I purse my lips, that unnameable emotion tightening in my chest. My hand curls into a fist before I even realize it. Maybe killing Owen so quickly was a mistake. He deserved to linger. To feel something.
For him, I would have gladly made an exception and indulged in all sorts of torture.
“Did he do the things you didn’t like?”
She sighs, shaking her head. “He was boring as fuck. Couldn’t read the room. I told him it was over, and when he realized he couldn’t pull me back in, he turned aggressive.”
The words spark something new in me—a thought that unfurls slowly and dangerously, like a flower blooming under a black sun. “Boring, you say?”
She turns her head toward me, a smirk ghosting across her lips. “Extremely. I’ve lived long enough to know what I like and what I don’t. He just kept missing.”
I pause, taken aback by the way her words slide into me, settling in places I hadn’t expected. My thoughts wander to the corners of my own past—sparse, ragged memories that hold little worth, yet heavy with the same familiar frustration coiling in my chest now. The echo strikes sharp, a quiet reminder of everything I have carried, everything I have endured, and the small, stubborn weight of recognition pressing against my ribs.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks, curiosity curling around the edges of her voice.
“I think I get it,” I reply. “This’ll make me sound like a complete asshole, but I’ve always had…refinedtastes when it comes to intimacy. Not many could understand them.” Her brows lift, a flicker of surprise crossing her face, and I gesture vaguely toward her. “See? Idosound like an asshole.”
“No, no,” she counters quickly, shifting her weight and moving closer. “I’m just trying to picture what you like.”
Heat surges through me before I have a chance to reign it in, a sharp, urgent pulse. The room shrinks, wrapping around me in sudden warmth, each corner pressing closer. Her gaze lingers, and the air itself seems to thicken further, coiling down toward the part of me that strains to remain composed—and fails. My teeth clamp against my lower lip, a frantic, futile anchor in the rising storm of sensation.
“What if we’re the same?” she probes.
The words settle between us like a spark igniting dry grass, quick and dangerous. She licks her lips, leaning closer, and the scent that follows twists through my senses, making my headreel. She hovers near enough that I can track the subtle rise and fall of her chest, the way light glints across her skin, fragile and sharp all at once.
One more inch, and I could kiss her.
Taste her.Trulytaste her.
Breathe her in until there’s nothing left of the space between us.
My eyes drop to her mouth, soft and pink, slightly parted, an invitation I almost can’t resist. My lips moisten without thought, and my breath catches as an invisible current seems to propel me forward. My hand moves of its own accord, drawn by the gravity that coils between us, pulling me closer and closer, until a whisper slices through the air, halting me in an instant.
She moves fast, and the cold kiss of steel touches my throat before I can even blink. The knife glints in the lamplight, its edge tracing the line of my artery.
I freeze, sensing my pulse hammering against the blade. My body betrays me completely as the heat surges lower, pressing between my legs.
Estella’s gaze drops for a brief, sharp moment as she notices it, and when she looks back up, her eyes have darkened. Her teeth catch on her bottom lip while she examines the exact place where the blade touches my skin. One wrong movement, and she could slice me open—make a clean, intentional cut that would let me bleed out slowly, breath by breath, while she watched.
“Do you think we’re the same,Dante?”
The blade’s edge glides along my throat, tracing a slow line that leaves a sharp sting in its wake. Heat floods the mark it carves, and I have to swallow the sound that rises from somewhere deep in my chest.
Each subtle shift of steel strips something from me, peeling back the layers I pretend to carry with ease, exposing the hunger buried far beneath the surface. A memory stirs, hazy andfamiliar, a reminder of the truth I keep hidden. Only a fragment of the darkness comes forward, but even that fragment is enough to pull me under.
My need fills the space inside me. The craving for that collision of pain and pleasure, the kind that lights every nerve until the two sensations blur together. The fire that devours everything in its path, folding ache into desire, heartbeat into heat so fierce it borders on agony.
Pain is not the enemy of pleasure; it is the passage that leads directly into it.
“Do you think you can handle it?” I ask, my voice low, roughened by the strain of holding still. My eyes find hers with a steady and challenging gleam burning in them. “Because I’m bored too,” I murmur, leaning just slightly into the blade, feeling it bite against my skin. “But I’m not interested in anything simple.”
Her eyes narrow. She studies me like she’s trying to read the pulse beneath my skin, to see whether I’m bluffing.
I’m not. I couldn’t be. I’ve tried to feel alive in a thousand other ways—revenge, adrenaline, quick sex—but nothing ever touches that line between control and surrender like this.
Time fractures around us. The room shrinks until there’s only her, the knife, the faint crackle from the fireplace, and the sound of our uneven breathing filling the space between heartbeats.
Slowly, she shifts the blade to the side of my neck. The tip grazes skin first, then presses in, just enough to sting harder than before. I suck in a breath through my teeth as the pressure builds, a line of fire spreading beneath the surface. My chest tightens until it feels like the air itself is thinning around us.
