16. Sixteen
SIXTEEN
HARLOWE
The kitchen smelled like rosemary and char. A table set for two held candles framing a steak, salad, and red wine—Arrow already carving into his own plate as I stepped inside. He didn’t look up when I entered, but the seat across from him waited, unmistakingly mine.
No threats, no orders. Just the expectation.
Sit.
So I did, sinking into the black leather chair opposite him, tucking my bruised hands beneath the table so I wouldn’t have to see them. I stared at the wineglass, the flickering gold of the votive, the perfect geometry of his jaw as he chewed.
This was the slowest part of the kill, I realized. The boring, domestic stillness that let the terror catch up.
He finished his bite and wiped his mouth. “Eat.”
I ignored him, swirling the wine, letting its perfume muster and burn the insides of my nostrils, before downing the entire glass.
Would he force-feed me? Would it be a replay of the donut shop?
My face must have given my thoughts away, because he cocked his head, watching, and then, almost lazily, got up and circled behind me.
For a tense second, I thought he’d pin me to the table. Instead, he poured more wine into my glass, the glugging sound drawing out beads of sweat on my neck. The bottle clinked against the rim as he set it down, then his finger traced along my jaw, absently, as if mapping my pain.
“Eat,” he said again, quieter, almost a whisper.
Reaching for the steak, I cut it into a hunk too rare and too large, and chewed with deliberate violence, hoping the churn of my mouth would camouflage the way my heart battered itself to a pulp.
Every time my knife scraped the plate, his eyes flickered, the air between us preloaded with something I refused to admit was kin to desire.
I cleaned my plate, not out of obedience, but because it was the only way to keep my teeth from chattering.
When the food was gone, Arrow folded his napkin, pushed back his chair, and regarded me with a bleak, world-ending stillness.
“I don’t expect you to be grateful. I do expect you to adapt.”
“And what if I don’t?” I asked, voice husky from salt and rage.
Arrow uncoiled from the table, angled a hand under my chin, and pulled me to my feet. The motion was so rehearsed, so gentle, that for a blink, I almost mistook it for kindness. But he spoke softly, each word unhurried, a needle through silk.
“Then I’ll retrain you, over and over, until you do.”
He didn’t let go. He steered me through the house, past the silent shadow of his bodyguard in the entry, past the intimidating nothingness of his living room, right to the enormous window that faced the blacked-out city.
I expected pain or public humiliation. Rather, he pressed my back to the glass and stood so close I felt his body’s heat arc between us like a fuse. One hand went to my throat, not rough, just claiming, with the patience of a man who’d spent his whole life starving.
“Why do you always run toward the edge?” he asked, thumb stroking the hollow above my pulse.
“I don’t. The edge always comes to me.”
Arrow grinned and it was beautiful, and it was a threat. “It’s coming now.” He tapped the tip of my chin. “My father ran this city on loyalty and gunpowder. You think he’d have wasted time on a Virelli brat like you?”
I swallowed. “You’re not your father.”
“That’s true.” The hand at my neck moved lower, mapping the marks he already knew by heart. “He broke things for fun; I do it for a purpose. I only destroy what deserves it.”
His palm lingered over my collarbone, then slid to the back of my neck, holding me in place. My hair caught in his fingers, and he let it, before releasing me and returning to his side of the table.
The silence inside Arrow’s house was absolute.
At some point, I realized there was no television, no music, not even the hum of a refrigerator.
I expected him to make conversation, but then he didn’t.
He poured himself another glass of wine and drank it standing, watching me like he could see the restlessness flicker and breed behind my eyes.
When I couldn’t stand the quiet another second, I turned on him, bracing for the next round. “What do you want from me?”
Arrow regarded me over the rim of his glass. “For now? Compliance.”
“You have it,” I spat, “unless you’re deaf or just pathologically disappointed.”
He finished the wine, then set the glass aside. “You’re not listening, Harlowe. I could chain you to the bed, and within a week, your spirit would rot, and I’d have nothing to show for it but an expensive corpse. What I want is something different.”
“And what’s that? Bitter tears and a grateful whore?”
Arrow moved closer, his face clean of joy or cruelty. “I want you to see yourself through new eyes. And then I want you to beg me to close them for you.”
I blinked, and in that slice of time, I understood.
He didn’t just want to break me—he wanted to teach me the taste of my extinction. My death would happen one atom at a time, and he’d leave me alive to mourn it forever.
