Dukes of Madness: Royals of Forsyth U (Royals of Forsyth University Book 5)
Dukes of Madness: Chapter 2

I could be unconscious for minutes, hours, or even days. Time doesn’t matter—not anymore. Everything is a series of ‘forevers’ now. Forever to drive away from my father’s. Forever to get out of the car. Forever to walk through the doors. Forever to withstand the elevator. I begin rousing to the thought that it can’t possibly be one life when it feels as though I’ve lived so many.

“Watch her head,” a voice says.

Another replies, “This will wake her up, right?” There’s an undercurrent of panic to the voice, and there’s something familiar about it. It invokes the memory of air and night, hurt and exposure, a smile as sharp as a knife’s blade, and a touch as piercing as a needle.

Remy.

I feel weightless yet unimaginably heavy, as if I’m being cradled by a loud gravity, swaying and lurching. It doesn’t take long to realize why. I remember Sy’s scent, but I remember Remy’s, too. Sharp and masculine, but with an edge of metal. I smell it now, realizing that my nose is an inch from his neck, his strong arms holding me against his chest. The points where our skin touches feels hot enough to singe me, but I’m shivering, and the more I swim back into consciousness, the tighter my jaw gets, teeth beginning to chatter.

“Is it warm enough?” Remy’s voice rumbles.

There’s an odd rustling sound—water, I realize—and then Sy’s voice answers, “Yeah, it’s good. Hey, look at me. Head check?”

There’s a pause, and then Remy’s muttered, “Seven.”

Sy responds, “Okay. Go ahead and put her in.”

I jolt toward awareness at his words. Put me in? Into the chest? Into the elevator? Where are they going to put me now? I groan, pushing weakly at Remy’s arm. Why won’t they just leave me be? When is it going to stop?

“She’s waking up,” Remy says, tightening his grip. There’s relief in the rumble beneath my ear. I feel the sway of him walking and I’m powerless to stop the descent when he bends, lowering me, dropping me, putting me in.

The panic is short-lived because suddenly, I’m immersed in warmth, my nerves awakening with the pinpricks of heat that level out into the loss of my shivers. When my eyes finally open, it’s to the sight of my naked body inside a bathtub, steam rising lazily from the water that covers my chest. There’s a hand cradling the back of my head, but when I wrestle my exhausted gaze up to blazing blue eyes, it slides away.

“Sy?” I rasp out.

“There you are,” he says, crouched like an awkward, bulging gargoyle beside the tub. He must see the question in my eyes, because he explains, “You passed out on the way up. Don’t fiddle with that.” He grabs my hand when I try to rub it, turning to show me something taped to my skin. “We’ve got you on an IV. It’s a saline solution. You’ll be alright; we’re just getting some fluids into you.”

Remy is standing beside him, reaching up to hook the IV bag to the rod above the tub, but he doesn’t take his eyes off mine. That razor-edged smile quirks his lips. “You’ve got good veins, Vinny.”

Everything feels hazy and… off. The more I let my gaze take in the bathroom—the bathroom at the top of the tower, I realize—the more suspicious I get about it. Sy rescued me. He brought me back. He’s making me better. Warming me up. Staring at me with those shrewd, worried eyes. And Remy is restless, fussing with the IV tubing. There’s a bruise yellowing on his jaw, and a disquiet brewing in his eyes, and none of this makes sense.

None of this adds up.

“Is this real?” I ask him. “Am I… am I really here?”

In my periphery, I can see Sy pull a confused face, but Remy…

Remy lowers to a crouch and holds my stare, the lines of his face solemn and sure. “This is real.” But he knows better than anyone that words won’t do. When he reaches up to take off his shirt, I find my eyes drawn to the ink there. How many times have I seen those words on his stomach? Memento Mori. How many times have my eyes traced the scar below it—the scar I’d made myself, the first night I met him?

But what Remy shows me is the tattoo on his arm.

“Our Lady of Sorrows,” he says, taking my hand. “Remember?”

Slowly, I count the points of the swords, my fingertips brushing over the warm skin. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. My hand falls away, heavy but reluctant.

