Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Erin
I go back to the room because I choose to.
That is what I tell myself as he presses his palm to the wall and the black door opens beneath my palm and warm gold light spills across my bare feet.
I choose this.
I choose him.
I choose every terrible, beautiful thing we are becoming inside a house at the end of the world while Carlos picks through the bones of our beginning.
The sensual room waits in silence.
Leather. Velvet. Silk. Dark wood. Glass looking out over the black Icelandic coast. The sea beyond it throws itself against the rocks as if it can break the land apart by wanting hard enough.
I understand the impulse.
Lucian stands behind me. He doesn’t touch me yet. That’s how I know he’s angry.
No, not angry.
Worse.
Afraid.
His fear is colder than anger. It moves through the room without sound, slipping under my skin, tightening every place his hands have ever been.
The door shuts. I feel it in my stomach. One soft sound.
This world opens from the inside. And I have to choose it.
I turn to face him. His eyes move over me. Slow, dark, and possessive in a way that should make me run and instead keeps me here.
“I’m trying not to put you over my shoulder and lock you in this room until Carlos is dead.”
My throat tightens. “That would be kidnapping.”
“Yes.”
“Romance continues to bloom,” I say.
His jaw flexes.
“Lucian.” I don’t want to see it again. I see it anyway.
The elevator. The dress. The key fob. The girl I was, walking into Lucian Bachman’s apartment with cheap courage and a lie tucked in her palm.
His voice drops. “You stepped away from me tonight because you thought I saw you differently.”
He is too good at knowing me, at cutting through every layer of pride and finding the small, shaking thing underneath.
I wrap my arms around myself, hating the defensive movement and unable to stop it. “Maybe you should see me differently.”
“Careful.”
“Why? Because you don’t like the truth?” My voice shakes, but I keep going because if I stop, I may fold. “I came with something meant to destroy you.”
“You were desperate,” he says. “I took advantage of that. I wanted to. That was part of who I was.”
“Part of Isobel, too.”
“Do not compare the two of you.” His voice is hard. “She left me in the fire.”
The words tear out of me. “What if I was the match that started the fire in the Village?”
There it is.
The ugly thought I have not been able to swallow since the file opened.
Lucian goes utterly still.
I press a hand to my chest, fingers digging into my own skin as if I can hold myself together from the outside.
“Carlos opened the door. The Morettis pushed me through. But I walked, Lucian. I walked into your life and—”
Lucian crosses the room before I can breathe. His hand closes around the back of my neck.
Enough to stop me from retreating inside myself.
“Red,” he says.
My pulse jumps. “What?”
“Say it.” His thumb strokes once beneath my ear.
I stare up at him.
His face is hard, but his eyes are burning. “Safe word, Erin.”
The room shifts.
My throat works. “Red.”
“And slow?”
The familiar word eases out of me. “Yellow.”
He grips the back of my neck. “If you say either?”
“You stop,” I whisper.
“Immediately,” he says.
My body shivers. This dangerous, furious, grief-haunted man is asking permission to take me apart.
“Color?” he asks.
I swallow. “Green.”
His eyes close for one brief second. When they open, something in him has changed. He’s focused.
“Good girl.”
The praise slides over me like silk. He takes my hand in his, dragging me to a corner of the room where there’s a rug and a black velvet cushion resting on it. I step onto the deep, soft cushion of the rug and it envelops my bare feet.
He steps back. “Undress.”
The command hits hard. My breath catches.
Usually, I would argue. Tease. Make him work for my obedience because defiance is my favorite form of foreplay and possibly my worst personality trait.
Tonight, I freeze.
Lucian’s eyes narrow. “Erin.”
“Hmm?”
“You heard me.”
“Yes.”
“Then obey.”
The word punches heat through me. Obey. Dangerous word.
Beautiful word.
It splits me open because some part of me wants to obey him so badly it scares me.
Another part hears it and sees the files, knowing now it was Carlos who sent me.
His voice lowers. “Do it for me.”
My heart stumbles. “What?”
“Not for Carlos. Not for the Morettis. Not for the girl who walked into my apartment with a lie in her hand.” His gaze burns into mine. “For me.”
I just stand there, taking him in.
“And for you,” he adds, rougher. “Because this is what you want to bring you back to me. To us. To who we are now. Together.”
