CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ZARA
Imprisonment has never been so enticing.
Axel shoves his rock-hard shaft so deep inside me that I feel him reaching new crevices, his royal crown scraping my inner walls with an alluring graze and his girth stretching me to my limit. Sublime agony.
Mumbling something about me deserving a bed, he tows us another ten, twenty, thirty feet, still pumping into me. Until I’m slammed against a wall in this dimly lit bootlegger’s vestibule, bound to it by his unfettered passion.
It was a kiss.
Maybe I should be intimidated by his unhinged pillaging or his proclamation that there is no escape, but I can’t help but relish how unraveled he is. I craved this. His lips against mine, his length filling me, his crack in control. Never did I imagine it would happen with a kiss.
With every brush of his lips, he grew more ravenous in that initial connection.
And so it continues.
Much like his elusive scent, he tastes like the incense of kings and the flight of fallen souls. Whiskey, power, and red, black, and green.
“I can’t get enough,” he mumbles against my neck before moving back to my mouth with a bruising tethering.
Nips and teeth and licks and swallows.
He grips me so arduously; every molecule of the atmosphere between us is suffocated into submission. He rules it all yet clutches me like a lifeline.
A treasure he seeks to ravage and shelter and own.
It’s a collision of all his versions, and while there’s nothing hotter than his dominant, controlled demeaner, this is a glorious answer to a month of pent-up desire.
I want him to tear me apart and put me back together as much as I yearn to be the only one who sees him like this—outside of himself, fierce and fragile and plundering everything he wants.
But I also sense his conflict about losing himself here.
“Break me then,” I rasp into his mouth, my skin sizzling from every point of contact. “Use me.”
My eyes flutter as I moan from the delicious force of a vicious pump.
“Those goddamn noises.” He doesn’t add anything to that initially.
He spins us and swaggers forward with all his lofty bravado as I swivel my hips and seize his mouth.
Until I’m flattened against another wall, and he has my hands pinned above my head, and his lips are everywhere.
“Want to get you … back … but I can’t …”
His mutterings are unintelligible at this point. It would make me laugh, except I’m too enthralled, too satisfied about being the one to kiss him stupid.
“Like you warned me that day in your office,” I go on, maintaining my train of thought as he sucks on my neck. “With our guns and your torture, when you said you’d split me in two.” I pull my knees up tighter to deepen his position. “You’ll mend me afterward.”
He lifts his chin, our gazes crashing like a surging tide. His pupils have blown into a black abyss, eating away all the blue. His pulse thrums with menacing hunger in his neck. His entire body vibrates with lust and greed and adoration. For me.
And in this clandestine escapeway, everything but Axel ceases to hold value. In place of death warrants and failed missions and forsakenness, I am held and safe and victorious.
“Always,” he promises, hammering into me. “I’ll mend, protect, cherish …” He inflicts a stinging bite on my nipple to emphasize his final point. “And ruin you.”
Despite the wolfish glimmer in his eyes and how aggressively he pistons his hips, I know it’s the idea that I’d trust him that’s his undoing now.
He’s asked me that question so many times.
I’ve never answered. Because I’d be a fool to trust him and a bigger fool to declare it.
So, though I’m uncertain where I stand with everything beyond these walls, here, in his arms, I’m confident that he’ll never break me beyond his ability to heal.
“Do it,” I whisper as he attempts to steer us several more paces toward the residence. “Split me in two, Axel. Then spend the rest of the night sewing me back together.”
His large, lean fingers weave through my hair until he’s palming my head, his lips colliding with mine when we bang into another brick barrier. “You’re un-fucking-real. A goddamn dream.”
He angles us so he’s dragging against my clit, lifting one of my legs until it’s thrown over his shoulder and I’m stretched like a dancer.
My thighs are sticky, and a rivulet of sweat trickles between my breasts.
It mirrors the one rolling from his temple.
I arch my back to heighten the friction, whimpering through every dizzying stroke of rapture.
And he keeps to his word—cradling and destroying in one fell swoop.
A hint of his unruffled composure peeks through as he studies me with hooded eyes, his dark lashes fanning a shadow onto his strong cheekbones, his ash-brown hair boasting of his wisdom and experience with the silver dusting at his temples, his rosy lips parted with intrigue.