Sy catches it, frowning at my pinky. “I think your finger might be broken.”

I look at it dispassionately, the swelling and bruising. “It is.” For no reason I can think of, my eyes go to their own hands. Remy’s knuckles are red and bruised. Sy’s are bearing shallow little cuts all over, some more scabbed than others.

Sy shoots Remy a dark look and gently places my hand on the lip of the tub. Instantly, Remy disappears. “What else? Is anything else broken? Does anything hurt?” Sy asks. The gentleness of his voice fits like a glove that’s two sizes too small, as if he’s writhing to fit into the mildness of it. Watching Sy make an attempt at compassion is like watching a bear use a pair of tweezers.

“I don’t think so,” I answer, and it’s only now that the awareness of my body hits me. Bare. Exposed. Scrutinized by his blue eyes. I cover my breasts with the arm that isn’t hooked to the IV.

Sy clears his throat. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” he says, shifting toward my head. “Can you dunk your head?”

I feel bizarrely calm, too tired to wonder what’s going to come next as I slide myself beneath the water. By the time Remy returns with an ice pack and a small, tattered towel, Sy already has my hair lathered up. It feels a bit like I’m a lost dog being tended to, but unlike before, the thought arrives to me without the sharp edge of acrimony. Sy’s fingers roughly massage my scalp and I bring my knees to my chest, hugging them as he aggressively scrubs the last four days away.

I feel hollowed out, too empty to contain a full emotion, but there’s a small flip in my chest at the way Remy watches me, his eyes never leaving mine. There’s a time I wouldn’t have been able to hold that stare. Too intense, too searching, unbearably plunderous. Now, I find myself unable to look away, as if some part of me is clinging to the squirming discomfort of being under his focus. The last time I saw him, he was pushing our mouths together, demanding yet somehow painfully sweet.

Sy says, “Dunk,” and I rearrange my limbs, sliding down with muscles that don’t feel like my own anymore.

Just as Sy runs a sponge over the ridge of my spine, Remy says, “Let’s go.”

Sy throws a glance at him. “What? She only has one hand.”

Remy grabs Sy’s upper arm, coaxing him up. “She’s trying to find her body. Let her clean up and we’ll come back.”

I stare at him, stunned to have this grasping confusion put into words, and then I fumble for the sponge. “I can do it.”

Sy gives me a look that’s as skeptical as I feel, but levers himself up. My neck cranes as he stretches to his full height, like he’s slipping back into his own skin. “Call us when you’re…” He makes a vague gesture, waving a hand toward my body, and then turns to lumber out into the living room, Remy following.

They stay close enough that I can hear the soft hush of their voices, the words indistinct, fluttering through the door like thin, tattered threads. Whatever they’re saying, there’s an urgency to the discussion, Remy’s voice more of a hiss than anything.

I wash myself clumsily but violently, scrubbing away the sweat and fear until my skin turns an angry red. Inch by inch, I do just as Remy said. I find my body again. These are my knees, bruised and sore. These are my calves, tired and strained. These are my thighs, soft and weak. None of it feels like mine, but it doesn’t feel like anyone else’s either. These are limbs, patches of skin, miles of veins and tangles of tendon, ready to be called home for whoever comes to claim them. I conquer them methodically, wiggling my toes to remind my feet whom they belong to, curling my ankles, inflating my lungs, blinking my eyelids. I remember that I’m made up of these mechanical parts, and I set each cog into motion, rusty joints and stilted breaths, until I can call them my own. Unlike the clock above, I refuse to be perpetually broken.

By the time I’m done washing, I can barely sit up straight. The exhaustion captures me, pushing me down. It takes a surge of energy that I’m not sure I possess to call out to Sy.

“I’m done.”

The words are thin and weak, but somehow he hears them, striding through the door with a large, fluffy towel in his hand. Remy hangs back as I unplug the drain, struggling to lift myself out of the water. But Sy doesn’t make me. He throws the towel over me and effortlessly scoops me up, giving me one adjusting bounce before I settle against his chest. It’s undignified, this entire thing one humiliation after the other, but my arms immediately wind around his neck, cheek resting against his shoulder as he brushes past Remy, carrying me.

