"Good girl," I breathed against her throat. "My good girl."
And when it was over, we lay tangled in the dark.
I still thought I should leave. Go back to my empty apartment and my empty life and pretend this night had never happened.
Instead, I pulled her closer and pressed my lips against the top of her head. She smelled like jasmine and sex and sweat and me.
Me.My scent on her skin. My marks on her throat. My cum still inside her.
Her breathing evened out. She was falling asleep in my arms, naked and trusting and branded with evidence of what I'd done to her. What she'd let me do. What she'd begged me to do.
I lay in her darkness, in her world, and felt the full weight of what I'd become. Not a blank slate anymore. Not a void where problems disappeared. I was a man who'd killed for a woman he barely knew and then fucked her like she was the only real thing in his life.
Because she was.
My father's ghost whispered from the shadows:You're dead, boy. You just don't know it yet.
Maybe. Probably.
I closed my eyes. Pulled the darkness of her world around us like a blanket. Her world…and my world now, too.
Completely. Fucking. Fucked.
CHAPTER 11
RAVEN
Iwoke up sore in places I'd forgotten existed.
Not the familiar ache of four hours hunched over a Steinway, or the low throb of feet that had logged too many miles on concrete. This was something I hadn't felt in a long, long time.
I lay still, listening. The apartment was empty. I knew it before I reached across the sheets. There was no weight shifting the mattress springs. No slow, deep pull of breath from the pillow beside mine. No sounds of anyone in the kitchen.
He was gone.
But not without a trace.
I dragged his pillow to my face and breathed in his scent. And my body hummed with the memory of what we'd done.
I pressed my face deeper and breathed him in until my lungs ached, then I took stock of my body.
I started at my throat.
My fingers found the bruise before I'd even sat up. A swollen, hot bloom just above my collarbone, tender when I pressed. Not a love bite. A claim. He'd locked his jaw against my skin and held until I'd felt the capillaries beneath surrender to it.
I pressed harder and the pain flared, bright and clean, and remembered the feel of his teeth. The sound of his growl vibrating against my pulse. The way he'd said "mine."
My hands wandered lower to the inside curve of my left breast, where his mouth had lingered long enough to leave a mark I could trace with one fingertip. It was round and hot at the center, the skin protesting when I touched it. He'd sucked hard enough to bruise while his thumb rolled my other nipple, and I'd made a sound so raw that I'd barely recognized my own voice.
My hips. Four distinct points of pressure on each side where his fingers had dug in, holding me open, holding me still. The bruises sat deep in the muscle, radiating heat like coals buried under ash. They'd darken over the next day or two, and I'd feel them every time I sat down, every time I crossed my legs, every time I shifted on the piano bench.
A slow smile spread across my face.
Good.
The insides of my thighs told their own story. More bruises. A scrape of stubble burn where his jaw had dragged across skin so sensitive it still tingled. And in between was the deep, stretched-full tenderness of a body that had been taken apart and put back together in a different order.
I ran my hands down my own body the way I read Braille. Each mark a letter. Each bruise a word. Together, they formed a sentence I could feel written across my skin:
