Chapter 8 #2
"I came here to test you," she says. "I wanted to see if the man from the bar is still here or if the lawyer put himself back together."
"The lawyer is gone."
"I know. I can feel your pulse. It's fast."
"You're touching my wrist barefoot in my room at eleven at night. Fast is the appropriate response."
Her mouth twitches before she pulls her lips into a thin line. The start of a smile, dead before it forms, the same way I killed mine in the gym. Two people who refuse to give each other the satisfaction of a genuine reaction, even as their bodies are having a conversation their mouths won't join.
She steps in. Close enough that her chest is inches from mine, and I can feel the warmth of her body through the thin t-shirt. Her hand is still on my wrist and Vita is still hanging at her side and the blade is close enough to my thigh that a wrong move would draw blood.
"Tell me to leave," she says.
"Leave."
"You don't mean it."
"I don't mean it."
She puts Vita on my desk. She wants me to see her disarm. She wants me to understand that putting the blade down is the biggest concession she knows how to make, and the fact that she's making it in my room is not tenderness.
It's a dare.
Both hands free now. She puts them on my chest. Flat, palms down, her fingers spread over my sternum. I can feel my heartbeat hammering against her palms and she can feel it too, I know she can, and the awareness is mutual and excruciating.
"I hate you," she says. "I hate what you represent, and I hate the arrangement and I hate my father for making it and I hate the Silent for engineering it and I hate this compound for being the place where it happens."
"Okay."
"And I hate that you followed me today. I hate that you beat that man. I hate that you stood in front of me with blood on your hands and said I'm yours because I'm not yours and I never will be."
"Okay."
"And I hate that I can feel your heart and it's fast and the fast means you want me and I don't know how to fight the fact that my body is telling me to climb you and let you fuck the anger out of me until neither of us can move."
By the time she’s done, every cell in my body is screaming at me to put my hands on her hips and pull her in and do exactly what she just described.
My cock is straining against my pants and her hands are on my chest and her mouth is six inches from mine.
I could do it. I could take it all. Use her and let her use me.
Take her and break her and truly make her my bride in all senses of the word except the paper we will be signing in a few days.
But I can’t.
She's testing me. She came here to see if I'd take what she's offering, and if I take it, she wins because she proved that Matteo Billone is the animal she accused him of being.
And if I don't take it, I win, but the winning requires me to stand here and say no to the thing I've been thinking about since the corridor.
"Three days," I say. My voice is rough. "In three days you'll be in this room wearing a ring and my last name and there won't be whiskey between us and there won't be a dare.
When I fuck you, Antonia, and I will fuck you, it won't be because you came to my room to prove a point.
It'll be because we both decided to stop pretending we don't want to tear each other apart. "
Her breath catches. Not a gasp. A break in the rhythm, a fraction of a second where her control slips and the princess shows her vulnerability.
"You think you get to decide when."
"I think we both get to decide when. And tonight isn't it."
She stares at me in disbelief. "You're turning me down," she says.
"I'm postponing you."
"Nobody postpones me."
"I just did."
She pulls her hands off my chest. Steps back.
One step, two, and the distance between us goes from inches to feet and the loss of contact leaves a cold spot on my sternum where her palms were.
She picks up Vita from the desk. Slides the finger ring on.
The spin starts, one rotation, fast, angry, the rhythm of a woman who came into a room with a plan and the plan didn't go the way she expected.
"Three days," she says at the door.
"Three days."
"And when it happens, Billone, don't expect me to be gentle."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
She walks out. The door closes. Her footsteps in the corridor, bare feet on concrete, and then the sound of her door opening and closing, fifteen feet away, the distance between my room and hers that feels shorter every day.
I sit on the bed. My hands are shaking. My cock is so hard it hurts and my chest is still cold where her hands were and the room smells like her, clean and warm with the leather undertone from the karambit sheath, and the smell is going to be in this room for hours.
I could have had her. She walked into my room barefoot and disarmed and put her hands on my chest and told me she wanted to climb me and I said no.
I said no because saying yes would have been easy and nothing good in my life has ever been easy. Because the six-year plan requires control and fucking her tonight would have been the opposite of control. Because she was testing me and I don't fail tests.
But the real reason, the one I won't admit to anyone including myself, is that when she put her hands on my chest, I felt my heartbeat against her palms, and the intimacy of her knowing my very visceral reaction to her is unsettling.
I don't want to just fuck her.
The realization arrives uninvited and unwelcome and I crush it immediately because wanting more than sex from Antonia Castillo is the first step off a cliff I can't see the bottom of.
Fuck her. Use the marriage. Take the seat. That's the fucking plan.
Three days.
I go to the bathroom. I turn on the shower. Cold, because the alternative is standing under hot water thinking about her and beating my meat. The cold water hits my skin, and my breath hisses out and the wanting doesn't go away but it gets quieter, and quiet is the best I can hope for right now.
Three doors down, she's lying in her bed with Vita spinning in her hand.
I know this the way I know everything about Antonia Castillo. Not because she told me.
Because I've been paying attention to the wrong things since the moment she walked through the gate.