33. Thirty-Three #2
Orion’s brow rose. “Well, in that case . . .” He took another drag and looked me up and down; no doubt, he saw the cum dripping down my thighs.
“Don’t mind me. Just enjoying the vibes in here.
Nothing says unresolved trauma like being held hostage in an elevator by the man you probably dream about strangling with his own belt. ”
I tried to twist free—pride, not hope, propelling the motion—but Arrow’s body locked me in an easy, indifferent counter.
He was showboating for Orion now, savoring the blush in my face, the mess on my thighs.
I hated the part of myself that sparked under the attention, that made my jaw sharpen, and my stare brighten with the knowledge of being a spectacle.
Orion leaned against the elevator wall, crossing his boot at the ankle. “You two ever considered therapy?” he asked. “I hear there are support groups for people like you two. Or maybe, like, a couples spa.”
Arrow’s laugh was a scrape, salt, and chrome. “This is our therapy.”
It was, in a way. The wound was the cure; the violence, the vaccine.
Maybe that’s why I let my pulse hammer out of the red and into the blue, let Arrow hold me there, pinched between him and the mirrored wall, Orion’s gaze reflecting and refracting every ugly, gorgeous thing we’d done in the last ten minutes.
Orion exhaled and flicked imaginary ash at Arrow’s chest. “Nice shiner, by the way. Virelli signature?”
Arrow’s mouth twitched. “She’s got a mean right.”
“Never doubted it.” Orion howled with authentic laughter. “God, I fucking missed this. You two are the last thing that makes sense in New York. Let me know if you need a photographer next time—document the war crimes, that kind of thing.” He winked at me. “You know, for posterity.”
The doors hissed open. Orion stayed in the elevator, saluting with his cigarette as Arrow hauled me into the marble corridor and down the hall, not even bothering to mask the trail of come that slid down my thighs and onto the glistening black floor.
“After you,” he said, toneless, as if we’d just concluded a board meeting instead of an exorcism. I staggered past him, legs jelly, knees slicked, and as I stepped into the corridor, I turned, unable to keep the smile off my face.
“You bleed too easily,” I said, trying for flippant.
He grinned. “So do you,” he grinned, nodding toward the blood mixed with come, dripping down my thighs from my ass.
He paraded me the entire way to the suite, and didn’t let go when he yanked the door open.
He spun me fast enough that I lost orientation, banged the small of my back against the edge of the foyer table, and then slammed the door shut with his boot.
He was gripping my elbow and shoulder, rotating both until my chest flattened to polished marble.
Arrow pressed his palm to the back of my skull, smearing my cheek on the matte white, and I realized his other hand was already at my ass, kneading the clench of it with a proprietary violence that telegraphed exactly what would come next.
“You’re going to remember this,” Arrow said, not a whisper but a snarl pitched for exactly me. “You’re going to remember every second you tried to run, and how I made you pay for it.”
I grinned into the table, feral and newly defiant. “If your goal is to scare me, you’ll need tighter knots.”
Wriggling my hips, a dare and a taunt, I felt the exquisite violence of his hand on my thigh as he spread my legs, nudging them apart with his knee.
He grabbed the paring knife from the floor, twirled it once, then drove it into the surface a millimeter from my face.
The marble skittered with the force, and I nearly giggled, because goddamn, he was such a drama queen.
I felt his hands at my wrists, binding them with zip ties conjured from the pocket of his coat.
He kicked my knees wide again, let the action bruise me, then trailed a lazy, surgical line up from the back of my thighs.
There was a rhythm to his violence, always: quick, surprising, but never random.
He made me wait for every escalation, every new indignity.
He peeled back the hood of my ass, exposing the raw, gashed seam of it, pink with fury, and leaking a shining river down the inside of my thighs.
I heard him spit into his hand. I felt the hot glob splatter my hole, not that I needed any more lubrication.
The slide of his thumb worked it in as he muttered something beautiful and necrotic under his breath.
He didn’t bother with my cunt, again. He aimed straight for my sore ass, thumb opening me wide enough that the pulse in my ears drowned out even the wet sound of the entry.
This time when Arrow fucked me there, it was with the grit of a man who no longer cared if the world called him obsessive or insane.
