She smells like mine.
"Fuck you," she whispers, but her voice breaks on it.
I tug her hair harder, and lick down to the delicate architecture of her collarbone, the places where her pulse beats hardest.
I kiss her there, scraping my teeth gently across the sensitive skin as if that’s enough to rebuke the violence we've been trading. I lick the sting away, kiss the skin again and work my way back up the hollow of her throat to the tender skin beneath her ear.
Bella moans.
Not the sharp, defiant sounds from before. Something different. Something that sounds like her armor cracking.
"Fuck you," she says again, but it's a whisper now, and her hips are moving differently—slower, deeper, chasing something that feels less like punishment and more like need.
My hand tightens in her hair. The other grips her breast, thumb circling her nipple, feeling it harden under my touch. Eventhough I'm holding her and have my fist in her hair and my mouth on her neck, she's the one in control.
She's always been in control, I realize. Since the moment she walked into my life with her cover story and her false name and that fire burning in her brown eyes. I thought I was the one who could play her like a piece on the board, but she played me first.
She played me better. She played me so well that I fell in love with her, and now…
Now we're both losing.
I feast on her neck, her collarbone, every inch of skin I can reach. Kissing, biting, licking—a map of devotion written in marks she'll wear for days. Bella's moans are changing. The fight is leaving her voice. The defiance is bleeding away.
And what's left underneath is soft, vulnerable desire.
This is no longer the performance she's been giving me. Nor is it the weapon she tried to make of her body. This is only Bella, wanting me the same way she has always wanted me.
"Slava," she breathes, and it's notfuck you.
It's worse thanfuck you.
I'm not strong enough to pretend I don't hear it, so I press my lips to her and kiss her so hard that it becomes impossible for me to know where I end and where she begins.
Her first shudder is almost undetectable. A tremor that runs through her like an electrical current, barely there. The second is unmistakable. Her entire body tenses, and I feel her inner walls fluttering around me.
And when the third comes, I can't tell if it's her or me. We're so tangled and fused at every point of contact, that our pleasure blurs together like watercolors bleeding on paper.
"Look at me." She breaks the kiss and begs.
I do.
"Look at me when I come for you."
I pull back just enough to meet her eyes. My hand releases her hair, comes around to cup her jaw, tilting her face toward mine. We're inches apart and tasting the air of each other’s lungs. We’re close enough that I can see every emotion swimming in her big brown eyes, see the swirl of tear tracks on her cheeks, and hear the tiniest of sounds caressing her trembling lips.
She's beautiful, and she's breaking, and it’s all because of me.
"Yes," she whimpers, hips rolling faster now. "Yes, yes, yes… I'm coming, I'm coming for you?—"
I want to tell her to let go. Want to tell her I've got her, that I'll catch her, that whatever falls apart I'll help her rebuild. But I can't promise any of that. I'm the one who broke her in the first place. I'm the one who took everything she ever showed me and turned them into weapons.
So instead, I just hold her, and press my forehead to hers as control slips away from both of us and do my damnedest to wish that we could’ve stayed forever in that hunting lodge, when everything was different.
When I still believed we might survive this.
"Come for me," I whisper, voice cracking. "Please. Please. Please."
With one final roll of her hips, she takes me all the way down—so deep that I know no other man has ever touched her there—and then she's coming, clenching around me in waves, her whole body arching, a sobbing sound escaping her throat amidst a hoarse scream.