“I’d rather die than be married to a fucking Romanov,” I hissed.
His lips drew back from his teeth. Nothing so grand as a smile, but more like a predator—where you’re cornered, but he’s still deciding whether to eat you or keep you as a trophy.
“Good,” he said. “But you’re not going to die.” His palm was so heavy on my neck, I could feel my pulse hammering fingertips away from his. “You’ll want to, eventually. I promise I’ll do my best to make you grateful for the alternative.”
And then, with a casual violence that startled me more than any blow I’d ever taken, he yanked me off balance until I crashed into his sternum, nose pressed under his jaw, arms locked behind my back with one effortless wind of his arm.
I thought he would choke me out, or force me to my knees—he did neither. Instead, he stood there, letting my breath saw up and down between his chest and the shiver in my own, as if experimenting with just how close you can bring prey to its panic before it learns to love the feeling.
His other hand slid up my spine, knuckles grazing the thin fabric of my nightgown. Everything in me contracted. I barely heard my own words, only the hum of blood in my ears and the staccato of Arrow’s breath on my hair.
He held me in silence, and the moment stretched.
“If you only knew what you look like right now,” he hissed. “Like a fucking curse. Like every goddamn Virelli in history at the moment before their neck snaps.”
His grip tightened, hard enough that my toes jerked up off the floor.
Arrow drove me backward, eyes locked on mine the entire time. When the table caught the backs of my legs, I braced for impact, but he only pressed forward with measured force, backing me onto the hard surface.
My knees buckled as I sat, and he caged me in with arms planted on either side, trapping me between his body and the table.
He leaned in, lips grazing my cheek, just below the bruise. I caught the faintest catch in his breath—a small twitch he didn’t bother to hide.
“You want to do damage?” he whispered. “Make me bleed for you?”
One hand slid to the hem of my nightgown and bunched it up, creased silk gathering against my thigh. “All you ever had to do was ask.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as a sob. “You think this scares me?”
He bared his teeth. “I want it to. I want you terrified, and screaming, and so hungry for it you choke on the taste. That’s how I’ll know you’re real.”
Arrow forced my legs apart with a gentle but implacable pressure, using only the flat of his palm. I didn’t resist, wouldn’t have even if I could. The shock of the cold glass table met the heat between my thighs and sent fire up my nerves.
His hand slid up, over my knee, into the crease where it met my hip. Deliberate. No teasing. No slow torture. Just an assertion of ownership.
I wanted to spit in his face—claw the veins open beneath the skin. I dug my hands into the table, felt the tremor take over, and watched him watching me, like he wanted to measure every ounce of my weakness and keep it, preserved, for later.
He yanked my nightgown up, not with lust, but an angry sort of reverence. There was no pause for approval or gentle preamble.
Pressing his mouth to the inside of my knee, he inhaled a stuttering breath, then bit down hard enough to leave me ragged and gasping.
His hand followed, fingers cold on my thigh, until they found their destination, pushing my underwear to the side and touching my hot pussy. He groaned, like he was holding back.
With Zephyr, every touch was calculated, but he wasn’t Zephyr; Arrow didn’t want to deliver ritualized pain for the sake of some balanced ledger. He wanted to peel me—take me from the inside out. See which frail bits held and which snapped under his tongue.
One finger pushed inside, swift and unforgiving, and I made a guttural whine, not for him, but for myself, and the only rebellion I had left. He swallowed the sound hard and looked up, his eyes cutting straight through me.
“Go on,” he murmured. “I want to know how much you can stand before you cut your own throat to get away from me.”
His finger curled, and any rational thought I’d had about keeping my composure atomized into static. I reached for him, hands clumsy, fingers catching hard in the expensive fabric that bracketed his shoulder.
Was I pulling him closer or pushing him away?
Both, maybe. I wanted his mouth on mine, but more, I wanted to bite back, wanted to see if he bled or just oozed more of that lethal, glimmering hunger.
He must have read it in my bones, because he let go of my legs—let me dangle, breathless, for half of a beat, so that I could feel the ache of emptiness before slamming me back down with his palm flat at the base of my throat.
Not choking, not yet, but laying his claim with precise pressure.
My knees were splayed obscenely, my jaw high in the air, and for the first time tonight, I realized what it looked like when a woman surrendered, not out of defeat, but from an instinct older and filthier than love.