He exhales as if he’s been waiting his whole life for that sound, forehead pressing hard to mine, sweat dampening his hair where it brushes against my temple. His thrusts slow but deepen, grinding into me, wringing out every shred of resistance until I’m gone, until I’m nothing but his.
“You’ll never run from me,” he mutters, half a vow, half a threat. His hand slides lower, splaying over my stomach, pressing down possessively where he’s buried inside me. “Not when I’ve got you like this. Not when I’ve branded every inch of you.”
The words splinter through me, raw, reckless. He isn’t careful with me, not in this moment. He’s deliberate, consuming, dragging me over the edge again until I’m sobbing into his mouth, clawing at him, whispering his name like a prayer I don’t believe in.
When I finally collapse, boneless and trembling, he doesn’t let me slip away. He gathers me against his chest right there on the counter, his hand cradling the back of my head like I’m breakable, fragile, something he’d burn the world to protect.
“You’re mine, Brooklyn,” he whispers against my hair, voice softer now, but no less unyielding. “And I don’t give a fuck who tries to take you—I’ll bury them all.”
His thumb strokes slow over my jaw, gentle where his grip had been bruising. He tilts my face up, and the kiss he givesme then is nothing like the others—no demand, no punishment. Just devastating tenderness, the sweetness that hurts worse than his roughness ever could.
Because it means he means it.
And that terrifies me almost as much as it saves me.
Ghosts
There are nights I can’t stop the past from dragging me under.
It starts the same way it always does.
The glass in my hand. The silence too loud. The city stretched out beyond the windows, glittering and empty at the same time.
And her voice.
Not Brooklyn’s.
Hers.
My wife.
Dead ten years and still sitting in the back of my skull like a ghost that refuses to leave the room.
When I close my eyes, I remember her true smile, with her chin dropped and her eyes darting away, as if happiness was a secret in my world. She didn’t belong at Club Z. She didn’t belong in the dirt I dragged home. And she paid for it.
The memory never comes clean. It drags blood with it, the smell of metal and smoke, the image of her hand slipping from mine in the wreckage. I couldn’t save her. Not from them. Not from me.
I’ve buried men for less than what they did to her.
And I’d do it again.
But it doesn’t change the truth: I failed her.
That failure rots inside me like a second heartbeat, pulsing every time I look at Brooklyn. Every time she tilts her chin and fights me, it’s like she doesn’t know I’ve already dug her grave beside mine. Every time she cries and still stays, like she doesn’t understand that’s the most dangerous thing she could ever do.
Because the last woman who stayed?—
She died.
My hand shakes around the glass, the whiskey biting as it goes down. I tell myself I drink to forget, but the truth is uglier—I drink to remember. To keep the wound open. Because if I ever let it heal, then she really is gone, and I can’t live with that.
Not again.
I rub my hand over my jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble, the rawness in my throat I’ll never admit to out loud. Brooklyn doesn’t know. She sees only the mask I give her—the control, the hunger, the obsession. She doesn’t see the rot underneath, the reason I can’t let go.
If she ever knew about my wife, about what it cost to love me.
She’d run.