It isn’t until I see the main room, my loft and the clock, the empty couches and vacant chairs, that my muscles seize with an abrupt panic. “Don’t,” I say, voice cracking miserably. “Don’t let him take me back.”

“I have this whole problem with the concept of wasted effort,” Sy rumbles, ambling toward the door closest to my loft—his bedroom. “No one’s taking you back.”

A nervous glance over Sy’s shoulder reveals that Remy is close behind, carrying the IV bag. “He’s not here,” he says, hanging close when Sy pauses by the bed. “Nick won’t be back. Not for a while.” Lower, he adds, “Not if I have anything to say about it.” There’s a sharp, vengeful glint in his eye as he hooks the bag to the iron bedpost.

The bed looks too good to be real. I remember the last time I was in it. The darkness, the paralysis, the fear, the slow build of pleasure as Sy rutted between my legs, and then the white-hot release of it. I remember it, but it feels like another life to consider this man—the same man who’s so carefully lowering me to my feet—is the same one who gasped raggedly into my neck and came undone above me, bruising and selfish.

Sy holds me upright, tucking the towel around me as Remy leaves the room. I’m not sure at first what they’re waiting for, my gaze drawn to the neatly made bed.

He tightens his grip on my waist. “Just a little bit longer.”

I swing my gaze to his, wondering what the endgame is here. “A little bit longer until what?” I ask, knowing this must be it. The catch. The other shoe dropping. The condition.

But he just gives me a strange look, saying, “Until you can rest.”

Remy comes back then, holding an old duffle bag. The flinch that jolts me when he strolls through the door is something I might come to feel embarrassed about later. “Sy rounded up all your stuff before Nick could throw it out,” he explains, unzipping the bag and turning it over onto the bed. Out tumbles just about everything I’d spent two weeks amassing here: Five books, six pairs of underwear, two bras, two t-shirts, two strappy tops, three pairs of pants, two pairs of shorts, one sweater, a hairbrush, and a pair of mismatched socks.

Remy gives the bag another shake, but when nothing else emerges, he turns it over, searching the corners of the duffle for something. “That’s it?” he says, throwing me an incredulous look. “These are all your clothes?” I blink in response and Remy sighs, picking up one of the more sensible pairs of panties. “We’ll deal with that later.” He crouches, giving my ankle a tap. “Lift.”

I clutch Sy’s shoulders as Remy pulls the panties up my legs, his warm knuckles grazing the soft skin of my thighs as he shimmies them upward. I’d welcome the heat of embarrassment, but I’m too tired for even that. He pushes the towel up with it and there’s a suspended moment where his fingertips linger over the bruises darkening my legs. He doesn’t poke or prod; he simply looks at them, an oddly pensive look capturing his features.

It’s short-lived once the towel flutters to the floor, his eyes jerking up to my exposed breasts. But once he stands, he doesn’t reach for anything else from the pile. He grabs a sweatshirt hanging on the back of Sy’s door, working it gently over my head, feeding the IV bag and tube through the wide sleeve before carefully threading my hand in behind it.

Afterward, Sy gives me to him.

That’s precisely what it feels like when he steps away, placing Remy’s hands on my waist. “Get her into bed. I’ll heat something up.” On the way out the door, he mutters, “…going to drag ass at my physics lecture in six hours.”

Remy doesn’t push me into the bed so much as he tips me toward it. There’s a wild energy to him that might make my hair stand on end if my body had the energy to sustain it. As it is, I find it hard to focus on anything but the unending softness of the mattress and the empty doorway.

I can’t help the instinct—nearing on premonition—that Nick is going to suddenly walk through it.

“You’re not saying much,” Remy says, moving my sad pile of clothes aside. “What’s with all the burnt umber? Did they scare your voice away?” The words themselves strike me as teasing, but the intensity of his stare imparts them with such a painful earnestness that a lump rises to my throat.

Not knowing how to answer that, I remain silent.

