24. Twenty-Four #2
At his bedroom door, he paused, before he tugged me through in a rush. The door slammed. I wasn’t aware of moving, but suddenly, my spine was against the oiled walnut of the closet, and Arrow’s mouth was on mine. Any last shreds of ceremony liquefied between us.
He hoisted my thighs onto his hips, squeezing until I thought he’d grind bruises straight through to the bone, and braced me against the closet door so hard I could feel coats jump on their hangers behind me.
There was no question of who the predator was, but he kissed me with a reverence I’d never experienced before.
Lips rough, then soft, then testing, as if mapping every inch of my mouth for evidence of old wounds.
His hands ran up the sides of my dress, following the long seam from hip to breastbone, then ripped it down off my shoulders in one quick motion, leaving the fabric to puddle at my hips.
Arrow stopped, suspended between wanting and violence, his eyes silvered out by the dark.
“If you say no, I’ll stop,” he said, which was a lie.
I said nothing.
Pulling him in by the collar, tasting the inside of his jaw, I let him see how wide open I was under my dress.
“Fuck,” he breathed, staring between my legs. “Look at you. Soaked for me.” His fingers gently brushed against the wet spot on my underwear. “This pretty cunt has been dripping for me all night, hasn’t it?”
He bit my neck, right where he had hours before, and I yanked his hands up to the chain, daring him to try and choke me out.
Arrow, too skilled to be baited, took the chain in both fists and wound it tighter, not enough to cut off air but enough to drag my neck into the space between us, skin pulled taut while he worked his mouth down my collarbone, drawing a thick wet line from jaw to breast.
“You’re going to scream my name until your throat is raw.”
The contrast of velvet tongue and jagged teeth ignited fresh nerves, every sense calibrated to the barometric shift in his pressure.
His hands roved up my thighs, the rough drag of his nails a threat and a caress, before he slipped his thumb under the hem and found the seam of my panties, tearing them off of me with a loud rip.
He brought them to his face, inhaling deeply. “Fucking soaked through. You want my cock that badly?”
My back arched from the closet, my ass flush to the carved wood, and I let out an involuntary hiss as Arrow dropped to his knees.
The sight of him in a suit, shirt twisted open at the throat, kneeling with the gold chain wrapped in his fists, was nearly enough to level me.
He pressed his face to the wound he’d made above my hip, the scarred pink crescent of the A, and kissed it, tongue tracing the shape.
He opened my thighs so wide it almost hurt, his jaw bracketed against the inside of my knee, letting his breath bloom hot up my thigh.
“Don’t you dare close your fucking eyes. I want you to watch me eat this perfect pussy.”
His first demand.
I obeyed, choking on a gasp as the metal dug under my jaw. He started slow, tongue lazy, making small wet circles on my clit.
“So fucking sweet.”
He licked a long stripe from my entrance to my clit, then sucked hard, as if he meant to coax honesty from my pussy before he devoured it.
I locked my knees around his skull, and the pressure only made him dig in deeper, nose pressed flat to bone, hands locked at the tops of my thighs.
He brought me to the edge too fast, then slowed, then twisted his tongue inside me, fucking me with it while his thumb worked my clit.
“That’s it. Grind on my face. Use me.”
Reaching down to shove his head away, he caught my wrist in his free hand and pinned it, hard, against the closet, his fingernails digging crescents into my pulse.
I wanted him to fuck me, but he held me at the edge for so many cycles, I started to see myself from far above, one more pretty dead girl—this time not dead on the inside, but murdered by the endless promise of pleasure.
When he finally let me come, there was no warning.
He flattened his tongue, bit down on my clit, and ground the pressure until I screamed—really, screamed, a sound I’d never heard from myself, not at Zephyr, not at any of the old pain—and when I shattered, Arrow held me there, mouth never leaving my pussy, making me ride his mouth until the aftershocks went from white-noise to seismic.
“That’s my good girl. Come all over my tongue.”
I could feel his smile on my skin with every quake, and if I’d had the power left to hate him, I would’ve spent it all in that moment. Instead, I let him draw the last scraps of climax from my body, until the chill of the wood against my heated skin was all I had anchoring me to reality.
Arrow stood, finally, the chain still wrapped around his fist. He released it, letting the gold links pool against my chest in a tangle, then braced both hands at either side of my head and looked at me, face flushed and glistening with my cum.
