32. Valentina
Chapter 32
Valentina
A hallway with lush green carpeting leads to a set of bathrooms. I tug Darragh towards them, and then beyond them. We move through another hallway, then a dark and empty sitting room, then another hallway, until we reach the end of this particular path.
It ends in a library.
It’s not a huge library. More of a cozy-yet-lavish study, with floor-to-ceiling books on every wall, a wooden desk on one side, and two leather armchairs with a table between them on the other. On the table stands a chess board with all its pieces set up for a game.
A click makes me halt my observation of the room. I turn around just in time to see that Darragh’s locked the door behind us. He doesn’t linger on that, doesn’t give me too much of a chance to panic, because he lets go of my hand, then, stalking over to the desk and turning on the small lamp there.
Once the light is on, he turns to face me once more. He leans his hips back against the desk and grips its edge with his hands.
“Take off your mask.”
The command feels oddly intimate. Even more revealing than if he’d asked me to take off my dress.
“Why?”
His nostrils flare. A muscle feathers in his jaw.
“Because it’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve seen your face,” he replies, his voice so harsh and grating it nearly cracks, “and so help me, Valentina, if I have to go one more goddamned minute, I think my head’s going to explode.”
His words fall between us, hitting the floor like stones at my feet.
“Turns out,” he mutters, yanking off his own mask and scrubbing a rough hand down his face, “this withdrawal shit’s a fucking nightmare.”
He stops rubbing his face and drags a hand through his hair, pushing back the dark red strands.
He’s gone two weeks without me.
He’s in withdrawal.
And it’s a nightmare.
The realizations come at me like punches I can’t dodge. My ribs feel tender in response. My pulse is fast, but everything else feels so, so slow as I hook my fingers beneath the edge of my mask and pull it away.
Something like hunger, something like agony flares in Darragh’s gaze. He stares at me, and I stare right back at him.
Because I’ve gone two weeks without seeing his face, too.
And I didn’t realize how much I was actually capable of missing him until now.
His face looks more drawn than usual. Shadows that I thought were from his mask are actually purplish marks beneath his bloodshot eyes, so striking I can’t tell if they’re from lack of sleep or if he’s been punched on both sides.
My fingers twitch to touch him. I fiddle with my clutch instead.
“You look like hell,” I murmur softly.
“And you fucking look like heaven.”
I’m not prepared for how the compliment rattles me. Darragh is the only man capable of doing this to me. Of stealing my words from my throat. I’ve always got a smartass remark on the tip of my tongue.
With everyone else, that is.
Off-balance and needing to recover, I cast about the room for a distraction.
“Do you play?” I croak as my eyes fall upon the chess set.
His eyes never leave me as I sit in one of the chairs and put down my clutch.
“Depends what I’m playing for.”
My breath hitches.
“What do you usually play for?”
The ghost of a smirk touches his mouth.
“Keeps.”
I lick my lips, my eyes darting from the chess pieces to Darragh.
“How about we play for something else?” I ask him.
He pushes off the desk and sits across from me. He’s so fucking big. All shoulders and biceps and long, long legs. He undoes the button on his suit jacket and shrugs out of it, tossing it across the chair’s back behind him.
“Like what, pet?”
Oh, God. If I don’t do this now I never will.
“Like my virginity.”
Now it’s Darragh’s turn to be rattled. Or at least, to narrow his eyes and watch me without replying for a moment. I wait, every nerve on edge. I can’t feel my fingers. My chest heaves, something I only become aware of when Darragh’s dark gaze flicks down to my cleavage.
Shit. I’m trying to play the cool negotiator, someone confident enough to offer her virginity in a game of chess to a monster, and here I am about to hyperventilate my boobs right out of my dress.
“So if I win, we-” Darragh begins.
“No,” I interrupt him, “if I win, we have sex.”
Sex. The word floats like an untethered balloon. Not quite heard or believed.
Until it explodes like a bomb.
