She’s close enough now that I can feel the warmth of her body, smell the subtle scent of my soap on her skin. “You’re a monster who kills people, but you’remymonster. I stopped trying to hate you for that the moment I realized that everyone who ever hurt me walked away, but you stayed.”
The words hit harder than any bullet. I open my mouth to respond—to argue or apologize or make promises I’m not sure I can keep… but she doesn’t give me the chance.
She kisses me instead.
It starts soft, almost tentative, like she’s testing whether I’ll accept this offering of forgiveness or absolution or whatever the hell this is.
When I respond—when my good arm wraps around her waist and pulls her flush against me—the kiss transforms into something hungrier.
This isn’t the desperate urgency of our first time, or the careful tenderness of recovery. This is claiming and being claimed in equal measure, two people who’ve survived hell together and come out the other side fundamentally changed.
I kiss her like I’m trying to communicate everything I can’t put into words—the fear, the devotion, the absolute certainty that I would raze the world to ash before I’d let anyone take her from me. She responds in kind, fingers threading through my hair, teeth catching my lower lip hard enough to sting.
When we finally break apart, both breathing hard, her eyes are dark with desire and something deeper that makes my chest ache.
“Take me to bed,” she says. Not a question, not a plea. A command from someone who knows exactly what she wants and isn’t afraid to demand it.
“Elara—”
“No planning, no calculating, no thinking about tomorrow’s consequences.” She’s already pulling me toward the bedroom, walking backward with complete confidence that I’ll follow. “Right now I just want you. All of you. The protector, the killer, the obsessive stalker who engineered my entire life to keep me safe.”
I let her pull me along, let her take control, because the alternative is admitting how desperately I need this. Need her.Need the confirmation that after everything—all the violence and manipulation and terrible choices—she still wants me anyway.
The bedroom door closes behind us, and for the first time since this started, I’m not thinking about threats or strategy or how to keep her safe. I’m just thinking about her hands on my skin, her mouth on mine, her body against mine in a way that suggests she’s not going anywhere.
“I love you,” I tell her, because now that I’ve said it once, I can’t seem to stop. “I know I’ve destroyed your life and I have no right to say it, but I love you.”
She pushes me back onto the bed with surprising strength, following me down to straddle my hips. Her hair falls around us like a curtain, blocking out everything except her face above mine.
“I know,” she says, and there’s something fierce in her expression. “And despite every logical reason I shouldn’t—I love you too.”
Then she’s kissing me again, and thought becomes impossible.
The kiss deepens, becomes consuming. Elara’s weight settles more fully against me, hips pressing down in a way that makes my breath catch.
She’s not hesitant anymore, not questioning whether she has the right to touch me like this. She takes what she wants with the same fierce determination she applies to everything else.
I try to flip us, to take control the way I always do, but she stops me with a hand firm against my chest.
“No,” she says, pulling back just enough to meet my eyes. “Let me.”
The command in her voice—the absolute certainty that I’ll obey—sends heat pooling low in my belly. I’m not used to surrendering control, to letting someone else set the pace. But the way she’s looking at me, the trust implicit in her demand, makes me want to try.
“Okay,” I agree, settling back against the pillows.
She sits up, straddling my hips, and pulls my shirt over her head in one fluid motion. The sight of her—bare skin illuminated by city lights, curves on full display—is enough to make my hands tighten on her thighs.
“You’re staring,” she observes, but there’s no self-consciousness in it. Just satisfaction at the effect she has on me.
“Can’t help it.” My thumbs trace circles against her skin. “You’re beautiful.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’ll keep saying it until you believe me.”
She leans down, kissing me slowly, deliberately, while her hands work at my shirt buttons. I help her push it off my shoulders, careful of the healing wound on my arm that she bandaged weeks ago. Her fingers trace the scar tissue there, then move to catalog other marks—evidence of a life lived in violence.
“Does it hurt?” she asks, lips brushing against a particularly vicious knife scar on my ribs.
