I can’t help it. I move.
I crawl—actually fucking crawl—across the floor toward her. The King of Chicago, the man who carves names into the city’s skin, is dragging himself through the starlight because the gravity of her is too strong to resist. I stop at her feet, my shadow stretching out behind me, my face level with her thighs.
“Wendy,” I rasp, the word a shattered thing. “Enough.”
She doesn’t answer. She just looks down at me, her expression unreadable, and takes another mouthful of the wine. She doesn’t swallow it. She holds it in her mouth, her cheeks slightly flushed, her eyes darkening until they’re almost black.
She reaches down, her fingers tangling in my hair, and pulls my head back. I’m looking straight up at her, my mouth open, a silent plea written in every line of my face.
Then, she leans down.
She doesn’t kiss me—not yet. She hovers her lips over mine, and I can smell the tart, fermented sugar of the grapes. Slowly, with a deliberate, mocking precision, she parts her lips and lets the wine spill out.
The dark, cold liquid hits my tongue, running over my lips and down my chin, staining my skin. I drink it from her like a beggar, my eyes locked on hers, the intimacy of it so filthy and so pure I feel my heart might actually stop. Once the glass is empty and the wine has transferred from her mouth to mine, she finally closes the gap.
She kisses me.
It’s a wet, stained, and violent collision. The taste of the wine is everywhere—metallic and sweet—as she devours me, her tongue sliding against mine, claiming the very breath in my lungs. I let out a choked, guttural sound into her mouth, my hands finally breaking free from behind my back to seize her hips, my fingers digging into her skin.
“Fuck,” I growl against her lips, the word a curse and a prayer all at once. “God-fucking-damnit, Wendy.”
I’ve never been more humiliated. I’ve never been more obsessed. I pull her down onto the floor with me, the wine staining the white rug, the starlight witness to the moment the master finally realised he’d been leashed.
The sweetness of the stars and the tenderness of the wine shatter into a million jagged pieces.
Something inside me snaps—a clean, violent break that echoes louder than the mechanical hum of the opening roof. The wine is still wet on my chin, staining my lips, but the “dog” is gone. The predator is back, andhe’s starving.
I don’t just pull her down; I tackle her.
I slam her into the white rug, the spilled wine blooming like a fresh kill beneath her back. I’m over her in a heartbeat, my weight pinning her into the floorboards, my hands snatching her wrists and pinning them above her head with a force that makes the brass rings on her fingers bite into her skin.
“You want to play games, Wendy?” I growl, my voice a guttural snarl an inch from her mouth. “You want to see what happens when the leash breaks?”
I don’t wait for her to answer. I don’t give her a second to breathe. I bury my face in the crook of her neck, my teeth sinking into the soft, fragrant skin right over her pulse point. I’m not being careful. I’m not being kind. I’m marking her with a feral, frantic intensity that says mine in every language known to man.
“Fuck,” I hiss, the word vibrating through her bones as I rip the lace scrap of her panties aside with one hand, the fabric shredding with a satisfying, high-pitched rrip.
She’s gasping, her body arching off the floor, her thighs trembling as they try to wrap around me, but I shove them down. I want her open. I want her exposed. I want her to see the monster she spent the last hour teasing.
I fumble with my belt, my movements jagged and impatient, the metal clinking against the stone floor. When I finally break free, I don’t ease in. I don’t do slow. I grab her thighs, hauling them up until her knees are practically touching her ears, and I drive into her with one long, punishing stroke that sends a shockwave through both of our bodies.
She lets out a sharp, shattered scream that echoes uptoward the stars, her nails digging into the backs of my hands.
“Peter!” she cries out, her voice a mix of terror and a dark, starving ecstasy.
“Shut up,” I command, my hips hitting hers with the force of a car crash. “You wanted the fire, Darling. Now you’re going to fucking burn.”
I’m moving like a man possessed, my pace relentless and dirty. Every thrust is a claim, every grunt a confession of how much she’s ruined me. The wine on the rug makes a slick, wet sound against our skin as I hammer into her, my eyes locked onto hers, watching the way her pupils are blown so wide there’s nothing left but the black.
I’m losing it. My control is a ghost. I’m biting her shoulder, my hands bruising her hips, my breath coming in raw, animalistic hitches. I want to be inside her bones. I want to fuck the memory of every other man she’s ever seen out of her mind until there is only me—the monster in the starlight.
“Say it,” I growl, my pace increasing until the world is nothing but friction and heat and the metallic scent of wine. “Tell me whose you are.”
“Yours!” she sobs, her head thrashing on the stained rug, her fingers fisting in the hair at my temples. “Yours, Peter! Fuck, please—don’t stop!”
I hit the wall and shatter. I let out a low, agonising roar, my body going rigid as I spill into her with a violence that leaves me hollowed out and shaking. I collapse on top of her, my face buried in her hair, our hearts slamming against each other in a frantic, dying rhythm.
The stars are still watching, cold and distant, but in here, on the floor of my sanctuary, everything is red.