“You’re fucking with me,” Darragh snaps. “How many times have you run from me, pet? How many times have you tried to escape? Told me this had to end?”
“That will be part of the terms,” I say, and I’m shocked to feel a tight ache in my throat. My eyes feel oddly hot. “If I win, we have sex. Once. No strings attached. And no repeats. After that, you will make every effort not to be where I am. If you have to continue doing business with Papà, you’ll do it in places where I can’t see you. No more showing up in my kitchen. Or at my cottage. You will effectively be out of my life. For good.”
His eyes go blacker and blacker with every word I speak. Even though he looks absolutely exhausted, I sense a rising, restless energy in him. Like a spring winding tight inside his body, ready to release.
He’s fucking furious.
“And if I win,” he snarls, rolling up his sleeves as if expects to be elbow-deep in blood any moment, “then I will fuck you anyway. Only you can forget all that other shit you just said.”
“Other shit?”
“The shit about me being gone from your life,” comes the miserable stab of his reply. “The shit about this happening only once.”
I catch my heart’s thrill and stuff it back down my throat before it can take flight. Because I can’t react this way. I can’t feel even the slightest shiver of pleasure at the idea that, whatever this relationship between us is, he wants it to continue.
He wants me, and I think that he probably hates that he wants me.
But he hates the thought of losing me even more.
I teeter on the edge of accepting the terms and running from them. Because I didn’t expect him to counter like this. I didn’t expect to be standing at a fork in the road. A road that could lead me further from him than ever…
Or a road that could bind me to him.
“Deal,” I breathe, and it comes out so quiet, but it feels like thunder in the room.
After seeing Darragh’s reflexes in action before, I shouldn’t be surprised by how fast he moves, but I am. He’s on the side with the white pieces, and before I know it, one of his pawns is already in motion, sliding forward two squares. I respond with a similar move.
And the game is underway.
We don’t speak with words. We speak with our hands. With our pieces. With our push and pull of strategy. Darragh’s a damn good player.
But as the minutes tick by, it becomes clear to us both that I’m better.
If this were a boxing match, or maybe even a game of cards, I’d never stand a chance.
But this is chess. Chess, that Curse and I used to play all the time, and still sometimes do. He’s got loads of books, the younger of my two cousins. And when I got tired of slogging my way through the dictionary that one summer, his tomes on chess were some of the ones I devoured instead.
I’m winning. We both know it. Darragh is agitated, his moves growing more and more reckless, more and more of his pieces being sacrificed to my questing queen and knights.
Strangely, I don’t feel any sense of victory. I only feel an anticipatory throbbing between my legs, and a hollowness where my heart should be.
If I win, this will be my last night with him.
It should be a relief.
And maybe it is, in a way.
But it also hurts far more than I could have imagined.
For an absurd moment, I think about throwing the game. About letting him win.
Just so I can see where the hell this goes.
But that’s not what I’ve come here for. That’s not what I’ve decided. This is my choice – possibly the first real choice I’ve ever made in my life. The first one that actually means something.
I am forging my future.
A future without him in it.
“Checkmate,” I whisper.
Darragh stares at the board. Something writhes at the back of his gaze. Something trapped and feral and not quite human. But when he finally raises his eyes to mine, they’ve gone icily blank.
“Stand up,” he commands. “Take off your dress. Then come to me.”
I swallow involuntarily. This is it. No preamble, I guess. But then I curse myself for being foolish. What did I expect, offering my virginity to a crime lord in a chess match? Champagne and roses and chocolates?
No. This will be painful. This will be a claiming.
And then?
This will be over.
I rise, holding my chin high even though I’m trembling. My arms twist behind my own back. I undo the zipper on my gown and the hooks on the back of my bra, letting everything fall away at once. Cool air kisses my heavy breasts. Darragh lets his gaze rove up and down my exposed body, his pupils blowing wide.
“Now come to me, pet.”
The pooled fabric of my dress rustles as I fully step out of it.
And I go to him.
