The Night He Left the Syndicate, I Took His Chair novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: One More Round
On the night Orson leaves the syndicate he takes Nerissa to bed one last time, then dumps her for a ferry heiress, and she walks out into the storm with nothing but her father's lighter, straight into the chairman's waiting car.
The night Orson Garside decided to leave the syndicate, he took me to bed like he was never going to see me again.
I should have known that was exactly what it was.
He came home at ten with rain on his coat and didn't say a word.
He pushed me back against the bedroom door and tore my black lace off with one hand.
The pieces landed at the foot of the bed.
The door was still rattling against the frame when I got his shirt open.
Buttons hit the floor.
I didn't care where they landed.
His chest was warm under my palms, rain-damp still, and his heart hammered against my hand like he'd been running.
I wasn't gentle.
Neither was he.
He shoved my dress up to my waist and pushed me back onto the bed hard enough that the headboard cracked against the wall.
The storm outside was building, wind throwing rain at the windows like it wanted in.
Orson climbed over me, his knees spreading my thighs, his weight pinning me into the mattress.
He didn't kiss me first.
He looked down at me, his broken nose shadowed in the lamplight, his eyes so dark they swallowed the light.
"Spread your legs."
His voice was rough, low, the one he used on the docks when he wanted something done and done now.
I spread.
The scrap of black lace was already gone, torn away at the door, and I was wet enough that when his fingers found me I made a sound I hadn't meant to.
He laughed, soft and mean.
"Already, Ris? I barely touched you."
"Shut up and fuck me."
He shoved two fingers inside me without warning.
My back arched off the bed.
"Say it again."
"Fuck you."
"No." He curled his fingers, slow, and I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. "Say the other thing. The way you mean it."
I grabbed his wrist and pushed him deeper.
"Fuck me, Orson. I want your cock inside me."
That was what he wanted.
He pulled his fingers out and undid his trousers with one hand, his eyes never leaving mine.
His cock was hard, thick, already slick at the tip.
I watched him stroke himself once, twice, while he looked at my open legs.
Then he was on me, notched at my entrance, and he pushed in with one long, brutal thrust.
I cried out.
He didn't stop.
He fucked me hard from the first stroke, his hips slamming into mine, the headboard banging the wall in a rhythm that matched the thunder outside.
Ten years I'd had Orson Garside.
I knew his body like my own.
This was different.
There was something desperate in the way he drove into me, something almost furious, like he was trying to leave a mark deep enough to last.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and met him stroke for stroke.
"Yes," I gasped. "Fuck, yes. Don't stop."
His hand fisted in my hair, yanking my head back so I had to look at him.
His knuckles were scarred against the sheets, against my hip, against my thigh.
"You like this? Hmm? You like being fucked like this?"
"Orson. Please."
"Please what."
"Please don't stop."
He bent his head and bit my shoulder, hard, and I felt him drive even deeper.
My nails raked down his back.
He grunted, low and vicious, and grabbed my hips to angle me higher.
The world narrowed to his body over mine, the slick sound of him fucking me, the pressure coiling low in my belly.
He was going to make me come.
It was right there, building, and I was too far gone to care about the noise I was making.
Then I remembered.
The doctor.
August.
The pills in the bathroom cabinet I hadn't touched in six weeks.
I grabbed his shoulders.
"Orson. Orson, wait."
He went still above me, buried to the hilt, his breath coming hard.
"What."
"I'm not on birth control."
The words hung between us.
The rain hammered the glass.
His eyes searched my face.
His body didn't move.
"Ris." His voice was tight as a wire, his cock throbbing deep in my pussy.
I looked up at him.
At the man I'd loved for a decade.
At the man who'd pulled me into this bed like the world was ending.
I lifted my hips, taking him deeper.
"Don't you dare stop."
He stared at me for one long second.
Something flickered behind his eyes, something I didn't have a name for.
Then he pulled back and slammed into me so hard I saw stars.
"Then take it."
I did.
He fucked me like a man possessed, rough and relentless, and I held on and gave it back to him, meeting every thrust, my nails in his shoulders, my voice breaking on his name.
"Yes. Yes. Fuck. Orson. Don't stop."
"You feel that? You feel me inside you, Ris?"
"I feel you. I feel everything."
"Good. I want you to remember this."
The pressure built, sharp and blinding, coiling tighter and tighter until I couldn't breathe.
He reached between us and found my clit, his thumb pressing in tight circles that were almost too much.
"Come for me."
I shattered.
The orgasm ripped through me, white-hot, and I heard myself scream his name.
My pussy clenched around his cock, and he groaned, driving into me through it, pulling every last pulse out of me until I was shaking.
He wasn't done.
He flipped me onto my stomach and pulled my hips up.
I was still gasping, still trembling, when he pushed back inside me from behind.
My face pressed into the mattress, and he fucked me deeper this way, one hand on my hip, the other tangled in my hair.
I could feel every inch of him.
"Orson," I whimpered, clawing the sheets. "I can't."
"Shh." He leaned over me, his chest against my back, his mouth at my ear. "You can take it. You always can."
He was right.
I pushed back against him, meeting his thrusts, and the second orgasm hit me out of nowhere, rippling through me until my legs gave out.
