Chapter 13
CASSIUS
Her building has the kind of security that keeps out college students and delivery drivers but wouldn't slow down a professional for more than thirty seconds.
I've had a key to her apartment since before she moved in.
Since I chose the apartment, furnished it, positioned it close enough to my world that I could watch her orbit around me without knowing she was caught in a gravity she didn't choose.
It’s nearly three in the morning and the lobby is empty.
The elevator is silent. The hallway smells like carpet cleaner and someone's leftover takeout, and the ordinariness of it feels obscene next to what's about to happen.
I don't knock. The key turns without sound, and I ease the door open and step inside.
Her apartment breathes around me.
The evidence wall is the first thing I see, illuminated by the streetlight that leaks through the curtains.
My face is up there.
Photographs, documents, red ink connecting the nodes of my life's work like a diagram of a disease.
I don't go out of my way to look at it. I know what's on it better than she does.
The kitchen counter is spotless. The coffee maker is cold.
A mug sits in the dish rack, still damp.
She made coffee and didn't drink it.
Small details that tell a story about a woman going through motions that have lost their meaning.
I move through the dark with the silence I learned from my father, who learned it from his father, who learned it in the old country where silence was the difference between breathing and bleeding.
Past the living room. Past the bathroom, where I can see the cracked mirror in the half-light. To her bedroom.
The door is open.
She's in bed.
Lying on top of the covers in a T-shirt and sleep shorts, one arm thrown over her face, the other resting on her stomach.
The gun is on the nightstand, positioned for a right-handed draw.
She's thought about this. Planned for the possibility that someone might come through that door.
The collar catches the moonlight, diamonds throwing tiny refractions across the ceiling like scattered stars.
She's wearing it to bed.
A week after learning what it really means, and she's sleeping with my collar against her throat.
I sit on the edge of the mattress.
The bed dips beneath my weight and she doesn't stir.
Her breathing is slow and even, her lips slightly parted, and she looks younger in sleep.
Softer.
Closer to the girl I found than the woman I built, and the distance between those two things is the distance between who I was before her and who I am now.
I reach out.
My fingers hover above the line of her jaw, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin without making contact.
I trace the shape of her face in the air.
The cheekbone. The curve of her lower lip. The edge of the collar where it meets the hollow of her throat and her pulse beats steady against the diamonds.
One centimeter. That's all the space between my fingertip and her skin.
One centimeter of air that holds everything I can't say and everything she won't forgive.
She moves.
Fast. Faster than I expected, faster than I taught her, which means she's been practicing something in her own time that wasn't in any of my lessons.
The weight of her hits my chest, and I'm on my back before my hand leaves the air above her jaw.
She straddles me, knees pinning my hips, and a blade appears from somewhere—under the pillow, the mattress, I don't know—and it's at my throat before I can process what the fuck just happened.
Kitchen knife. Eight-inch blade, serrated edge, the kind you use on bread or bone.
She's been sleeping with it.
Three nights running, she's been falling asleep with a knife within reach because the gun on the nightstand wasn't close enough, wasn't personal enough for the kind of killing she's been imagining.
Her hand is shaking. Not from fear. From the effort of holding back.
"You don't get to come here." Her voice is raw, wrecked, stripped down to the wire beneath the composure she wears like a second skin. "You don't get to watch me sleep. You don't get to touch me."
I hold perfectly still, my hands at my sides, palms flat against the comforter.
Every instinct I have is screaming to grab her wrist, disarm her, flip her beneath me and pin her down until she stops shaking.
I override all of it because she needs this.
She needs to hold the blade and feel the power of it and know that the choice is hers, that whatever happens in this room happens because she decides, not because I manipulate it.
"Then kill me," I say. My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. "You've had a week. If you were going to do it, you would have done it."
"Don't tell me what I would have done."
"I'm telling you what I know. You had a gun.
You had evidence. You had every reason. And you let me walk out.
" I tilt my chin up, pressing my throat into the serrated edge.
The sting is immediate and specific, a thin line of heat that blooms into wet warmth as the skin parts.
