“Enough.”
When I come, it’s like something cold and brittle inside me finally shatters and releases. A wall comes down. A barricade burns. A tower crumbles.
And I fuckingbreak.
I grab his face and crush my lips to his, tasting his venom and my blood, his fury and my pain. My core explodes, liquid flooding my thighs as Bane buries every huge inch inside me and roars into my mouth. I can feel every pulsing jet of his cum as it spills hot into me, my thighs quivering and tightening around his hips as we ride out the wave until there’s nothing left.
Until we collapse onto the paint and blood smeared across the canvas beneath us.
A beautiful, chaotic mess.
Just like us.
23
DOVE
I figured out his secret.
I think he knows.
I think he might try to hurt me.
I think he’s going to kill me, Boo.
My throat tightens, a shiver finger-walking down my spine as I re-read the entry—one of the last Lark ever made in the diary—for the umpteenth time.
The first time I read it, I freaked. Lark had figured out someone’s “secret”. She thought “he” was trying to hurt her, maybe even kill her.
…I genuinely thought the man she was talking about wasBane.
In fairness, it’s notthatwild a stretch. At least, I didn’t think so at the time. When I first read those lines, I had this idea in my head that Bane was a cold, brutal, uncaring monster. But now, having read about the ways my dead friend was so cruel tohimat times, I’ve questioned that theory.
Lark used to lie to him. She manipulated his emotions. Made him jealous. Gaslit him into apologizing to her aftershedid terrible shit tohim. There’ve even been times when I’ve pictured Bane snapping. Of the two of them clashing, even though we all thought they were perfect.
But I know now how unfounded that fear was.
I saw Bane as cold and brutal, because that’s how he wasto me.
…Because I took her away from him.
Okay, not me personally. I wasn’t the one who locked her in that room, shaved her head, abused her, and killed her. That was all Lorenzo.
But I’m the reason she was there in the first place. And he knows it.That’swhy I always framed him as someone vicious and angry, capable of immense violence.
It’s embarrassing now to think that I ever entertained the idea that it was Bane that Lark was afraid of. Banedoesobviously have a dark viciousness inside him, and an unflinching ability tousethat viciousness.
But…not like that. I might not remember much of the past, but Irememberhow they were.
Funny enough, when I’m with Bane, I feel how she must have felt when he was withher: Utterly protected and safe.
Possessed. Desired.
Needed.
I don’t think that’s something either of us was expecting. But here we are.
There are other instances in the latter chapters of Lark spiraling: of paranoia and fear strangling her. She wrote about “him” being “on to her”. Of “knowing that she figured him out”. There are other entries where she was panicking about him hurting or even killing her.
