Vice and Void (The Savage Wolves Brotherhood #1)

31. Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Dakota

They rode in silence for nearly two hours before the storm caught up to them. It came down in sheets, pelting Dakota’s exposed arms and soaking through her tank top. Callum pulled the motorcycle under the next bridge to shield them from the rain. She hopped off the bike the moment his feet hit the pavement, flinging the helmet off. She didn’t care that she looked like a drowned rat or that her makeup was undoubtedly smeared down her face.

Dakota began to pace, biting her fingernails as she walked past colorful graffiti on the nearest cement pillar, made an about-face, and walked past the bike. She could feel Callum’s eyes tracking her, could feel his stare boring into her skull, willing her to look at him. She kept her gaze trained on the painted yellow line separating the shoulder from the lane.

The wind howled through the underpass, only amplifying the sound of the train rumbling over the tracks above them. Exhaust and wet concrete mixed with the rainstorm, creating a maelstrom of overwhelming scents that clenched Dakota’s stomach. Her clothes were too tight, her skin too prickly, her nails too long as they dug into her palms.

“What’s this about?” Callum finally asked, half-shouting over the train cars.

Dakota didn’t say anything for a long time. It could have been seconds, minutes, or hours, she didn’t know. Her wet clothes began to cool, sending a shiver up her spine. Still, she didn’t stop pacing .

“Dakota.”

She looked up at him, green eyes meeting gray as the rain continued to downpour around them. Tiny rivers tracked across the pavement, catching in puddles and filling the rumble strips at the edge of the underpass. One after another, they filled, flooding into the next until water gathered under the motorcycle’s wheels.

“Did you know about that? About what those distills do?”

Callum stood, depositing his helmet on the seat next to hers. “Of course I do. I’ve known for years.”

Dakota shook her head, swallowing past the lump that lodged in her throat. “I’ve…I’ve treated the civilians in Blackdon for years, even as a mender, and I—“ She paused to gather her tangled thoughts, wondering how in the world she was going to straighten them out again. “How can you live with yourself?”

Callum scoffed, the sound like a metal pipe dragged down a chalkboard to her frayed nerves. “You don’t get to pass judgment on the decisions we make as a club, on how we earn money. You may have had a say once upon a time, but you lost that right twelve fucking years ago, princess.”

She whirled on the toes of her sneakers, pinning him with a glare that he returned in kind. “Why didn’t you let me visit you?”

The question jarred him. His jaw unclenched a fraction, and his arms slipped from the knot he had folded them into. “What?”

“When you went to prison,” Dakota clarified. She remained rooted in place, the rain misting her back as a kick-up of wind blew it under the bridge. “I came to visit every single day for three fucking months. Three months, Callum! And you refused to see me or even entertain the thought of talking to me. Not until you had the guard give me that fucking letter.”

Callum’s brow knitted together, a fury rolling over his expression. “What the fuck are you talking about? What letter?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!” Dakota shouted despite the lump in her throat. Her eyes burned, tears blurring her vision, but she refused to let them fall. “Don’t do that. I wrote you a letter telling you everything after three months of begging you to see me, and the guard delivered your reply on the last day I visited.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dakota,” Callum retorted, splaying his hands out to his sides. “I never got a fucking letter from you. I wasn’t allowed out of my cell for a fucking year. No one ever told me I had visitors, let alone that it was you! ”

Years of sorrow, shame, and grief imploded with such intensity that Dakota thought her chest would cave in. “You didn’t get my letter?”

“No, I didn’t get your fucking letter!” Callum shouted back. He lifted a hand to swipe it through his hair, tugging at the ends of his locks before curling his fingers around to rest on the back of his neck. “I waited for you. I waited for nine fucking years.”

Callum closed the gap between them so quickly that Dakota didn’t have a chance to step away. His hand reached out to grasp the back of her head, hauling her toward him. Then his lips were on hers, scorching and burning. It was familiar yet new, twelve years of things unsaid spoken in the span of a second. He eased back, breaking the connection that melted Dakota’s mind into nothing.

His molten stare meticulously searched hers as though memorizing every shade of green, every streak of gold. “The only thing I thought about in that fucking prison was you. Nothing else mattered. Just. Fucking. You.”

Dakota stepped back, but Callum moved with her.

“The first thing I did when I was released three years ago was run to your dad’s house, and he said that you fucking left and never came back.”

Another step back. His lethal eyes were still fixated on hers. Every cell in his body trained on her like a sniper locked onto a target. Dakota’s back hit a concrete pillar, and Callum stepped further into her space. Her stomach flipped, her heart barreling into her throat as he towered over her.

