Chapter 13 #2
I enter her in one hard thrust that punches a sound out of her lungs—shock and pleasure and rage compressed into a single syllable that I swallow with my mouth on hers.
I set a rhythm that's punishment.
For her, for me, for the lie I kept all these years and the truth I told three days ago and every ruined thing between us that we keep choosing to hold instead of drop.
Every stroke drives deep, angles up, hits the place inside her that I mapped eons ago with the patience of a man who understands that knowing someone's body completely is its own form of power.
She grabs the headboard.
Both hands wrapped around the iron bars, knuckles white, and I understand the choice she's making.
She's holding onto the bed because if she holds onto me—if her arms wrap around my neck or her fingers twist into my hair—she'll lose the last wall she's still standing behind.
Touching the headboard is touching something that isn't me.
It's the final lie she's telling herself—she's enduring this, not wanting it.
I bury my face in her neck.
My mouth finds the collar and I groan against the diamonds, the vibration traveling through the metal into her skin, and her hips jerk against me in a response she can't suppress.
"I hate you," she says. The words come out shattered. Broken edges where composure used to be.
"I know." I change the angle. Hook her leg over my shoulder, fold her body beneath mine, drive deeper into her until she's gasping and the headboard is slamming a rhythm into the wall. "Hate me louder."
She does. She screams it.
Hate and rage and grief pour out of her in a sound that should break something, should shatter glass, should bring the walls down around us.
She screams it while I fuck her into the mattress with everything I have, everything ugly and desperate and feral that lives in the space between what we are to each other and what we've done.
The orgasm takes her against her will.
I feel it build—the tension ratcheting through her thighs, the flutter of her around me, the way her breathing fragments into sharp, desperate bursts—and I feel her fight it.
She fights it the way she fought me, with everything she has, clenching her jaw and squeezing her eyes shut and willing her body to disobey.
It doesn't.
She breaks apart.
Her back arches off the bed, her thighs lock around me, and the sound she makes is my name and the word hate and something between them that might be please, all of it tangled together in a single wrecked exhalation that takes every wall she has left with it.
I follow her.
I don't mean to—I meant to hold on, to maintain control the way I always maintain control—but her body clenching around mine and the sound of my name in her broken voice is more than discipline can manage.
I bury myself to the hilt and spill into her with my teeth sunk into the curve of her shoulder, biting down hard enough to feel the skin give, hard enough to taste copper.
Marking her the way she marked me.
The thin cut on my throat, the bite on her shoulder—they’re an even exchange.
Mutually assured destruction.
The word doesn't feel big enough for the silence that follows.
We lie in the wreckage of her bed.
Not touching.
The sheets are twisted around our legs and stained with blood.
Mine from the knife, hers from the bite…and neither of us has the coordination or the will to untangle any of it.
Her breathing slows first. Mine takes longer.
I stare at the ceiling crack she's been staring at for three days and understand, for the first time, the compulsion to map something that leads nowhere.
She turns her head and looks at me in the dark.
Her eyes are wet but the tears haven't fallen, held in place by whatever mechanism inside her refuses to let them.
The collar glints at her throat, and in the thin light, it looks less like jewelry and more like a wound that's learned to shine.
"This doesn't change anything," she says.
"It changes everything, little wolf," I reach across the space between us and hook one finger through the collar.
She doesn't pull away. The diamonds are warm from her skin, and beneath them her pulse hammers against my knuckle like something trapped.
"You had three days. A gun. A knife. Every reason in the world, and you're still wearing this, even though I gave you the damn key. "
She doesn't answer.
Her jaw tightens and her eyes shine brighter, but she doesn't pull away, doesn't reach up to unhook my finger, doesn't tell me to stop touching the thing around her throat that means more now than it ever has.
I don't let go.
We stay like that as the dark thins and the windows go from black to charcoal to the pale gray of a dawn neither of us asked for.
Not touching except for my finger hooked through the diamonds at her throat, her pulse beating steady against my skin, and the blood drying on the sheets between us like a map of everywhere we've been and everywhere we can't stop going.
She falls asleep first.
I know because her pulse slows under my fingertip and her breathing deepens and the tension in her jaw finally releases, and even in sleep she doesn't pull away from the collar.
She sleeps with my hand at her throat the way she's been sleeping with a knife under her pillow.
Some instincts don't distinguish between threat and comfort.
Some bodies don't know the difference between a weapon and a home.
I watch the sunrise paint her ceiling the color of old blood, and I think about the things I've taken from her and the one thing she refuses to give up, and I don't sleep at all.