Blood splattered my face, neck, and chest. The knife he’d been holding fell from his hands, clanging against the marble. Blood the color of dark wine poured out of the silky straight line from his neck. Behind him, Grim held a knife to his throat, gaze locked with mine.
I barely had a moment to register the promise in Grim’s eyes, when the man fell to the floor.
Blood pooled beneath my stilettos, slid like liquid metal down Grim’s knife, coating his fingers.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
With each drop of blood, my heart rate slammed against my chest. Grim’s eyes were locked on my neck, the vein in his own throbbing.
Something was about to shatter.
TWENTY-SEVEN
GRIM
She’d let me fuck her like this, as a body bled out beneath her stilettos, because Gemma Crowne was not the party girl princess America painted her to be. Gemma Crowne courted death.
Seduced it.
Teased it.
From the very first day our eyes connected in that empty high school room, I knew the truth. She was wrapped in it. I should have seen her for the siren she was then, but I was wrapped in death too.
Maybe that was why I could never let her go.
“Why do you keep saving me?” Her tongue darted out, wetting her bottom lip.
My eyes locked on that, on her pouty pink lips and her wet, red tongue.
When I spoke, my voice was too low. Too dark. Too smoky. “You have a debt.”
“That’s it? That’s the only reason you’re keeping me alive?”
“Yeah.”
She tilted her head back to hold my stare and hoisted herself onto the black marble sink. Blood fell in drops off her heels as she spread her legs wide for me. Easily. With the movement her dress rose.
No fucking underwear.
I gripped the leather handle of my knife to keep from dropping to my knees and worshipping her cunt, the muscles in my neck spasming.
This fucking killed me. How natural it was for her. The girl with all the walls never had any for me.
I knew she wanted it just as much as I did.
It drove me fucking insane.
That knowledge.
That at any fucking time Gemma would spread her legs for me. The only thing stopping it was me. And, yeah, it wouldn’t be healthy or good, but we’d never been those things. We’d never wanted those things.
She scythed her bottom lip, blanching the pink skin.
Fuck.
My muscles already ached with the strain of holding myself back. I would always remember how I felt inside her. How her perfect cunt gripped my cock, like it was made just for me. There wasn’t a moment that passed I didn’t want to get her back to the point where her nails dug bloody rivers into my back. When she begged, and moaned, and fell to her fucking knees for me.
I could barely see past the need.
