25. Twenty-Five #2
The contempt was textbook, but also weirdly fond.
“Crime scenes. Rehab. The morgue, once, for a field trip. My father thought it would build character.” I held his gaze until he looked away first, and mimicked his smirk. “You should try it sometime.”
Arrow shifted gears, always in control, always with that sense of a hand ready to snap to your throat if you made the wrong move. We drove through the city, over the bridge, down into the canyons of buildings where even noon was a shade of blue twilight.
He parked in a garage beneath a modern slab of polished chrome and black windows.
It reminded me of the kind of penthouse a Bond villain would rent out while negotiating nuclear ransom.
Inside, the lobby was silent, except for the drone of security cameras and the echo of our footsteps.
Arrow flashed his keycard, and the elevator doors yawned open.
At floor fifty-two, he guided me out with the same light grip he’d used all night. Not a leash but a calculated promise. Try to run, but only if you want to see me catch you.
The door across the hall opened before we reached it, a silent shadow greeting us—Orion, wearing black clothing and a bandaged forearm, his wolfish grin undiminished by any evidence of pain.
“Nice to see the happy couple,” he drawled, and cocked his head. “Try not to cut his dick off before dinner. It’s his only friend.”
Arrow rolled his eyes. “I’ll see you downstairs at nine, fucker.”
Orion gave me a two-finger salute before gliding away into the darkened hallway. Arrow punched in the passcode, and the penthouse opened up like a planetarium, glass and steel, the city spread out fifty stories below in the fading light.
He led me past a jungle of houseplants, each with a black label printed in Russian, and a taxidermied falcon on the mantel, straight to an open living room where the world’s largest sectional circled a massive, stone fireplace.
“Make yourself at home,” Arrow said, his voice echoing off the glass. He unzipped his coat and tossed it across the sofa.
Kicking off my shoes, I wandered, taking in the hungover glamour of a modern city lair.
The penthouse was designed with angled glass and ultramarine marble.
There were fresh roses set in a vase the size of a baptismal font, and every visible surface reflected a piece of the storm slate sky ribboning the river.
I drifted to the window and watched the hustle and bustle of the city below.
The thought of falling all the way to Second Avenue would once have been the only comfort in a place like this.
Now, watching the clouds skirmish, daring the wind to push the building into a new angle of collapse, felt almost peaceful.
Arrow joined me at the window, one hand braced against the glass like a man ready to rupture the whole city below. His other hand snaked around my waist, not hard, but inescapable, as if it mattered that I know, at every moment, exactly where I was supposed to be.
For two beats, the room was silent except for the guttering of Arrow’s breath behind my neck. I flexed my spine backward in slow increments until the fine hairs of his arm tickled my bare skin, and waited for him to speak.
“I didn’t think you’d like the view,” he said.
“I hated it until about six hours ago.” Leaning my forehead against the window, I let the cool glass ground me. “Now, I just wish I were higher up.”
He let out a tight, feral snort. “You always want more.”
“Says the man who owns this city, half its cemeteries, and maybe my soul.” I pressed my cheek to the cool pane, eyes scanning the ten thousand stories unspooling between here and street-level. “You hungry?”
“For what?”
“Something with calories, Romanov. I can’t live on coffee and trauma alone.”
His chin grazed the top of my head. “I’ll make you something.”
He released me, but every surface in the penthouse seemed to lean into the vacant space he left behind.
Prowling the rooms, I took in the open kitchen, two guest suites, a bath tiled in icy lapis, and stopped at the end of the massive Alaskan King bed in his bedroom.
How many orgies had Arrow hosted on this bed? How many girls moaned his name while he drove into them, all devil and violence. Or did he fuck them softly, staring into their eyes, promising them castles and rainbows?
Perching on the overkill mattress, toying with the chain at my throat, I let out a bark of laughter and flopped backwards across the whole width of the bed, arms extended like a corpse at rest, but with a sprawl that made it clear I planned to enjoy being dead.
The sheets smelled faintly of Arrow cologne and tang, linen, and soap. Digging my heels into the plush edge of the mattress, scrunching handfuls of the cooling coverlet in my fists, I let the question fester.
Would this have been enough for me—if Arrow had just fucked me, branded me, and left me to my chain in a glass box above Manhattan? Or did I already want more than he could ever threaten or ravish out of me?