He followed me over, his rhythm breaking, his fingers digging into my hips hard enough to bruise.
"Fuck. Ris."
He pulled out at the last second and spilled hot across my lower back, his whole body shuddering with it.
We collapsed together into the wrecked sheets, tangled and sweating and breathing like we'd drowned.
The rain was steady against the glass now, softer than before.
I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, my body still pulsing with aftershocks.
Every part of me ached in a way that felt like being alive.
I should have felt afraid.
Instead I felt like something lost had come home.
I turned my head to look at him.
"Orson."
"Hmm."
"Is the world ending?"
He didn't answer.
He kissed me instead, hard and deep, and when he pulled back his eyes were darker than the storm.
Then he rolled off me, reached for the nightstand, and I heard the click of his lighter for a cigar.
He lit the cigar and leaned back.
The smoke drifted in the lamplight.
His face looked colder through it than I'd ever seen it.
"Ris," he said. "If I ended things with you, you wouldn't cling to me, would you?"
He said it lightly, like a joke.
The back of my neck went cold.
I had been at his side ten years. I knew every one of his voices.
This was the one he used right before somebody lost something.
He liked women who knew how to behave and still had a little bite.
So I took the cigar out of his fingers.
I swallowed whatever was climbing up my throat and smiled at him.
"You think I'm still the nineteen-year-old who would've died for you?"
At nineteen I would have.
If he'd thrown me away at nineteen, I'd have walked into his territory with a tire iron and bet my life on him.
But I was twenty-nine now.
Orson laughed and took the cigar back before the ash could reach my fingers.
He ruffled my hair.
"This is where it ends, Ris. We're not kids anymore. We can't keep living like this."
I didn't move.
I wasn't going to be the one who cried first.
I got up, found my coat on the chair by the bed and put it on over nothing.
I made it two steps.
His arm hooked around my waist and dragged me back down onto the mattress.
His mouth found my spine and moved slowly down it.
He spoke right into my ear, low and soft.
"Did you hear me? Hmm?"
It was the voice he used on his men when he expected them to obey.
I looked at him and said nothing.
He laughed quietly.
"Listen to that rain. Stay for one more round before you go."
For ten years I had let Orson Garside have his way.
Maybe he'd forgotten what I'm like once I make up my mind.
When I cut somebody off, I cut them off clean.
I put my hand flat on his chest and pushed him away.
"You think a little rain is going to make me stay?"
For one second he looked stunned.
Then he got his face back.
"You're smart, Ris. So I'll just say it. Her name is Emmeline Weatherby."
I knew the name. Everybody on Solmere Isle knew it. The Weatherbys owned the ferry.
"She's too innocent to sink into this life with me," he said. "But you can."
I looked at the black lace on the floor and the soaked sheets.
My throat closed.
For once in my life I had nothing to say.
So I was good enough to bleed beside him for ten years.
Just not good enough to marry.
He had dressed me himself all that time. Black stockings. Stilettos. Dresses so tight I couldn't sit down in them.
Now that I'd learned to look like that for him, I was too cheap to keep?
I opened my mouth to ask him.
He held up one finger to his lips.
His phone was ringing.
He put it on speaker, like I was furniture.
"Orson? You said you were coming to get me." The voice was small and breathy. "I'm all by myself. I'm scared."
He was out of bed before she finished.
He dressed in the dark and left without looking back.
The front door slammed. His car went down the bluff.
Twenty minutes later my phone lit up.
Orson: I'll be gone a while. Get your things out of the house. I'll have the locks changed in two weeks.
Then, a long time later:
Orson: Call me if you need anything.
Orson: I can't give you a title. But we can still be friends.
Ten years.
He was offering me friendship like a tip on a counter.
I didn't answer.
I went into the closet and stood in front of everything he had ever bought me.
Forty dresses. Eleven pairs of heels. A drawer of stockings still in their packages.
I didn't need two weeks.
I took off his coat and put on the only things in there that were mine.
My old diner jeans from Mavis's, worn white at the knees. A gray fisherman's sweater that had been my father's.
I took off the diamond watch Orson gave me on our fifth anniversary.
I laid it on the bed next to the house keys, the car keys and the black card.
Then I opened the nightstand on my side.
My father's brass Zippo was in the back, under the receipts.
I flicked it once.
The flame jumped up, steady as it was the night Orson and I first slept on a concrete floor with nothing else for light.
I put it in my pocket.
Then I walked down the stairs and out the front door into the rain.
It was three in the morning, and I didn't take an umbrella.
The wind off the sea nearly knocked me over at the top of the drive.
I was soaked before I reached the gate.
There was a car on the other side of it.
A long black Lincoln, engine running, wipers going, headlights off.
The back window slid down.
An old man sat inside with a cane across his knees. Silver hair. Walrus-ivory handle.
Percival Hesketh. The chairman of the Table.
In ten years, he had never once spoken to me.
He looked me up and down, the wet sweater, the jeans, the bare face.
"Miss Rendell," he said softly. "Orson tells me he's leaving us."
He tilted his head at the empty seat beside him.
"He also tells me you're the one who knows where every dollar is. Get in."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend