Chapter Twenty-Two
First Claiming
He removed his mask. Allie watched the decision unfold in real time—the stillness that preceded motion, the deliberate flex of his fingers at the balaclava’s edge, the slow drag of matte black fabric up and over the sharp architecture of his skull.
The face beneath was not a surprise. It was a confirmation.
High cheekbones carved from the same ruthless economy that governed every movement he made.
Dark eyes that held nothing but the truth of what he was.
A mouth she already knew the shape of—not from sight, but from the way it had traced her jaw and her throat and the curve of her ear while she trembled in the dark.
He dropped the mask on the metal table without looking at it, the soft flump of fabric against steel the only sound in the room besides the hum of the bulb and the wet rasp of her own breathing.
“I was going to kill you when this started.”
The words came out quiet and absolute, his accent softening the edges without diminishing the weight. He did not move toward her. He did not need to. The confession filled the space between them as completely as his body had when he pinned her to the concrete minutes earlier.
“That was the cleanest version of the plan. Take you. Break you. Use what you knew and what you were to reach the people who left my brother in the road. When I finished with them, you would not have left this room breathing.”
Allie remained in the chair. Her pulse knocked hard against the base of her throat, a frantic drumbeat she could not quiet and did not try to hide.
The torn strap of the black dress had slipped farther down her arm.
Her bare feet were numb against the grit of the floor.
The raw marks on her wrists had faded to a memory of restraint, but she could still feel the ghost of the cuffs every time she flexed her fingers.
“And now?” The question left her lips before she chose to ask it. Same two words. Same flat, unflinching delivery she had used when he told her the original design no longer fit.
“Now the thought of you dead feels like a waste I am no longer willing to make.” He stepped closer.
The scent of him reached her again—soap and salt and the clean heat of a body kept hard for years.
“You see me. Not the story. Not the fear. Me. And I have not been seen cleanly in a very long time. That changes the math.”
He held out his hand. The leather glove was still on it.
The palm faced upward, fingers slightly curled, an offering that was not a question and never had been.
Allie looked at the long, powerful fingers that had sealed tape across her mouth and gripped her chin and pinned her wrists above her head, and understood that taking them now would finish the crossing she had begun in the silence of the previous hour—the irreversible movement from instrument to something else, something neither of them had a word for yet. She placed her hand in his.
Toro pulled her out of the chair and into the hard plane of his body in one continuous, seamless motion.
The impact drove the air from her lungs.
His free hand locked around the back of her neck, fingers threading into the tangled mess of her hair, and he brought his mouth down on hers with a force that was not a kiss so much as a claiming.
Teeth. Tongue. The wet heat of him pushing past her lips and stroking deep, tasting the inside of her mouth as if he were cataloguing it for later use.
Allie made a sound against him—half protest, half something far more dangerous—and he swallowed it whole, walking her backward until her bare shoulders met the concrete wall with a soft, percussive thud.
He did not stop pressing. The full weight of his body pinned her there, chest to chest, hip to hip, the thick ridge of his arousal already hard against her belly through his trousers.
He kissed her like he was learning her, mapping the slick interior of her mouth, the sharp edge of her teeth, the desperate way her tongue pushed back against his.
When he finally broke away, her lips felt swollen and hot and used, and the air she dragged into her lungs was cold and sharp and tasted of him.
“Turn around.”
The command landed low and steady in her ear.
She turned. Her palms met the rough concrete, grit pressing into her skin, and she pressed her forehead against the wall’s indifferent surface while she listened to the soft rustle of fabric behind her.
He stripped the black dress from her body in two efficient movements—one hand at the zipper, one at the torn hem—and left it pooled on the floor at her bare feet.
His own clothes followed with the same ruthless lack of ceremony.
Shirt. Boots. Trousers. The whisper of leather as he peeled off the gloves, finally, letting them drop to the concrete beside the mask.
Then he was behind her, naked and hot and fully hard, and the length of him pressed against the base of her spine made her eyes squeeze shut.
His hand slid between her legs from behind.
One finger. Then two. They parted her slick folds with an unhurried, clinical precision that made her gasp and buck against his palm.
She was already wet—had been wet since the moment his voice roughened with the admission that she had stopped being a tool, since the shift in the air that told her the geometry between them had permanently altered.
“You have been waiting for this whether you admit it or not.” His lips brushed the shell of her ear, breath hot and even.
“Your body has been negotiating for days. I am done letting it negotiate.” He bent his knees, notched the broad head of his cock against her entrance, and pushed into her with one long, relentless thrust that seated him to the root.
Allie’s cry bounced off the concrete walls and came back to her fractured.
He gave her no pause to adjust. One hand clamped down on her hip with a grip that would leave bruises she would trace with her fingers later, in the quiet, in the dark.
The other braced against the wall beside her head, knuckles whitening as he began to fuck her with deep, measured strokes that seemed designed to remind her exactly how much of her body he could occupy.
The angle was merciless. Every thrust dragged the thick ridge of him across the place inside her that made her vision white out at the edges, that pulled involuntary, broken sounds from her throat.
She clawed at the concrete and tried to find a rhythm she could survive.
He refused it. He set the pace and held it, owning every inch of the movement, owning the way her hips bucked back to meet him and the way her breath came in ragged, desperate gasps.
