33. Thirty-Three
THIRTY-THREE
HARLOWE
The doors slid open, and he was standing there. He wasn’t doubled over. He wasn’t limping. He wasn’t even winded.
He was just there. Just . . . waiting.
My breath caught in my throat as his eyes met mine, full of something not quite human.
I didn’t even have time to scream. He stepped forward, a shadow in motion, and with one hand, shoved me back into the elevator.
My spine slammed against the mirror. His body followed, hot and merciless, pressing me between cold glass.
“You think you can run from me?” His voice was quiet and lethal in its restraint. The doors slid shut behind him, the elevator lurching into motion, now caging us both.
“You deserved that,” I spat, chin tilted. “You had no right—”
“No right?” His hand slammed against the wall beside my head, making the entire panel shudder. “I own the right. You gave it to me the second you shattered on my cock. You don’t get to run after that.”
My hands braced against his chest, but it was like trying to push a mountain. “You don’t own me, Arrow.”
He leaned in until his mouth grazed her ear, his breath fire and gravel. “Then why do you shake when I’m close, malyshka?”*
I did shake. But not from fear.
From fury.
From want.
From whatever monster we summoned in each other.
“I’ll scream,” I whispered.
He smiled. It was a terrible, beautiful thing. “Do it. You know how hard I get when you scream.”
He clapped a palm over my mouth and rammed my knees wide apart, the other hand gouging the back of my scalp, pinning me to the elevator’s glass wall.
He rolled his hips into mine, grinding the seam of his cock against my naked cunt, dry-humping me with a savagery so absolute I forgot the ache, the shame, even the welt blooming on my jaw from the prior impact.
The whole elevator vibrated with it. I could feel the security cam watching the raw feed of my humiliation archiving live to six data centers. I wanted to scream. I wanted to dare him, one last time, to break me wide enough that my father’s old gods would shudder.
Instead, I bit his palm, sharp and hard enough to tear through skin.
He yelped in shock, and then his whole demeanor snapped.
In a motion so fast it nearly fucked with my inner ear, he slammed his palm against the emergency stop button, then yanked my body away from the glass, spun me two hundred degrees, and mashed my chest up against the elevator panel.
My sweaty tits smeared the brushed steel. He wrenched my wrists behind me; one hand locked them together while his other hand fumbled with his zipper, cock already red and glossy with his latest violence.
He slammed me into the wall, his heated breath at my neck, and shoved inside my sensitive ass with a single impalement that made me scream.
My cheek mashed to the cold steel wall, his cock splitting me so suddenly my knees quaked.
No prep, no lube, except the leftovers smeared between my thighs—maybe from him, maybe from me, probably both, history was a collaborative mess.
Arrow didn’t fuck me there the way others might, cautiously, hesitantly, with a softening plea for permission. He did it like a confession, a handprint of force that said, “You signed up for this, and so did I, and neither of us will ever admit just how much we needed to see if it would break us.”
I gasped for air, left in my wrists twisting in his grip.
He ground his bony thumb into the back of my hand, keeping me buckled against the control panel.
His cock filled me, starting slowly, a measured, brutal slide, the pain blooming deep and with it, the old thrill: yes, this hurts, and fuck, yes, I want it, and god, every shiver is an apology I will never have to make.
I heard him pant in my ear, hot and ragged.
“You think you can out-fuck me, Harlowe?” He leaned in, voice so low it barely survived the echo. “You think if you get ruined enough, I’ll go away?”
The question made my breathing worse, ratcheting the odd agony in my chest. I wriggled, helpless, and he hauled my wrists higher, with an efficiency that made me shake, not from restraint but the certainty he’d been planning for this since the first time he kissed me.
My body fused to the wall, my eyes burning with unshed tears and something wobbling at the horizon of pleasure, and I waited for him to slow. He never did. Not for a second.
I knew this was the hammer space of sensation inside me—blinding, vaulting, brighter than the Manhattan skyline, as he fucked me with a rhythm tuned to rage, to retribution, to the entropy of our mutual destruction.
His cock split me, the raw slap of hips on ass muffled only by the wet, fleshy thunder of our bodies colliding at maximum.
There was no sense of time. No floor, no ceiling.
Only a boiling vertical concrete blur outside, and the knowledge that when this ended, it would either be in murder or in something so close you couldn’t tell the difference.
