29. Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
ARROW
Two days later, after a long night going over plans with Atlas and Orion, I pitched up at the penthouse with a bottle of Chianti and a compulsion so raw I’d almost burned through two cars just getting across the bridge.
She was reading. Or half-reading, slouched on the lounge in nothing but old sweats and a band tee that looked like she’d stolen it from a dead boyfriend. She didn’t look up until I poured two full glasses, the red sloshing like hemoglobin in the wide-bellied bowl.
Arrow Romanov, domesticated by wine and need. If anyone could see me now, I’d be dead in the morning.
“Have a nice night at the office?” she drawled, eyes not leaving her book.
“Productivity was at an all-time high.”
She chuckled, the sound liquid and amused. “You’re leaking metaphors again. You know, most men just say what they mean.”
I set the glasses down and sat, spine bowed from the fatigue I never admitted to anyone but the walls. “Most men aren’t being hunted by their own reflections.”
This got her attention. She tucked her knees to her chest, scruffing the hem of the ancient tee until it grazed the inside of her thigh. “Arrow, are you trying to tell me you’re scared?”
“Trying? Harlowe, I’m screaming it at you.”
She stared, eyes narrowing as if struggling to find the angle she most enjoyed. “Scared of what, exactly?”
Scared of the quiet, of the city sleeping, of the pantomime of my father’s men pretending not to surveil this building even as I checked and re-checked the cameras.
Scared of what hunger would do to us if left unsatisfied for one hour.
Scared of my father’s name and mine, and what they’d splinter us into if we weren’t careful.
Instead, I said, “Scared of losing track of your fucking heartbeat for longer than a minute.”
She grinned, wild and radiant. “I knew it. You’re a romantic.”
I topped off her glass and let the wine find the cracks in my self-discipline, filling them until neither of us could tell whose pulse was whose.
“What about you?” I asked, voice softer than I meant. “What’s your worst fear?”
Harlowe considered this question as if she were expecting a better one. She bit her thumb and let the silence stretch until even the night paused to listen.
“I’m afraid of being bored,” she said, too quick to be a lie, but too easy to ever be the whole truth.
I watched her profile sharpen in the angular blue of the window light, eyes already somewhere else.
“No, really,” I pressed, forcing it with the lazy brutality of a dare.
She swirled the wine in her glass, sloshing it until rivulets ran perpendicular to gravity, then looked up at me.
“I’m afraid I’ll get used to hurting people—that I’ll get good at it. That I’ll get so good, I’ll forget how to stop.”
There.
There it was.
I felt my pulse harden, not in the expected places. She took a sip and watched me over the rim of her glass.
“You were always going to get good at it, Harlowe,” I said. “It’s genetic.”
Her mouth did a twist—half amusement, half regret. “Do you think we’re monsters?”
I thought about Luca, the eye, the absolute clarity of bone and blood. I thought about myself in the mirror. I thought about her, the way she’d held that razor blade smile in the ballroom, the way she’d unspooled me for parts and then put me back together in a slightly different order.
“Only on the days we try to be good people,” I said.
She bit her lip, looked at the purple-blue moon over the East River. “Then let’s never be good again.”
Sliding across the couch, she straddled me, legs bracketing my hips with a lack of hesitation. She pressed her mouth to mine, wet and open, no prelude, just the heat of all her old boredom burned up and replaced by a new, meaner appetite.
Harlowe moved like she had me clocked.
She knew what I’d like and how close I was to fucking fracture. I let her ride me, my hands braced on her ass, letting her grind down until the wet heat of her bled through the thin gray of my sweatpants and the raw edge of my self-control.
Harlowe let me see her hunger, no mask, her gaze dead center on my face as her hips worked a slow, cruel motion. My cock was hard enough to ache.
“Do you think they’re watching?” she said, breathless in my ear.
I kept my hands on her hips. “Who?”
She stuffed her palm under the waistband of my pants and pressed a nail into the skin above my cock, scoring it until I flinched.
“The city. My father. The devil himself. Anyone who’s been waiting for this.”
I wanted to say no, but we both knew the answer, so I just took her by the chain at her neck and twisted it hard. She moaned, loud and ragged, the sound of a wolf testing the leash. I knew she liked the pain, maybe more than she’d admitted being drunk. Maybe more than she ever would at all.