I stop between his spread legs. His fingertips skim up the sides of my thighs, and my skin explodes with sensation. His hands reach the sides of my lace thong. I gasp when the fabric is pulled so tightly against my groin it stings. Rip goes the lace.
The shredded panties fall away, leaving behind welts of red on my skin.
Darragh drags his thumbs over the red places, making my irritated nerves jump. My clit pulses. I can feel wetness gathering already.
“Fuck,” Darragh whispers. His breath hits my skin like a drug hitting my bloodstream. It affects every inch of me.
And when his mouth suddenly closes over my right nipple, it feels like he’s sucking directly on my clit.
I nearly collapse with the unexpected, erotic force of it. Darragh catches my hips with rough hands, squeezing hard and dragging me forward until my knees hit the edge of the chair he’s sitting in. He growls against my flesh, then fastens his teeth around my nipple at the same moment that he digs his fingers harder into me.
When he leans back against the chair, he takes me forcefully with him. I’m flat against him, straddling him now, and when he grinds his hips, I feel the delirious stiffness of his erection beneath his clothing. It seems impossible that any part of a person could be that hard.
It seems impossible that I’ve made him that way.
But I have. I haven’t even touched him yet, and he’s already like a rock beneath me, nearly bruising as he fucks himself against my body.
I don’t know where to put my hands. I want to wrap them around his neck, or to bury my fingers in his hair, but that feels too forward somehow. Which is a crazy thing to think, considering I’m naked in his lap right now.
Ultimately, I chicken out. I steady myself against the back of the chair behind Darragh’s head instead.
I think he notices. When I glance down at him, I find him already looking back at me, his eyes open as he drags his hot, wet tongue across my nipple.
And then, his mouth is moving. Up to my collarbone, where he stops to bite me, making me cry out with the sharpness of it. But that cry melts into a mewl when his tongue finds the side of my neck. He licks up to my ear and I shudder violently.
Between his sucking mouth at my neck and ear and his cock thrusting against my bare pussy, I’m already dangerously close to coming.
Trying to distract myself from the treacherous sensations rising so quickly, I speak. Or, attempt to, anyway. It comes out as more of a moan.
“Where have you been,” I ask him, my thighs quivering, “for the past two weeks?”
“Why?” he demands against my ear. He blows on the damp lobe, then clamps down on it with his teeth, making me jump. “You were thinking about me?”
“I just… Just wondered. I-”
“I dreamed about you.”
My eyes fly open at the honesty of his admission. And the bitterness of it. His hands move between us, and the next time his cock bumps up against me, it’s his bare, molten flesh. It’s terrifying how instantly my body reacts to that fact. The quickening ache inside me. The emptiness my instincts are begging me to fill with him and only him.
“Fucking ironic, really,” Darragh groans as his tip nudges up against my entrance. “Can barely fucking sleep when I’m not near you. And the few times I do, you’re there. Inside my head.”
Of all the cottages in the country, he had to buy that one? That’s what I asked him.
What I had to do was get some fucking sleep.
“You’re soaked for me,” Darragh growls, dragging me out of memories. “Virgin pussy this fucking wet? You might not even bleed.” The pressure at my entrance intensifies. I moan, my hips already arching to take him, when I freeze.
“Wait!” I gasp, scrambling away from him. “I have a condom.”
Darragh stills. Then, he gives a mirthless laugh.
“Of course you do. How very prepared of you. How very fucking business-like. A Titone, through and through.” He shoves me sideways off his lap and rises. “Where?”
“P-purse,” I stammer, momentarily overwhelmed by the sight of him standing before me with his cock jutting out from his body like that. It’s the first time I’ve seen it in the light without his hand in the way. The length of it is thick and lined with veins, the skin a nearly violent red. So swollen it looks painful.
Maybe this is going to hurt the both of us.
Darragh yanks open my clutch and swiftly finds the condom. He tears the package with an efficient ease that tells me he’s done this before. Probably many times.
No. I refuse to feel jealous right now. And I refuse to feel like an inexperienced idiot in front of him.
