I follow her over the edge. I can’t stop even if I tried. I bury myself inside her and let go, coming so hard my ears are ringing while my hands grip her like she's the only solid thing in a world that's tilting off its axis.
The orgasm strips everything from us—every mask, every wall, and every carefully constructed lie we've been telling ourselves and each other.
For one perfect, terrible moment, we're just two people who love each other, shaking apart in each other's arms.
Then the moment passes, and reality floods back—cold and brutal and inescapable.
The warning I whispered in her ear the first time we came together under that shower returns in my ear, and I hate myself more than I ever can.
If you ever betray me, malyshka, you'll wish you were still my enemy.
Bella slides off me first without a word. She just lifts herself up, lets me slip out of her, swings her leg over and slides off the desk. Her knees buckle when her feet hit the floor. She catches herself on the edge of the desk, steadies, then collapses on the ground.
She doesn't look at me as she lies there, naked and wrecked. Her hair hides her face, and her shoulders are rising and falling with breaths that sound like they hurt.
I need to say something. I need to do something other than lie here on my own desk, softening cock still wet with the evidence of what we just did and staring at her back like it holds answers I've forgotten how to ask for.
But when I shift and get ready to stand, she breaks the silence.
"Leave."
Bella's voice is flat and stripped of all emotions. She's already accepted that this is the end, that this is over, and that whatever existed between us died somewhere in the last hour and there's nothing left to do but accept it.
I sit up. The desk creaks under me. Papers rustle.
"Bella—"
"I said leave."
An apology forms in my throat, and no word is adequate. I want to crawl across this floor and gather her up and tell her that none of it was real, and that the monster she asked for isn't who I am.
But she doesn't want my apology.
She wants my hate.
And dammit, I can't give her that either. Because even the hate was always a lie. The hate was the mask I put on when I found the thumbprint in the safe. The hate was the performance I gave because it was easier than admitting that she'd broken something in me that I don't know how to repair.
I don't hate her.
I love her.
But it’s too late to tell her that.
So, I do as she commands me to.
I leave.
50
BELLA
The floor is cold.
That's the first thing I register—not the satisfying ache between my legs, nor the rawness of my throat, nor the tear tracking down my temple and pooling in the hollow of my ear. It’s how cold the floor is, and I'm lying on it while the man I love walked away from me without looking back.
I made him do that.
The thought arrives with the clarity of a bell struck in an empty room. Imadehim do that. Every brutal moment of what just happened—his hands gripping hard enough to bruise, his body punishing mine with a ferocity that should have terrified me, and the way he was holding back even as I urged him to go harder.
