Chapter 31 #3
He gripped my hips, positioning me over him, and I felt the thick head of him pressing against me.
Our eyes met, held, and in that suspended moment before I sank down onto him, I saw every version of us that had ever existed—the kids we'd been, the people we'd become, the life we might have had if the world had been different.
Then I lowered myself onto him, and coherent thought scattered.
The stretch of him was almost too much, pleasure bleeding into pain and back again until I couldn't separate the two. I gasped against his mouth, my fingers digging into his shoulders, and he groaned low in his throat, his hands tightening on my hips hard enough to bruise.
My pussy felt unbelievably full, and I had to shift slightly, getting used to the unfamiliar sensation, feeling each and every last delicious inch of him.
“Fuck,” he breathed, his mouth dropping to my collarbone. “Gabriella, fuck—”
I started to move, slowly at first, adjusting to the feel of him inside me after so long. But it didn't take long before slow wasn't enough anymore. Before I needed more, needed everything, needed him so badly it felt like I was coming apart at the seams.
His hands guided my movements, helping me find a rhythm that had both of us gasping.
The jacket shifted with every roll of my hips, the leather sliding against my skin, and every time he looked down at where we were joined, at the sight of me riding him while wearing his cut, something almost feral flashed across his face.
“You have no idea,” he gritted out, his voice wrecked, “how many times I've pictured this. How many fucking nights I've laid in this bed and imagined you exactly like this.”
I couldn't respond with words. I could only show him with my body, with the desperate way I moved against him, with the sounds I couldn't hold back.
“Gabby,” he growled, feeling me tense around him.
“Fuck me, Luke. Let’s turn your fantasies into reality. Fuck me until I can’t remember my own name. Until I forget everything. Everything but you, your cock, and the way you make me feel.”
His mouth found my throat, my jaw, my lips, kissing me between broken breaths and muttered curses.
“Fuck,” he muttered, the veins in his neck protruding from holding himself back. I braced my hands on his shoulders as his head tipped back onto the bed, and balanced on the balls of my feet, bouncing on his cock harder and faster.
“Tell me you’re still mine, Gabby.”
“I’ve always been yours.”
“I’ve missed you so fucking much.”
“Luke…” I breathed. “Keep fucking me. Please. Please keep fucking me.” I begged when tears came to my eyes and I didn’t know what else to say.
When one of his hands slipped between us, his thumb finding my clit, I shattered. My entire body began to shake, my movements becoming more erratic.
“That’s it, princess. Cum for me. Show me you’ve missed me as much as I’ve missed you.”
I could barely think straight. I bounced on his cock, feeling more full than I could ever remember, the stretch of him inside me blending pleasure with pain.
“I love you,” he breathed with nothing but honesty and freedom, squeezing my clit between his fingers. It was on the tip of my tongue to say it back, but instead, I crashed my mouth to his, biting at his lower lip and slipping my tongue into his mouth.
He met every one of my movements with his own, sliding his tongue against mine. He sat up, pushing away from the bed, until we were both pressed against each other, my tits against his chest, our bodies so close we may as well have been one.
I continued bouncing on him, my moans smothered in his lips, and both of his hands went back to my ass, guiding my movements, bringing us both to the edge.
The orgasm hit me so hard I saw white, my body clenching around him as I cried out his name. And somewhere in the middle of it, I felt him follow me over, felt him bury himself deep and break apart inside me with a groan that sounded like it had been torn from somewhere primal.
We stayed like that for a long moment after, both of us shaking, both of us trying to remember how to breathe. His arms wrapped around me, holding me against his chest, and I could feel his heart hammering beneath my palm.
“Stay,” he whispered against my hair. “Just for tonight. Stay.”
I closed my eyes, knowing I shouldn't. Knowing every minute I remained here made leaving harder. But I also knew I couldn't deny him this. Couldn't deny myself.
“Vienna…” I whispered, but he shook his head almost immediately.
“No,” he said quietly, though there was iron beneath the softness of it. “No. Don’t.”
His hand remained on my thigh beneath the leather, his thumb dragging once over my skin in a way that was almost absent-minded, but his face had gone hard again.
The hurt in his voice was quieter now, and somehow that made it infinitely worse.
It would have been easier if he had shouted.
Easier if he had turned cruel or cold or angry enough to make me retreat into my own anger and use it as armour.
But Vienna had never been that simple for me, and tonight was no different.
Pushing myself up slowly, I pulled the jacket tighter around my body, even though I knew full well that only made everything about this more intimate.
“You know I can’t stay. But I came here, didn’t I?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “I chose you.”
His expression darkened almost instantly, and the look in his eyes made my stomach twist. “That’s the fucking problem,” he said. “Because you keep choosing me in private and leaving me to rot in public.”
I flinched like he had physically struck me.
He saw it too, because his jaw clenched the second the reaction crossed my face, regret flickering there for half a heartbeat before it disappeared again.
But he didn’t take the words back, and I didn’t ask him to.
Neither of us had come here tonight for lies.
“I didn’t come here to hurt you,” I said quietly.
His laugh was low and bitter, and it scraped something raw inside my chest. “Bit late for that, sweetheart.”
The word should have sounded cruel on his tongue after everything that had happened between us, after all the years and all the damage and all the things we had both done to survive.
Instead, it made my eyes sting so quickly I had to look away.
He noticed, of course he noticed, and just like that some of the fight seemed to leave him.
