Chapter 23 Claimed #2
Her foot barely filled his palm. Built for dancing, not for war. Everything about her was so small. Breakable.
His hands slowed.
Her skin warmed beneath his touch, and he found himself lingering. Tracing the curve of her arch with more attention than the task required. Feeling the rabbit-quick flutter of her pulse beneath her ankle bone, his gaze climbed.
Past her ankle to the slender column of her calf. Higher. To the soft swell of her knee, and the tender hollow behind it. Higher still. The pale expanse of her lush inner thighs parted slightly.
His gaze fell into the shadows beneath the fabric of his ruined shirt, where the material had ridden up.
Christ.
Soft, pink folds held secrets as delicately as a rose bud. He remembered her honey-blonde curls. Blood rushed to his cock with such violent speed that his vision tunneled with crystalline focus.
The cleft of her sex. Her hidden pearl nestled in those soft folds. The shadows that led deeper. Would she be warm there?
His cock strained against his trousers with aching urgency that bordered on agony. Every rapid heartbeat throbbed between his legs, demanding attention, demanding release, demanding…
She cleared her throat.
Heat flooded his face, as hard as it flooded his groin, and he dropped his gaze. “Sorry.” The word scraped like gravel over glass.
He returned to her feet with ferocious concentration. Anything to keep from looking up again. Anything to distract from the image now seared into his memory.
Wet heat. Tender flesh. Delicate flower. One whiff. One touch. So soft…
His erection refused to subside. He shifted his weight and prayed she couldn’t see the evidence of his disgrace.
“I’ll find you a pair of socks.” He escaped to the dressing room, quickly adjusting himself.
His gaze caught his reflection, and he glared.
You are not some rutting animal driven by your baser instincts.
He returned to the bed, hands trembling as he unrolled the black cashmere, working the fabric up past her ankle with exquisite care. The sock swallowed her tiny foot.
She looked ridiculous.
She looked beautiful.
She looked like she belonged to him.
The thought lodged in his chest like a splinter, sharp and impossible to ignore.
“That should help.”
“Why did you have that list of names?” Her voice came soft, but her question stunned him all the same.
He reached for her other foot, deliberately focusing on anything except the heat burning under his skin. “They are bad men.” He rolled the sock over her calf.
“What happened to your knuckles?”
Jack glanced down at his own injured hand.
The skin had split across two knuckles, dried blood crusting in the creases, the flesh already purpling toward a bruise.
He thought of Hadrian’s face. The satisfying crunch of cartilage giving way as he beat him bloody, teeth scattered across stone like thrown dice.
“A bad man bumped into my hand.”
He smoothed the sock and his eyes fixed on the task because looking at the judgment that undoubtedly filled her eyes felt too dangerous.
“Hadrian?”
The name stabbed like a blade shoved between his ribs.
His name was vulgar in her mouth. Hearing her say it—hearing her lips shape those three syllables—made something ugly and possessive rear up in his chest.
“Why do you care?” The question came out sharper than intended, a snarl barely leashed. “He hurt you.”
“I didn’t say I cared.”
He stilled. A bubble of amusement rising in his chest—sudden, inappropriate, and real in a way nothing had felt real in years. He scowled. “He’ll never look at you or come near you again.”
Silence stretched, filled only by the crackle of the fire and the distant sounds of revelry drifting up from the grounds below. Another bell crashed. Another capture. Another body surrendered to the game Jack had built, the game that had somehow spiraled so far beyond his control.
Her small, pale fingers reached forward, hovering, hesitating. Then it landed on his hand. On his damaged knuckles. A weight so slight and warm. Impossible softness tarnished by his brutalized flesh.
“Thank you.”
Jack stopped breathing.
Dainty, delicate bones wrapped in silken skin. Smooth and feminine. Her nails were polished the color of ballerina slippers, and chipped at the edges.
Not like the Chancellor’s meaty fingers. Dry, not clammy. Light not suffocating.
What did she want?
His throat constricted.
Her touch asked nothing. Demanded nothing. Simply rested, light as a moth, offering warmth without expectation.
Move. Pull away.
The command echoed through his skull as seconds stretched into an eternity. One heartbeat. Two. His skin burned where she touched him, nerve endings firing in confused alarm, because touch had always meant pain. Always meant transaction.
But she wasn’t taking. She was just... there.
Three heartbeats. Four.
His chest tightened.
Pressure built behind his sternum, vast and terrifying, rising like floodwater against a dam. He wanted to pull away. But also wanted to never stop. Never change.