He told me I looked like heaven tonight.
“Spread your legs,” he rasps as he rolls the condom over his dick. I do so, humiliation and arousal combining until I’m right on the edge, until I’m already clenching around nothing.
Darragh lowers himself over me. His breath tears out of him. His hips surge forward.
He’s in me, oh God, he’s in me. White slashes across my vision. The pain is blinding.
“Breathe, pet,” Darragh pants raggedly against my ear. “Don’t pass out on me now.”
I suck in air, clawing at his shoulders, his neck, his arms. There’s no embarrassment about touching him now. If I don’t grab him, squeeze him, dig my nails into him, I don’t know how I will survive this.
But I will survive it. I will.
And no matter how much it hurts, I won’t admit it to him. I’m the one who asked for this. Who challenged him to the chess match. Who lifted my chin and stripped off my dress and came to him when he ordered me to.
Darragh draws out of me, then slams back in. Powerful. Punishing.
Painful.
“You can tell me that it hurts,” Darragh hisses between clenched teeth as he picks up speed. “Or are you too proud?”
I don’t answer him, pursing my lips together and shaking my head so hard it makes the pins dig into my scalp. I can’t admit it. Can’t admit what he does to me.
Can’t admit any of it.
But there’s nowhere to hide. Not from him. Not now.
“You can try to lie to me.” He stares down at the place he’s thrusting in and out of me. “But your body can’t.” His gaze hits mine with the force of a collapsing star. “You’re bleeding for me.”
He draws out, extra slow, giving me just enough time to see my blood streaked along the condom.
It should be a horrifying sight. But I feel a strangely drunken euphoria instead.
“Oh,” I moan. “Thank God.”
Darragh hesitates before thrusting back in. “What?”
“Sorry,” I say on an exhale. “I just mean… I’m definitely not a virgin anymore.”
His eyes narrow dangerously. “So?”
“So? So, now I can’t get married.”
I wiggle slightly, because I’m starting to feel so strangely empty without him. But he doesn’t respond at all. His face, which has been drawn tight with need up until this moment, goes flat and unreadable. His eyes aim somewhere beyond me, focusing on an unknown point on the wall.
“So that’s what this was about.” He says it so quietly that I’m not sure if he’s talking to himself or to me. “You weren’t asking me to fuck you.” His eyes come back to my face, and I’m shocked by the empty ice of them. “You were asking me to ruin you.”
Without warning, Darragh slams back into me with a force that steals my breath. Maybe he doesn’t care if I pass out now, because he doesn’t let up even for a second. He doesn’t remind me to breathe this time, either, as he fucks into me ferociously.
“You used me.” His words are scathing. He honestly sounds like he hates me.
So then why is each word hissed between searing kisses along my jaw, my throat, my cheek?
“Used my dick like your own personal get-out-of-marriage-free-card. Foolish fucking Titone.” He drags his mouth roughly across mine, pausing to suck greedily on my lower lip before he pulls back slightly. “You are a real piece of work, you know that? And the irony of it is, you’re probably exactly what I fucking deserve.”
I let him rail against me, with his damning words and driving cock and his searching mouth. I can’t respond. Can’t do anything but suffer the onslaught of him. His anger, his pain.
His pleasure.
It’s really hitting him now. The pleasure. I can see it in the slipping of his mask. That emotionless expression is cracking under the building pressure of his furious need.
I feel that pressure, too. My body responds, as if on a cellular level, to every move he makes. I can’t hold back a moan. Darragh’s face contorts with dark need. He’s fucking me so hard that the chair is thudding backwards with every thrust.
“But here’s what you didn’t properly plan for, pet,” he rasps. Sweat beads on his brow. My pussy clenches, and I swear I feel him throb in response.
I’m going to come.
“I haven’t ruined you for marriage.” Darragh gives a heavy, broken groan when I begin to clamp down on him, my pussy spasming with screaming ecstasy. “I’ve only ruined you,” he grinds out, punctuating his words with thrusts, “for every. Other. Man.”
