Feel My Pain (Curse Bound 1)

They locked in a struggle neither could win, but as the blade wiggled against Roach’s cheek, a gash opened in Zane’s despite nothing touching his skin. As is an invisible hand guided a phantom knife into the pristine flesh.

He flinched, too distracted by the unexpected sensation to land the killing blow, and Roach knocked him off with a punch that left his own ribs aching.

“Fuck!”

Wheezing through his nose, Zane got to his knees, his gaze meeting Roach’s like a rabid fox too out of his mind to fear dying.

“Your face! Your fucking face!” Roach yelled, holding his bleeding stomach. “What the fuck?”

Zane blinked, his expression torn between fury and anxiety, but when he gave in and pressed his palm to the bleeding gash on his cheek, tension left his shoulders and he looked back at Roach, like a child who had just found out Santa didn't exist.

Chapter 5 - Zane

This was some Voodoo shit, but which one of them was the doll?

The sting on Zane’s face was slowly turning into full-blown pain as the shock wore off, but he was too stunned to move as he stared back at Roach, who sported the same two cuts Zane had on him. Blood soaked through the white undershirt in the same place that treacherous bastard had previously slashed Zane. While Zane couldn’t rule out that he’d made the cut and hadn’t noticed it in his fury, by the time his cheek had started bleeding, he’d been the only one with a blade.

What. The. Fresh. Hell. Was. This?

“You’re fucking with me,” he uttered in the end, fighting through a sense of nausea that came with sharing space with the bastard. “I don’t know how, but you are!”

“Let’s reassess this,” Roach huffed from where he sat on the floor, and every time he shifted, the wound on Zane’s stomach twitched with fresh pain.

“How about you stop wiggling around? How deep is this fucking cut?” Zane asked, leaning against the squashed boxes to uncover the injured spot.

He remembered vividly how it felt to be on the verge of death, but seeing his flesh split open and leaking fluid still made his brain fog up.

Roach laid on the floor with another deep breath. “I don’t know. You’re not dead yet, so it can’t be that deep. And I’ll wiggle as much as I want! When did you cut me?”

“I only cut you on the face. You must have done this to yourself,” Zane decided and grabbed a random white T-shirt, which he pressed to his bleeding stomach.

Roach stilled and eyed him in silence, but then, like the psycho he was, stuck a finger in the gaping wound.

The pain that seared through Zane’s body brought him to his knees with a thud, and he gasped for air, dizzy and screaming.

There was that banging on the door again. “I’m gonna call the cops!”

“You’re not gonna do shit, or I’m gonna talk to them about you,” Roach yelled back.

“Fuck. Fuck you sideways, Roach,” Zane wheezed, curling his knees to his chest, as if it could protect him from an attack, which incredulously had come from within. The bastard watched him from the side of the bed, eyes wide as if he were a kid who’d just discovered he could rip off a ladybug’s legs for fun.

“I think we’ve got a bigger problem on our hands than fucking,” Roach said grimly, and when he got up, Zane could cry from the pain of shifting flesh.

Roach stomped to the bathroom door, but Zane forgot why it was happening in the first place when Roach pulled off his cut and T-shirt. Not because Zane was attracted to all those bulging muscles. It was the ink on Roach’s skin that had Zane throbbing with growing panic.

Eight skulls arranged in black and white flames to cover Roach’s shoulders. Acid traveled up his gullet until he could taste it. He was swearing. Bleeding. In pain.

Maybe he was seeing things because of shock?

“Wait,” he uttered, grabbing the hem of his own top and fighting through the discomfort that caused him to rip it off. “Am I crazy or… or—”

Or do we have the same damn tattoo?

He’d woken up to his after a drunken night several months after… everything. He’d assumed he’d given the tattoo artist the wrong number of skulls to put on him and had given up on making adjustments, because it didn’t matter. Not that he remembered getting the ink at all, because he’d been blind drunk for a week, even though he couldn’t recall drinking that much booze.

But it did matter. There was a reason why there were eight skulls etched in his flesh instead of nine, and—as unbelievable as that was—it was because the tattoo was actually… Roach’s.

“Or what?” Roach turned toward him as he opened the bathroom door.

Zane looked twice at the distance between them and wondered how fast Roach could reach him, but in the end chose to shift so the bastard could see his ink.