His breathing is heavier now, controlled but strained, and I feel powerful in a way I never have before.
“And when I fall apart,” I whisper, my fingers tangling in his shirt, “It will be because of you. Because I’m yours, and your mine.”
Silence.
Thick, electric and torturously suffocating.
He stares at me like I’ve just set the entire room on fire.
“Seraphina,” he says, low and desperate and wrecked all at once, “you have no fucking idea the things I’d do for you. To keep you by my side.”
Maybe I do.
Maybe that’s the point.
Instead of softening, instead of retreating, I hold his gaze and let him see it. The woman I am becoming.
“Take me dancing,” I say again, breath warm against his mouth. “Then make me burn in the way that only you can.”
Chapter Eighteen
Trey
Far Away – Nickelback
She has no idea what she’s just done to me.
When she told me she didn’t want gentle, something inside my chest shifted in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not because I am incapable of hardness, because I knowexactlywhat I am capable of. I know the weight of my hands. I know what violence feels like under my skin.
But she said it without fear.
She didn’t tremble. She didn’t soften the edges of her words. She didn’t look at me as though she was asking permission.
She was choosing.
That distinction changes everything.
I want to drive her through the bed… through the floor, through the wall… like driving a nail into wood.
Shit.
I want to crucify her.
That might be a bit too much.
Right?
Focus.
My neighbor had this Dalmatian—Monty. Deaf as a post, but every time I saw him, he was destroying their apartment with that whip of a tail, grinning like an idiot, just pure chaos wrapped in fur.
Then there was Taz, this tiny Yorkie who ruled him like a tyrant. Absolute menace in a miniature body.
One time I was house-sitting when they were away, and Taz went into heat.
Monty did everything he could about it—poor guy had enthusiasm, not accuracy. Just… a lot of effort and very little success. Absolute tragedy in motion.
Why am I thinking about this?
