26. Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
HARLOWE
Blinking awake at midnight, I found the glass panes showing a city already gone to black, the skyscraper lights casting everything in icy silver.
I wandered into the living room. The city was so loud, even fifty stories up, that I could hear a persistent, oceanic hush, as if all the breath in Manhattan was trying to siphon itself through the glass and into my lungs.
Arrow had left the lights low. The only illumination came from the city outside, washing everything in hard angles and monochrome. At the kitchen island, I drank a glass of water and paced slowly, letting the cold marble chill the bottoms of my feet.
Pulling a throw blanket from the couch, I wound it around my shoulders. The storm that had threatened all week finally peeled open above Manhattan, fat drops smashing the glass in rapid-fire percussion. Traffic blurred into rivers of headlights moving through the rain.
The keypad beeped outside the door.
Arrow walked through the door soaked, a ballistic vest strapped across his chest, a gun at his hip, blood coating his bare forearms.
I didn’t move.
He blinked, registering, and surveyed the room with a soldier’s efficiency before his eyes landed on me—standing there naked except for the shirt, the chain, my hair loose. I looked less like a bride and more like a prisoner in some pagan ritual.
I said nothing, only watched as he peeled off the vest. The black fabric stuck to his skin with a wet sound.
Blood—most of it too dark to be new—spread in arcs on his arms, his stomach, and there was a fine-mist pattern at his collarbones. The splatter painted his tattoos and his face, dripping on the white marble. I stared at his skin and the Rorschach of violence mottling it, a language in blood.
My nose filled with the iron tang, and I realized my body had no negative reaction. If anything, I wanted to lick the blood from his chest, taste the proof that the devil could touch death and not even lose his pulse.
Shutting the door with his heel, every muscle mapped by shadow, he unbuckled his gun and set it on the entrance table with a gentleness I’d only seen in the way he sometimes touched my hair.
For a moment—maybe a little longer—he just rested both palms against the wood and breathed, letting whatever happened elevator up his spine and switch off behind his eyes. Only then did he look at me, through the dark, with a gaze so private it was almost a crime to witness it.
Padding closer, silent in the blanket, I stopped an arms-length away. The bloodstained musk of him pressed the old panic button in my brain and settled in my chest.
Arrow didn’t reach for me. Instead, he dragged one hand across his jaw, thumb digging into his cheekbone hard enough to leave a streak.
“That yours?” I asked softly.
He considered it. “Some of it.” He hooked a thumb in his waistband, then let the hand fall slack. “This time, only a little.”
I nodded. He smelled like rain, cordite, and the deep, resinous woods of expensive cologne. Without bothering with towels, he stalked to the bathroom, leaving a trail of death and rain behind him. I shuffled after him, magnetized.
The lights in the glass fortress turned on automatically as I stepped into each room, painting me in ethereal spotlights.
At the sink, Arrow scrubbed his hands and arms, water blooming pink, then red, then clear. Splashing his face, he wiped his neck with a towel, then turned to me, lips pressed flat, color high in his cheeks.
For several seconds, he just stared at me.
He took in my wild hair, the way the blanket drooped off my shoulder to expose the hollow at my collarbone, and the fresh finger marks streaking blue up my neck.
Arrow looked at me like a man with a loaded gun at both temples, unable to decide which he preferred.
“Did you have to kill someone tonight?” No inflection, just a quiet need to break the silence.
Stepping closer, dripping, he said, “Needed to send a clear message. You want details?”
“You can’t shock me, Arrow.”
He looked up, eyes so clear that it made the rest of him look even more wrecked. “Have you ever seen what happens when a man thinks he’s already dead?”
I shook my head.
“He stops watching who else is left in the room.”
Hooking a finger in my chain, he used it to pull my head toward his. “You want me to stop?”
“No,” I said, because it was true.
Arrow let out a slow sigh, pushing his pants down just enough to reveal the V of his hips—inked skin and blood splatter—and the faint line of dark hair trailing down to his cock.
His eyes found mine as he reached for the gold chain at my neck, his fingers tracing the gold links slowly, deliberately, leaving rust-colored smears against my skin.
“There was a leak. Two Virelli men, maybe three, paid to end the engagement. They made it as far as the building across the street, to a high floor, with a sniper kit in the window. Frank caught the play before they chambered a round. He, Orion, and I went up together.”
He paused, then his mouth twisted into something cruel. Not pride. Something worse.
