Chapter 19 #2
She works. I work. We eat dinner together at the kitchen island—takeout, mostly, because neither of us cooks and the idea of sitting down at Cavallo surrounded by people feels like too much right now.
She steals my whiskey every night and I pretend not to notice.
She falls asleep on the couch with documents on her lap and I carry her to bed, and she curls against me without waking, and the domesticity of it is so far from where we started that some nights I lie awake trying to reconcile the woman breathing against my chest with the girl who held a gun to it.
By Friday, the work is mostly done.
The territory is integrated. The finances are clean. The organization is running smoother than it has in years, and the woman responsible for most of that is standing in my bedroom in a towel asking me what we're doing tonight.
Purgatory is packed. The bass shakes the walls and the members all have shit-eating grins.
It's a good night. A profitable night. The kind of night that used to be enough.
Selene walks in beside me, and enough stops being the word that applies.
She's wearing black. A dress that fits like it was sewn onto her body, cut low enough to show the collar in full, high enough on the thigh that every step gives the room a glimpse of what's underneath.
Heels that add four inches and change her walk from confident to predatory.
Hair down, loose, the way I like it, though she'd deny choosing it for that reason.
The room notices. Of course the room notices.
Heads turn the way heads turn when something dangerous walks in wearing something beautiful, and the whispers start before we've made it past the bar.
I catch fragments. Her name. My name. The Russian situation.
Words like queen and collar and don't fucking stare exchanged between people who know enough to be impressed and not enough to be afraid.
She hears them. I know she does, because the corner of her mouth lifts in that sharp, private smile that I've been noticing since she walked back into my life, and she doesn't slow down.
We move through the club like a blade through silk. Peter and Paul flank us. Lionel is already downstairs.
The crowd parts, and the parting is different now than it was two weeks ago.
Before, they parted for me and tolerated her. Now they part for both of us, and the deference is directed at the woman as much as the man.
She feels it. I can see it in her posture, the way her spine straightens and her chin lifts and her hand finds the small of my back instead of the other way around. She's not being escorted. She's arriving.
We reach the elevator. The doors close. The descent begins.
"Hell," she says. Not a question.
"Hell."
She looks at me. The sharp smile is still there, but underneath it there's something warmer, something that burns instead of cuts. "The room with the glass?"
"If you want."
"I do."
The elevator opens.
Hell unfolds around us—red light, leather, the thick hum of soundproofing and desire. It's a busy night down here too. The rooms along the main corridor are occupied, the doors closed, the observation windows drawing their usual audience.
Selene walks past them without looking.
She knows where she's going. She's been in this room before, on the other side of the glass, watching. Learning.
The room at the end of the hall. I open the door and she walks through it.
It's one of Hell's showcase rooms. Larger than the others.
The bed is oversized, draped in black silk, positioned to face the full-length observation window that takes up the entire far wall.
The glass is one-way from this side—we can see out, they can't see in.
But there's a switch by the door, and when you flip it, the tint reverses.
The room becomes a stage, and the hallway becomes the audience.
Selene looks at the switch and looks at me.
"I’m ready," she says.
We flip it at the same time, her fingers on top of mine. The glass shimmers and clears, and suddenly we can see them—the people in the corridor, gathering, drawn by the lit room and the promise of what happens inside it.
Faces in the red light. Watching. Waiting.
Selene turns to me, the audience at her back, the bed between us, the collar burning at her throat.
"They're going to watch us," she says.
"Does that bother you?"
"No." She reaches behind her neck and unzips the dress. One slow pull, the sound of it louder than it should be in the quiet room.
The fabric falls away from her shoulders, pools at her waist. Slides over her hips and hits the floor, and she steps out of it wearing nothing but the collar and black heels and the expression of a woman who has decided, finally and completely, to stop being ashamed of what she wants. "I want them to see."
She crosses to me, unbuttons my shirt ever so slowly.
Each button is a deliberate act, her fingers moving down my chest while the people on the other side of the glass press closer.
I can see them in my peripheral vision, the shapes of their bodies, the hunger in their posture, but my eyes are on Selene.
She pushes the shirt off my shoulders. Runs her hands down my arms, fingertips tracing the veins, the muscle, the scars.
Then her mouth follows the same path. A kiss to my collarbone, to the center of my chest, to the scar on my ribs, and each one is soft and slow and deliberate in a way that's designed to drive me out of my mind.
"Selene."
"Quiet." She undoes my belt. Pulls it free in one long slide.
Wraps it once around her fist and holds it there, the leather taut between her fingers, and the image of her standing in nothing but the collar with my belt in her hand is something the people behind the glass will remember for the rest of their lives.
I know because I'll remember it for the rest of mine.
She drops the belt, pushes my pants down and takes me in her hand before I've finished stepping out of them. The sound I make when her fingers wrap around me is not the sound of a man in control. It's the sound of a man being dismantled in front of an audience by the only person who knows how.
"Sit on the bed," she says.
I sit and she straddles me. The glass is behind her, the watchers pressed against it, and I can see their reflections framing her body like a dark halo.
But she's not looking at them. She's looking at me. Only me. The audience is for the world. The eye contact is for us.
She takes me inside her slowly, sinking down inch by inch, her hands on my shoulders, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and the sound she makes when I'm fully inside her is low and raw and the most honest thing I've heard in this room, which is saying something for a place that deals in exposed nerve endings.
