Chapter 16: The Fire you Don't Touch
POV: Elias Voss
Elias watched the city from the penthouse window like it owed him something.
The lights blurred into lines, streaks of gold and steel across the glass. Beneath him, millions of people moved through lives they would never know were beneath his boot.
But none of that mattered.
Not tonight.
Not when the only thing he could think about was Noah’s voice—breathless, shaking, saying please.
And the look on his face when Elias pulled away.
\---
He poured a drink.
Didn’t touch it.
His jaw ached from clenching. His palms itched with restraint.
He wanted to touch Noah again. Not just to tease. Not just to possess. He wanted to know him—how he kissed when he wasn’t cornered, how he moaned when he wasn’t muffling it, how he would sound falling apart with no one watching but Elias.
But that wasn’t allowed.
That was the rule.
Because men like Elias Voss didn’t get to want.
\---
His father had made sure of that.
“Control is currency,” the old man used to say. “Desire makes you poor.”
It was drilled into him before he was old enough to speak back.
Elias had watched his father love and destroy his mother in the same breath. One moment: roses. The next: broken glass, bruised wrists, silence. Always silence.
He learned quickly: want nothing, need nothing, trust no one.
If you loved something, you broke it before it broke you.
\---
He was sixteen when he kissed a boy for the first time.
He remembered everything: the smell of sweat and leather, the way the boy’s fingers trembled when they touched his jaw. The heat. The ache.
It had been electric.
It had been dangerous.
And it had lasted less than three minutes before his father walked in, saw, and said nothing.
Nothing at all.
Just a look. The kind that stripped you down and threw what was left into the fire.
The boy disappeared the next day.
Elias never asked what happened.
He didn’t need to.
\---
He spent the next decade unlearning softness.
He learned to shut doors before anyone reached them.
To leave beds before they warmed.
To cut off want at the root.
It worked.
It always worked.
Until him.
\---
Until Noah Hart walked into his office in a too-big suit and didn’t flinch when Elias tore into his proposal on day one.
Until he started learning Elias’s moods before he said a word.
Until he stood in front of him after the first kiss and whispered, I don’t want you to stop.
Elias should’ve ignored him.
Should’ve fired him.
Should’ve broken him.
Instead… he let him in.
\---
And now?
He couldn’t stop thinking about that damn mark on Noah’s collarbone. Faint. Red. Temporary. But it was proof.
Proof that Elias Voss had broken his rule.
And he wanted to break it again.
\---
He finished the drink in one swallow and leaned back against the glass.
He didn’t know what the hell this thing with Noah was becoming.
Obsession?
Desire?
Something worse?
But he knew one thing:
Noah Hart had lit a fire inside him.
And if he wasn’t careful, it would burn everything else to ash.