She's still looking at me. Something in my face must be visible, because her expression shifts. The tears recede, the strategic mask drops, and what replaces both is something raw and unguarded, something that looks like recognition, as if she's seeing in my face the same thing I'm seeing in hers.
"This is wrong," she says. "Whatever this is. You know that."
"I know."
"I'm your prisoner."
"Yes."
"And I hate you. For what you did. For bringing me here. For every minute of sleep I've lost and every hour I've spent terrified and every moment my mother spends wondering where I am. I hate you for all of it."
"You should."
"Then stop looking at me like that." Her voice breaks on the last word, just slightly, just enough. "Because I can't do this. Ican't be the woman who falls for her captor. That's not a love story. That's a pathology."
"I'm not asking you to fall for anyone."
"You're not asking anything. That's the problem. You just stand there with those eyes and cook me breakfast and hand me knives and look at me like I'm the first real thing you've ever seen, and I can't..." She stops and presses her hand over her mouth. Her eyes close.
I should stay where I am. Every rational calculation, every survival instinct, every moral principle I have left tells me to stay where I am and let her finish this sentence and then go to opposite ends of this house and keep the distance between us intact.
She doesn't let me.
She crosses the kitchen in two steps and her hands fist in the front of my shirt and she pulls me to her, and then her mouth is on mine and the world catches fire.
It's not gentle. There's nothing gentle about it. Days of fear and fury and sleeplessness and the constant grinding proximity of two people who have been circling each other, too close to escape and too charged to touch, it all detonates at once, and what's left is heat and need and the desperate animal urgency of two people who don't know if they'll be alive tomorrow.
She kisses me like she argues, with everything, total commitment and zero retreat. Her teeth catch my lower lip and I taste copper and I don't care. My hands find her waist, the curve of her hips through my flannel shirt, and I grip hard enough that she gasps into my mouth.
"I hate you," she says against my lips.
"I know." I lift her. She wraps her legs around my waist and I press her back against the wall, hard, pinning her there with the weight of my body. The impact drives the air from her lungs ina sharp exhale, and the sound goes straight to my cock. "Tell me to stop."
"No."
Her hands are in my hair, pulling, and the edge of pain clarifies everything. I roll my hips against her and she moans, grinding back against me through too many layers of clothing. I can feel the heat of her through the fabric, can feel how wet she already is against the ridge of my cock, and the knowledge that this defiant, furious woman wants me despite everything makes something dark and possessive unfurl in my chest.
Mine.
The thought arrives fully formed and unapologetic. She's mine. Has been mine since the moment she walked out of her unlocked room and stood in the hallway with fury in her eyes and not an ounce of surrender. Every woman I've touched before this was a transaction, a body against a body, forgettable before it was finished. This woman I would burn cities for, and the certainty of that is as terrifying as anything the cartel has ever asked me to do.
I pin her wrists above her head with one hand. She doesn't fight it. Her eyes go wide and dark and blazing, and when I hold her there, pinned between the wall and my body with her arms stretched above her, she arches into me and says my name like a profanity.
"Mateo."
"Say it again."
"Fuck you."
"That's not what I asked for." I press my mouth to the side of her neck, drag my teeth along the tendon, and she shudders. Her pulse is hammering against my lips. I bite down, marking her, and she cries out.
I let go of her wrists. She drops her hands to my shoulders and digs her nails in as I pull the flannel shirt open. Buttonsscatter across the linoleum. There's nothing underneath but her bra, black and practical. She stopped wearing the blouse from the kidnapping after the first day, and the flannel against bare skin has been quietly driving me out of my mind ever since. I unclasp the bra with one hand. Her breasts spill free, full, the nipples already hard, and I cup one roughly, rolling the nipple between my thumb and finger until she hisses. I lower my mouth to the other and suck hard, pulling the peak between my teeth, and her fingers twist in my hair and her back arches off the wall.
"This doesn't change anything," she says, even as she grabs the hem of my shirt and yanks it up. Her voice is wrecked but the words are deliberate, a line drawn in sand even as the tide rushes in. "This doesn't make what you did okay."
"I'm not asking for okay." I pull the shirt over my head and her hands are on me immediately, nails dragging down my chest. I catch her hands and bring them to my mouth. I kiss her knuckles, then bite the pad of her thumb, and her breath hitches. "I'm taking what you're giving me. And you're giving me everything tonight, Sofia. I can see it in your eyes."
"You arrogant..."