Damn him for being everything I ever needed but didn’t know it had a name.
“Lucian.” My hands go to the hem of my sweater. I pull it over my head.
Slowly.
The air touches my skin. Warm. Heavy. Charged.
Lucian watches every inch I reveal as if I am not guilty. As if I am not ruined. As if the sight of me is still enough to make the world shrink to us.
I drop the sweater. The jeans I pulled on before breakfast follow.
Then my bra.
Then my panties.
My clothes are littered around me, dotting the rug.
I stand before him naked and trembling, and for once, I do not know whether I am trembling from desire or pain. With us, they seem to be forever intertwined.
Lucian looks at me for a long time. So long that it makes my nerves rise to the point I think I might say our safe word for the first time in my life.
“Say something,” I beg.
His jaw tightens. “Knees.”
The word hits like a strike.
My body responds instantly by radiating heat, low and sharp.
My pride responds too. “Lucian.”
“Knees, Erin.”
I stare at him and see the dark place in him.
The man who wants my surrender like proof. The man who wants me lowered before him so he can believe I still trust him. The man who looks at my shame and thinks if he can command my body, maybe he can drag my heart back from the ledge.
My eyes burn.
“Is that what you want?” I ask. “Submission?”
“Yes.”
The answer is immediate. It makes my stomach flip.
“You want me on my knees, surrendering to you so you can make me forget how I first came to you?”
His answer is sharp. “No.”
“Then why?” I breathe.
His eyes flash a warning. “Because I will remind you who you are to me, now. Always. Forever.”
Forever.
His words make everything stop.
I hold them in my head, in my heart, in every part of my body.
Then, I fall to my knees. The soft carpet welcomes me like a kiss.
Lucian steps away from me.
Only one step, but the distance feels enormous.
Then his hand goes to his belt. My pulse stutters.
The sound is soft. Leather sliding through loops. One slow pull.
Heat pulses low in my core, tangled with nerves, shame, and something deeper.
He folds the belt once in his hand.
Like a ritual.
The belt hangs from his hand, dark and wicked against the warm light of the room. He does not touch me with it. Not yet. He lets me look and lets the want and fear tangle in me.
My throat goes dry. “Lucian.”
His eyes lift to mine. “Color.”
The room seems to narrow around that one word.
My choice.
I swallow. “Green.”
“Turn around,” he says. “Chest pressed to the cushion. Face down.”
Everything in me wants to run. Instead, I force myself to obey. Slowly, knees in the carpet, I turn to face the cushion. I bend at the waist, pressing my naked breasts against the soft velvet, my face over its edge.
I turn my face to the window.
The glass wall reflects us in shadow: me naked and shaking, pale skin, curves on display. Lucian behind me in an open shirt and dark trousers, belt in his hand, his face carved from possession and restraint.
He crouches down. I watch him in the mirror as he moves. So controlled, so graceful. His hand settles on the back of my neck.
“You are going to listen to me,” he says, his mouth near my ear. “And you are going to believe me.”
The belt touches the back of my thigh. Cool leather dragging over heated skin. Lucian’s hand tightens at my neck. “What are you to me? Now and forever?”
I want to respond. No words come. He waits.
The belt trails higher, over the curve of me, a slow drag that makes every nerve wake.
“Mine,” he says to me.
My eyes burn. “Yours.”
“Not theirs.”
My voice shakes. “Not theirs.”
“Not the Morettis.”
The belt leaves my skin. He pulls himself to a stand. He towers over me. I can’t breathe. The silence before the first strike is unbearable.
Then it lands. Not brutal and not soft.
A sharp, bright line of heat across the middle of my ass, hip to hip.
I gasp, grabbing the edge of the velvet pillow. The sting blooms fast, spreading through me in a hot rush.
He crouches down again. His palm follows instantly, rubbing over the mark, soothing what he just lit.
“Color.”
My breath comes too fast. “Green.”
His mouth brushes my shoulder. Tingles travel up my skin. A nip at my neck. “Good girl.”
The praise breaks me a little.
The belt strikes me again. This one is lower. Heat and pain dance along the lower curve of my ass where it meets the tops of my thighs. This time I know what is coming, and somehow that makes it worse. Better. My body braces. My mind scatters.
Still, every ugly thought Carlos planted rises, trying to get its teeth into me.
