Not to be outdone, Marcus shed his shorts too, eager to get under the cover of the bubbling surface of the spa before his dick decided it wasn’t as exhausted as the rest of his body. It still hadn’t fully recovered from what he’d witnessed the day before or the dreams he’d been so rudely awakened from earlier.
Knox’s bare ass was even paler than the rest of him, inspiring a chuckle from Marcus as he finished stripping and took up a spot on the opposite side of the spa. Damn if the jets didn’t feel incredible massaging his back and ass. This had been a great idea.
“Are you laughing at me?” Knox glared even as he sank gingerly into the frothing water. Fortunately, it didn’t quite reach the gash in his chest. Kennedy probably wouldn’t have approved if it had.
“Not the way you think.” Marcus shook his head. “Just noticing you could stand to go naked in the sun a bit more.”
“And broil my ass? No fucking thank you.” Knox huffed, but his gaze lingered on Marcus’s bare torso, which was pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum. “I remember one time when I was living on the streets during the summer, not too long before I met Kennedy, I fell asleep in the park. During the day the cops would leave me alone—I could hide in among the rest of the people hanging out on the grass. But I was so fucking tired I slept in the sun all damn day. Got blisters everywhere. Still have a few scars.” He pointed to one that was going to seem minor compared to the trail left by the bullet skimming his pecs.
Marcus wasn’t heartless. “It sounds like you had it rough growing up. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” Knox shrugged one shoulder, then sighed as he relaxed against the jets, letting them massage the soreness from his muscles.
“No, but I recognize that I got lucky in the family lottery and I wish everyone could say the same.” Marcus smiled softly as he thought about his mom and dad.
“Tell me about them.” Knox wasn’t high pressure. Hell, he didn’t even have his eyes open.
Marcus was proud of his family and he didn’t mind sharing. “My mom is a kickass intellectual property lawyer, and my dad owns an independent pharmacy. They’ve been together since they were in eighth grade and they worked their butts off to make sure that my sister and I had everything we needed and then some growing up. Most of all, their love. They supported me when I went to school for criminal justice and afterward when I got disillusioned by how broken the system I was supposed to be upholding turned out to be. I got in trouble for saying so a little too loudly on the force, and when Jordan heard about my case, he approached me to come work for Shields, where we might sometimes break the rules, but for all the right reasons. My fam doesn’t know exactly what we’re up to, but they are smart enough to know this isn’t a simple security firm. And somehow they’re still proud of me. My mom said she has plenty of lawyer friends if I ever need them to get one of us out of a bind.”
“So you’re vigilantes?” Knox wondered.
“I guess. Kind of. We operate in a gray area. Sanctioned and hired by official agencies to do what they can’t when there’s too much red tape tying their hands. At the very least, they look the other way and drop us intel breadcrumbs that lead us to messy situations we can clean up.” Marcus sank deeper into the water, letting it wash away the memories of some of the threats he’d eliminated. It wasn’t that he liked killing people, it was that sometimes doing so was better than letting them keep hurting innocent people. He didn’t regret it. And if that made him a psychopath, well, so be it.
“At least there’s a code of honor to what you’re doing.” Knox rested his head on the edge of the spa. “Where I came from, everyone was scrambling to survive and if that meant you dragged someone else down to get ahead…”
“Is that how you got mixed up with the Vipers?” Marcus asked. He couldn’t believe Kennedy would have involved herself with him if he’d already been headed down that path.
Knox let out a harsh laugh. “Nah. Actually was trying to do the right thing too. But it didn’t work out. I was destined to be gutter trash.”
“What does that mean?” Marcus sat up straighter, not that Knox noticed with his eyes still scrunched as if he could block out the memories.
“I was seventeen when I fell for Kennedy. Believed the stuff she told me about how we could make a better future for ourselves. And that things didn’t have to be like they’d turned out for my mom. So when I got approached by some undercover cop to be a mole, and bring them some evidence as a kind of tryout for their program, I took it.”
Marcus didn’t interrupt, afraid Knox might clam up at the slightest hint of judgment.
“The problem was that to get what he needed, I had to fit in. I had to be one of them, at least for a while. I didn’t think it would be an issue. Buy a little from them, smoke it with them a time or two until I could get everything the cops needed on my wire. Problem is, from the very first hit…it changed my life. It was magical poison. When I was high, none of my problems mattered. I had never felt so light. Except maybe when I was with Kennedy, though then I was worried constantly she was going to figure out that I didn’t belong with her. I also had some attraction to dudes, and I didn’t know how to tell her. If she would take it the right way or freak out or think it changed how I felt about her. We were young. And I was an idiot. Still am, mostly.”
