Gardner’s pupils were fully blown, just a thin ring of sapphire around the deep black, and his chest was rising and falling like something snapped up in a trap. Theo had the power and the control for the first time, what he’d wanted ever since that first meeting in the dorms, and yet he felt hypnotized in this moment, some wild animal caught in a floodlight. He couldn’t tell, really, who was on top—didn’t know which one of them would win this silence, a long-overdue confrontation.

Heat poured off Gardner and he felt boiled, he felt nuclear, he wanted to lick it and eat it and warm himself, and those eyes were on his face, that place on his lip which he tongued, over and over, keeping a link to that violence, his weakness, a moment of unwilling submission.

How many nights had he lain in his bed in his private room at Gwynns, licking over his lip, remembering Gardner under his pressing hand, his flesh rising and responding and—

He had told himself he just got off on the power of that moment when he was holding someone down.

And the silent encounter in the bell tower, and Pride, and feeling beholden, and wanting to lie down with a heavy body resting on his.

His mouth was watering from the harshness of the whiskey and from thinking about—about other things, other bits and pieces he could pour into him, filling, mindless, a body. Skin, hardness in his throat. He kept Gardner there, Gardner’s fists clenched, his mouth partly opened with his heavy breath. Gardner was holding himself back and leaning into him, his face drawing closer as he was pulled in by that scar.

He felt a tingling, his face down to his knees, like he knew what he wanted to do, falling, asking, opening. It had been this way, always, even when he didn’t know, really, what this feeling was. He’d kept himself from touching Gardner as much as he possibly could, and his skin sang with these echoing seconds before he finally gave in.

It was sex and it was something else.

Here in his nightclub, the space he had claimed as his own, he knew he was creating a new kind of scar; he was slicing himself up on the honed edge of Gardner’s eyes. It was a tragic mistake, it was so terribly stupid, and it felt absolutely wonderful, and he hated himself. And that was his life, wasn’t it? That was how he was made, how he functioned. He could hardly bear himself; the urge was too strong.

God, his jeans were so tight, it was painful, and he reveled in it, and he leaned in farther, tilting his head down in those scant inches, and he waited. Watched Jack, watched him lick his own lips. Theo spoke nearly into his mouth.

“Like what you see?”