Pushing down the remains of my dress, he touched the fresh mark he’d bitten on my collarbone, thumb smudging the blood that still welled up in slow beads.
“You’re perfect like this—on the verge of shattering, but too stubborn to fall apart.”
He brought his wet fingers to his mouth and licked them clean.
Not waiting for me to recover, he yanked his belt loose, unzipping, and guiding his cock out—hard, pulsing, the biggest dick I’d ever seen. Veins mapped the length of his shaft, prominent and pulsing, matching the tension visible in his clenched jaw.
Arrow spun me in his arms, pressing me face-first to the closet, hands pinning my wrists high and flat above my head. My face smashed into the wood.
“I’m going to fuck you now, Harlowe. It’s going to be hard and fast,” he growled in my ear. “Every time you sit down, every time you move, you’ll remember my cock inside you.”
No more foreplay.
He lined up and pressed the head of his dick against my entrance, pushing inside me, slow at first, just the tip, still cold and slick from anticipation.
The stretch was immediate, almost painful.
He wanted me to feel it, every ridge, every inch, the helpless drag as he forced me open in increments.
“Take it. Take every fucking inch.”
Bottoming out, his hips flushed with my ass, the heat of him felt like a red hot knife in my belly. I could feel him throbbing inside me, so deep, I thought he’d split me in two.
He stilled, savoring the effect of the absolute invasion.
Then, without a word, he pounded into me, in and out, punishing.
Each thrust jolted my body up the closet door, leaving prints of my cheek and blood where the wood caught me.
My nails bit grooved moons into my palms, and the pressure against my neck made the world pulse in and out.
Arrow growled in my ear as he hammered into me, body tight to mine, hand always correcting my posture so I took the brunt of every collision.
“You’re going to come again, and you’re going to scream my name this time. I want them to hear you in Brooklyn, Harlowe. I want every cunt at your father’s table to know exactly who you belong to now.”
The words set off an incendiary chain inside my skull.
I could feel the rush blazing up from my center, every stroke ratcheting another bolt loose.
It was mortifying to be fucked so naked—so helpless against the hard grain, spit pooling on the closet door while every impact stamped the future into my spine, but it was also an exorcism, a violence that felt the most like love.
I fucking needed it, and he knew it.
Changing the angle, his hand shoved my hip into a new alignment and drove into me at a slant. I shrieked, the sound ripped raw and unfiltered. The only way to answer was to bear down, fuck him back, and meet every thrust with a hunger that refused to let the brute win without a fight.
“My name—my fucking name, Harlowe,” he gritted out, teeth bared at my ear, both of us reduced to the language of animals. When I came again, I bucked so hard we almost toppled, my legs giving out from under me. The only thing keeping me up was the pressure of his body against mine.
“Arrow, fuck. Don’t fucking stop.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
I came so hard my vision went white at the edges, then flooded with color. My body locked down on him, muscles clenching so tight I couldn’t breathe. It was a baptism by the devil’s dick.
Arrow’s rhythm fractured—once, twice—and then he was shouting my name, raw and unhinged, like I was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth.
My legs failed, knees scraping down the door, palms splayed for purchase, sobbing—yes, sobbing—caught somewhere close to surrender. He followed me down, not gently. We collapsed in a wet heap, my hair wild and matted to his cheek.
Arrow pressed his forehead to my bare shoulder and stitched our hands together.
He eased out of me slowly, and every ruined nerve re-fired. There was a noise—a shivering, half-delirious laugh—maybe from him, maybe from me. My body convulsed once, twice, then let go. He rolled us until I was on my back, his weight pressing down but not crushing.
Thumb finding my jaw, he wiped away the blood from where I’d bitten my bottom lip. His pupils were saucers, the color ringed in pale blue, and the smile this time wasn’t a weapon, but a gift.
I gently kissed his neck, then nibbled his earlobe. He groaned, more animal than man, and with it, the world realigned. Not Romanov, not Virelli, not even the ancient ledger balanced between the two, but simply us, two bodies locked together in the infinite currency of violence and need.
We crawled from the floor to the bed—impossible to say who propelled whom, just a tumble of limbs and heat. He mounted me again, his cock still hard, the chain wrapped around his fist like a leash. He tugged only when I tried to raise my head and look away from the eye contact he demanded.
“Eyes on me, moya prekrasnaya gadyuka.”*