“Relax your shoulders,” he said into the shell of my ear, breath hot. “It’s not going to bite you.”
“I’m not good with… weapons.”
He chuckled lowly. “You’ve been living with one, little wife.”
My heart stumbled. My body remembered every time he touched me like prayer and punishment.
“Hold it steady,” he said, adjusting my grip against. My fingers twitched on the trigger the moment his lips found the back of my neck, a single, searing kiss that made my knees falter and breath abandon me.
“Now,” he whispered. “Shoot.”
I did.
The bullet kissed the sea with a scream, and I felt the recoil jolt through me; or maybe it was just him, the gravity of his body at my back, the hands still wrapped around mine, mouth dragging down to the base of my neck as if the echo of the gunshot had awakened something primal in him.
My breathing was ragged.
The heat of his naked chest against my back did something to me.
It was something hidden and buried that suddenly needed to be unleashed.
I dropped the gun.
It clattered against the wood.
I turned, my hands found his chest, still bare and warm. I looked up at him, lips parted in a gasp I hadn’t fully taken yet. And I kissed him. It was instinctive and sudden. It shocked me too.
I felt like I’d implode if I didn’t kiss him.
At first, he didn’t move.
As if shocked or unsure or resisting something monstrous inside him.
Then I reached higher, tiptoed to deepen the kiss, fisting his hair, and that’s when I felt him growl. From his chest. From his gut. From hell.
He crushed me to him, hands gripped my hips, sliding down and pulling me up, hoisting me slightly so our mouths could crash together with rawer, messier precision. His tongue traced the outline of my lower lip before plunging in like he’d waited centuries.
My hands clutched his shoulder, nails digging in, and he didn’t stop. He only deepened it. Kissing me and devouring me.
I let him.
Because whatever cage this was, it had started to feel like mine too.
There are things a woman should never forgive. But the body, traitorous and trembling, often kneels before the very hands that broke her.
I kissed him.
I kissed Zagreus Vitale like he was mine to kiss, like I hadn’t wept for days in the corner of his mansion, like he hadn’t pulled me from the wreckage of my own life only to reassemble me with shackles. Like he hadn’t murdered Adrian with the same hands that now held me.
I kissed him.
And now I stood alone, barefoot in a room filled with everything I thought I wanted, and none of it made sense anymore.
In less than an hour. He fulfilled my wish.
There they were.
The brushes I had begged for laid out, and the canvases, tall, white, blank like fresh tombstones waiting to be ruined by memory. And the colours.
