His hands were wild, ripping and shredding my clothes, until nothing existed against my body but him. The wood under my bare ass was cold, but the fire in his veins felt scalding hot, and I shivered from the sudden collision.
When I went to remove his shirt, he refused me the right, holding my wrists tight in his grasp.
He smeared a trail of blood as he slid his busted lip from the corner of my mouth up to my cheek, pausing at my ear. He breathed heavily, his teeth tugging on my earlobe. “Is this where his mouth lingered on what’s mine?”
The question felt rhetorical, but I answered it anyway. I couldn’t deny him.
“Yes,” I almost whimpered.
His mouth roved all over me as he worked me to heights I was too afraid to fall from alone.
Stinging sensations bloomed from my skin, bites and sucks, and I gave up the garden to the thorns, giving him total access to my flesh.
“All fucking day,” he breathed out, his breath warm against my throat. The smell of whiskey was so strong that it was starting to make me feel like I was getting a contact high. “Perseguitato.”Haunted.
My breath escaped me completely when he thrust deep inside of me, holding nothing back, setting a punishing rhythm. He didn’t even wince when my nails sunk into the fibers of his shirt and pierced through to flesh. It spurred him on to a wildness that made my head twirl and my eyes roll.
The sounds caught in the room could have belonged to me or a cat. The noises seemed almost inhuman—the mewling and moaning. Guttural noises were coming from his throat, grunting and growling with effort.
This was his way of asserting his dominance, since earlier I had ruled his world. He was taking over mine. This wasn’t about my pleasure, but his pain.
The more we moved, the louder we became. The impact from our bodies colliding echoed in the room, right underneath the animalistic noises from our mouths.
Words escaped the prison of my thoughts, or perhaps they hadn’t. I was so his that the only sure thing was him inside of me. He answered either thought or speech.
“No,” he said after a hard, punishing thrust and a brutal grunt. “What you doto me. You’re so far under my skin that I can’t fucking control you.”
A noise escaped my throat, somewhere between a sob and a scream, and it drove him even deeper, until I shattered like glass in a powerful hand, holding on to him like the last beats of life. But he wasn’t stopping there.
He gave me a few seconds to recover, his lip leaving a blood trail down my skin, over every spot he ravaged with his mouth, until he began again.
Over and over and over—until at last, he snapped off a curse from his mouth, and we broke together.
As I lie limp over his shoulder, tears welled in my eyes, slipping down my cheeks. Salt invaded my mouth, along with the iron tang of his blood.
We were still joined, and I used the last ounce of my strength to hold on to him, arms around his neck, legs around his waist, not wanting him to separate us.
“Did he…” I sniffed. “Did he hurt you badly?”
I went to touch his eye, but he moved his face.
“He didn’t hurt me.”
His tone was matter of fact, even, but with a sharp coldness underneath that cut me deep. Though he knew I was holding on, he separated us, leaving me even colder. The connection was severed, and I’d started to bleed out from the wound.
“Vincenzo,” he said, starting to remove his clothes. “He had the honor.”
With another piercing stab, this all became so clear to me.
Luca was using them against one another.
It was common knowledge that if Brando and Vincenzo were stranded on a deserted island, only one was coming out alive. Luca purposely pitted them against each other for the sake of making a point.
“Did you…” I didn’t know where to put my hands, and after setting them a few places and picking them up, I finally folded them in my lap and left them there. “Were you able to hit him back?”
He grinned, but there was nothing nice about it. It was as frigid as his attitude. “That’s not the way the game works.”
He threw his pants and boxer briefs to the floor. He was ah, turned on again, and from this angle, the objectonseemed more like a weapon made for destruction instead of pleasure.
