That’s when the anger twists into something else.
Want.
Hot, reckless, furious want. My body leans toward him before my mind catches up, drawn by the memory of how it felt to stop fighting for one single night.
I hate him for that. I hate myself more, because standing here, shaking and breathless and cornered, I realize the truth I don’t want to face.
I don’t want to go back to being numb. I don’t want to go back to shrinking.
I want whatever this madness is. The danger, the intensity, the way he looks at me like I’m something worth waiting for instead of something to be managed.
So when I step into him, it’s not surrender. It’s defiance of everything that I was before I stole those diamonds. And when my hands fist in his shirt and my mouth finds his, it’s because I want to hold onto this feeling, even if it destroys me later.
Before, life and death were equal in my mind. Balanced on luck and tipped by the possibility of freedom. That balance has been slowly recalibrating since the moment I began planning to escape my uncle. And the more it leans towards my possible death, the more I realize I want to live.
Leonid
I reach for her wrist and pull her into me, body to body, deepening the kiss.
She stumbles into me, the forest swallowing us whole as I drag her from the open ground and into the cover of the trees. The woods are thick here, all old growth, twisted trunks and low branches. The earth is soft underfoot, damp with fall and centuries of secrets. Prague remembers everything. It keeps it buried just under the surface.
She wrenches against me once, more out of reflex than resistance.
“Let go of me,” she breathes.
“No,” I say quietly, and the word settles between us like a verdict.
I push her back against a tree instead, branches shadowing her face so completely that the rest of the world disappears. Her breath stutters when she sees how isolated we are, how alone, how utterly unseen.
Her pulse jumps under my fingers.
“You let me run,” she says, voice shaking now. “You let me think—”
“I let you prove something to yourself,” I interrupt. “That you’d rather die than be owned. I see it,” I pant between kisses. “I see you.”
Her throat works. She looks at me like she wants to hate me, like she’s terrified of how much she doesn’t.
“So last night,” she challenges. “Was just another test?”
That’s the crack. The one I feel in myself before I hear it in my voice.
I pull away, close enough that her breath hits my mouth but far enough that I can see into her hazel eyes. “Last night,” I say lowly, “was the moment I stopped pretending this was just curiosity.”
Her lips part. Her body leans forward before she can stop it.
I feel the full weight of it then. The obsession blooming like a bruise under my ribs. The way my world has narrowed down to her breath, her pulse, the knowledge that nothing has ever fed this hunger the way she does. Power, money, violence, threats. None of it touches this.
Only her.
My hand slides to her hip, fingers digging in just enough to make her gasp, and I drop my forehead to hers, fighting the urge to take more, to lose myself completely.
“You are ruining me,” I murmur, not sure if I mean it as an accusation or a confession.
Her hands fist in my shirt again. “Then stop,” she whispers.
I laugh under my breath. “It’s far too late for that.”
I lower my head, not to her mouth this time, but lower, following the curve of her throat, her breath hitching as she realizes exactly where my intent is going. Her hands tighten, nails biting into cotton, and the sound she makes is raw and unguarded and absolutely fucking lethal.
