29. Twenty-Nine #3
I’d wanted to be gentle, just once, but the sight of her, wrung out and luminous, stoked the old want. She hooked her heel around my calf and dragged me closer, lips grazing the bruise on my chest as if to remind me what it was to be broken and celebrated for it.
She nipped my jaw. “If you’re going to talk shit about being scared, at least have the guts to admit you’re terrified of what I could do to you.”
Harlowe bit down, harder than expected, and I felt the ache run to the hinge of my skull.
I made a noise—half-laugh, half-fucked—and let myself collapse onto her, pinning her wrists to the sheet.
Her pulse throbbed against my cupped palm, and I licked a slow, hot line up her throat, savoring the flavor of sleep and salt and aftermath.
“I’m going to marry you,” I said, not a threat, not even a question.
She closed her eyes, lashes twitching, soaking in the sentence.
“Yeah,” she said after a second. “I guess that’s still the plan.”
“Not because they want it. Not because I need Virelli muscle under my thumb.” I let my hand slip down, tracing her ribs, counting the scars. “But because I want to keep you exactly like this—marked. Feral. Under me and over me, every fucking morning.”
She smirked, but it wasn’t unkind. “Consider this my enthusiastic RSVP.”
I rolled off her, tugged her close, and wedged my thigh between her legs until she was forced to admit how wet she was even now, after the carnage of last night.
“Have you ever thought about kids?” I asked it softly into the hollow behind her ear, knowing full well it was a landmine.
She flinched, just barely, then tilted her head into the silence, letting her mouth hang open. If there was fear there, she didn’t hide it.
“Only when I want to scare myself worse than you ever could,” she said. “Or when I want to see if it’s possible to break the pattern.” She licked her lips, a nervous tic, then pressed the length of her body into mine, her hand trapped beneath my ribs. “I’d be a terrible mother,” she whispered.
I turned in her grip, palm on her spine, and held her there, refusing to let her vanish. “You wouldn’t.”
Harlowe let out an animal sound, low and bitter, and buried her face in the pillow. “You don’t get it, Arrow. Violence breeds violence. Every woman in my family ends up cracking. Or dead. Or both.”
“Then be the Virelli that endures,” I said. “Survive it, and teach the next one how to do the same.”
She snorted, and the snort was full of dark hope. “Is that what we’re doing? Building a dynasty of monsters who fuck harder than they die?”
I thought of my mother, nothing left of her but stories, her signature a jagged fossil in my memory.
I wanted to say: yes, that is exactly what we’re doing.
Instead, I turned her in my arms and let her straddle me, hair tangled around her face and the raw, unvarnished light on every bruise.
I ran my fingers over her hips—where they’d take my baby, if we went that far.
If we let the world come for us, and didn’t run.
“I want it all,” I told her, and let my hand travel from her ribs up to cup her jaw. “The violence, the fucking, the consequences. I want it all with you.”
She closed her eyes, but the corners of her mouth trembled with a new, more dangerous smile.
“You’re lucky I believe in lost causes,” she whispered, and then she pushed down, impaling herself on me, raw and unhurried, like this was the only way two people were ever meant to tangle.
We didn’t move, not right away.
I let her ride the stillness, let her decide whether to devour or forgive.
She settled, pelvis flush to mine, her cunt so wet it threatened to make a river out of both of us.
Harlowe held herself there, the pulse at her neck a living seismograph, every tremor tracking something ancient and unyielding.
She bent forward, forehead to mine, sweat beading at her temples, and let her hair form a black tent around our faces. I kissed her, full-lipped and slow, and she let it linger until the ache of wanting more was worse than the urge for oxygen itself.
When she started to move, it was with her hips rolling slowly, as if every inch was a negotiation between pleasure and pain. My hands pinned her thighs, holding her wide, every muscle in my forearms raw from the effort of not just flipping her over and rutting out the ancient need.
“You think it’s possible?” she panted, pace quickening with every bounce. “You think we could ever be more than just damage and reaction?”
I sucked a bruise that would bloom at her clavicle. “The best things are made from damage and reaction.”
Harlowe smiled, and the smile was not a lie.
She leaned in, chest to chest, and rode me until my mouth was full of her hair and my lungs ached.
She let me come with a shudder, the wrist of my hand tangled in her hair, my teeth bared at the ceiling, and the whole city burning out behind my retinas.
She collapsed on top, and for a time, there was nothing but sweat, breaths, and the least possibility of hope.