“I begged Lyra for months to tell me where you were, but you know what she told me?” He didn’t bother to wait for a reply. “That you had moved on, and it was time I did, too.”

Dakota opened her mouth to respond and tried to resuscitate any reply pooling in her sneakers, but words failed her. His eyes finally broke from hers, darting down to lay on her parted lips as though nothing else existed outside them. Need curled within her, lighting her on fire. It didn’t matter that she was soaked to the bone and freezing fucking cold.

She needed Callum Reynolds as if he were the only thing on the planet that could breathe life back into her. And perhaps he was.

In a blur of limbs, Callum hauled her against the concrete barrier, his hands clutching her ass. Her legs wound around his waist, her arms around his neck, her fingers grasping at the nape of his hair. His eyes darkened, the color a storm-gray of desire that matched the clouds above them.

Dakota stared at him, lips parted and breath ragged. Inches and wet fabric sat between them, and there was an unspoken resolve not to be the first to bridge that gap. It seemed Callum no longer cared. He leaned forward to brush her cheek with his lips, his hands squeezing her thighs.

“Get the fuck back on the bike, Dakota.”

She turned her head to note the rain still pounding the pavement, but he released a hand from her ass to grasp her chin, forcing her stare back onto him.

“I don’t give a fuck about the rain. Get. On. The. Bike.”

“Why?” Dakota whispered—the only word her muddled brain could form.

“Because I’m not spending another second under this bridge. And I’ve got twelve fucking years to catch up on.”

The last hour of the ride to Norwich was the longest hour of Dakota’s life. She couldn’t stop touching him. Couldn’t stop running her fingers along his arms, up the front of his soaked shirt to feel his clenched abdomen. To graze her fingers along the toned muscle of his chest. She was desperate for him to turn around, for her thighs to encase him at a different angle. Her need for friction was sweet and bordering unbearable.

And it seemed Callum was torturing himself by refusing to touch her back—the white-knuckled grip he had on the handlebars gave him away.

The rain continued to pour. Dakota may as well have run head-first into the sea, fully clothed. Not a single inch of her was dry, but that didn’t slow down Callum. If anything, he only pushed the bike dangerously fast, slicing through the water pooled on the two-lane highway. The droplets were uncomfortable against her exposed skin, almost painful, but they gave her something to focus on besides her aching core.

The moment Callum pulled into his driveway and parked the bike, his arms wrapped around Dakota in a vise grip, hauling her from the seat. The helmets were tossed on the lawn, utterly forgotten. Lips on lips in a brutal kiss, tongue dancing against tongue in wild and unending strokes. His hand threaded in her soaked locks, her hands clutching at the back of his shirt. Dakota let out a mewl of protest as he broke the kiss long enough to unlock the front door, but then she was tugged over the threshold, the door slamming shut behind them.

She was against the living room wall, water sluicing off her clothes and dripping down the drywall. Callum yanked her shirt off, pulling it over her head before dropping it with a wet thwap against the floor. His shirt went next, joining hers in a disregarded pile.

Dakota peeled herself from the wall, and Callum slowed to a stop near the mouth of the hallway that led to the back bedrooms. Her heart thumped against her chest, erratic and painful. He pulled away, breaking the kiss to fuse his stare with hers. She never broke that contact as she lifted her trembling fingers to undo the button of his jeans, to lower the zipper past his hard-as-steel cock. He never broke the contact as he tucked a lock of her soaked hair behind her ear.

The next kiss was slower, carnal even. One of his hands rested in the crook of her neck, the other molded to her waist, his thumb grazing just beneath the band of her bra. Their tongues searched one another, twelve years of grief and loneliness and pain ebbing away with every caress.

Urgency took over as Callum’s hand fell from her waist to the band of her jeans, and the demand for more drove Dakota deeper into his space, clawing at his back, his hair, his arms. It wasn’t a spark of need and longing but an inferno that threatened to burn her alive if he wasn’t inside of her in the next millisecond.

Callum walked her back, expertly avoiding the walls of the darkened hallway before he lifted a hand to open his bedroom door. The knob cracked against the back wall, but neither of them cared whether it dented the drywall or not. Dakota wasn’t pleased when his mouth fell away from hers when he dropped to the edge of the mattress. He shucked off his wet jeans, not looking away from her to see where they had landed. He was a spread of ink and muscled flesh, a field of feral desire and coiled tension. He leaned back onto a hand that sunk into the bed, showcasing his broad chest.

