Not the kind she understands. Not ownership, not control, not the dependency she built and called devotion. The kind that comes from being chosen. From choosing back. From standing in rooms together that should have broken both of us and walking out the other side still holding on.
“You think you know what his body feels like. You don’t. You know what else you don’t know?” I slant my head. “How it feels to be loved by him.”
It lands exactly the way I intended it to. Hard. Destructive. True.
She’s in so much pain. It’s in every labored breath she takes. In the way her eyes roll every few seconds. Yet she manages a smile, something cruel, something evil.
“Do you see me when he fucks you?” Her chest rises andfalls. “Do you see my hands on him, my pussy taking his cock, taking the one thing you thought would only ever be yours?”
It doesn’t hurt the way she wants it to. She’s reaching because everything else failed and this is the last thing she has, the claim that what happened in that cell belongs to her.
I'm going to take that from her too.
The thought arrives fully formed, certain, without hesitation. I turn to Reth, rise onto my toes and kiss him. The kind of kiss that says everything I haven't put into words yet—that I'm here, that I chose this, that I'm not afraid of this room or what's in it or what comes next. His hand finds my waist automatically, the way it always does, like my body is somewhere his hands already know to go.
When I pull back, his eyes are dark, searching my face.
I bring my mouth to his ear. "I want her to watch you choose me," I whisper. "I want her to see exactly who you belong to now."
His grip tightens on my waist.
"Sophia." Low. Warning and question at the same time.
"She said we both know what you feel like." I pull back just enough to look at his painted face. "She's wrong. She never knew. She had your body. She never had you choosing to give it." I hold his gaze. "There's a difference, and I want her to see it."
Something moves through his expression. Deep. Complicated.
"You don't have to prove anything," he says. "Not to her."
"I'm not proving anything." I reach beneath my dress, letmy panties fall around my feet, then brush my thumb across the edge of the paint on his jaw. "I'm taking something back. The same way you are." A beat. "We came here together. We finish it together."
His forehead drops to mine.
"Are you sure." Not a question anymore.
I press another kiss to the corner of his painted mouth. “I’m yours, Nazareth. And you’re mine. Show her what that looks like.”
29
RETH
Idon't kiss her gently.
I fist her hair and drag her mouth to mine and kiss her the way the night has made me—rough, starving, tasting blood and paint and her underneath both of them, my hands gripping hard enough to leave marks because I’m not a gentle thing right now and she knows it and she wants this anyway.
All of me.
Not just the pretty pieces. But the broken darkness too.
She moans into my mouth, and my blood roars.
I pull back and look at her. Flushed. Eyes dark. Lips swollen from mine. Beautiful in a way that makes something feral rear up in my chest, something that has been running on violence all night and is now pointed entirely at her.
I drag the chair sideways. Hard. The legs screech against the floor. Give Valeria the angle I want her to have. Then I sit and pull Sophia down onto my lap.
She doesn't hesitate. Never hesitates. That's the thingabout her—she has never once flinched from me, and she's not flinching now, not in this room, not covered in the evidence of what I've been doing, not with Valeria sitting so close, bleeding.
I grip her hips, and she reaches between us, unzipping my pants and pulling out my cock. I’m already achingly hard for her. Some might say it’s the adrenaline, the bloodlust, the high of revenge. Maybe it is. But mostly…it’s her. The woman I’ve loved for years. The woman I never thought I’d have. The woman who taught me that monsters deserve love too.