This was not about wanting, but about branding.
About taking the helix of Virelli and Romanov and welding it at the tailbone, so hard and so deep that nobody—no woman, no girl, not even my dead brother’s ghost—could ever separate me back into who I’d been before tonight.
Each thrust burned. Each thrust punished. Each thrust was a dare.
The savage sound of my scream lived right under my skin as the new rhythm bucked through me until I was slippery with sweat, and half-gone with exhaustion.
Arrow wrapped one hand around the zip tie at my wrists, using it as a handle to piston me back against him, the other sprawled at my hip, gripping so hard I might bruise for a decade or more.
My cheek mashed to the marble, and I let him rut out every inch of rage and insult, every humiliation I’d heaped at his feet since the first time we met and ruined each other, or before then in some cosmic math, the predestined first time either of us opened our mouths to speak.
I screamed his name, and he laughed; I whimpered, and he kissed the back of my neck, then bit down, a signature, a warning, an immortal fuck-you to the world that kept pretending we weren’t the only two predators left on the island.
When he spilled inside of me again, it was a detonation, so pure I could have measured my freedom in the microseconds it took for him to collapse over my body, both of us gasping, two halves of the same lucky, dying star.
The sweat and blood and the spit pooled on the marble, all the fluids of war and impending marriage, and surrender.
He held there, chest to my back, cock softening inside but not letting me go, breathing heavily.
I let the air return to me in jagged swallows, brain a fog, my pride, cunt, and ass decimated but not unmade.
Only evolved.
We stayed exactly like that for a minute, the scent of sex and adrenaline locking us together more tightly than any contract ever could.
Finally, Arrow levered himself off, hands braced at the edge of the marble, and tugged my wrists up after him.
He sliced the zip-ties with a flick of the paring knife, the plastic snapping away so fast my arms flopped leaden to the desk.
He massaged the red bands out of my skin, and I hissed, equal parts agony and gratitude.
He turned me to face him, then dropped to his haunches and thumbed the cum glistening at my thighs, sniffing the mix that drooled out of my ruined ass.
He watched the exodus with proprietary fascination, as if savoring the last drop from an expensive bottle.
I tried to look away. He pinched my chin to force a stare.
“Don’t hide,” Arrow said, quiet now, voice a ghost of the raw-boned thing from the elevator. “You’re most beautiful after the war.”
Blood pulsed in my ears, dizzy and soft.
He pressed his forehead to my belly, breathing in like I was a drug he needed in overdose, and then, with all the tenderness he’d denied for the past hour, buttoned my skirt back up, tucking the torn hem under my blouse so I was at least half-dressed for the next round.
He found my jaw, lifted it, and kissed me.
Slow. Deliberate. A benediction for broken, dangerous things.
I expected to hate him more after. I expected to hate myself.
But what bled through the rupture was nothing like shame; it was hunger, a weird pride in the way we could never stop at enough, and maybe, in the leftover silence, a messy edge of hope.
We could break the pattern, Harlowe and Arrow, if only by loving each other so hard we left no pieces for the city to chew on.
Arrow tucked my hair behind my ear and said, “Next time, don’t use the paring knife. The chef’s is sharper.”
God. He was an asshole. I laughed, then sobbed, then laughed again, mouth open and throat raw, clinging to his arms because I could.
Because after everything, he still knew exactly how to make me come apart the best way.
He braced me through the aftershocks, listening as my giggling breath stuttered into something steadier.
“You need stitches,” I whispered.
He kissed above my eye, a benediction. “I need you more,” he said.
I stared at him, this man who’d just brutalized and worshipped me in equal measure, and saw something I hadn’t expected. Vulnerability beneath the violence.
"You're bleeding," I said again, my voice steadier this time.
He glanced down at the wound, almost dismissive. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. I stabbed you.” The reality of what I’d done hit me anew. I’d actually stabbed him. And he’d fucked me harder for it.
Arrow’s laugh was soft and dark. “Is that concern I hear, Harlowe Virelli? For a Romanov?”
I pushed against his chest, but there was no force behind it. “Fuck you. I just don’t want you bleeding out before the wedding. Think of the tabloids.”