So handsome. Maybe even more so because he’s intent on learning what will tip me over the edge and willing to tame himself to do it.
The passageway begins to quake—or maybe it’s me.
Either way, I surrender to the impending tempest, eager to let it fracture the deepest parts of me, to cleave my story into a before and after, then and now.
To become his wrecked darling, his poisonous thorn, tarnished and splintered and replanted to flourish again.
With that notion, he leans forward and bites my collarbone, never sacrificing his ferocious cadence. And I detonate, exploding in a concealed pocket of his castle, like a tawdry mistress. Screaming for the pleasure of the king.
It’s revitalizing in ways I can’t quite name. But I let him consume me and ruin me, envelop my frame and croon his praise into my ear. And as I’m shuddering in his embrace, floating somewhere in the amber light, he covers my lips with his palm, driving himself home.
His determined thrusts and the pure depravity of being muzzled and used elongate my orgasm, which he garners immediately.
“That’s my girl. Keep coming. So goddamn radiant. You’ve got more for me.”
He’s right. I’m suspended in that realm of ecstasy, soaring and shattering at once, with no reprieve in sight. Every second of him taking what he wants from me lifts me higher and brands me deeper.
“Coming inside you,” he announces, and there’s a pause, a question, a request for consent, and maybe regret that we’re discussing parachutes while mid-skydive.
I’d venture that he’s generally more prudent about his encounters, but that awareness only ignites a blazing inferno in the depths of my core, setting any reservations aflame.
My days are numbered anyway. He said I sold my soul, but like the kiss, having him in a way no one else has is worth the cost.
“Fill me up, Axel. Give me your cum,” I plead when he lifts his palm from my mouth.
That does it. His mammoth frame jerks around me.
“Fuuuuuuuuck, Zar.” He erupts inside me—hot and forceful and never-ending, full of the same power he infuses into everything.
When I moan from the sheer deliciousness of him streaming into me, he covers my mouth with his for an unapologetically brutal fusion.
And that wildness he tries so hard to tamp down is revived once more while he endures his own endless bliss.
He keeps taking from me, intent on wringing every drop of euphoria from each of us, leaving himself in the deepest parts of my body, marking me as his. Neither of us can stop trembling.
But after several minutes, sweaty and tangled with one another in this desolate corridor, we finally catalog the destruction.
Our jagged breaths and pounding heartbeats.
His pants finally surrendered and are now pooled around his ankles.
My skirt is encircling my waist, my blouse is ripped, and my front-clasping bra is hanging loose.
In a shared breath, we dissolve into hysterical laughter, whether it be from the sight of us in shambles or the adrenaline spike.
I bite my lip as my hands explore his strong shoulders. “We probably shouldn’t do that before a meeting unless there’s a hurricane or a lion on the loose to explain why we’re so disheveled.”
“Wisdom,” he quips with a grin that unravels years of turmoil inside me.
It’s an exchange that trumps anything I’ve ever shared with another person. Somehow more intimate than the sex itself. A possessiveness bubbles inside me. That postcoital elation flooding him is mine.
Eventually, we calm and quiet. He rests his forehead against mine, and his quenched smirk morphs into a concerned frown before he pecks my nose.
“Don’t say it.” I hate the panic in my voice, but if this man that I’m hopelessly falling for tells me he regrets this an hour after my father practically euthanized me, I won’t care if I survive.
“Clearly, you don’t have any idea what I was going to say.
” He dusts some matted wisps of hair from my face, his tranquil presence returning even though his breaths are still ragged.
“That was the most fun I’ve ever had. You are beyond any fantasy I dared to imagine.
We have a lot to figure out, but I owe you an apology.
” That worry line returns, regret knotting his forehead.
“I’ve been careless with you. More than once.
It won’t happen again. We’re going to talk about limits and preferences and—”
“I’m on birth control,” I blurt, assuming that’s part of it. The fear that I’m trapping him.
“There’s a very loud voice in my head that wishes you weren’t, but … good.”
That’s not at all the response I expected. The idea that he wouldn’t feel trapped, that he likes the notion of something that would bind us forever, is almost more than I can handle. My entire body quivers in his embrace.
He chuckles as if he’s in on a secret. “You and me both, darling.”