Chapter 19 #2
Pressing my forehead to hers, I started to move.
Slow. Deep. Every stroke deliberate, pulling almost all the way out before sinking back in to the hilt.
The kind of pace that let her feel everything.
The ridge of my cock dragging against her walls, the weight of me pressing her into the mattress, the way my breathing fell apart a little more with each thrust.
This wasn't fucking. Every other time had been fucking. Desperate, brutal, possessive. Just two bodies ripping into each other while the world burned.
No, this was something else. This was a man trying to pour everything he'd never said into the body of the woman he loved because words weren't big enough and time wasn't long enough and the only language he'd ever been fluent in was touch.
"Look at me," I said. Which was stupid and impossible and I didn't care.
She tilted her face up. Her blind eyes found mine—not seeing, but finding nonetheless—and the expression on her face split me open.
It was trust. Total, absolute trust. The face of a woman who had handed her safety to a monster and believed he'd keep her whole.
I thrust deeper. She gasped, her nails biting into my shoulders.
"Right there," she breathed. "God, right there—"
I held the angle. Drove into her with a rhythm that made the bed frame creak against the wall, slow and steady, a cadence that felt like a heartbeat. Her legs climbed higher around my waist. Her heels dug into my lower back, pulling me closer, deeper.
"You're mine," I said. Not a growl. Not a command. Just the truth, spoken against her mouth while I moved inside her.
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I'm yours." Her voice was breaking. Not from the sex, but from whatever she was feeling underneath it. "I'm yours, Milo."
My vision blurred. I blinked hard and kept moving.
I dropped my mouth to her ear. "You're the only real thing I've ever had."
Her breath hitched and a sound caught in her throat—half gasp, half sob—and then her arms were around my neck, pulling me down, pulling me closer, like she was trying to fold me into herself.
I could feel her getting close again. Felt her walls tightening around my cock. Her breath going shallow and erratic. Her fingers digging into my back with an urgency that said she was trying to hold on and couldn't.
"Let go," I whispered against her throat. "Let go, little bird. I've got you."
She came with a sob. A real one. Something ripped from the deepest place inside of her. She cried while she came, tears sliding from the corners of her beautiful blind eyes, her body clenching around me in waves while her mouth found mine and she kissed me through it. Wet and messy and desperate.
It broke me.
The orgasm hit me hard and desperate. I buried myself deep—as deep as I could go—and came inside her with a groan that I muffled against her throat, because the sound that wanted to come out was closer to a scream.
My whole body locked. My hands fisted in the sheets on either side of her head.
And I emptied myself into her while she held me, her arms tight around my neck, her legs wrapped around my hips, her heartbeat slamming against mine through the pressed-together skin of our chests.
I stayed inside her when it was done. My face buried in the curve of her neck while her fingers combed through my hair in slow, absent strokes.
"You're crying," she whispered.
Fuck.
She was right. There was wetness on my face, pressed against her throat.
"No, I'm not," I said.
She smiled. I felt it against my temple. "Liar." She traced the line of my jaw.
I caught her hand. Brought it to my mouth. Kissed her palm. Then the inside of her wrist, where the skin was thin and pale and I could feel her pulse tapping against my lips.
"I love you," I said again. Because I could. Because she'd said it back. Because I might not get another chance. "Whatever happens. Remember that."
Her smile faded. "You keep saying that. 'Whatever happens.' What's going to happen, Milo?"
"I don't know yet."
Another lie. The worst kind. The kind that sounded like honesty.
"But I need you to trust me, Raven," I said. "Even if—" I stopped.
"Even if what?"
Even if I become the thing you should've been afraid of all along. Even if I do something that makes you wish you'd never let me through your door. Even if you call me a monster and mean it.
"Even if it gets harder before it gets better," I said.
She was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers ghosting along my face, reading me the way she read everything, with a patience and precision that saw more than sight ever could.
"Okay," she said softly. "I trust you."
I kissed her forehead, and pulled her against my chest. She settled into me, her cheek over my heart, one arm draped across my stomach and her leg thrown over mine, her breathing gradually slowing into the rhythm of approaching sleep.
I held her, staring at the ceiling as she drifted off.
I'd done a lot of terrible things in my life.
Cleaned up murders. Dissolved bodies. Watched men die and felt nothing.
Not guilt, not horror, not even curiosity.
I'd existed in the margins of death since I was a child, and it had hollowed me out so thoroughly that I'd believed there was nothing left inside me capable of breaking.
I was wrong.
The woman sleeping on my chest had found the one thing I hadn't managed to kill.
And tomorrow, I was going to use it to destroy us both.
Her breathing evened out. Her body went slack and warm. One hand rested over my heart, fingers curled loosely, the way they always settled when she slept.
I didn't close my eyes. I lay there with her heartbeat against my ribs and I counted the hours like a man counting the last steps of his life.
And when the first gray light crept through the windows, I slipped out of bed. Pulled on my clothes. Leaned down and pressed my mouth to her forehead one last time.
She stirred and reached for me.
"Milo?"
"Go back to sleep, little bird. It's okay."
She murmured something I couldn't catch. Her hand found air where my chest had been. Then she settled back, curling into the warm spot I'd left behind.
I stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her for a very long time.
Then I walked out of the apartment and closed the door and stood in the hallway and listened to the silence on the other side for just a moment longer.
Taking the stairs two at a time, I walked into the cold morning air and got in my car and sat there with my hands on the wheel and my eyes on her window.
I had twenty-four hours.
I thought about the boy who'd stood in his father's van at eight years old and learned that death was just a mess to clean up.
I thought about the man who'd spent twenty-two years proving that lesson right.
And I thought about the woman upstairs who'd proven it wrong, who'd reached inside the void where my humanity used to be and found something still breathing.
I started the engine.
Whatever came next, it was going to cost me everything I had left.