I want her ruined.
“Touch me,” she says, her plea a dare to unravel me. “Orion, please.”
“Jesus—ah, fuck.” Hearing my name pleaded in her desperate, breathy voice torches my control. The dark tide batters my skull, and I’m quickly losing the battle to rein in these intrusive cravings. “I want to pin your body to this wall, Collins. Trap you right here, where I can do the most unspeakable things to you.”
And some sick part of me whispers from the depths, taunting that I make all my victims immobile.
Her soft moan curls around the base of my spine. “Touch me, and I’ll let you.”
A violent anger tears through me, loathing this inadequacy within me that I can’t give her what she needs.
In shameless demonstration, I thrust the rock-hard evidence of my frustration against her ass, and her breathy, “Oh, fuck,” drops right to my cock.
If she begs me to fuck her, I’ll have little choice but to mercilessly ravish her up against this speaker. And there’s a difference betweenfuckingand the depraved, vile acts I want to commit against her body.
Her beautiful light draws the darkest side of my nature—the sinister force craving nothing more than to snuff it out.
“Goddammit.” I squeeze my eyes shut against the violent images. Yet there is no escape from the vicious, wild chaos that thrashes in the void.
Her broken cries stoke a fire already raging dangerously out of control. The temptation to touch her, to taste her—god-fucking-dammit.
The aching demand in my cock begs to lower my zipper and take her while she whispers the last of her warm breath across my mouth. To witness the desperate look on her face as she comes apart under me, her tender melody unraveled beneath my rough fingers. To see the pain etched in her contorted features as her skin pales, circulation all but cut off.
Restraint lost, I seize the blades of the tie, my body crushed against hers. “Tell me to stop.”
Her throaty moan is an arousing stroke down my sternum as she shakes her head defiantly.
“Words, Collins.”
“No. Don’t stop,” she forces out on a strangled breath.
The fire erupts, and before I can leash the destructive impulse, I have the blades wound tight around my fists, eating the slack until I hear the sharp catch of her breath.
“Sweet fuck—” I grind into her, rewarded with the seductive sound of her choked moan as she arches her spine. The music swells into a pulsating rhythm, matching the fury between our bodies fighting to get closer, to burn with friction.
This savage need scrapes at my skull to be unleashed. Every wicked and sick need frays another thread of my control. The urge to mark her—to sink my teeth into her flesh, to draw blood just to watch the red bead and trail across her skin—is a demon roaring into the hollow abyss of me.
And for a single heartbeat, I let the lie coil through me—that this is the only way I’ll build any immunity to her. That I’ll find the strength to resist the sinister force when the void calls.
As her whimper cracks the air, I fight the feverish desire to collarher throat with my bare hand, desperate to feel the frantic flutter of her pulse beneath my fingertips the instant she breaks.
“Ah…Christ,” I rasp harshly, choking up on the tie. “When you destroy me, I want you to revel in the ruin, angel.”
Abandoning all resistance, I let the darkness have me as I pull the tie taut.
The Law of Totality (Holism): The fundamental principle that the combined whole is inherently more than the mere sum of its individual parts. It is the foundation and core of Gestalt psychology, explaining our innate drive to find meaning and structure amid chaos, to treat the whole person, not simply isolate the symptom.
14
Gravitational Waves
Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.
—VOLTAIRE
COLLINS
The ligature cinches tighter, cutting off my airway. Panic tears through my tenuous grasp on reality, sinking me further into a subspace I can never fully escape.