“They were both cousins of yours, I think. You want to know the names?”
Grinning wide, I felt Arrow manipulate the chain—pulling it tight, letting it go slack, playing it like a leash.
“Let them enjoy the afterlife. I never liked family reunions.”
He shrugged and made one last pass with the chain, dragging it slowly across my collar before letting it fall.
“Thought you’d say that.”
Standing there, hair dripping, silver eyes brimming with full-spectrum unspeakability, the muscles in his face quivered with the effort of control.
Arrow Romanov was not a man who ever sought comfort, but in the animal darkness of the bathroom, stripped down to skin and teeth, I saw what hunger looked like beyond performance. It was a death mask peeled back to reveal a raw need for warmth—for being wanted, not just endured.
I reached for the towel and pressed it to the bleeding scratch at his shoulder. His chest was still slick with water and blood. My body was exhausted, aching, strung out from hours of him.
But we didn’t separate.
We stood there in that narrow space, not touching, but not leaving either.
“You’re not repulsed by me.”
Not a question.
Thumbing a clot of blood from a cut on his eyebrow, I licked it, watching what it did to him.
“Why would I be?”
Arrow blinked and swallowed hard enough that I could see his vocal cords knock against the skin.
“Most girls want to play at darkness; they don’t actually want to see it eat.”
“Lucky for you, I like a little carnage with my afterglow.”
Barking a laugh, he looked genuinely young, full of nerves and unfinished need, a messy animal who still wanted to impress the girl with his war wounds. He splayed his hands on the edge of the sink, water from his dark hair dripping onto the marble and down his chest.
“You ever shoot anyone?” he asked.
The question was weirdly tender, like an offer.
“No, but I have excellent aim with a switchblade and I once nearly took off a man’s thumb with a wine opener.”
Arrow’s smile split the darkness. “You want to?”
Arching a brow, I let the blanket slide to my feet, standing shameless in his shirt and bare thighs. “Are you offering?”
“I wasn’t thinking of myself. But you might need to, one day. You should know if you can stomach it.”
Silence hung between us.
Looking at me for a long while, eyes not leaving my face, he waited, like he was asking me to tell him what kind of future I wanted.
What I wanted from him.
What I wanted from us.
“I’m a Virelli,” I said finally. “There’s nothing I can’t stomach.”
He let that hang, beautifully, violently, then stepped in, looming tall over me.
“Perfect.”
Grabbing my wrist hard, he ran his thumb up the blue vein in the crook of my elbow. “You’d be lethal if you ever stopped holding out.”
“Maybe I just need the right target.”
He took a half-step back, the space so loaded it nearly cracked my skull. He watched me in the mirror. Not a word was exchanged, but the agreement was absolute.
Cupping both my collarbones, thumbs pinning the chain, he drew me in until our foreheads mashed. I expected a kiss, the devouring kind, but instead, he just hovered there, his breath hot against my lips, then pulled away.
“Would you take my life if I asked you to?” Arrow whispered, voice shorn to the blade. “Would you kill me, little viper? Put a bullet in my heart?”
The question landed in my chest and splintered. Sucking in the scent of him, I opened my mouth and let the answer be the only promise I would ever keep.
“I’d do it slow.”
“Good.”
Taking my wrist, he pressed it to his heart, daring me to find a weakness beneath.
We stood in front of the mirror, a Virelli and a Romanov, stripped raw, and staring at each other until the future looked as small and obvious as the vein throbbing under my thumb.
Wrapping his hand around my throat, he squeezed tight.
I let him.
He lowered me, lips ghosting the corner of my jaw. Threading my arms around his neck, I pressed my body against the hard length of him and let myself melt into whatever came next.
The chain, taut at my throat, choked a line of fire and pleasure up through my skull.
Hooking my thighs to the marble, he hoisted me onto the bathroom counter. My knees grazed his ribs. Bracing both hands at either side of my hips, pinning me, he waited—not for permission, but for confirmation, to see if I’d blink, look away, or feign reluctance.
The hush in the penthouse was so encompassing, I swore I could hear the echo of my blood.
Grabbing a chunk of his hair, I yanked his mouth to mine so hard our teeth knocked together.
His mouth tasted of rust and bile, violence on his tongue.
Running his tongue along the inside of my mouth, he teased the tip of my tongue.
I sucked it, drank him, and felt the first pulse of want hit my groin like a detonator.
He kissed down my neck, then took the chain between his teeth, dragging it through his mouth slowly.