"So either use that knife, little wolf, or put it down and let’s deal with what's actually happening between us. "
Her eyes are dark in the moonlight.
The hazel’s gone nearly black, pupils blown wide, and the expression on her face is something I'll carry with me regardless of what happens next.
Fury and grief and desire and disgust, all of it churning behind her eyes like weather she can't control.
"What's actually happening between us," she repeats.
The blade presses harder. Another millimeter of steel into skin, and the blood is running now, a warm trickle down the side of my neck and into the collar of my shirt.
"What's happening is that I'm sitting on top of the man who murdered my parents, and I can't decide whether to cut your throat or—"
She stops, and I feel it.
The involuntary shift of her weight, the way her hips roll against mine in a movement so small she probably doesn't even register it consciously, but I register it.
My body registers it with the same predatory awareness it registers everything about her—the catch in her breathing, the flush creeping up her throat, the tension in her thighs that isn't just adrenaline.
She feels me harden beneath her, and the expression on her face cracks.
Not with desire. With horror.
At me, at herself, at the sickness of this moment and the fact that her body doesn't care about murder or betrayal or any of the reasons she should be driving that knife home instead of grinding against me in the dark.
"You hate me," I say. Not a question.
"Yes."
"You want me dead."
"Yes."
"And you're wet right now."
The knife shakes.
I wrap my fingers around hers, not pulling the blade away, just steadying her grip.
Her blood-warm hand sits inside mine, the handle between our palms, the blade still kissing my throat.
My blood is on both our fingers now, slick and warm, and the intimacy of it is more obscene than anything I've ever done to her in the dark rooms of Hell.
"That's the part that's killing you, isn't it?" I murmur. "Not what I did. What you still feel."
She kisses me.
Except it's not a kiss. It's a collision.
Her mouth crashes into mine with teeth and fury and the copper taste of my blood from the cut on my throat, smeared between our lips like a sacrament.
She bites my lower lip—hard, hard enough to split it, the same place she split it on our reunion night—and the sound that comes out of me is something I don't recognize.
Raw. Pained. Hungry in a way that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with the woman on top of me who is tearing me apart with her teeth and her grief and the knife she's forgotten she's holding.
I flip her.
One movement.
Hip bridge, shoulder rotation, mechanics my body learned before it learned anything gentle.
The knife skitters from her grip and clatters across the hardwood, spinning into the darkness under her dresser, and then it's my weight pressing her into the mattress and my hands pinning her wrists above her head and her legs kicking against mine with genuine, furious force.
She fights me.
Not the performative resistance of our games in Hell, not the choreographed push-and-pull of dominance and submission that we both understood was theater.
She actually fights.
Nails raking down my forearm hard enough to tear skin.
Knee driving toward my groin—I block it with my thigh and the impact sends a jolt of pain up my hip.
Her teeth snap at my jaw, my ear, anything within range, and I pin her wrists with one hand and use my weight to press her into stillness.
"Get off me."
"No."
"I said get off—"
"I heard you." I settle between her thighs, and even through the thin fabric between us, I can feel the heat of her, and she can feel me, and the way her breath catches is a confession her mouth would never make. "Your mouth says one thing. Your body's saying something else."
"My body is a liar."
"Your body is the only honest part of you right now."
I don't undress her gently.
I hook my fingers into the waistband of her shorts and pull them down in one rough motion. She kicks, connects with my ribs—a solid hit that makes me grunt and will leave a bruise by morning—but I don't stop.
I pin her legs apart with my knees and run my hand up the inside of her thigh, and the sound she makes when my fingers find her is somewhere between a sob and a curse.
She's soaked.
The evidence of it coats my fingers, slick and undeniable, and the humiliation that flashes across her face is worse than anything the knife could have done to me.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what? Don't touch you?" My thumb finds her clit, traces a slow circle that makes her spine arch despite everything she's trying to hold together. "Don't prove what we both already know?"
"Fuck you."
"That's the idea."
I free myself with my other hand.
No warning, no foreplay beyond the violence and the blood and the three days of silence that were their own kind of torture.