just standing there with her wrist in his hand like a statue while she railed against him. I stepped between them and tried to stop him. He still snapped her wrist like it was kindling. Told her he’d fillet her tongue if she tried, then gave her a demonstration on me.”
My hands are trembling, just like my voice. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen,” he says. Every last molecule of air is punched out of my lungs at his words. “Old enough that my interferencewas starting to become a problem for him, and he had to escalate to knock me back in line. The pain was excruciating. The healing was worse. It takes a long time for your body to rebuild that much tissue and scar over, and it fucking burns the whole time your skin is trying to knit itself back together. But I’ll be damned if knowing that next time he’d take something worse than my skin didn’t keep us both on our best behavior for a long time.
“His ultimate goal for me was to create a monster to do his bidding, one who would eventually inherit his throne. And I made a very good monster. But I was one trapped in a cage, in a life I didn’t want, with no way out. For a long time, I survived by being exactly what I was expected to be and coping the best I could. Drugs, women, torture—anything that brought either euphoria or numbness. I did it all.