She rides me, her back facing the audience, which means they see everything—the curve of her spine, the flex of her thighs, the collar glinting at the nape of her neck as she moves.
But her face is mine. The expressions that cross it—pleasure, intensity, something fierce and possessive—those belong to me alone.
The watchers get the performance. I get the truth.
"This is mine," she says. Rolling her hips in a slow, devastating rhythm that makes my fingers dig into her thighs hard enough to mark. "This empire. This body. This life."
"Yours," I manage.
"Say it louder."
"Yours."
She leans back, shifts the angle so I hit deeper inside her, and the moan that leaves her mouth is not quiet. It carries.
It fills the room and bleeds through the glass and the people on the other side hear it and press closer and she doesn't care. She wants them to hear.
I grip her hips and thrust upward, meeting her rhythm, and her head falls back and the collar catches the red light and she looks like something out of a painting that should hang in a museum nobody's allowed to enter.
The heels are still on. I can feel them digging into the mattress on either side of my thighs, and the sharp bite of them against the silk sheets is a detail I didn't know I needed until right now.
"Harder," she says. Not a whisper. A command. Loud enough for the glass. "I want them to see what you do to me."
I flip her.
She lands on her back on the black silk, and now the glass is beside us, a full-length window showing the audience everything from every angle.
I hook her leg over my shoulder and drive into her, and the sound she makes reverberates through the room and out into the corridor and the people watching press their hands against the glass.
She pulls me down. Mouths against my ear, words meant only for me, lost beneath the sounds she's making for the room.
"I love you. I've loved you through every horrible thing you've done and every horrible thing I've done and I will love you in the dark and in the light and in front of anyone who wants to watch. "
I bury myself in her. Deep. Hold there. Her body arches against mine and her nails rake down my back hard enough to draw lines that will show for days.
"Again," she breathes. "Say my name."
"Selene."
"Louder."
"Selene."
She wraps both legs around me and pulls me in so deep I lose the ability to think in complete sentences. The rhythm turns urgent, graceless, two bodies chasing the same edge with the single-minded focus of people who have been through too much to pretend this is anything other than what it is.
Need. Raw, uncut, witnessed need.
The audience doesn't exist. The glass doesn't exist. The empire and the bodies and the war we just won don't exist.
There is only her beneath me, the heat of her around me, the sound of my name in her mouth and the feeling of falling that I've spent my entire adult life avoiding and am now surrendering to completely.
She comes first. Her whole body tightens, her back lifting off the silk, her thighs clamping around me with a force that borders on pain, and the sound she makes is my name tangled with a moan that hits every register between whisper and scream.
I feel her pulse around me, the rhythmic clench of her body pulling me deeper, and I hold on for three more strokes before I break.
The orgasm rips through me.
Not the controlled release I've trained myself to deliver, not the modulated performance of a man who doesn't let anything take him by surprise.
This is total. Complete. The kind of surrender that leaves you blind and breathless and gripping the sheets with white knuckles because the alternative is losing your grip on something more fundamental.
I come inside her with my face pressed against her throat, my mouth on the collar, the vibration of her name against the diamonds, and for a moment the world narrows to the two of us and the heartbeat I can feel through the metal and the skin beneath it and nothing else matters. Nothing else has ever mattered.
The glass is still clear.
The audience has thinned but not disappeared.
Some of them are watching us in the aftermath the way you watch the last embers of a fire—not for heat but for the memory of it.
Selene lies on the black silk. Wrecked. Beautiful. Mine.
She reaches over and flips the switch.
The glass goes dark and the audience vanishes.
"Just us." She curls against me.
I pull the sheet over both of us, a gesture so domestic it feels absurd in this room, in this place, in the context of everything we are.
But she presses her face into my chest and sighs, and the sigh is the sound of someone who has arrived somewhere and doesn't plan to leave.
"Vincent called me by my first name today," she says. "Not Miss Deveraux. Selene. First time."
"I noticed."
"Marco told me my restructuring plan was, quote, annoyingly good."
"That's the closest thing to a love letter Marco has ever written."
She laughs. Quiet, real, the laugh of a woman who has not had much to laugh about lately and is allowing herself this small one because she earned it.
"Emilia hasn't called," she says. The laugh is gone. The sentence sits between us, flat and heavy.
"I know."
"I check my phone every hour. Like a reflex. I don't even realize I'm doing it until the screen is already in my hand and the notification bar is empty."
I don't tell her about the fact my men are watching over Emilia. Don't tell her Emilia is seeing a therapist, or that she went back to work, or that she's safe. That information belongs to a different conversation, on a different night, when Selene is ready to hear it.
"She might come back," I say instead. "Not soon. Maybe not for a long time. But people who love each other the way you two do don't stay apart forever."
"You sound like someone who believes in happy endings."
"I believe in you. Wouldn't you say that's close enough?"
She presses her lips to my chest. Right over my heart. The gesture is small and fierce and I feel it in places I didn't know I had left.
We lie in the dark of Hell, in the room where the glass has gone opaque and the audience has moved on and the only witness left is the silence between two people who have shown each other everything and are still here.
She's not my creation. She's not my possession. She's not even my weakness anymore.
She's my equal. My partner. My queen.
And God help anyone who tries to take her from me again.