Her skin is pale and smooth, goosebumps sprouting from the sudden exposure. I run my palms from her shoulder blades to her hips, watching her shiver.
“You want to be fucked,” I murmur. “Say it.”
She draws a breath, her chest flattening against itself under her own arms, hands fisted.
“I want to be fucked,” she says, icy as ever.
“Bend over,” I say.
She does. Her palms brace the sill, the glass cold under her bare breasts. Her spine curves, her ass a perfect target.
I line myself up against the damp notch in her thong, then trace my finger down and snap the narrow band. The sting makes her gasp. A real one, the tiny evidence of nerves away from the perfectly constructed surface.
I hook my finger under the elastic, pull it aside, and let my cock settle in the wet split between her thighs. She doesn’t beg, not even with her eyes, but her ass pushes back, angling for more, and that’s the closest I’ll ever get.
I enter her slowly, the first slide slick and almost too easy. She’s greedy for it, muscles milking me as if her body is pulling me in against the inertia of my will. Her face hits the glass with a hollow thud, which she doesn’t seem to mind or adjust for. I thrust, slow at first, watching the reflection of her cheek against the window pane, her eyes shut tight and lips parted in concentration. I want to destroy her composure, but I also want to see how long it holds.
“Harder,” she whispers, her voice not just a command but a plea.
Voltage shivers up my spine and pools hellishly in my brain. I drive harder, with all the focus of a problem set in front of me, solving for X with every savage in and out.
Her grip on the sill tightens as her head lolls forward, cheek pressed flat against the glass. She’s gone feral and silent, all the fight redirected to clenching around me, to holding out against what I can sense is a tidal orgasm looming. The furniture in the room vibrates as I fuck her with the distinct and deliberate force of someone obsessed with obliteration.
She comes without warning, without sound at first, a sudden quake that chokes off in her chest and then explodes in a high, breaking gasp. Every muscle in her back knots, then snaps loose. The window fogs instantly with her breath.
I keep going. Because I’m greedy. Because I need it. Because I want her memory to be shaped into the sound and sensation of this. I want her to remember it as violence, but also as inevitability.
She clamps down so hard, it’s almost painful. I fuck her through it, relentless, my own orgasm building like a nucleardetonation. I reach around, finger her clit, and she jumps, spasms, a second peak barreling through her with enough force that I feel her knees buckle.
I let her collapse, slumped forward, breasts mashed and flattening into the sill. The room is a heat trap, a stillness thick with aftershocks, but I hold her up with my hands, massaging her hips, thumbs digging into the marks my grip has left behind.
Only when my own climax rips through me, more blinding than I can recall ever feeling, do I let myself lean in, pressing my weight into her back, pinning her to the glass so she can’t move away. I want her to feel it, the way my body makes her own a site of violence and reprieve all at once.
I want her muscles to remember me tomorrow, for it to matter that I was here. That she let me split her in two, and neither of us died.
Chapter 15
False Leverage
POV:Evie
The thing about houses is that they all confess eventually. Not in words; words are unreliable things. They dress themselves for the occasion and masquerade as truth.
Houses are less imaginative. They confess in warped floorboards, in doors polished more often than others, in drawers that stick because someone opens them too quickly and closes them too hard. They confess in dust disturbed where dust should have settled. In servants who pause half a breath too long before answering ordinary questions.
In receipts. Especially in receipts.
Men can clean blood from stone. They can rewrite timelines. They can move witnesses, silence staff, redirect police, and call murder an accident until the word becomes respectable through repetition.
But men are rarely careful with paper that looks unimportant.
That’s their weakness. One of many.
The receipt is folded into the back of a ledger in the library, tucked between pages recording charitable donations made through a Vitale foundation with a name so tasteful, it practically reeks of laundering.
I almost miss it. Not because it’s well hidden. Because it’s too badly hidden. That gives me pause. A sloppy secret is usually bait.
I stand very still with my fingers on the paper and listen to the house. No footstep in the corridor. No shift of a guard outside the far door. No Teresa appearing with tea she hasn't been asked to bring. No Luca pretending not to be a wall with a pulse.
