Chapter 18 #3
I cup his face, stubble under my palms. Gray eyes in the dark, watching me with something that looks fragile for a man who has never been fragile a day in his life.
"I choose this," I say. "Not because you made me.
Not because I don't have options. Not because Emilia walked out and you're what's left.
" I brush my thumb across his lower lip, the one I've split with my teeth twice now.
"Because this is what I want. You are what I want. And I'm tired of hating myself for it."
I kiss him. Slow. Deep.
No anger, no teeth, no punishment.
I kiss him the way I've wanted to kiss him since the moment I found out the truth and realized that the truth didn't kill what I feel—it just stripped away every excuse I had for feeling it.
I undress him, pull his shirt over his head, and my hands move over his chest the way they've moved a hundred times, but it's different now because there's nothing between my skin and his skin except honesty.
The scratch marks from our reunion, faded to thin white lines.
The scab on his throat. The scar on his ribs from something that happened before I existed in his world.
I trace them all with my fingers, then my mouth, pressing my lips to each mark like I'm reading the history of him through his skin.
He reaches for my shirt, and I stop him.
"Let me."
I pull it over my head, unhook my bra, step out of my pants and stand in front of him in the dark living room wearing nothing but the collar.
With the city lights painting my body in blue and gold and the key glinting on the coffee table beside us like an exit sign I'm choosing not to follow.
He looks at me.
Not the quick, hungry appraisal of the early days.
Slow. Thorough.
His eyes move over me the way his hands will in a moment, touching everything, missing nothing, and the attention is so total and so focused that I feel it on my skin like heat.
"You're the most terrifying thing I've ever seen," he says.
"Good."
I sink onto him. Slow. Taking him in inch by inch, and the feeling of him filling me, of his body inside mine, is something I let myself feel without fighting it for the first time.
No resistance. No shame spiral. No mental arithmetic about what this makes me or what my parents would think or whether the girl I used to be would recognize the woman with her knees on either side of a killer's hips.
I roll my hips. Slow, deliberate, the kind of rhythm that lets me feel every inch of him, and his hands grip my waist but don't guide. He lets me set the pace. Lets me take what I need.
"I choose this," I say again. My forehead against his. My hands on his shoulders. Moving on him in a rhythm that belongs only to me. "I choose you. The monster. The murderer. The man who destroyed my world and then built me a new one inside it."
"Selene—"
"Shut up. I'm not done." I clench around him, watch his composure fracture, watch those gray eyes go dark and unfocused. "I choose all of it. The collar. The empire. The blood. Every ugly, broken, irredeemable piece of what we are together."
I increase the pace. His fingers dig into my hips, hard enough to bruise, and the controlled exterior starts to crack the way it only ever cracks with me.
The jaw tightens. The breathing goes ragged. A muscle in his neck twitches, and I can feel him straining beneath me, holding back, trying to let me lead when every instinct he has is telling him to take over.
"Say it," I tell him. "Say what you said to me the night I told you I loved you."
"You're everything to me." His voice comes out ruined. Shredded. The voice of a man who built an empire on control and is watching it dissolve under the hands of a woman who asked him to be honest. "Everything."
"Then give me everything. Not the version you show the world.
Not the strategist, not the crime lord, not the man who has an answer for everything.
You. The real one. The one who paces in the middle of the night and makes me coffee before he leaves and sent a female doctor because he thought about what Emilia needed before anyone else did. "
Something breaks open behind his eyes.
I see it happen—the last door, the one he keeps locked behind all the others, swinging open. And what's behind it is not the monster I called him.
It's a man who is terrified of the thing in his chest that beats faster when I'm close and has no strategy for what to do with it.
He surges up, wraps one arm around my back, and buries his face in my neck.
The sound he makes against the collar is something I've never heard from him—not a groan, not a growl. Something broken and open and close to a sob, the sound of a man who has held everything in for twenty years finally letting something out.
I hold his head against my neck and ride him harder. Deeper. My fingers twist in his hair, pulling his face up so I can see him, and his eyes are wet, and seeing Cassius Wolfe with wet eyes while he's inside me is the most intimate thing that has ever happened between us.
More intimate than the knife. More intimate than the desk. More intimate than any of the games we played in Hell, because this is the one thing he can't fake.
"I see you," I tell him. The same words he said to me. Giving them back. "The real you. And I'm still here."
He comes apart.
His arms crush me against his chest and his hips drive up into me, deep, deeper, the rhythm gone now, replaced by something raw and graceless and real.
I feel him let go—not just physically, not just the orgasm building and breaking, but something else.
Something structural. A wall coming down that's been load-bearing for his entire adult life.
I follow him. The orgasm rises through me like a wave I don't fight, warm and enormous and shatteringly quiet.
I press my forehead against his and breathe his name and feel my body clench around him and let it happen.
No screaming. No tears. Just his name and the dark and the feeling of being exactly where I belong, which is the most terrifying feeling of all.
He holds me afterward. Arms wrapped tight, face in my hair, heartbeat hammering against my chest. His arms are shaking.
His breath is uneven. And I hold him back and let him tremble and don't say a word, because some things are bigger than language and the silence between two people who have just shown each other everything is one of them.
After a long time, I reach over to the coffee table. Pick up the collar key. He goes still. Every muscle in his body tenses against mine, and I feel him hold his breath.
I place the key on the nightstand beside the bed. Not in a drawer. Not in my pocket. In the open, where we can both see it, next to his whiskey glass and my father's .38 that I've taken to keeping close.
"I'm not using it," I say. "But I want it there. I want us both to know it's there."
He presses his lips to my forehead. "Okay."
"This collar stays on because I choose it. Not because it's locked. Not because you put it there. Because it's mine now."
"Okay."
"And tomorrow, you and I are going to sit at that table together and finish what we started with Zhukov. As equals. Not as your project. Not as your weapon. As your partner."
"Yes."
I curl against his chest and listen to his heart slow, feel his arm tighten around me and his chin rest on top of my head, and the weight of him around me is not a cage.
It's a choice. My choice. Made with open eyes and bloody hands and full knowledge of exactly who he is and what he's done and what I am because of it.
Emilia is gone. The girl I was is gone. My parents are gone, and the grief of that will never fully leave, and I will carry it alongside the love I feel for their killer and the contradiction will live in me like a second heartbeat for the rest of my life.
But I'm not gone. I'm here. In the dark, in his arms, in a life I didn't choose but am choosing now, every second, every breath, every beat of the heart that belongs to him whether I want it to or not.
I choose you. All of you. The blood on your hands and the lies on your tongue and the darkness that made me who I am. I choose this life, this empire, this man who ruined me so thoroughly I became someone worth being.
My parents would be horrified. Emilia already is. The girl I used to be would scream.
But she's dead. I killed her myself, somewhere between a factory in Sunset Park and a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, somewhere between a friendship bracelet and a diamond collar, somewhere between the girl who cried in Emilia's guest room and the woman who holds a killer in the dark and calls it home.
And the woman who took her place?
She belongs here with Cassius, in the dark.