“Molly,” I moan against her mouth.
Her hands fist tight in my shirt. “Don’t say a damn thing,” she rasps, voice shredded and uneven. But it’s not a threat. It’s a plea, and I know it because I feel the same way: don’t make me stop, don’t make me think, don’t let this dissolve into a conversation we’ll regret in the morning.
I let go of her hair and bring my palm to her chin, tilting her face so I can see every ember in her eyes. They’re luminous and furious, but what really gets me is the shimmer beneath the rage — that scared brightness that says she’s still got a heart, even after all the years she’s spent trying to kill it.
“I see you,” I say, and the words come out rough, almost reverent.
She glares. “Don’t talk.”
“Yeah?” I let my thumb trace the line of her jaw, slow enough that she can stop me if she wants. “You gonna stop me?” I say it like a challenge, but what I mean is: please don’t.
“Yes.” She’s not convincing, not even a little. “I will stab you.”
I grin, because she’s always got teeth. “With what? A fork?”
“I have options,” she snaps, but her breath catches when I dip my head and kiss the corner of her mouth, then her throat. “I keep a Ka-Bar in a sheath by the coffeemaker.”
Her hands shove at my chest with half-hearted force, and I catch her wrists and pin them behind her back. She goes still. Not from fear. Not freezing. Testing.
“What is it?” I ask, low. “Is something wrong?”
She stares at me, her pupils blown wide, and shakes her head. “Don’t you dare get soft on me now.”
“I’m anything but soft right now,” I growl, and she feels it: my hips pressed against her, my hands on her wrists, my mouth at her ear. The line works; she shudders, and her whole body seems to lean into mine.
“Prove it,” she whispers, then bites my shoulder like punctuation.
So I do. I kiss her again — harder this time, rough enough to leave a mark, and she whimpers, the sound so honest it nearly undoes me. She’s letting herself be vulnerable, if only for these seconds, and I know what it costs her. My chest feels too tight, and it’s not just want. It’s something like awe, like fury, like I’ve been given something precious and I don’t deserve it.
Her name leaves my mouth without my permission, softer this time, and when her lips part, I know she hears it, too, that she believes that I mean it. That I love her. And I see in her eyes that same flash of fear again, but stronger, that scared, loving part of her echoing that unspoken truth. I see it and I feel it; it’s in the way her whole body melts against mine, her legs slipping between mine, her hands clenching in the fabric at my back.
That’s the moment everything inside me changes.
Because this isn’t supposed to be real.
She isn’t supposed to feel like this — warm and stubborn and alive in my arms, like the world makes sense when she’s here and furious and wanting and scared.
But then, right as I’m about to lose myself in her, I hear it: Midnight’s voice, cold and surgical, reminding me what happens if I get soft. If I fuck up. If I let myself love her.
Poison crawls up my throat.
Molly runs her tongue along my lips like she can taste my hesitation, and her eyes narrow.
“Where’d you go?” she demands, and her voice is knife-sharp, but the hand she puts on my chest is trembling.
I force a smirk to hide the sick fear inside me. “Nowhere.”
“Liar,” she says instantly.
I open my mouth, to say what, I don’t know, but she yanks me back to her, and this time her kiss is all desperation, no strategy, like she’s trying to wring the truth out of my tongue.
“Don’t get weird on me,” she hisses. “If you’re going to do this, do it. If you’re not —”
“I am,” I cut in. No matter what comes after, I want her. I want all of her. Now.
I grip her waist and lift her bodily, like she’s nothing, and she yelps, more startled than scared. I carry her to the bedroom, and she clamps onto my shoulders, nails digging in, face wild and alive.
“You’re insane,” she says.
