19. Nineteen #3
She hissed the words so viciously, I wanted to slow clap. Instead, my hand captured her wrist, yanking her close. She cursed shrilly as I leaned in, face to face, letting her taste my breath and the flick of my tongue.
“I’m going to make you my wife, Harlowe. One way or another.”
A muscle jumped in her cheek. She tried to wrench away, but the pain in her leg pulled her off-balance.
She lurched, caught herself hard, and in that heartbeat of vulnerability, I saw what monsters like my father never understood.
She wanted to live. She wanted to win, and if she couldn’t have a clean victory, she’d settle for whatever bloody, cracked trophy survived the collision.
Her breath was so close to my mouth, all I’d have to do was tip my head to bite her bottom lip. I did.
She howled, even as her eyes flared wide and delighted at the pain. Every inch of her was a contradiction.
“Let go,” she snarled, but her body said otherwise, connecting with mine in a full-length shiver.
I didn’t oblige.
Walking her backward, my hands clung to her ribs, the holy hush of the cathedral-turned-sex-club echoing off our bones. The marble was cold and slick beneath her, but the fire in her skin ran over every surface it touched.
Pinning her with my bodyweight, I forced her to the altar like a prayer. I expected her to writhe and buck, to curse my name and every ancestor whose blood hummed in my arms. Instead, she lay very still, gathering the tremble in her chest into an arctic calm.
“If you ever want to kill me, don’t ever fucking hesitate. Do it right. But if you’d rather live, listen.”
She went limp, and I actually thought I’d broken her. But when I leaned in, expecting tears or a sob, she sucked in a breath and hissed, “Why should I do a single thing you want?”
“Because you’re smarter than your father.
” I took her face in my hand, just enough pressure to force her to turn and see me.
“Because you don’t need to die just to prove the grave is shallow.
” I pulled her up until she was on her tiptoes, the ruined lilies crushed beneath her feet, my hand still tight in her hair.
“Because you know what happens if you walk out that door. Next time it’s not me, it’s my father, and he doesn’t care whether you beg. ”
Harlowe made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. I let her hair go, and watched her gather herself—so slow, so violently beautiful in the shudder of her recovery.
She didn’t hate me, not in the way hate is normally a distance. She hated me the way you hate the oxygen that keeps your rival alive. It was a proximity hatred—intimate, necessary for survival.
Propping her against the rail, she ground her palms into the velvet, trying to find a position that didn’t reek of surrender. I stood back, balanced on the cracked marble, and watched her invent a new kind of resilience out of spite and ruined hosiery.
Shards of glass glowed in the moonlight, or maybe it was the blood on her shin catching the city light. Either way, the effect was rendered holy by the violence beneath it.
She was the one who spoke first, choking on her own sarcasm. “Don’t tell me you’re going to propose. That’d be too civilized for a Romanov.”
I gave a thin smile. “I can do what your father never managed.”
Her chin rose a millimeter. “Make a girl say yes?”
“Make a girl want to outlive me.”
Something dark moved in her, visible as the twitch at the corner of her mouth. She was recalibrating, running the next ten moves forward.
I stepped forward.
She tensed, but didn’t shy away.
I put a hand on the altar rail, next to hers, but not touching. “One breed left alive to write the story.” I let the silence coil.
Her eyes widened, catching every line I tossed. “Is that what this is? A fucking breeding program? What, you want to create some kind of Romanov-Virelli super-baby that carries both our bloodlines?”
“Would that be the worst thing?”
“I’d rather cut out my own uterus with this broken glass.”
“You’d deny yourself children just to spite me?”
“I’d deny myself anything to keep Romanov poison from spreading,” she hissed. “I’m not a broodmare you can impregnate to secure your legacy.”
“That’s not the only reason I want you,” I sighed.
“You want me because you like to break things,” she scoffed, gripping the altar to steady herself.
I leaned closer. “If I wanted to break you, you’d already be in pieces.”
