Epilogue #2
I’m a wreck in his arms. I’m clawing at his shoulders, my nails drawing thin red lines across his skin, my voice failing as he drives into me with a relentless, punishing pace.
Every thrust hits my cervix, sending waves of white-hot electricity through my gut.
He’s erasing the world. He’s erasing the booth.
He’s erasing the needle. There is nothing left but the friction, the marble, and the man who turned himself into a devil just to hear me scream his name.
“Peter! Peter!”
I’m falling. The orgasm is a tidal wave, building in the base of my spine, turning my blood into liquid fire. I’m clamping around him, my walls pulsing in a desperate, rhythmic squeeze that has him groaning, his teeth baring in a mask of pure, agonising pleasure.
He doesn’t slow down. If anything, the desperation in his movements turns feral. His hand releases my wrists, but only so he can wrap his fingers around my throat—not to choke me, but to anchor me, his thumb pressing against my pulse point as he watches the life and the lust flare in my eyes.
“Look at me,” he commands, his voice a broken, jagged thing. “Watch me take you.”
He pulls back so far I feel the cool air hit my insides for a split second before he hammers home with a force that nearly knocks the wind out of me.
He’s reaching for something deeper than skin, deeper than bone.
He’s driving into me like he’s trying to fuse our souls together so we can never be pulled apart again.
My climax hits like a physical blow. My vision fractures into a thousand shards of golden light, and I’m screaming his name into the curve of his neck, my internal muscles convulsing around him in a tight, rhythmic vice.
I’m milking him, my body demanding everything he has, every drop of the life he fought for.
Peter lets out a guttural, animalistic roar that vibrates through my entire chest. His body goes rigid, his muscles locking like corded steel as he delivers one final, soul-crushing thrust. He pins me against the marble with the full weight of his obsession and erupts.
I feel him—hot, thick, and endless. He spills inside me in heavy, pulsing waves, filling me to the brink until I’m overflowing, his heat searing into my womb. He doesn’t pull back. He stays buried deep, his forehead resting against mine, both of us gasping for air that feels too thin to breathe.
He’s shaking. The man who stood unmoved in a hail of gunfire is trembling in my arms as he empties himself into me, marking me from the inside out. It’s a baptism of salt and sweat. It’s the final seal on our contract.
“I’ve got you,” he whispers against my lips, his breath hitched and ragged. “You’re full of me. You’re never going to be empty again, Wendy. Never.”
He lets my legs slide down his body until my feet touch the cool floor, but he doesn’t let go. He keeps me pinned there, his cock still thick and thrumming inside me, the spent slickness of our joining dripping down my inner thighs.
The sun is starting to dip below the horizon, painting the room in deep violets and bruised oranges. The world outside is vast, silent, and entirely unaware of the two monsters who found peace in the ruins of their own lives.
I wrap my arms around his neck, burying my face in the crook of his shoulder. I can taste the salt on his skin. I can feel the steady, powerful beat of his heart against mine.
“Stay,” I whisper.
“Always,” he promises.
The Mediterranean night doesn’t offer the quiet peace of a normal life; it offers the heavy, velvet silence of a secret well-kept.
Peter eventually carries me to the bed, but he doesn’t tuck me in like a victim.
He lays me out on the black silk like a prize he’s still counting.
He lies beside me, his hand resting flat over my stomach, right where his heat is still settling inside me.
He isn’t sleeping. He never really sleeps.
He watches the door, the window, and me—always me—with the terrifying patience of a man who knows exactly what it costs to keep a miracle.
“We need a new name for you,” he says, his voice a low grate in the darkness. “The world thinks Wendy died in that fire. She was too soft for this life anyway.”
I turn my head on the pillow, looking at the silhouette of the man who burned his soul to ash to build me a throne. I reach out, my fingers tracing the jagged scar on his shoulder where a bullet nearly took him from me.
“I don’t need a name,” I whisper. “I just need to be yours.”
He moves then, looming over me, his shadow swallowing the room.
He kisses me—not with the desperation of the forest, but with the slow, arrogant confidence of a king who has already won the war.
It’s a kiss that tastes of iron and expensive wine, a kiss that promises a lifetime of beautiful, gilded corruption.
“You were always mine,” he growls against my lips. “I just had to wait for the rest of the world to find out.”
I pull him down, closing my eyes as the weight of him settles over me once more. Out there, past the cliffs and the black sea, there are people searching for the ghosts of a girl and her butcher. They’ll find nothing but cold cases and empty bank accounts.
We aren’t a tragedy anymore. We aren’t a cautionary tale. We are the thing that happens when you push a man too far and give a woman a reason to hate.
I’m not the girl who loved sunsets anymore. I’m the woman who loves the dark, because the dark is where he is. And as the moon climbs higher over the Amalfi Coast, I realise I didn’t just survive the fire.
I became the flame.