My orgasm crests, and I convulse on him until I’m helpless, hopeless. Darragh drives right through my climax, not giving me a moment’s mercy to recover.
But if he has no mercy for me, I think he has even less for himself. Because that ruthless pounding means he can’t stop himself from coming violently. When it happens, it seizes his whole frame. Muscles, arteries, and tendons snap as he arches into me one final time.
His eyes aren’t empty now. They’re raw. Angry. Accusing. Aching.
Maybe even afraid.
He tears his gaze away with a gruffly raw moan.
Without his face to focus on, I let my eyes fall to his body. To the straining, shaking shape of it. To the flowers and vines and dice and chains inked into the taut forearms that hem me in. My attention snags on one set of tattoos on his right forearm that doesn’t seem like the others. All the other tattoos are recognizable shapes.
These ones are just black dots. Four of them on the outside of his forearm, one on the inside. They’re no larger than the tip of my pinky finger. They seem completely random among the rest of the ink.
His hips twitch as a tremor wracks his frame. I gasp, flinch, and my fingers fly to grip Darragh’s arms when my pussy spasms in response.
When I’m capable of opening my eyes again, I see my own hands on him.
And I see that the black dots aren’t random after all.
They’re arranged in the precise formation that my fingers are on Darragh’s arm right now.
I’m not with Darragh in this library, but on a roof. I’m choking, I’m dying. I’m digging my nails into him as hard as I can. I make him bleed, and his blood is red. But the scars I leave behind…
Are black.
They’re my nail marks. From that day.
He had them permanently inked into his skin.
Before I can even begin to examine what that might mean, or why it makes me feel like I should sob, Darragh pulls out of me. I cry out at the physical coldness of his absence. A new and terrible emptiness without him.
I never felt empty before him. How uniquely punishing, that I should feel it after.
When I know this will never happen again.
I struggle into a sitting position, my limbs so weak I’m not even sure I’ll be able to walk out of here at this rate. In the time it’s taken me to gather my wits and sit up, Darragh has already disposed of his condom and fixed his clothing. He stands before me fully dressed. Composed.
It makes me feel exposed and vulnerable to remain sitting here naked and bloodied like this. So I grit my teeth and get up, hobbling in my high heels over to my dress. I look around for my panties, taking way too long to remember that Darragh ripped them off and that they’re useless to me now. Forget it. I collect my dress from the floor and start to pull it up.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed on two fronts tonight, pet.”
I hold up the bodice of my dress against my chest and pause.
“The first is that, despite all the ruining that happened tonight, you’ll still be married. And soon.”
My blood cools rapidly.
“What do you mean?” I demand. “What the hell are you-”
“The second,” he interrupts, “is that I will not be adhering to the other set of terms you laid out for our chess match. I took your virginity. But I won’t be staying away from you.”
Shameful relief, then anguish, pour through me in equal measure.
“But you… You can’t… That’s not fair!”
“Never said that I play fair. I said I play for keeps.”
“But you didn’t even win!”
“Doesn’t matter.” He closes the distance between us and pinches my chin between his fingers. “I won the day I convinced your da to give you to me.”
The blood that was cool turns to ice, and then feels like it leaves my body entirely.
“What are you saying?” I ask through numb lips.
“I’m saying that we are already engaged,” he replies simply. Bluntly. A brutal statement of fact. “We have been for the past two weeks.”
“Are you shitting me?” I smack his hand away from my face. “You got all pissed off about not knowing my true intentions for why I wanted to have sex with you tonight? And now, here you are, dropping this bomb on me? Really, Darragh?”
I’m shaking. I’m so angry I can’t think. I release my dress and let it fall, smacking my hands wildly against Darragh’s shoulders, his chest. He stands there and takes it, because it probably feels like nothing at all to him. But I have to do something . I might literally die from this feeling if I don’t.
