I stay buried inside her, chest heaving against her back, one hand splayed possessively over the corset, the other tangled in her hair.
Then the haze cracks.
The car is no longer moving. Engine off. We’re parked in theshadowed curve of the driveway, the House of Night looming black against the moon. The silence is sudden and absolute, broken only by her ragged breathing and the wet sound of our bodies still joined.
What the fuck have I done?
I just rutted her like an animal in the back of a car, like a godforsaken teenager. I’m covered in her blood, while she’s barely healed from everything else that’s been done to her. I told myself it was possession. Claiming. But the truth is uglier: I lost control. I saw red, and I drowned in it.
Shame hits harder than lust ever could.
I pull out abruptly. The slick drag makes her flinch, a small, wounded sound escaping her throat. Blood and semen smears across her thighs and drips onto the leather. I can’t look at her.
I tuck myself away with shaking hands, zip up, buckle my belt like armor. The scent of copper and sex clings to me, thick and damning. I shove the door open and step out into the cold night air, gravel biting through my soles.
I don’t help her out. I don’t speak. I just walk, ten strides, then twenty, until the chill burns my lungs and the distance feels like penance.
Behind me, the car door hangs open. She’s still inside, folded forward on the seat, tulle rucked high, thighs trembling, blood cooling on her skin. Raw. Used. Left.
I stop beneath the portico, palms flat on cold stone, staring at the dark windows of the house that swallowed both our names the day the contracts were signed. This was never meant to be anything more than an arrangement.
A signature. A ceremony. One clinical night to seal the alliance. Duty discharged.
I was supposed to take her once, high on tradition and ritual, then retreat to separate wings and separate lives. She’d belong to the Barons. I’d continue my work. No jealousy. No hunger. No dragging her into the back of a car and fucking because the sight of blood and another man’s mark on her made me lose my mind.
That’s not the bargain.
I gave her my vows for power, for leverage, not for this. Not for the way my pulse still hammers with the taste of her blood on my tongue, not for the way my cock wants to be back inside her even now, hard again at the thought of how perfectly she broke for me.
I slam my fist against the balustrade once, hard enough that stone bites skin.
Want,possession,beyond the legal line has no place here.
I am the Baron King: controlled, strategist, keeper of death. I do not rut in the backseat of the car like some sex-starved college boy. I do not mark what is already mine on paper with teeth and cum and blood.
I draw the night air deep into my lungs until it burns, until the scent of her is replaced by pine and frost.
Tomorrow, the walls go back up.
Tomorrow, I remember what this marriage actually is.
Tonight I forgot, and that is the only thing I will allow myself to regret.
11
Hunter
The clocklight spills across the soundboard, the time in a garish red: 3:48 a.m. Two hours and twelve minutes, and I’m out of here. Not that I usually mind. Hosting Royal Noir gives me time alone, a much-needed hit of nicotine, and a chance to listen to the crackpot theories running around Forsyth, but since the fire, I’ve found myself itching to get back to the house.
The studio has a musty smell, like old vinyl, burned coffee, and the two cigarettes I allow myself every show. Ares is sprawled under the desk, his brindle head on my boot, snoring like a chainsaw with asthma. It’s worse since the fire. Outside the station, the campus is dead; inside, the playlist is keeping me awake.
I lean into the mic, voice low, smoke curling from the stub of my first cigarette pinched between my fingers.
“Forsyth never sleeps, babies. She just pretends. She closes her eyes and waits for the Shadows to come carry her secrets away. Theones who tuck the city’s sins into the dark. You’re listening to Royal Noir, and this is Hunter Sorrin reminding you: every corpse has a story, but only the dead get to keep it.”
I let the reverb on my voice die, cue the next band on my curated playlist, Bauhaus, and kill my mic.
That’s when the booth door opens without a knock.
