Chapter 14 #3
His mouth leaves mine and travels down.
Jaw, throat, the edge of the collar.
He traces the diamonds with his tongue, a gesture I know from our reunion night, from a dozen nights before the truth, but now it carries a different feeling.
He's tasting his ownership of me, and I'm letting him, and the complicated spiral of shame and desire that creates makes me dig my nails into his shoulders hard enough to feel muscle give beneath my fingers.
He drops to his knees.
The sight of Cassius Wolfe on his knees between my legs is something that should feel like power, and it does, but it also feels like surrender—his, mine, both of ours—and the distinction between those things was never as clear as I pretended it was.
He presses his mouth to the inside of my knee.
A kiss.
Soft, almost reverent, completely at odds with the man I know him to be.
Then he works upward.
Slow, deliberate, open-mouthed kisses along the sensitive skin of my inner thigh that turn into drags of his tongue, wet and warm and devastating.
Each one higher than the last.
Each one closer to where I'm aching so badly that I can feel my own pulse between my legs.
"You don't have to forgive me," he says against my inner thigh, the words vibrating into my skin. "You just have to feel this."
His mouth finds me.
The sound I make bounces off the office walls and comes back to me unrecognizable.
He licks a slow, flat stroke from entrance to clit and my hands slam down on the desk behind me, bracing, because if I don't hold onto something solid I'm going to fall backward into the surveillance feeds and the whiskey and the paperwork of an empire I'm supposed to hate.
He's patient.
That's the devastating part.
Last time was rage and adrenaline and a knife that neither of us could put down.
This is something else.
This is Cassius at his most methodical, his most focused, his tongue working me with a precision that's almost clinical except for the sounds he's making against me, low groans that vibrate against my clit and tell me this isn't strategy.
This is pure fucking need.
He slips two fingers inside me while his mouth stays on my clit, curling them upward, finding the spot that makes my vision white out at the edges.
I'm gripping the edge of the desk hard enough to leave half-moon marks in the mahogany, and my thighs are shaking, and the sounds coming out of my mouth are not words.
They're fragments.
Pieces of language that broke apart somewhere between my brain and my lips and came out as gasps and moans and his name repeated like a prayer I don't believe in anymore.
He builds me up and pulls back.
Builds me up again, tongue circling my clit in a rhythm that's just fast enough to drive me toward the edge and just slow enough to keep me from going over.
Every time I get close, every time my thighs start to clamp around his head and my back starts to arch, he eases off.
Replaces pressure with softness. Lets the wave recede just enough that when it builds again it's higher than before.
"Please," I hear myself say.
I don't recognize my own voice.
It's wrecked. Hollowed out. Begging, and I don't beg, I have never begged, but his mouth is between my legs and his fingers are inside me and I've been fighting for days and I don't have any fight left for this.
He gives me what I'm asking for.
His lips close around my clit and he sucks, hard, while his fingers curl and press and find the place inside me that detonates everything I've been holding together.
I come with my thighs clamped around his head and tears streaming silently down my face.
Not from pain.
Not from pleasure, exactly.
From the devastating recognition that I am exactly where I want to be.
In the office of the man who destroyed my family.
On the desk where he plans operations and calculates territorial logistics and signs orders that end people's lives.
With his mouth between my legs and his collar on my throat and no more lies between us.
This is the truth I've been running from, and it caught me, and it feels like relief and ruin at the same time.
He stands, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
His eyes are dark and his breathing is ragged and the front of his pants strains against an erection that he hasn't moved to address, like this was about me, just me, and what he needs is secondary.
But I don't want secondary.
I don't want him controlled and considerate and careful.
I want the man underneath all of that, the one I heard through the wall at all hours of the night pacing and pouring whiskey and being as wrecked as I am.
I reach for his waistband and he catches my wrist. "You don't have to—"
"Shut up, Cassius." I undo his belt and pull him free.
He's hard and hot against my palm, and the sound he makes when I wrap my fingers around him is the most honest thing I've heard from him since the night he confessed. "I don't want your restraint. I don't want you handling me. I want you to stop performing and just feel this."
I pull him to the edge of the desk, guide him to my entrance and he pauses there, the head of him pressing against me, and the look on his face is asking a question his mouth won't form.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him in.
He slides into me slowly.
Inch by inch, filling me with a completeness that makes my breath stutter and my head drop forward against his chest.
This isn't the violent thrust of last time.
This is something more honest.
This is two people who know exactly what they're doing and choosing to do it anyway.
I hold his face in my hands, force him to look at me while he moves inside me, slow and deep, each stroke dragging against the places that are still swollen and sensitive from last night.
"Don't close your eyes," I say. "I want you to see me. Not the girl you created. Not the weapon you built. Me."
His rhythm falters.
Something cracks behind those steel-gray eyes like a fissure opening in stone, and the raw thing I see underneath is not the crime lord, or the strategist, or the man who killed my parents.
It's something younger. Something that might be afraid.
His forehead drops to mine, and he makes a sound I've never heard from him.
Not a groan, not a growl, not the controlled sounds of a man who modulates even his pleasure.
This is unarmored. Close to pain.
The sound of a man letting someone see the part of him that exists beneath the architecture.
"I see you," he breathes. "I've always seen you."
We move together.
The rhythm isn't punishment, and it isn't tenderness.
It's something more honest than either.
His hands grip my hips, pulling me into each thrust, and my legs tighten around him, my heels digging into the small of his back, drawing him deeper.
The desk shudders beneath us with every stroke.
His monitors flicker with surveillance feeds of an empire we're both supposed to be running and neither of us is looking at anything except each other.
The orgasm builds differently this time.
Not against my will. Not something I fight.
It rises through my body like a tide, warm and inevitable, and I let it come because I'm done fighting things that are going to take me regardless.
It crests.
My body clenches around him and my forehead presses against his, and I exhale his name like something I've been holding in my lungs for days.
No screaming. No crying.
Just his name, and the quiet devastation of meaning it.
He follows me.
His arms wrap around my back, crushing me against his chest, and he buries his face in my neck and comes with a sound that vibrates against the collar and through my collarbone and into the hollow of my throat where my pulse is hammering.
His arms are shaking.
Cassius Wolfe's arms are shaking, and I hold him through it and feel his heartbeat against mine and don't let go.
We stay like that for a long time.
Tangled together on his desk in the blue light of the surveillance monitors, the spilled whiskey soaking into the paperwork beneath us, his face in my neck and my fingers in his hair and the city glittering through the windows like it doesn't know what's happening thirty floors above it.
He carries me to his bed.
Not the guest room.
His.
I don't fight it.
My arms are around his neck and my face is against his shoulder and the hallway passes in a blur of dark walls and soft carpet and the steady rhythm of his footsteps.
He lays me on the sheets and pulls the covers over both of us and I curl against his chest and listen to his heart.
The beat is slower now. Steadier.
"This doesn't mean I forgive you," I murmur into his chest.
"I know."
"I don't know if I'll ever forgive you."
"I know that, too."
His arm tightens around me.
His chin rests on top of my head, and I can feel his breath in my hair, slow and even, and the weight of him around me is the most dangerous kind of comfort.
The kind that feels like home when you know the house is built on a graveyard.
I close my eyes.
The guest room is twenty feet away, clean and safe and empty, with a lock that works from the inside and a door I could close against him.
I stay where I am.
The most dangerous place in the world is the only place I've ever felt safe.
I don't forgive him. I don't know if I ever will, but I stay.