12. Twelve #2
His breath was hot on my skin. “You think I don’t know the difference between a whore and a martyr?
” The words slithered upward along my thigh.
“You want to be worshipped and destroyed at the same time.” He tasted the inside of my knee, then bit it just shy of where I really wanted his mouth.
“But you’ll spend your entire life hunting for a punishment worse than me.
You’ll never find it, Harlowe. I’ll make sure of that. ”
I stared down at him, at the black glimmer of his hair and the unblinking tension in his posture. “You’re not my priest,” I spat, but it came out hoarse, softer than I wanted. “You don’t get to absolve shit. Least of all yourself, Romanov.” I said his family name with venom.
If it fazed him, he didn’t show it.
His lips dragged slowly enough to be cruel, teeth brushing against my sensitive skin.
“I’m not here for absolution,” he said, his voice as sure as pain. “But you should know that you can’t run from this.”
The nip came hard, not enough to mark, but enough to make my whole leg jump. When he pulled back, I saw now that there was no warmth in his eyes. The bite was because he could.
I shoved his chest. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
My hand never made contact with his face—caught mid-slap. His grip was iron, but not bruising.
“I’m your fiancé, Harlowe. And as much as I don’t want to be, I’m a man of my word.”
“You’re disgusting,” I spat, twisting my wrist hard, until he was forced to loosen his grip.
He did, but not before running his thumb over the inside of my palm, tracing the faint scars where the barbed wire around my brother’s corpse had ripped my palms apart.
Silence thickened. My breath sawed in and out.
Arrow looked up at me from his knees, every muscle held in a preternatural restraint.
“You tell yourself story after story about what you’ll do when you meet the monster in the dark, that you’ll scream, you’ll fight, and you’ll win.
” His mouth ticked up at one edge, a smile that wasn’t.
“You’re old enough to know better, Harlowe. The monster always wins.”
Rising effortlessly, he leaned until the air between us was as tight as cello wire.
I wanted to slap him, or kiss him, or both, but I did neither.
I glared at him, my body vibrating. He held my stare effortlessly, then shrugged off his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves, a mannerism I was beginning to enjoy.
I realized now that his hands weren’t the hands of a man who lived in offices and boardrooms; they were the hands of a man who used them for hurting and for saving.
And maybe Arrow Romanov only knew how to do both at once.
A platinum lighter appeared from his pocket. One flick, and the flame bloomed. Its light turned him gold and evil. He gestured to my bare wrist, where the bruises from Zephyr’s earlier session were already blooming faint purple.
Arrow liked my pain. He wanted to brand me with it, like a signature only he had the right to apply. Everything in me wanted to recoil, to twist away, but I’d spent years honing hate into diamond clarity.
I held his gaze and waited for him to blink first.
He didn’t.
The lighter snapped shut, then disappeared into his pocket. Straightening, he looked down at me as if appraising a new kind of damage. “You’re not afraid of me,” he mused, almost to himself.
“You wish.”
His hand came to my jaw, not to strike, but to tilt my face so we were breathing the same air.
“Yadovitaya malen’kaya gadyuka,”* he said, and there wasn’t a trace of a smile now. “But I can wait for you to figure out what kind of afraid you want to be.”
The release came suddenly—he let go, turned his back, and opened the confessional door. Instead of leaving, he waited, holding it with two fingers, daring me to storm past or stay and beg for a second round. I shouldered by him, knocking his hand loose, but he only followed silently.
The club was winding down. People went to their limos, their afterparties, or their walks of shame, but Arrow trailed me to the street without a word. He took the cathedral steps two at a time, overtaking me, then halted at the curb.
Ivan held a black umbrella over his head as Arrow lit another cigarette, watching me shiver in the rain, waiting for me to get into his car.
I rolled my eyes and stalked two blocks toward the L train, feeling the cold bite into my battered thighs and pulse in my veins, but he kept pace behind me, a steady metronome of hard-soled shoes against the cracked concrete. I spun on him at the edge of a yellowed streetlamp.
“Following me doesn’t make you mysterious. It makes you a stalker.”
“Did you enjoy yourself tonight?” Arrow asked.
The rain made his hair look even darker, his face sharper, and I realized with a jolt of revulsion that he looked beautiful in the way funerals sometimes were.
“I did,” I said, “but I think you missed the part where I get to consent. Was that in the fine print with the collar, or do I get to negotiate that after the vows?”
He let my words sit between us, unrefuted. “Do you know what happens to disobedient brides in my family?”
“Yeah,” I shot back. “They end up drowning in the Hudson, or chained to a stove in New Jersey.”
Arrow smiled, cigarette ember flaring. “We’re not animals.”
“Says the guy whose kin nailed my brother to a fucking cross.”
That got under his skin. Arrow flicked the cigarette into the sewer as if ridding himself of the thought.
“You believe every nursery story your father ever told you?”
“I believe the evidence. I believe the body count.” I held my breath, not because he scared me, but because I needed to say it out loud, to let the ugly words rip loose from my tongue. “I believe every story that ends with a Romanov holding the smoking gun.”
He stood very still. The rain cast strange shadows down his face, dividing it along the hollows of his cheekbones. When he spoke, his voice was caught between disgust and pity.
“Then you should know, I don’t need a gun to end you.”
“But you need a leash?” I snapped, flashing the Cartier band from my purse like a badge of honor. “What, you want to see your mark on my neck? Is that what gets you hard, Romanov?”
Arrow moved so fast I almost fell backwards.
His hand landed, open-palmed, on the wall beside my skull, and his whole body caged me against the vandalized brick.
I blinked in shock, not because the move was violent, but because his grip never touched me, not really—he just hovered, the threat enough.
“You want to make me a monster?” Arrow whispered. “You want to feed every fear your daddy ever banked on, every bedtime story he thought would keep you loyal to his orbit?”
He dropped his gaze to the spot just below my jaw, where the bruises from Zephyr were quietly blooming into focus. For a breathless moment, I thought he’d kiss them.
“I could snap you in two,” he said. His voice was utterly sure, so blankly unafraid it was almost a mercy.
“But I’d rather see what you become when something doesn’t kill you right away.
” He stepped back, letting the night and the rain and the air itself rush in between us.
“Go home, Harlowe. You’ll need your strength for the wedding. ”
Without waiting for my reply; he turned, got into the car, and left.
I stood there until the cold seeped through his jacket, the urge to cry so stale it sickened me.
On the train, I stood against the doors, feeling every lurch and every jolt. When I got home, the foyer was lit up. Frank sat at the base of the stairs, bracing a glass of scotch balanced on his thigh. He looked at my lack of attire, noticing the jacket that didn’t belong to me.
“I would have picked you up.”
“I know.” I wanted to weep, or maybe just let the memory of tonight’s pain bloom into something less lonely. But I asked the only question I thought mattered anymore. “Do you think he’ll kill me?”
Frank finished his drink, set it on the table, and sighed. “No,” he said. “He’ll try to break you, but not kill you.” It was kindness, in a way, the certainty of my future humiliations instead of my death. “You’re his prize, Harlowe. He’ll make an art form out of your survival.”
I left him there with the ghosts and the scotch and climbed the stairs, fury rising in my throat until it was almost a comfort.
In the mirror above my bathroom sink, I looked wild, hair wet from the rain, smeared makeup in streaks down my cheeks.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what Arrow would do on our wedding night.
Maybe he’d fuck me like a whore, or maybe he’d just watch as I undid myself, slow and meticulous, and only touch me to document the aftermath.
* Venomous little viper