He let go of my wrists and seized a handful of hair, yanking my head back so I gasped.
“Keep your eyes up,” he grunted. “I want you to watch.”
I watched myself in the reflection of the elevator walls—hips arched, mouth open.
I watched him jackhammer inside me, veins in his neck threatening to burst, sweat slicking every inch of his wild, beautiful self.
I watched us as ruin, as prophecy. I watched a girl become a war crime, and the man who would love her only if he could destroy every last inch.
He fucked me, relentless and punitive, until the elevator’s glass fogged around us, until the red cherry of the emergency stop button was the only thing that glared in my peripheral.
He bent to my ear. “Which is it, Harlowe? Do you want me, or do you want to kill me?”
“Why not both?” I rasped, tears scalding the rim of my lashes.
He liked that. He liked it so much he stopped fucking for a beat, the cock of his throbbing hot inside me, then started a new cadence, deeper, each thrust bordering on violence but never crossing all the way to cruelty.
His hand wrenched my hair to the side, and using his ruined voice, he hissed, “I want it burned into you. No one touches what’s mine.”
He continued to fuck my ass with a tempo that wanted to erase any previous lovers from the record, to overwrite Harley’s teeth with something deeper and more permanent.
The friction was tenderized by the torrent of arousal running down my thighs, and with every thrust, he grunted, low and mean, “You don’t get to leave me. Not even in your head.”
The words were myth, sacrament, and violence as old as the city.
I came again, this time so hard I thought my heart would silence itself.
He let me thrash, let me try to claw the wall, then finished himself, fists locked at my waist as he emptied himself inside me, cock pumping until I could feel the perfect, sticky bloom of his cum coating me inside and out.
My knees buckled. He didn’t let me fall; he pressed his body into mine, keeping me flat to the wall, breathing hard enough that each exhale frosted the metal. Slowly, he loosened his grip on my hair, then my neck, then my wrists.
We stood there, suspended in glass and cold, and the aftermath of being very nearly murdered.
The silence in the elevator was obscene, the only noise was the wet, erotic drip of his cum and my cunt leaking together down the inside of my thigh.
I didn’t look at him. I watched myself in the mirrored wall, watched the mascara streaks, the bruises, the little tremor that lived now forever in my hands.
Arrow tucked himself away, rolled his shoulders in a gesture that was impossibly composed.
Then, with no menace, he reached out and pressed the restart button.
The elevator lurched, exhaled, and continued its climb.
He stepped back, giving me two feet of space as if he were an old friend who’d just bumped into me at a cocktail party.
I breathed. I watched for any tell in his body, any sign he was about to finish what I’d started with the knife. But if anything, Arrow was less angry now, more at ease, a wolf that had finally devoured the lamb and realized it tasted exactly as advertised.
He took out a handkerchief from his back pocket, a little ostentatious, embroidered A, and wiped the sweat from his face, then held it against the stab wound I left him with, expression unreadable. I waited, panting, my wrists pink and my face twitchy with the heat of not knowing what came next.
I watched him through the glass, his reflection bisected by the scratch in the mirrored panel, and felt myself brighten into the truth.
I liked this. I liked this so much I could barely see straight, could barely remember what it was to want anything that wasn’t his blood, his cum, his violence, and his need.
The elevator chimed, a sound so ordinary it almost broke the spell. The doors yawned open to a wall of smoke and cologne and six feet of leather-jacketed sin.
Fuck my life.
Orion.
He strolled in like he’d been summoned by the devil himself, a cigarette dangling from his fingers, eyes glittering as if he’d just walked in on a scandal he wanted front-row tickets to.
“Well, well,” he drawled, gaze flicking between Arrow’s wound and my face, which probably looked like I’d just been caught red-handed breaking and entering a man’s soul. “Is this the floor where foreplay turns into a felony, or should I come back in five?”
Arrow didn’t move.
Didn’t even blink.
I tried to push away, but his grip shifted subtly—just enough to say you’re not going anywhere.
Orion took a drag, exhaled smoke in a perfect ring. “You know, I thought I heard the sound of sexual tension echoing down the hallway. Glad to see I wasn’t hallucinating.”
“Just having a conversation with Harlowe,” Arrow replied with a smile.