The possibility that I might be the hungriest animal in the room made me smile. Drifting for a minute, half-conscious, the phantom ache of last night and this morning coiled through my legs like a new pulse.
Arrow called for me from the kitchen. “How do you feel about eggs?”
“Depends,” I called back, “did you lay them yourself?”
He snorted. “I do everything myself, Harlowe.”
It was true.
Propping myself up on my elbows, I watched him move behind the granite island through the doorway, his sleeves rolled, his tattooed wrists taut as he held the steel pan.
He beat eggs into a froth, added smoked salmon, then flicked in scallions and a pinch of chili oil, then cranked the gas on the pro stove until the blue tongue roared up in a perfect executioner’s flame.
Watching him work the skillet was hypnotic—the sharp movements, the controlled power of his hands. It was the same intensity he’d used hours before, just channeled into eggs and heat instead of me.
Violence was just another way Arrow moved through the world—sometimes with his cock, sometimes with a gun, sometimes by adding a drop too much fire to the pan so lunch arrived with a note of danger.
I prowled into the kitchen, hungry but also needing to be close to him. “You always attack a skillet like that?” I asked, catching the scent of the chili oil lancing through the air.
He didn’t turn. “You like it? Or are you going to throw it at me if it’s wrong?”
“Depends on how many shells are in it.”
Arrow scraped the eggs onto a plate, tossed them with coarse salt flakes and a flinch of caviar from a tin at the ready. He pushed the plate at me across the countertop, then handed over a fork after licking chili oil from his thumb.
The first bite was delicate, briny, the salt popping on my tongue in a way that made the taste linger on my gums. I made a show of licking my fork after every bite, slowly, eyes fixed on Arrow’s mouth as he watched me polish off the last scraps.
When I finally set the fork down, he snatched it up, tongued the tines with a methodical patience that I pretended not to find deeply arousing. A second later, he tossed the fork in the sink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, looking past me like he’d already forgotten I was there.
“Was there something else you wanted?” he said, feigning casual as he started to clean up, but the urge in his eyes was so sharp I could almost taste it.
I leaned back against the counter, letting the sweater slip off my shoulder.
Bare skin, collarbone, the edge of the chain visible.
I watched him carefully—the way his jaw tightened, how his grip on the spatula didn’t loosen but his knuckles went white.
He was playing at indifference, but his body was screaming.
The catch in his breath. The slight flush creeping up his neck.
He was losing.
“Savoring the quiet, that’s all,” I said. “I assumed at least three people would have tried to kill us by now.”
He grinned. “Give it time.”
Beautiful, that smile. Lethal, too.
Arrow moved around the counter in three strides and set his palms flat against the stone on either side of me.
Caged. The granite was cold under my back, but his body was a furnace, barely a breath between us.
He could’ve broken the counter in half and wouldn’t have cared—nothing was getting between him and me right now.
I looked him over, slowly, cataloging the swelling bite at his jaw, the new bruises on his collarbone, the faintest trace of a scratch across the back of his hand. I wanted to dig my teeth into him all over again.
“Do you always get this sentimental after sex?” I leaned back slightly, tilting my head.
He didn’t flinch. “Sentiment is just anger with a mask on. You bored already, Harlowe?”
My hair fell back, exposing the necklace with his initials. His eyes followed the movement, then lingered on my throat for a second too long before meeting mine.
“A little. I want to know when this post-coital honeymoon ends and the old Romanov psycho kicks back in.”
A genuine laugh escaped him, soft and disbelieving. He reached across and anchored his palm at the nape of my neck, thumb catching on the chain, index finger tracing the seam of my jaw.
“You think I’m not already ten steps ahead?” His other hand closed over the back of my hand, nails scraping the knuckles idly. “Right now, every asset on the Virelli side is watching their phone for who gets clipped first. It’s—” He paused, searching for the word. “Beautiful.”
“Pathological, you mean.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” Arrow murmured. He studied the dazzle of the sun on my hair like evidence in a crime. “You’re not scared?”
I shrugged. “Of what? You? I don’t have the energy.”
He let his palm wander, up to press the chain into my pulse, a calm threat. “Not good for the brand, little viper.”
“Why viper?” I asked. “Why not something bigger? Meaner?”
“Because vipers are small but venomous.” His eyes met mine. “And they strike when cornered. You do the same thing.”
“And the ‘little’ part?”