“Open them.”
Her eyes fly open. Blue and wet.
“You’ve got a lot of fire for a pawn,” I whisper. My face is inches from hers. I can feel her breath on my lips.
“Let me go,” she says, but there is no air in her voice.
“You threw a glass at my head,” I say. “In my world, Iris, that’s an act of war.”
“I missed,” she spits.
“Only because I moved.”
I shift my weight, driving my knee between hers and forcing her legs apart. My thigh locks her to the wall as I press my hips against hers.
I let her feel the difference in weight. The strength difference. I let her feel how powerless she is.
But as I press against her, the equation changes.
The anger is there, yes. But beneath it, desire ignites. Fear and lust burn the same fuel.
I feel her body against mine. The softness of her breasts pressed against my chest. The heat radiating off her skin.
It’s intoxicating.
I shouldn’t notice it. I have an enemy at the gate and a hostage in my room.
But my body doesn’t care about the siege.
I’m hard.
Iris freezes at the evidence of my reaction pressing against her stomach.
She stops fighting, going completely still.
Her eyes widen in sudden shock.
A heartbeat later, her gaze drops to my mouth, then snaps back up to my eyes.
She hates me. She wants me dead. And yet, her body is leaning into mine. She’s trembling, the fear bleeding into a desperate, raw need.
“You want to fight me?” I murmur, leaning down until my lips graze the shell of her ear. “Be careful. You don’t know what you’re waking.”
She shudders.
“Do it,” she whispers.
The words are barely audible.
I pull back to look at her face. “Do what?”
“Whatever you’re going to do,” she says. Her voice is jagged. “Break me. Kill me. Just stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you want to devour me.”
I stare at her mouth. Her lips are parted, swollen, red where she has been biting them.