“What’s your grand plan then?” she asked. “Drag me back to your glass prison? Lock me up and throw away the key?”
Reaching out, I brushed a strand of hair from her face. She jerked away, but there was nowhere to go with the altar at her back.
“My plan,” I said slowly, “is to give you a choice.”
She laughed, the sound echoing through the empty club. “A choice? That’s rich coming from you.”
“You can come back with me now, willingly. Or I can have you hunted down and brought back in restraints.” I stayed calm, and I saw how it angered her. “Either way, you will be my wife.”
“Some choice,” she muttered.
“It’s more than your father ever gave you.”
She knew I was right.
“And if I come back willingly?” she asked. “What then? We play house until one of us murders the other in their sleep?”
I stepped closer. “Then I don’t put you in the collar Natalya brought. I don’t chain you to the bed. I don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”
“Do you think I believe that?”
“I don’t care what you believe.” I let my fingers trace the line of her jaw. “I care what you do.”
She wrenched herself upright. “You’re pathetic. You act like you inherited a destiny, Arrow, but all you ever got was a disease.” Each word is hissed out, not fury, just the loathing of a girl who knew she had no more moves.
I wanted to correct her, to prove there was a method to my madness. But the truth was, Harlowe Virelli had always been more contagion than conquest. It was the flaw that made her irresistible, and the reason I couldn’t break her any more than I could set my bones.
“You done?” I asked.
She swayed and would have toppled if I hadn’t already braced her with my arm. The weight was too familiar, too necessary, and I hated how easy it was to hold her upright.
“Stop pretending you care,” she said, voice nothing but wires and rust. “Just put me out of my misery because if my fate is to carry Romanov spawn, then I’d rather be dead.”
The tremble in her lips mesmerized me—the almost comic purity of her threat. I wanted to call her bluff, snap her neck, and be done, but I wasn’t built for clean endings. I was constructed for slow deaths; for deep bone marrow curses and the kind of damage you only feel after the fact.
“Take your hand off me.”
I let her go, watching for the crumple.
Harlowe didn’t give me the satisfaction.
She stood, gathering her ruined dignity around her like a queen rearranging a slip dress, then stumbled toward the exit.
I remained two paces behind her—that was enough distance. She knew the city outside was colder than the church and less forgiving. Escape was a fantasy. I could have caught her and carried her home, but there was a kind of grace in letting her imagine the next move was hers.
Harlowe paused at the curb, then turned, the mist haloing her head like a punishing saint. “Why all this—the theatrics? The chasing me?” she asked, so quietly I nearly missed it. “Why not just finish it?”
I remembered the night my father broke my nose for the first and only time, how the blood had tasted like joy, like justice.
“Because then it’s over,” I said, matching her quiet.
“We’d both be just another line in a book that no one wants to finish.
” The laugh came out ugly, unfiltered. “But when you run, you leave a trail that outlasts the bodies. I want that. I want a thousand years of men cursing the night they ever heard the name Harlowe Virelli.”
She spat at my feet, hocking deep from her chest. “You’re fucking insane. I hope you choke on my name.”
“I will,” I promised. “But it’ll be on my terms.”
Harlowe turned away then, half dragging her leg, the brief flicker of resolve in its exhaustion the only light in the night. I could almost see the exact moment she realized what I suspected all along—the city would never let her leave.
Not even in pieces.
Her form shrank as she limped down 44th, silhouetted hard against the glowing arc of the lamps.
I trailed her, not so close as to herd, but close enough to collect the crumbs she’d dropped along the way—a streak of blood on an iron railing, and the cold breath of her as she wrapped her arms around herself.
She never looked back.
Little fucking viper.
“Get in the car, Harlowe,” I said, nodding at the car hemming the alley.
My watchman had the back seat ready.
She slid in with a loud sigh, but she didn’t argue. Not from fatigue, but from calculation.
The wind had shifted, and she knew it.