Chapter 27
PINK
“You brought him to the dark room.” Bane’s voice held malice as he stood there taking me in. He barely even glanced at Rafe.
“He’s going to be my husband, so I figured why not?”
“I told your ass you don’t come in here with other people.”
“Well, I think what you’re telling me at this point is moot considering you’re only watching me for your brother anyway.”
He turned to his brother. “You ready to handle her all by yourself, or are you handing her off to me again?”
“Bane, I swear to Christ, if this doesn’t make you see that there’s shit you two need to resolve, I don’t know what will.” His brother didn’t even hesitate. “She’s all yours.”
Fuck that man, I swear to God. He exited and left us with fury ricochetting around the room—volatile, magnetic, and catastrophic all at the same time. “If he’s leaving, so am I.”
I moved toward the door, but Bane blocked my way. “I think you’re going to stay.”
“Why? Got a mask you want to wear?” I scoffed. “I’m over your masks and your fuckings in the darkness, Bane. I don’t want it.”
“Is that so?” He tilted his head. “What do you want so badly from me then?”
“Does it matter? Why don’t you ask Sabine what she wants since she’s perfect.”
“I’m asking you. What the fuck do you want, Bianca Zarelli? You have had it all with me already for years. You get every damn thing you want.”
“How can you believe that?” I choked out. How could he believe I was getting all I wanted when all I wanted was him.
“How?” he bellowed and then stormed at me to grab me by the throat and yank me close.
“You want a house to burn, I provide it. You want a man to screw around with, you get it. You want a mil to throw at a roulette table, it’s yours.
You want a romance book to fantasize over, it’s at the penthouse for you in a day.
You want into the dark room to play out a fantasy, here we fucking are. ”
“You think I care about any of that?”
“What more can I give you?” He sounded broken, but I was too.
“Yourself! It’s all I ever want. And if you can’t give me that, give me the damn pain to make me forget that you can’t, that I’ll never have you. That she will or some other woman.”
He shook his head at me, his eyes darkening with a desire I knew he didn’t want to feel. “I’ve given you that time and time again.”
“With a mask? Sure, but I want to see it, Bane. I want to know it’s you.
I want the delicious slap of your hand, want you to take control.
I want you to push me to the brink of pain so that I forget I’ll never have you again, because that’s where this is going isn’t it? You’re going to let me go, aren’t you?”
“What does it matter if I’m with her when you’re going to be with him?”
“It still fucking hurts,” I screamed. “And I want to be so close to death that my adrenaline has me shaking and crying and feeling like I’m not going to make it out so I forget that hurt.
Drowned me in my goddamn fear of losing everything.
” The words poured out of me like gasoline, every syllable daring him and him alone to strike a match.
“But you know you can’t lose a damn thing … Not when you’re with me, Pink,” he murmured, his thumb moving from my neck just to brush away a lone tear that escaped down my cheek before he leaned in and kissed me slow.
“So let me have it without the mask, Bane. Just once.”
But Bane didn’t move. He instead stood there, the storm of his own emotions filling the room.
Then he shoved me back, letting go of me and paced away.
His shirtsleeves were rolled up showing those tattoos I loved, and his veins stood out like rivers leading up, up, up where I wanted to go.
I wanted to touch every part of him and see all of him if he’d let me.
When he turned back to me finally, I let my gaze travel back to that beautiful face of his.
He had that look in his eyes, the one where a predator sees that their prey has finally stopped running.
I’d succumbed to what we both knew I wanted.
He let the silence stretch between us, now so comfortable in it.
I knew he was mulling over our time together, considering what could be done now that we were in this deep.
And then his voice carried quietly through the room, “I’d kill a man for you.
Me. Gut him without thinking twice about it.
And I considered doing the same to my own brother tonight, Bianca. ”
He turned to walk over to me. When his chest met mine, I gasped, but he didn’t look like it had any sort of effect on him. “Bane—”
“This between us … It’s something I can’t control anymore. It’s something that consumes me and shifts my focus from protecting those around me. It’s a liability and a damn weakness.” His jaw worked up and down. “I don’t want to love.”
“But do you?”
He shook his head back and forth slowly. “No. I won’t love you, baby girl. I refuse to.”
And those words hit me like a tsunami stealing away the imaginary life and dreams I’d built.
He dragged a hand over his face and when he opened his eyes, his blue stare was dead with apathy. He pulled his gun from where it was tucked at his back waistband, and I lurched back. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have done ages ago, Bianca.” He said my name like it was acid on his mouth. “You’ve been a poison that festers and rots me from the inside. You’ve turned me into what I shouldn’t be.”
“Bane—”
“Sit down and shut up,” he growled and pointed the gun toward the velvet chair in the middle of the dark room.
If I begged, I wondered if he would let me go.
But his stare was suddenly full of a resentment I knew he wouldn’t let lie, and so I sat as he pulled his phone from his pocket and pressed a button.
“Rafe, Bianca’s created a precarious situation that affects not only herself but our resort and name too.
” He waited a moment. And then he met my eyes.
“I intend to do what I should have a long time ago.”
And then he admitted what I thought he wouldn’t. “I’ve slept with her of course, but I’ve slept with enough women to know she’s not irreplaceable.” He hummed as his brother talked, and I glanced at the door to which he then walked over to block.