I came as a weapon. I carried the fob. I lied.
The belt snaps down again.
I cry out freely, grateful for Bachman’s obsession with soundproofing.
Lucian’s hand is there now warm and firm, rubbing the sting into heat.
“What are you?” he demands.
I shake my head.
His palm grips my hip. “Answer me.”
“I don’t know.”
Wrong answer.
The belt lands again. Sharper. I gasp his name, half protest, half plea. “Lucian.”
Lucian steps in behind me, his shirt and chest brushing my back, his voice rough at my ear. “Yes, you do.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“I was sent,” I whisper.
His whole body goes still.
“I was sent to you,” I say, my voice breaking. “The Morettis sent me. Carlos opened the door. I walked through it.”
Lucian’s hand slides around my throat, not squeezing, only holding me exactly where I am.
“Yes,” he says.
The word hurts because he does not deny it.
He does not rescue me from the truth with pretty lies.
“You walked through it,” he says. “Then you became mine.”
The belt strokes over my heated skin again, softer now, almost tender. Another strike. I jolt, the sound leaving me raw.
He soothes it with his hand. “You became mine.”
Another. Heat flashes through me so sharply that my hands hurt from gripping the cushion so tightly.
“And not because I bought you. Not because they sent you.”
The belt lands again, lower, wickedly precise.
I cry out, and this time the sound turns into something dangerously close to relief.
“Because I chose you. And you chose me.”
His hand smooths over me.
Another strike.
“You chose to stand between my brother and a bullet.”
Another.
“You chose me when running would have been easier.”
Another.
My knees tremble. My skin burns. My heart feels cracked open and exposed.
The belt falls from his hand onto the floor.
The sound is final.
Lucian turns me around before I can gather myself, lifting me easily onto the edge of the cabinet. I gasp as the cool surface meets my heated skin, then again when his hands frame my face.
“Tell me. Now.” His eyes are wild now. “What are you?”
A tear spills over. He catches it with his thumb. “Yours. I’m yours.” The sob breaks out of me.
I hate it. I need it.
Lucian kneels between my thighs. His strong arm slides underneath my waist. He pulls me up and against him so we’re kneeling as one. He presses himself hard into my burning backside.
“Say you were not one night.” His hand slides into my hair. “Say it, Erin.”
“I was not just one night.”
“Again.”
“I was not just one night.”
His forehead presses against the top of my head.
He cups my face under my chin, turning my lips to his. “And what are you?”
I breathe through the sting, through the ache, through the ugly truth and the beautiful one waiting behind it.
“Yours.”
For a second, he doesn’t move.
Then his mouth crashes down on mine.
Hard. Possessive.
Exactly what I need.
I kiss him back with everything I am. Every lie. Every shame. Every ruined beginning.
Lucian lifts me from the rug and carries me to the bed. I’m feather-light in his arms. He lays me down on my stomach. My face is pressed into the soft covers. His clothed body grazes my naked one.
He presses a kiss to every place the belt kissed before him. Each one softer than the last.
My eyes burn into the sheets. His palm smooths over me one last time.
I turn my face enough to look back at him.
The room is blurred at the edges. He is not.
“Thank you,” I say.
His expression shifts, heat returning, deeper now. Darker.
He crawls over me, his body covering mine, his mouth at my ear.
“You were never just one night.”
I close my eyes. “No.”
“You were our first night. First night of our forever.” His lips brush the back of my neck.
There’s that word again. Beautiful and bloated with that dangerous poison: hope.
I’m starting to believe that we’ve left behind the battles of our past—that the messy, fairy-tale ending where I become a mafia queen and he is forever tied to my family might actually come true.
I lean into him, pulling him closer. “I’m ready for forever, our forever.”
“Me too, baby,” he responds with a strained laugh. “First, we just need to conquer a monster.”
“Good thing I know a dragon slayer,” I reply, “someone who could tame me.”
“Tamed,” he says, shedding his clothes. “And ready to claim.”
He gathers me into his arms with a growl. Despite everything, a giggle escapes me as he nips at my neck, nuzzling me with his chin. “I’ll slay any dragon that comes between me and my princess.”
I wrap my arms around his neck, locking eyes with him so we’re connected in every way possible. I close my eyes, turning my head with a gasp as he fully enters me.
If he can conquer my demons, what else can’t he overcome?