“Fuck you, Darragh,” I spit, slapping and clawing and banging my fists on him. I can’t believe, after everything, that he’s trapped me like this. I thought I was the one moving the pieces around the chessboard. Meanwhile, he found a way to rig the entire fucking game. He went around me, past me, right over my head.
He went straight to my papà. Bought me the same way the Fabbris did.
“I hate you,” I cry. It’s only then that Darragh finally seizes my wrists and makes me stop. I wonder if I’ve finally pushed him too far, but all he says is, “Careful. You’ll break one of your pretty nails that way.”
“My pretty nails?” I laugh, but it’s so bitter. “Like the ones that gave you the marks you’ve now got tattooed on your arm? Those nails?”
Darragh doesn’t answer me. Nor does he let go of my wrists. He holds them in his iron grip. His thumbs stroke, as if unconsciously, against my skin. When he finally does speak, he only mutters, “Valentina-” before he’s cut off by a sudden buzzing.
His cheeks tighten with irritation. He finally lets go of me to pull his phone out of his back pocket. As he swiftly rejects the call, I take advantage of my moment of freedom and yank on my bra and dress. I’m just fumbling with the zipper at the back when Darragh’s phone begins to buzz again.
This time, he doesn’t ignore the call. He stabs at the accept button and puts it to his ear.
“Rowan, this entire city better be on fucking fire.”
I can’t hear whatever the other guy Rowan is saying. All I can do is watch as Darragh’s jaw goes slack with shock. Then so tight I think his molars might crack.
He lowers his phone, stares at it for a second, as if he’s not quite sure how it got in his hand, then slowly puts it back in his pocket.
Then, he stabs his fingers under the chessboard and sends the entire thing – pieces and all – smashing against the nearest bookshelf. My stomach drops, then clenches painfully, as the sound of the impact crashes through the room. The pieces clatter chaotically to the floor like hail.
Darragh doesn’t look down at the disaster he’s created. I’m not sure he even registers it. His gaze is unfocused and remote as it rests on the spines of the books ahead. Stillness chains him. I’m not sure he even breathes.
But then, that stillness shatters. He bursts into agitated motion. His suit jacket flies from the back of the chair as he rips it away and yanks it on without looking at me. Out of nowhere, he says, “I have to go to Ireland.”
“Ireland?” I stare at the disaster of scattered chess pieces on the floor. Rooks and royalty and pawns. “What, you’re already so done with this conversation that you’re going to fly across the ocean?”
“My grandda is dead.”
My shoulders stiffen in surprise.
His grandda. The one who rescued him from homelessness after his parents’ deaths. The one who likely helped forge him into what he is today, for better or worse.
And just like that, the fight goes out of me.
“Darragh…”
“I’ll try to take care of things as quickly as possible,” he says tonelessly. “But it sounds like I’ve got a fucking mess to clean up out there.”
My heart twists.
I want to touch him. Even after everything.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
He’s got his back to me right now. Even beneath the suit jacket, I can see the muscles tense. Then, he’s moving to me, turning around and closing the distance between us in ground-swallowing strides.
“Don’t apologize to me, Valentina. Don’t give me that fucking shit. Here. You wanna be sorry? You wanna get all sentimental on me now? Take this.” He jams his hand into an inner pocket of his suit jacket, pulls something out, then presses it into my palm. “Wear it. Every day I’m gone. Morning, noon, and night.”
He forces my fingers to close around the boxy shape. “I don’t care where you are. I don’t care what you’re doing. Eating. Sleeping. Praying. Fingering that sweet little pussy I just fucked. You wear it. ”
He heaves out a harsh breath and drops his hands, only for one of them to shoot back up, capturing a stray lock of my hair between his fingers and thumb. He studies it with mute, nearly hostile intensity. Like the black strands hold all the secrets to the universe, but they’re keeping all that precious information just out of his reach. He gives my hair a tug towards his face, as if he’s going to bring it to his mouth and kiss it.
Instead, he lets it go.
“I’ll be back for you.”
I can’t tell if it’s a promise or a threat.
Whatever it is, it’s the last thing Darragh says to me before he goes.