He was different, but so was she. But it was still him. It was Callum. And he was hers.

“Show me what I’ve been missing,” he murmured, his eyes carving a trail that heated the column of her throat, the valley of her breasts, past her navel, and fixing on the band of her jeans.

Dakota stepped away from him and turned around, giving him her back. Her hands inched up to the button of her jeans, slowly popping it open. She felt his heated stare, his panting breaths, but he never moved to grip her, to urge her forward. He was enjoying this as much as she was. She hooked her thumbs into the band of her pants, pulling at the wet fabric at a torturous pace.

Down an inch on the left, swaying her hips to tug them down an inch on the right. Back and forth. With every pull of need, with every heated pulse that echoed through her core, she only moved slower. Once the band of the jeans was low enough to expose the lace of her black thong, she felt Callum’s fingers slide beneath the strap.

“I knew bringing these along was a fan-fucking-tastic idea,” he said. Dakota’s jeans were gone in a flash of motion, and her back hit the mattress, but Callum hadn’t joined her yet.

He palmed his cock through his boxer briefs as he stood at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed on hers for another heartbeat of time before they dragged over her breasts, her waist, her hips. Dakota spread her legs wider, sliding her heels across the bedspread. Callum seemed to have stopped breathing. She certainly had. He lifted a knee and sunk it into the mattress between her thighs. His hand reached forward, a thumb skimming across the damp fabric that covered her sex.

Dakota let out a moan as her head dropped back, and Callum let his thumb linger on her clit before slowly stroking toward the other side.

“Tell me,” he demanded, lifting his molten stare to connect with hers. Dakota’s breath hitched in her chest at its intensity. “Tell me how soaked these gods-damned panties are from you thinking about me. About this.” He paused to put a hint of more pressure against the apex of her thighs. “How desperate are you to be fucked?”

Dakota’s breath came back in shallow pants as his other hand reached behind her to unclasp her bra, tossing it to the side. Her breasts spilled out, and as though he couldn’t help himself, Callum bent his head down and clamped one of her nipples between his teeth. The pressure of his thumb and the flick of his tongue was only serving to barrel her toward release.

Callum must have known that because he let her nipple go with a chuckle that ghosted over her skin. Please . He chuckled again. She didn’t know she had said it out loud. His thumb slid across the fabric in slow, unhurried circles. She tried to roll her hips to create even the slightest bit of friction, but he backed off with each attempt. She moaned again, desperation flooding her, and she looked up at him to see that he was watching her with the same restrained defiance.

“Callum, please,” Dakota mewled as his thumb dipped beneath the hem of her panties to gently graze against the side of her clit. “I need more. I need you.” Her back arched off the bed as his thumb dipped further beneath her panties, skating across her in soft and unrelenting strokes.

She was desperate. Threatening to fracture. Wanting. Heady.

Callum lowered his mouth to her throat, laying open-mouthed kisses on her neck and chest before knuckling her panties aside to sink a single finger into her heat. His groan flooded her with need, with desire, with an all-consuming, unstoppable force that she had no plan to inhibit.

“Fuck this,” Callum said, and Dakota gasped as he withdrew his finger from her. The sound of tearing lace came next, and then his mouth was on her. His groan vibrated along her sex, bucking her hips from the bed, but he forced them back down with a simple shove of his forearm.

“Callum,” Dakota whispered, and it became a cry of pleasure in the next breath as his tongue swiped clean up her center. Her hand shot to his head, fingers threading through his hair as he devoured her. But just as she was on the verge of tipping into oblivion, he pulled away to look through the valley of her breasts at her.

“Say it again,” he commanded, sinking two fingers into her and stroking a slow curl along her front fall. “Louder. I want to hear you scream my name.” Another gasp ripped from her throat as he bent his head down to suck on the bundle of nerves.

“Callum!”

He chuckled, his breath ghosting along her inner thighs. “Better. Keep practicing, princess. You’ll need to be louder by the end of the night.” His head dipped between her thighs again, and this time, he kept his wild stare trained on her as he worked.

Dakota was a whimpering, sensitive mess beneath his expert touch, and Callum knew just how far to take her before pulling back. Her moans filled the bedroom, filled the house, and that wave in her core built and built before she finally came apart on his tongue, writhing against the sheets as he sucked and nibbled and licked every inch of exposed flesh.