A sound escaped him, wounded and involuntary, dragged from something hidden deeper than his lungs.
She pulled her hand away.
The absence of her touch hit harder than the contact. His knuckles chilled. Exposed. Ugly.
He shot off the bed. “I’ll get you a clean shirt.” The words came out strangled.
The dressing room swallowed him like a held breath.
Cedar and wool met the faint ghost of cologne. He tried to remember how to breathe.
What are you doing?
His hands shook, flicking away the sensation of her touch. But it clung to him. He stretched his fingers, splaying them wide, then squeezed his hands into popping fists.
He couldn’t keep steady. This was more than tremors. His fingers vibrating with tension, his body couldn’t contain. His whole frame buzzed like a struck bell, every nerve still singing from the phantom pressure of her touch.
He pressed his palms flat against the gilded mirror fastened to the wall. Felt the cool glass against his overheated skin. Tried to anchor himself to something solid, something real, something that wasn’t her.
He fumbled for his phone and checked the time. 3:47 AM. Soon, the sky would shift from black to sapphire, then purple to gold. Three hours, maybe less, until the final bells rung.
Three hours until she walked out of his life.
Three hours until the charter plane carried her back to London.
Three hours until she became a memory, a ghost, a woman he’d touched but never truly…
Never truly what?
He stared at his reflection in the darkened mirror. The glass threw back shadows more than features, but he knew what hid beneath his clothes. Raised ridges. Silver tissue puckered like braille. Marked. Ruined. Branded like someone’s property. Chattel. A boy sold for beans.
No one had ever looked at his scars without flinching. He couldn’t bear the thought of her pity or disgust. Even the doctors—the expensive private practitioners who took his money and asked no questions—eventually averted their eyes.
But she had looked.
In the bathroom. In the mirror. Her gaze had traced the ruins of his back, and she hadn’t flinched. She saw him. Read him like a story she couldn’t quite translate.
Never before had he wanted someone to figure him out. To find his secrets, feel his pain, and know.
But why her? What made her so different? So unique?
There was an unspoiled innocence to her. A goodness that hadn’t yet hardened. A virgin. And that was how she was going to leave.
As he stared at the rows of finely tailored options before him, he thought back to her essay.
It would be a luxury if, for just one day, I could breathe air that doesn’t smell of hunger.
He knew that air. Had choked on it for years. The stench still coated his core memories. Some days, he could still taste it.
It was a lingering flavor of rot that contoured him into the man he was today. And it spoke to him on a deep level that she might be sewn from the same tattered thread.
He snatched a clean dress shirt from the rack and paused, looking back at his blood-spattered collar. No part of Hadrian Welles belonged here.
He changed quickly, forgoing the jacket and waistcoat. He stowed his gun in the safe, grabbed another shirt for her, and left the dressing room, rounding the corner of the alcove and—
Every resolution crumbled to dust.
Perched on the edge of the bed now, legs dangling over the side, his ridiculous black socks bunching below her knees, she sat with ruined shirt open—buttons undone, fabric parted—exposing the pale valley of skin between her breasts.
His gaze slid down her throat, where a purple bruise started to form. His stare caressed the gentle slope of her breasts, the concave indent of her waist, falling softly into that golden nest of curls.
She wasn’t looking at him. But she knew he was there. Knew he saw her.
The shirt slid off her arms, falling down her back to the bed.
Jack swallowed, unable to move, forgetting how to breathe.
The clean shirt slipped from his fingers.
Blood in his ears in a deafening roar. His pulse thundered as his breath left his soul.
Tangles of wild blonde framed her face in a halo of chaos and survival. Firelight painted her skin in amber and gold. Freckles scattered across her shoulders like cinnamon sprinkled on cream.
Violence mapped across her beauty, trespassing in ways that filled him with such rage he wanted to punish whoever dared to mar her.
This was his doing. His crime. Bruises marbled her ivory skin in faint watercolor stains.
Scratches slashed her collarbone, her shoulders, and face in thin lines of red.
She was a work of art. Small, perfect breasts, pale as cream, tipped with nipples pink as dawn. A calm breeze traveled from the window, and her delicate flesh tightened in the cool air.
She lifted her arm to cover herself—
“Don’t.” The word ripped out of him, low and rough, tearing something loose inside his chest.