He moved closer again, slower this time, and cupped the side of my face in his hand.
His thumb brushed beneath my eye before anything could spill over, and the gentleness of it nearly undid me more thoroughly than any anger ever could have.
“Tell me to come with you,” he said.
My breath caught in my throat.
He held my stare, not letting me look away, not letting me hide.
“Tell me to come with you right now,” he said again, more firmly this time, his voice low and intense enough to send something dangerous skittering through my chest. “Tell me to walk you back there and burn that entire fucking place to the ground on my way out.”
My heart lurched so hard it physically hurt. “Vienna…”
“No.” His hand slid to the back of my neck, not rough, not threatening, but anchoring. “Answer me.”
And God, I hated that he was asking. I hated that there was a part of me—a selfish, desperate, exhausted part of me—that wanted to say yes so badly I could barely breathe.
I hated even more that I already knew I couldn’t.
Because Vienna would do it. That was the terrifying truth of him.
He would set the whole world on fire if I asked him to, and he would burn right along with it if that was the cost of getting me out.
“You’re not his,” he said, his voice roughening with every word, the emotion in it starting to bleed through no matter how hard he tried to keep it under control. “You’ve never been his. You think I won’t burn every last bastard in that clubhouse if it means you can fucking breathe again?”
My throat tightened so hard it hurt to swallow. “And you think it wouldn’t cost you everything to even fucking try?” I whispered back.
His face changed then. All the anger, all the grief, all the possessive violence and heartbreak and years of waiting seemed to sharpen into one devastating truth all at once.
He leaned his forehead against mine, his eyes closing briefly as though even holding himself together for this conversation was costing him more than he wanted me to see.
And when he finally spoke, his voice was barely more than a wrecked breath.
“You are my everything.”
That was the thing that broke me.
Not because I hadn’t known. I had. I had always known, even when I forced myself to look away from it.
Even when I had stood there all those years ago and done what I did.
Even when I had built entire walls around myself to survive the aftermath and convinced myself there was no point touching the grief because it would only drag me under.
I had known. But hearing it now, hearing it like this, after everything, stripped bare and honest and so painfully certain that there was no room left to hide from it… it was unbearable.
My hands found his face without thought, my fingers trembling slightly as I held him there, as though touching him might somehow steady the ache tearing through my chest. For a long moment, neither of us said anything.
We just stayed there, breathing the same air, forehead to forehead, broken and furious and far too in love for any of this to ever end cleanly.
And maybe that was why it hurt so badly when I eventually pulled away first. Because I had to.
Because if I didn’t, I already knew I would never leave this room again.
Vienna’s eyes tracked every movement as I bent to gather my clothes from where they had been discarded across the floor. He didn’t stop me. Didn’t speak. Didn’t plead. Somehow, that silence hurt worse than if he had dragged me back into him and demanded I stay.
I dressed slowly, painfully aware of his gaze the entire time.
A part of me wanted to tell him not to look, not because I didn’t want him to see me, but because I knew if I let myself fully register the way he was watching me now—like I was something precious and already half-lost—I would unravel completely.
Another part of me wanted him to memorise every second of it, just in case this was the last time either of us got to pretend we had a choice in how this ended.
By the time I was done, I still couldn’t quite bring myself to look at him properly. I reached for the jacket last and paused the second my fingers touched the leather. Vienna noticed immediately.
“Put it back on,” he said.
My fingers tightened around the leather. “You know I can’t.”
He stood then, slow and deliberate, and crossed the room until he was in front of me again. His hand covered mine where it gripped the jacket, his touch warm and solid.
His hand slid from mine only so he could take the jacket properly and help me into it once more.
He didn’t rush. Didn’t make a joke. Didn’t even attempt to disguise what the act meant.
He put it on me like a vow, like a warning, like a promise neither of us was brave enough to say out loud.
And when he stepped back just enough to look at me in it one final time, something cold and undeniable slid through me, because I knew with sudden awful clarity that I had just done something irreversible.
“I have to go,” I whispered.
Vienna held my gaze for one long, brutal second before nodding once. But there was nothing yielding in his expression. Nothing defeated. Nothing resigned. If anything, he looked more certain than ever, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quiet enough to sound almost gentle.
“Do what you need to do, Gabriella.”
A chill slid down my spine at the way he said it.
My fingers tightened around the front of his jacket. “Vienna…”
He leaned down and pressed one slow, deliberate kiss to my forehead, and when he pulled back his eyes were dark with something that made my pulse trip all over again.
“This is the last time you walk out of here and think I’m letting you go again. If you come here again, you’re staying. Even if I have to chain you to the fucking bed.”
For a second, I couldn’t breathe. But then I just nodded, because what else could I do?
My fingers curled tighter into the front of his jacket, the leather warm from his body now, and I hated the way my mind betrayed me so quickly, pulling me backwards before I had even made it to the door.
Because this wasn’t the first time I had stood in front of him wearing something that belonged to him.
It wasn’t the first time he had looked at me like I was already his, like there was no version of the world in which I didn’t end up by his side.
And once—God, once—I had believed it too.
Once, I had lain in this very room with his future wrapped around me as easily as his arms, stupid enough to think wanting it badly enough would somehow make it ours.
Stupid enough to think love could soften the blow of what was coming.
Stupid enough to think that if I chose him loudly enough, the rest of the world might one day be forced to accept it.
It had been one of those rare mornings where nothing felt impossible.
And like a fool, I let the memory take me.