Callum tugged the lace panties from beneath her and, with a quick yank, dropped his boxer briefs to the floor. Dakota’s hooded, lust-filled eyes roamed over his naked body, taking in the tattoos, old scars, and corded muscle. He was as beautiful as she remembered and somehow even more. His hand reached for his cock, his fingers still glistening with her arousal as he stroked himself in long, slow movements. She could feel her heartbeat in every corner of her body, but from the dark gleam in his eye, she knew that he was nowhere close to being done with her yet.

“Twelve years, princess,” Callum said as though he could read her mind. “I’ve got twelve fucking years to make up for.”

Before she knew it, he reached for her ankles and tugged her to the end of the mattress. She was flipped onto her stomach, and then he yanked her to her knees and pitched her onto her forearms until her hips were lifted behind her. She was desperate to be used, to be fucked, to be filled. This was Callum, and she knew that he gave her control. She could stop this anytime, but she didn't intend to.

The ripped lace panties in his hand brushed against her ass, then her hip, and up the line of her spine. She shivered in anticipation, swallowing back a moan as his fingers delicately brushed along her sex. She was still wet for him. Dripping. Then, there was nothing but cold air as he backed away from her.

“Callum,” she whispered, desperately looking over her shoulder to see the dark smirk gracing his lips. “Please. I need to feel you. Don’t make me beg.”

Those words, that plea, seemed to snap his restraint. With one hand gripping her hips, he notched himself at her entrance and pushed just the crown of his cock in. She could feel his hand trembling against her side as he withdrew and then pushed in deeper. As though he could no longer contain himself, he sheathed himself to the base in one smooth stroke.

Pain and pleasure filled her, stretched her. Callum pulled back to the tip and slammed in again and again. Long, deep strokes that glided through her arousal. His arm banded around her waist, his thumb pressuring her clit in small circles as he picked up a devastating rhythm that threatened to tear her apart.

Dakota was moaning and begging, gripping the sheets in tight fists as she met him thrust for unrelenting thrust. Every stroke was powerful and merciless, every piston of his hips against her ass harder and harder. She was tension and freedom, a knot that pleaded to be unraveled as she chanted his name. His groans and shouts only flooded her with arousal, only clenched her core around his cock until he was calling her name in return.

It was rough and wild and primal. But it was him. And it was her. And it was them.

He promised to ruin her. She begged him not to stop. He quickened his pace. She screamed his name.

Then she was detonating, stars shattering her vision into a kaleidoscope of color. Callum’s arms wrapped around her waist as his hands splayed against the front of her thighs, viciously thrusting as he thickened before finally spilling inside of her.

Dakota tried to recover her breath as he slowly withdrew, but it was unsteady, and she was still panting when he collapsed on the bed next to her. There was no barrier between them now, no metal wall or shield to keep him at arm’s length. His fingertips traced the length of her spine, and she turned to look at him.

Peace and calm replaced the normal agitation and frustration that marred his face. In the dim afternoon light, she could see the thrum of his pulse. She grabbed his hand, lightly tugging it toward her to outline the ink on his forearm. His skin pebbled at her touch, and she softly smiled at the sight of it .

“Turn over,” he muttered, leaning forward to press a kiss to her sweaty temple. His hand brushed back her damp, tangled hair. “I want to see it.”

Dakota’s grin was sated and boneless, but she rolled onto her back. Callum propped himself onto his elbow, reaching forward to trace the initials he had inked on her hip twelve years before. CR. Callum Reynolds.

“I thought you would have covered it up,” he said, tracing the initials with a gentle brush of his forefinger. A shiver built in the base of her spine as she watched him gaze at the small tattoo, as she watched his own tattooed fingers dip between her thighs, and she let out a husky moan when two of them sunk into her heat once again. “Tell me why.”

“Tell you what?” she repeated, breathless and wanting, as he slowly pressed his palm against her swollen clit.

His eyes searched hers, but he said nothing as his fingers drove in and out of her in long, steady strokes. She clutched his shoulder as she cried out, placing her forehead against the hollow notch of his throat. He didn’t break his tempo, curling and pressing and pumping as a third wave threatened to crest.

“Tell me why,” he said. Dakota was panting as his lips grazed her ear, his fingers working between her thighs. “Tell me now, princess.”

“Because I couldn’t let you go.”

Callum withdrew his hand and nestled into the cradle of her hips, lifting her knee and pushing his cock into her heat with a groan that Dakota matched. His lips came down on hers in a raw and brutal kiss as he rocked into her at an angular thrust that had her whimpering into his mouth.

“I never let you go,” he replied.

She lost track of time. Minutes turned to hours, and the afternoon sun gave way to dusk which gave way to starless night as she begged and screamed and cried his name in a hundred different ways.