Her arm froze halfway to her breasts, and her lashes lifted with a sharp flick as she finally met his gaze. If she was afraid, it didn’t show. She lifted her chin in challenge, now refusing to hide her body in shame.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
She lowered her arm.
Blood surged to his cock with vicious urgency. The ache of such raw wanting was so desperate it bordered on pain.
Everything she was in that moment, sitting naked on his bed, marked by the long night, arrested him. He couldn’t blink. Couldn’t do anything but stand there and stare at the stunning picture she made, paralyzed by the terrible beauty of her.
She was his Walden. A secret utopia yet to be destroyed by man.
Their eyes locked. The fire crackled. Outside, the hunt continued—moans and laughter drifting from shadows as bells continued to toll. But in this room, time had stopped.
Jack looked away, his gaze rushing to the floor like a rat seeking a crevice to hide. Anger surged inside of him as his body betrayed him.
“Why didn’t you use the safeword when Volkov gave you the chance?”
“I didn’t come here to lose.”
He pinned her with an accusatory stare. She’d already lost so much—because of him. “You would have been compensated for your time—”
“But it would have cost me. For the rest of my life, I would have wondered if I was still somehow less than everyone else, because I didn’t make it to dawn.”
How could she ever wonder such a thing? She was so much more than anyone else out there.
He frowned. “You could have—”
“Why was Dr. Tannh?user on your list?”
His stare jerked to her face, heart slamming against his ribs. Was she doing this on purpose? Using her body to disarm him?
“I didn’t like the picture he took of you.” The words escaped before wisdom could intervene.
She stiffened for a breath. “Oh.” Small. Hurt. Ashamed.
That single syllable broke something inside of him. “No.” He stepped forward, recklessly, stupidly, and for once she didn’t flinch. “I didn’t like…the look in your eye. You didn’t like it.”
She met his stare. Her eyes glistened in the firelight. “No.” Her rough confirmation proved he’d read her correctly. Vulnerable. Scared. Guarded.
His voice dropped lower, scraping bottom. “I didn’t like that others saw you that way.”
“He…” She looked at him for a long moment. Measuring. Searching. For what, he didn’t know. “He was awful.”
Jack swallowed tightly, his hands clenching into fists at his side. “He won’t be practicing medicine for long.”
Her lips twisted. “I doubt—”
“Don’t doubt me. Not when it comes to that. I have my ways.”
Her gaze sharpened. “Why was Peter on your list?”
His chest heaved as his heartbeat raged in his throat, his wrists, his throbbing cock.
Pounding.
Relentless.
His jaw clenched as he thought of the footage he’d watched. “He put his hands on you.”
Her brow pinched with confusion. “Isn’t that the point—”
“I wanted to break his hands.”
Did she see him now? A valley of ruin and ash. A bleak soul grown from grey dust. A solemn, brooding dumping ground where careless people left footprints up and down his spine.
They smashed up things and creatures, then retreated into their lies. He was every ugly truth they left. The evidence of their crimes too filthy for anyone to believe.
So he made an artform out of not being seen.
And it worked.
For years, his fortune grew, and he remained oddly unseen. He preferred standing alone in the shadows. Liked that they could look right through him, as if he were nobody from nowhere.
Who is J. Thorne anyhow?
But he wanted her to see him now. God help him, he wanted her to face the scarred, hideous man behind the mask and not flinch away.
“Peter’s not like the others—”
“Don’t say his name,” he snapped, sharp enough to make her stiffen. But he didn’t scare her into silence. Not yet.
“Why?”
The question hung between them like a guillotine ready to fall.
He should lie.
Make something up.
But the truth crawled out of him, harsh, serrated, and raw. “Another man’s name in your mouth disgusts me. Especially when you refuse to say mine.”
Her breath caught. A sharp little intake with the fallout of a bomb.
He could sense the walls crumbling around him, his carefully constructed world trembling with instability before it would fall to dust.
She looked up at him with those haunting, knowing eyes. “Jack.”
His name whispered past her lips like a prayer, and the world began to fall.
His hands framed her face, cradling her jaw, as his mouth crashed into hers. She gasped against his lips—surprise or surrender, he couldn’t tell. Didn’t care. He swallowed the sound whole. Drank it down like a drowning man sinking into ruin.
Her back hit the mattress. His body followed, covering hers, pressing her down.
He couldn’t get close enough.
His tongue swept across her lower lip, demanding entry, and when she let him in, a sound tore from his throat. Animal. Starving. The pained groan of a man who’d denied himself a lifetime of sustenance, finally granted a feast.