“This cunt is mine now.” The words were low and even, his voice still terrifyingly controlled even as his body drove into hers with increasing force. “Say it.”
Allie shook her head once, forehead grinding against the cold concrete. The denial was automatic. The last flag of a surrender she had already made.
He reached around her hip. Two fingers found her clit—swollen and slick and achingly sensitive—and began rubbing in tight, perfect circles that matched the rhythm of his thrusts exactly.
The dual sensation ripped a sound from deep in her chest, something between a moan and a sob, something she had never made before and would never make for anyone else.
“Say it.”
“It’s yours.” The words scraped out of her raw and honest. “Fuck. It’s yours.” He pulled out of her completely.
The sudden emptiness was a shock. Allie made a noise of pure, undiluted loss—her body clenching around nothing, her hips pressing back instinctively to find him again.
Toro turned her, dropped to his knees on the concrete without ceremony, and put his mouth on her before she could gather a full breath.
He licked into her with the same relentless focus he had used with his cock.
His tongue fucked her open, broad and flat and then pointed and precise, tracing the shape of her, learning the places that made her thighs tremble.
His lips sealed around her clit and sucked with a steady, unhurried pressure that made her hands fly to his hair and grip hard.
Two fingers slid back inside her, curling forward to stroke the spot he had already claimed, keeping her stretched and full while he ate her like he had all the time in the world and no intention of letting her come.
Her thighs began to shake. A high, keening whimper escaped her throat.
He stood. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in a gesture that was too casual for what he had just done.
Then he spun her back to face the wall, one hand flat between her shoulder blades pressing her forward until her cheek rested against the cool concrete.
“I’m not finished taking what’s mine.”
He slicked himself with the wetness he had pulled from her body—her own arousal mixing with his saliva—and pressed the head of his cock against the tighter entrance lower down.
Allie tensed. Every muscle in her body locked.
He did not stop. He pushed forward in slow, incremental inches, one hand stroking a long, soothing line down the curve of her spine in a mockery of comfort, until the thick head of him popped past the tight ring of muscle and she cried out at the burn and the stretch and the overwhelming sensation of being filled in a place that had never been claimed by anyone.
“Breathe,” he ordered. She breathed. A long, shuddering inhale that she released in fragments.
He worked himself deeper in short, controlled thrusts, pausing between each one to let her body adjust and then demanding more, until his hips sat flush against the curve of her ass and she could feel every pulse of him buried inside the impossible tight heat.
Then he began to fuck her there with the same measured, possessive intensity he had used in her cunt—deep strokes, unhurried, each one a deliberate invasion that unspooled something in Allie’s chest. Something that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the terrifying relief of being taken completely, of being wanted without softness, of being seen without the filters everyone else had required.
He reached around her hip again. His fingers returned to her clit, wet and certain.
The orgasm crashed through both points of penetration at once.
Allie’s voice broke on a sound she did not recognize as her own—a raw, guttural cry that echoed off the concrete and came back to her like a stranger’s voice.
Her body clamped down around him in hard, rhythmic waves, pulling a low, guttural noise from his throat that was the first real loss of control she had ever heard from him.
He fucked her through every pulse of it, dragging the climax out until her knees buckled and the only thing keeping her upright was the iron grip of his hands and the thick length of him still buried deep.
When the shaking finally slowed to tremors, he pulled out, turned her, and pressed down on her shoulders with a single firm, inescapable pressure. Her knees met the concrete.
Allie looked up at him from the floor. Lips parted.
Eyes glassy and unfocused. The taste of herself still on his mouth when he fed his cock between her lips and she opened for him without hesitation.
He fucked her throat with short, controlled strokes, one hand fisted in her tangled hair, watching her eyes water and her throat work around him.
He watched her take everything he gave her—watched the way her lips stretched around his girth, the way her jaw strained, the way she swallowed around him instinctively—until his control finally fractured and he came with a low, rough sound she felt in her chest.
Thick, hot pulses spilled across her tongue and lips and chin. She swallowed what she could. The rest dripped down her throat and onto the torn strap of her dress still pooled beneath her knees. Silence returned in layers.
The hum of the bulb. The distant drip of water in the walls.
Her own ragged breathing slowly steadying.
Toro stood over her, bare chest rising and falling harder than she had ever seen it move, dark eyes locked on the picture she made—on her knees, his come glistening on her mouth and chin, his fingerprints blooming purple on her hips, her body used in every way he had decided to use it.
Allie stayed where he had put her. Lungs burning.
Thighs trembling. The last clean boundary between them dissolved like salt in water.
He reached down. Dragged his thumb across her lower lip, collecting a streak of himself, and pressed it gently back into her mouth. She closed her lips around the digit and sucked.
“You are not a door anymore,” he said. The roughness at the edges of his voice was the first genuine crack she had ever heard in his composure.
“You are the thing I will burn the rest of them for.” Allie held his gaze from her place on the concrete floor and felt the words sink into the same permanent hollow the evidence had carved out days earlier.
She had been broken open in a new way—split along seams she had not known she possessed, remade into something that could hold both fury and this.
The man standing above her already knew he was lost inside the breaking. Neither of them looked away.