Marcus forced himself to stay planted where he was. “You were an addict with no support—that’s not the same thing at all.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not what the cops said. Once they had what they needed from me, they didn’t reward me with an admissions letter to the academy like they’d promised. Nope, they threatened to toss my ass in jail. That’s why I had to leave. And the only option I had, and—let’s be honest, the only way I could score more drugs—was hustling for the Vipers in exchange for a place to go. No way was I about to get Kennedy tangled up in that shit. So I bailed. On her, on the future we’d pretended could be real. On myself. For a long time. I don’t remember a lot of it to be honest. I was so fucked up, in a lot of ways.”
“So what turned things around?” Marcus figured Knox was a hell of a lot stronger than he gave himself credit for. To have survived all that. To have slipped through every crack in the system as a child and to have been let down by an institution he should have been able to trust, exactly like Marcus had…
It was a lot.
“Maybe we’ve been in here long enough.” Knox pushed up a bit, water sluicing down his flat abdomen, but Marcus lunged forward and clamped his hand on Knox’s wrist.
“Not yet. Look, it’s obvious to me that Kennedy disagrees with your assessment of yourself. She’s never gotten over you. So tell me why I should let you be around her now and how you’re different, and definitely not going to hurt her again.”
“Oh, so that’s why you gave me this shiner, huh? You have a hard-on for her too?” Knox shook his head as if pitying Marcus. “Of course you do—who wouldn’t? You saw how she rode me yesterday. Damn.”
Now neither of them were getting out of the spa any time soon.
They settled back in, Marcus willing his dick not to respond to the echo of Kennedy’s moans ringing through his mind. “She’s magnificent. You saw her in the field. She’s confident and incredible at her job. She has this way of calming people down when they’re injured and fixing them even in shitty conditions so they can do it all over again another day. She’s smart as fuck, funny, and…well…wounded down deep. It’s a combination that’s impossible to resist.”
“You forgot drop-dead gorgeous,” Knox offered.
“That too.” Marcus didn’t bother denying it, though it was only one of many things he found irresistibly attractive about her.
“You ever made a move on her?” Knox asked with a wicked tip to one side of his mouth.
“Kissed her last night.” Marcus couldn’t resist a tiny jab. He was still a guy, after all.
“But did you fuck her?” Knox was pushing his luck now.
“Don’t make me give you a matching black eye,” Marcus growled.
“I’m taking that as a no. Noted.” Knox full-on grinned.
“That’s your fault, asshole. You broke her so bad she doesn’t let anyone else in.” Marcus groaned.
“I didn’t ask about her heart. I asked if you slept with her.” Knox scrubbed a hand over his face. “Anyway, don’t worry. I never had before yesterday either. And I wouldn’t say that was a stellar performance.”
They both knew Knox hadn’t even come though he’d gotten Kennedy off more than once.
Knox sobered then. “Of course, I’d pretty much sworn off sex myself since I seem to ruin the lives of everyone around me. And to answer your question, what happened… I guess I got pretty good at doing whatever the Vipers needed done in exchange for drugs and a shithole to exist in while high. They kept giving me more elaborate jobs and bigger payoffs. Eventually I got hooked up with a guy named Riggs, the nephew of Vex, who’s the head of the gang. We, uh, were more than friends. Lovers. But when I scored some of this hardcore hybrid shit as payment for one of my errands, he didn’t believe the rumors about how strong it was. Both of us thought we could handle it.”
Marcus clenched his hands on the tile bench he was sitting on as if it could prevent what he knew was coming. Poor bastard. “He OD’d?”
“We both did.” Knox stared right at Marcus then, with the most haunted gaze he’d ever seen. “But for some reason, they were able to bring me back. Not him.”
“Fuck,” Marcus hissed. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t know. It might have been a lot easier to go out on a high like that. I’m sure he didn’t feel any pain.” Knox threw one arm over his face as if too embarrassed or ashamed to meet Marcus’s horrified stare.
It was then Marcus realized precisely how lost Knox was and how desperately he might need a bright light like Kennedy to help him find his way back to a life filled with something other than backstabbing, misery, and suffering.
“Is that why you tried to commit suicide by informing?” Marcus asked quietly.