He exhales hard, taking the marker out from behind his ear. “Sy makes me do this thing sometimes. He calls it a head check. Scale of one to ten.” He perches on the side of the bed, picking up the hairbrush beside the table. He inspects it before uncapping his marker, pressing the felt to the back of the brush. “Ten is the best you can be. You know what’s real, so much that you don’t even think to question it, but you also feel it. The realness, I mean. Everything is crisp and clean, like a new sheet of white paper.”

The back of the brush is almost completely black now, and he pauses, looking down at his forearm. He traces the scar he’d slashed there that day we were up in the belfry.

“One is the worst you can be. Nothing feels real except for the certainty that nothing is real, and that’s the dangerous part about it. People like my dad… they think I’m just weak-kneed. But the truth is, I’m never more confident than when I’m at one on a head check. It’s because they burrowed in.” He presses two fingers to his temple, an angry hurt filling his eyes. “They dug into the fleshy parts and burned away the story, but the sparks can sense the empty places. At least, that’s what Sy says.” When he finally emerges from his thoughts to look at me, it’s with inquisitive eyes. “I know it’s not the same with you, but do you think you can—”

“Five.” Only a portion of that made any sense, but this answer feels right. “I’m… a five.”

I don’t see the shadows haunting his expression until they fade away, leaving a peculiar grin. “Ah, five’s not so bad. I’ve had some good times at a five. Stole a car and took it all the way to Northridge, no headlights the whole way.”

Remy pushes me up into a sitting position, and I can’t find it in me to be suspicious when he slides into the bed behind me, pulling me back into his chest and gathering up my hair.

“I was going to come for you that first day,” he says, running the brush through the ends of my hair. His nose is so close to the shell of my ear that I can hear the breath he speaks the words with. “Sy made me wait, though. He said if we did it wrong, they could hurt you. It made sense at the time. Sy isn’t like the rest of us. Guy’s never had a passing thought in his life. He needs to catch them, wrestle them down, make them say ‘uncle’.” He puffs a low laugh, his chest expanding against my back. Abruptly, he thrusts the brush in front of me, voice coming out in a muttered rush. “But I wanted to. See?” He only gives me a second to look at the scribble-painted plastic, dried but still giving off a distinct marker-odor, before returning the bristles to my hair.

There’s a suspended moment where my eyes fall closed at the rhythm of the bristles, pulling me back—releasing, pulling, releasing—and I don’t even try to decipher what that’s about. I know the low burn of satisfied comfort in my chest isn’t real. This is just so much better than being in the box. But I feel it, all the same, and for a second, I become liquid-lax, melting into the hard, powerful cradle of Remy’s body.

And then I feel him.

His cock is hard against the small of my back.

Gradually, my muscles regain their tension, and Remy, intuitive as he is, gives a deep hum.

“It’s your skin,” he whispers, reaching around me to touch the knees I’ve drawn to my chest. “I’ve never seen anyone bruise as pretty as you. Do they hurt?”

I swallow thickly, nodding, but I know now what I need to do. It’s almost a relief, knowing the cost. Funny that I used to think myself above it, as if my body were so sacred that it was too much to pay. Now, I easily reach behind myself, grasping the hardness beneath the denim of his jeans.

He releases a quiet breath, grabbing my wrist and prying it away. “It’s not like that, Vinny.” Gently, he places my hand into my lap, resuming the brush’s strokes through my hair. “It’s the violet. I like the way it looks, not the way it hurts.”

It’d throw me off kilter if I were on it to begin with. As it is, it’s easy to sink back into him, taking the reprieve at face value. Maybe there will come a time when I need to repay all this tenderness. When it comes, I resolve to remember the way I’m feeling right now, so grateful to be in a place where warmth and space and softness even exist. It doesn’t mean I’ll forget that these men are erratic—hot and cold—vicious one minute, sweet the next. It’s a constant rollercoaster, and I’m too tired right now to try to do anything but take advantage of the highs and prepare myself for the lows.

The long, gentle brushstrokes and familiar warmth of Remy’s body lulls me into a deep, consuming sleep. It’s peaceful. Calm. The exact opposite of who I know these men to be: agents of chaos.

I also know better than to think this is going to last.

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