She leaned in, her bare skin hot on my chest, and bit my mouth like she’d been counting the hours since last time. She licked the blood when she pulled back.
“Do it,” she said, her breath a dare. “Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t hold back.”
So I didn’t.
I hauled her up by the chain, twisting her wrists behind her.
Her shirt caught at her ribs, baring the lines of her body, and I turned us sideways on the couch.
The city beyond seemed to pause, hanging on its own suspension while I forced her knees wide against the cushions and lined my cock up between her slick, hungry thighs.
She shivered, but didn’t pull away.
“Hurry the fuck up,” she panted.
But I wanted to hear her beg. I twisted her wrists tighter in the makeshift gold shackle, drove in slow enough to scrape pleasure over every inch of her, then stopped, just to watch her face contort.
When she bucked, I pulled out again, then in, then out, until she cussed at me in two languages and threatened to slash my throat in my sleep. Her threats made me smile. I liked her best when she hated me a little.
I pushed her to the edge, over and over, letting the city’s hush be the only applause.
Harlowe was panting in my ear, biting my shoulder, her whole body shivering with need by the time I let go and took her, hard enough to threaten the frame of the couch.
She shattered on my cock, body arching up, head thrown back to bare her throat like some animal that never learned to be afraid of predators, only to become one.
The sounds she made were feral, untaught, so honest it nearly killed me.
I lifted her and carried her to the bed, and she watched me disappear into the closet with curiosity. I carried a leather chest back into the bedroom and set it at the foot of the bed, letting the click of the lock snap the air.
She watched, unblinking, hunger flaring in both pupils. I opened the case and took my time—a coiled black rope, handcuffs, anal plugs in surgical steel, vibrators, nipple clamps, and a black leather paddle—and fanned them across the blanket at her feet.
Harlowe didn’t ask, she just moved to kneel at the edge of the mattress, hair wild and mouth open.
“Do you want to choose?” I asked. “Or do you want me to?”
She looked at the array, jaw gone slack. “What if I want both?”
“We can do both,” I told her, and picked up the rope first.
It was perfect. Japanese made, and strong enough to lift a car or tie a girl so tight her blood sang.
I made a careful show of looping the rope through her wrists, then to each post on the bed frame, a geometry born from both utility and the old hunger to display a prize.
I let her feel the tension, the slow pull of skin into submission—and watched the muscle in her jaw refuse to go lax, even as the rest of her melted under my hands.
Her pulse was rapid, and her breath was weirdly calm.
Bending down, I traced my tongue along the raw edge of her thigh, tasting sweat, then salt, then the deep, red wine of her. Her hips jerked.
It was a reflex, and I could tell she hated how little control she had.
She wanted to win, even now.
Baring her teeth, she let a string of hissed threats between them.
When I pressed two fingers inside and curled them up, she fell silent and shut her eyes, clenching down hard enough that my knuckles cracked.
I wanted to make it last. I wanted her ruined for hours, not minutes.
So, I rummaged through the arsenal of weapons and curios I’d assembled over the years.
There was iron here, rosaries strung with teeth instead of beads, and a box of knives, each with a history that would outlast the men who’d bled for them.
I picked a blade that felt right—a sleek, obsidian-handled switchblade, Russian made, custom, with the old crest etched on the hilt.
The sweaty sheen on her skin caught the high city light. Her hair spread around her face in a dark corona, violet at the tips where I’d yanked it hard enough to bring tears. Her eyes followed me as I moved, and when she saw the knife, she smiled, a twist of something transcendent and savage.
Crawling up the length of her body, I pressed the flat of the blade beneath her jaw, letting her feel the chill and the promise of it.
She reacted, not with a flinch, but a lazy tilt of her head, vein pulsing under the edge, like she wanted to dare me to find out what color Romanov and Virelli blood would make when mixed straight out of the artery.
The point glided down her throat, between her breasts, tracing the delicate bones there. For a moment, I poised the knife at the rise of her left shoulder, and she exhaled. “Do it,” she whispered.
I pressed the tip just enough to dimple the skin—no blood, not yet—and then flicked it off slowly. She didn’t close her eyes, not even for a second.