“Maybe.” Knox shrugged one shoulder, the one farthest from his injury, which seemed even more terrifying now that Marcus realized how little Knox cared for himself. No wonder he’d been willing to fling himself in front of the Viper for Kennedy. “Or maybe I wanted a shot at doing one good thing before I’m used up.”
“Well, you definitely have the opportunity to do that now, by helping us shut them down.” Marcus believed now that Knox might be the key Jordan had thought he would be all along.
Knox nodded.
Marcus cleared his throat. There was only one more thing he really wanted to ask. “Did Kennedy ever find out you’re bisexual?”
Marcus couldn’t help prying. Because as far as he knew, she’d had no clue that he was sometimes attracted to men too, even if he’d never found one he’d wanted to act on those impulses with before.
“Nope.” Knox frowned. “Hell, I didn’t fully admit it to myself until Riggs swallowed my cock for the first time. Even then I played it off as something I only did when I was high and not thinking straight for a lot longer than I should have. I wonder if I’d acknowledged what we really had, if Riggs wouldn’t have been so eager to avoid his own struggles by taking so much shit that night.”
“You should definitely take Jordan up on counseling sessions.” Marcus tried to be gentle when he suggested it.
“I’m not sure there’s enough time left in any of our lives to hash out all my issues, but hey, what the fuck. Trying new things. Why not?” Knox pinched the bridge of his nose and then winced as he mashed the bruise there.
“Sorry about that black eye.” Marcus felt a smidge bad about it now.
“I deserved it. That and a million more.” Knox did climb from the spa then, wrapping a towel around his waist with two flicks of his wrists.
“For the record, you don’t need to worry around the Shields.” Marcus got out too, fully aware of Knox’s gaze glued to his crotch as he toweled off. “Whether you’re bi, poly, straight, ace, whatever, we’ve pretty much seen and embraced it all within our group.”
“Seriously? Some of those guys didn’t seem like they’d be the tolerant type.” Knox shot Marcus some side-eye.
“Well, considering Jordan has both a husband and a wife, and Nolan’s got a girlfriend and a boyfriend, and Ransom and Levi are partners outside of the office plus go home to the same wife, and James…jeez. He’s got a husband, a wife, and six other best friends, whom he hooks up with, and will be more than happy to explicitly detail those encounters for you, unintentionally rubbing in the fact that you don’t even have a single lover…. Yeah.”
“Are you shitting me right now?” Knox seemed skeptical.
“Nope.” Marcus shrugged. “I guess Middletown is a hotbed of sexual open-mindedness these days. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Huh.” Knox seemed to slouch a little less then. He turned toward Marcus and sighed. “Thanks. You didn’t have to be cool with me. Especially since I ruined your chances with Kennedy. I’ll try to make things right.”
“Maybe you should let me worry about my chances with the people I’m interested in.” Marcus couldn’t say what possessed him—maybe it was the confused look in Knox’s gaze, like he didn’t know what to do with people who weren’t out to screw him over—but he found himself taking a step forward and wrapping his hand around the back of Knox’s neck.
And just like he had with Kennedy the night before, he ignored his better sense, dipping his head to deliver a short, hard, but thorough kiss to Knox’s lips, which were parted in utter shock.
It only took a fraction of a second before the other guy groaned then kissed him back. But before it had hardly begun, Marcus broke them apart, his cock tenting his towel. When he looked down, Knox’s cheeks turned red.
Marcus chuckled but didn’t object when Knox turned and marched toward the elevators. They rode in silence up to his floor and on the short walk to his door. Once inside, as if by tacit agreement, they each went to their separate rooms, and shut their doors.
With only one wall between them, Marcus had no doubt that Knox was relieving more tension than the spa had by jerking off when his soft grunts and groans filtered through the drywall. So Marcus did the same, taking his shaft in hand and pumping. It took embarrassingly few strokes as he thought about watching his two obsessions fucking the day before, the conversation he’d just had with Knox, and the way Kennedy and Knox’s lips felt pressed to his before he launched his release across his chest with a roar he couldn’t have smothered if he’d tried.
Knox’s answering cry reverberated through Marcus’s nerve endings, setting off aftershocks that puddled the last of his come on his abdomen. As he imagined Knox cleaning himself up and what it would be like if they showered together, along with Kennedy, instead of separately, Marcus realized they were fucked.
Because sometime…sometime soon…they were going to have to face Kennedy and the intense and twisted connections strung between the three of them.