He spits in his palm and fists himself, then drags his slicked hand between my cheeks, teasing himself along my crack in slow, steady passes. It’s ritualistic, almost, the way he works me open. He doesn’t ask if I’m ready; he just waits for my body to say so.
He presses the head of his cock against my asshole, pushes just enough to make me gasp, then pulls back again, teasing, grinding, slapping my ass just to watch me flinch and shudder. My hands spasm, knuckles white on the edge of the sink, forehead pressed to the cool marble. My heart is a jackhammer in my ribs.
“Relax. Let me in,” he breathes, voice all hunger and smoke.
It hurts at first, the blunt pressure pushing past the shallow resistance. Less a piercing, more a slow, merciless splitting, like being unstitched. I whimper and brace my legs wider to ease the angle. Every atom in my body burns.
Then he spits again, and the heat of it slides, soothing the burn, and I moan with an ugly, desperate need that surprises even me. He waits, gentle for a single heartbeat, then leans his weight in slow and merciless, not stopping until I’m stretched full around him, until there’s nothing left of me but this hot, perfect violence.
My lungs flutter, a hummingbird caught in bone. I don’t want him to stop. I don’t ever want to forget this: the helpless, filthy joy of stuffing myself with him, the pulse of blood and slick and pain, the way the pressure starts to flip from agony to something worse, something sweeter.
He moves, shallow at first, hand clamped around my hips, steadying me. I’m crying out by then, animal sounds, so far from language that I don’t even recognize myself.
He just fucks into me, a little deeper each thrust, a little rougher, until I can’t stand and have to collapse over the sink, palms splayed, my forehead bouncing off the mirror, tears tracking sideways because I’m making a total, catastrophic mess of myself and I never, ever want to get clean again.
The friction is just this side of impossible, and he knows, he must know, but he doesn’t let up, doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He just keeps saying my name, low and savage, as if he’s trying to squeeze a diamond out of me with every thrust. I savor each white-hot inch, let myself choke on the hurt, and tilt my hips to take more, greedy for the feeling of being rewritten from the inside out.
When I look in the mirror, our faces are reflected in perfectly ugly symmetry: my eyes red and streaming, black mascara chopped across my cheek like warpaint, mouth open in a ragged, keeningoh. Alessandro is right behind me, jaw clenched, hair slicked to his forehead, hands gripping my waist like he’s hauling me back from the edge of a cliff. We’re both animals, both ruined, and I love it.
I never thought I’d live to see myself want to be hollowed out for someone, never thought it would feel anything but like a theft, and now it’s nothing like theft. It’s a baptism, a second birth. I want him to fuck the memory of every other man out of me. He grabs my hair, not to control but to anchor himself, and uses it to steady the rhythm.
I’m unmoored, made of electricity, every nerve ending lit up and screaming. I can hear my own voice, wanton and huge, echoing off the marble,“fuck, yes, more, don’t stop, please don’t stop,”and when my body starts to shake, he brings his hand around, two fingers instantly on my clit, rubbing hard and filthy as he pounds into me.
There’s nothing left but sensation: the slip and burn of his cock, the bite of his teeth on my neck, the way he stares me downin the glass, my own face breaking apart under the sensation, the raw feel of a good, hard cry. My pussy is still throbbing, and when he grinds those fingers on my clit, I come again, my whole body locking up, spitting out a splintered, shrieked “fuck!” that could probably be heard three floors down.
He doesn’t stop, not even when I go limp, not even when my legs threaten to give. He just keeps fucking in tight, ragged strokes until I feel him stutter and spasm in staccato movement, then jerk me tight to him as he empties inside me. He presses his face to the back of my neck, heat and sweat and shudders, letting out a single, strangled moan. When he’s spent, he collapses against my back, both of us sliding to our knees together, bodies tangled in the small, cold bathroom, knees bumping into ceramic, cheek to cheek, chest to back.
For a minute, we just breathe, ragged, uneven, spit and tears drying on our skin. Alessandro clutches my hip with a grip like he’s afraid I’ll evaporate. I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror and wonder if this is the last time I’ll ever see myself alive. Small and spent and marked by someone who doesn’t even know what he’s ruined in me.
He nuzzles the sweat-soaked hair at the crown of my head. “You okay?”
I laugh, exhausted, edged with something close to gratitude. “I’m fucking spectacular.” My voice comes out raw and ugly, and I love it. “How about you?”
As I turn to see him and our eyes lock in, realization hits me. He looks different. New. Changed.
He looks like he has feelings… feelings that might be for me.
So I do the only thing I can. I kiss him.
Chapter 35
Aftermath of Revenge
POV:Evie
Revenge, as it turns out, is less satisfying than advertised.
This feels like false marketing. There should be regulations.
One spends months building toward a single outcome, dragging herself through grief, surveillance, nausea, council politics, moral corrosion, and the particular indignity of throwing up because two unborn children object to breakfast. And when the outcome finally arrives, it doesn’t feel like victory.
It feels like paperwork.
Dante is gone. Not dead. Not bleeding out in an alley. Not dragged before a tribunal while men in dark suits pretend they’re different from courts because their sins wear better tailoring. Gone. Removed. Cut off. Exiled.
A word with clean edges and ugly depth.
Alessandro did it. That’s the first fact. Not me. That’s the second.