Fuck, I might die in the dark room tonight. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst way to go. I’d always wanted time in here with him alone. Time he never wanted to give me, and now he was offering a way out, one I wanted if I had to endure him being with someone else.
“I don’t need our father’s or her father’s permission if you don’t.”
He nodded and then clicked off the phone.
“Bianca, I’ve tortured men for much less than what you did today.”
“What?” I whispered.
“You disrespected our family at that table.”
“That’s what you’re concerned about, after what I said to you?
” My mouth almost dropped and then I couldn’t stop the words that shot out right after.
“Every single one of you at that table deserved to be disrespected.” I lifted my chin and narrowed my eyes at him. “And I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
He came for me with the precision of a man who had murdered and who would murder again. He was going to take my damn life. I’d be the next freaking skull on his shelf, and I didn’t care.
Bane Black was a psychopath and proud of it. I loved it about him. Loved him even if he didn’t love me back.
He yanked me up by my neck and threw me against the wall. My back hit it with a thud, and his other hand brought the gun up under my chin—hard enough to make me remember how small and fragile my life was.
His stare was ice cold, his voice a blade slicing over my skin. “You’ve caused us enough disrespect and me enough pain that even my brother wants nothing to do with you,” he said, low and lethal.
My pulse ricocheted. He’d just called his brother. He’d confirmed it. Permission.
Maybe he truly did care that little about me. Maybe I was just a pawn, and they’d finally moved me around enough. Hell, I was a huge liability at this point, and they seemed to be over the partnership with my father. They didn’t need it. They didn’t need me.
I was useless.
The thought dripped like poison into my veins.
My heart started to gallop so fast it felt like it was trying to climb out of my chest. He was about to take what he wanted.
And then erase me. Bury me. I’d become an obligation instead of a prize.
Still, I held his gaze. My mouth moved before my fear could smother it.
“If that’s the case,” I whispered, “if I’ve caused you that kind of pain, don’t be gentle when you take what you want.
If you’re finally going to fuck me without a mask, Bane, I want to watch every feeling you have for me.
And if it’s my last fuck, you owe it to me not to hold back a damn thing, don’t you think? ”
Something flickered behind his eyes—rage, hunger, the ghost of a smile—and then his lips curved into a laugh that didn’t sound like mercy at all. It sounded like malice.
There was no mask this time as he took my mouth in his and devoured my lips. He ripped his teeth over them so hard, we both tasted blood.
I clawed at his back as I pulled him close and moaned loudly.
This wasn’t a game between us anymore or us pursuing an outlet to stave off our desires for one another for another day. This was our end, our goodbye, us in our rawest form. He didn’t want me anymore but needed me like this one last time.
His hands went to my ass to lift me up and I immediately wrapped my legs around him, where they belonged. I touched his face and held him to me, rubbed my hands over the perfect lines of his jaw and whimpered.
I was getting Bane.
I was getting the only man I ever wanted here and now.
The tears that streamed down my face were probably ridiculous because they were for him, not for my life, not for the fact that I thought they were planning to kill me after. I pulled back to catch my breath as his mouth went to my neck and sucked on every part of it.
“I should care that you and your brothers are going to dispose of this but I don’t. I don’t care at all.”
He slammed me into one of the dark walls and ground his cock into my center, “You’d take me any way you can get me. I’m taking you the same way. I’ll always want you even when I want to kill you, Pink.”
And then he was stripping my dress off me and I was pulling at his clothes like an animal. I couldn’t stop. I needed to see him completely bare, see him raw and real without anything between us.
Once we both had not a scrap on us, we stood before one another breathing fast. “You should have never been this beautiful to me. You were always going to be poison.”
“And you were always going to be the destruction I couldn’t avoid.
” I murmured back to him as I walked slowly up to him and stared at the slope of his nose, the cut of his jaw, the scruff of his five o’clock shadow.
“I hate how much I fucking love you, but I do love you, Bane.” I admitted because being close to someone potentially taking your life made you honest.
He cracked his knuckles, never looking away from me.
“I’ve loved you since the day you told me a damn dog died in a book, Bianca Zarelli.
I love your mess, your poison, your self-destructive tendencies, and your obsession with making villains victims. Even still, you’re poison and for the family, I eliminate that from our lives always. ”
He picked up the gun but I got on my knees and crawled toward him as I stared at that pierced cock standing at attention for me, throbbing as my lips came close. He put the gun to my head as I put his cock in my mouth and I sucked it in deep.
I got to look up at his face while he held that gun to my temple and see the turmoil and love and hate all wrapped in one over his features and I gagged on how big he was.
He groaned and his head fell back as he let me work him in my mouth before he yanked my hair back and then pulled me to my feet so he could bend me over a velvet tantric chair in the middle of the room.
My ass was up in the air and he dragged the pistol’s barrel over a cheek before he moved it over my clit and then into my pussy.
The cool metal felt foreign and forbidden.
And it made me feel alive. Being so close to death would do that to a person.
Even still, I mewled that I didn’t want that. I wanted him. He was always all I wanted.
And then the head of his pierced cock was there as he placed the pistol next me and instead put both hands on either side of me before he thrust into me fully.
Hard.
Rough.
Violent.
With all he had.
I turned to look at him, to meet his gaze, to take him in one last time.
We went over the edge together. In love and hate with each other for one last time.