I could feel her getting close again. Felt her walls tightening around my cock. Her breath going shallow and erratic. Her fingers digging into my back with an urgency that said she was trying to hold on and couldn't.
"Let go," I whispered against her throat. "Let go, little bird. I've got you."
She came with a sob. A real one. Something ripped from the deepest place inside of her. She cried while she came, tears sliding from the corners of her beautiful blind eyes, her body clenching around me in waves while her mouth found mine and she kissed me through it. Wet and messy and desperate.
It broke me.
The orgasm hit me hard and desperate. I buried myself deep—as deep as I could go—and came inside her with a groan that I muffled against her throat, because the sound that wanted to come out was closer to a scream. My whole body locked.My hands fisted in the sheets on either side of her head. And I emptied myself into her while she held me, her arms tight around my neck, her legs wrapped around my hips, her heartbeat slamming against mine through the pressed-together skin of our chests.
I stayed inside her when it was done. My face buried in the curve of her neck while her fingers combed through my hair in slow, absent strokes.
"You're crying," she whispered.
Fuck.
She was right. There was wetness on my face, pressed against her throat.
"No, I'm not," I said.
She smiled. I felt it against my temple. "Liar." She traced the line of my jaw.
I caught her hand. Brought it to my mouth. Kissed her palm. Then the inside of her wrist, where the skin was thin and pale and I could feel her pulse tapping against my lips.
"I love you," I said again. Because I could. Because she'd said it back. Because I might not get another chance. "Whatever happens. Remember that."
Her smile faded. "You keep saying that. 'Whatever happens.' What's going to happen, Milo?"
"I don't know yet."
Another lie. The worst kind. The kind that sounded like honesty.
"But I need you to trust me, Raven," I said. "Even if—" I stopped.
"Even if what?"
Even if I become the thing you should've been afraid of all along. Even if I do something that makes you wish you'd never let me through your door. Even if you call me a monster and mean it.
"Even if it gets harder before it gets better," I said.
She was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers ghosting along my face, reading me the way she read everything, with a patience and precision that saw more than sight ever could.
"Okay," she said softly. "I trust you."
I kissed her forehead, and pulled her against my chest. She settled into me, her cheek over my heart, one arm draped across my stomach and her leg thrown over mine, her breathing gradually slowing into the rhythm of approaching sleep.
I held her, staring at the ceiling as she drifted off.
I'd done a lot of terrible things in my life. Cleaned up murders. Dissolved bodies. Watched men die and felt nothing. Not guilt, not horror, not even curiosity. I'd existed in the margins of death since I was a child, and it had hollowed me out so thoroughly that I'd believed there was nothing left inside me capable of breaking.
I was wrong.
The woman sleeping on my chest had found the one thing I hadn't managed to kill.
And tomorrow, I was going to use it to destroy us both.
Her breathing evened out. Her body went slack and warm. One hand rested over my heart, fingers curled loosely, the way they always settled when she slept.
I didn't close my eyes. I lay there with her heartbeat against my ribs and I counted the hours like a man counting the last steps of his life.
