When I finally forced myself to look, she was watching me. Her dark eyes were open now, unreadable pools of exhaustion and residual fire.
The emptiness rushed back in, colder than before. I reached down, grabbed her discarded shorts and panties from the floor, and tossed them onto her stomach.
“Get up,” I said, my voice hoarse, scraped raw, and utterly empty. “Get out.”
The words were ash in my mouth. A lie so profound it tasted like blood. We both knew I didn’t mean them. We both knew she wouldn’t go. But the script was written, the roles assigned. We had to say the lines. It was the only thing left that felt familiar.
Pointless. All of it. And the only thing that had ever mattered.
The silence after the rage fuck was a living, breathing predator in the room. It didn’t just exist; it coiled around us, a python of unsaid words and exposed nerve endings, squeezing until the air itself felt like shattered glass in my lungs. This wasn’t the quiet of release. It was the quiet of detonation, the ringing aftermath where you’re deafened by the echo of your own destruction. The only sounds were the frantic drumbeat ofrain against the window and the ragged, ruined symphony of our breathing—hers a shaky, hitched rhythm, mine a low, furious growl I couldn’t seem to choke down.
She was standing by the coffee table, still in pieces of her Sin Bin uniform, her black shirt clutched to her chest because I had thrown it at her instead of handing it over like a decent man. Her shorts were crooked on her hips, her bra strap twisted down one shoulder, her panties ruined somewhere under the couch, and the coffee table sat shoved at an angle between us like evidence. Mail was scattered across the rug. The plastic water bottle had rolled under the chair. The cheap wood was marked from where my hands had gripped it and where hers had scraped over the edge while we used the only solid thing in the room to destroy what little was left of our self-control.
She looked annihilated. Beautifully, utterly wrecked. Lips swollen and dark from my mouth, the intricate crown of her braids half-unraveled, tendrils clinging to her damp neck. Her eyes weren’t just bright; they were radioactive with a pain so acute it had mutated past tears into a kind of terrifying, glittering clarity. She looked like mine. And the violent, possessive ache that thought ignited made me want to put my fist through the drywall, to feel something solid break because my insides already had.
But she wasn’t mine.
She’d carved that truth into me with a blunt knife over a year, and the scar tissue was so thick now I was choking on it.
I bent, the movement jerky enough to send fire through my ribs, and snatched the rest of her uniform from the floor where it had landed in our frantic, angry tangle. The fabric was still warm. I didn’t let myself think about that. My split knuckles screamed under the gauze, fresh blood blooming through white where Maddox’s face had opened them again, and the bruise along my jaw throbbed with every clench of my teeth.
I tossed the clothes onto the coffee table beside her, the thump too loud in the predatory quiet. “Get dressed.”
Her head snapped up. The shirt shifted in her hands with the motion, revealing the shadowed hollow of her throat, the rapid flutter of her pulse. I hated that I saw it. I hated that my blood still roared for her, that my hands itched to finish what we’d started, to wipe the look off her face by replacing it with one of helpless, shattered pleasure. I hated that even now, knowing the cost, my body’s first language was still Aura.
“Easton.”
My name in her mouth was a gut-punch. It wasn’t the breathy sigh from when I was inside her. It was soft. Wounded. A plea masquerading as a statement. It made me feel like a villain, and right now, I needed to be the fucking hero of my own ruin.
“No.” I yanked my jeans back up over my hips, the denim snapping against my skin like a reproach. I grabbed my own shirt from where it had landed near the couch and dragged it over my head, hissing when the movement pulled tight across my ribs. Being bare in front of her now felt like the ultimate humiliation. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” Her voice was a threadbare whisper.
“Say my name like you get to soften what just happened.” My own words were stones dropped into the silence between us. “Like it wasn’t just two people using each other as weapons because talking hurt too much.”
Her mouth opened, then closed. A year ago, her silence would have been a victory. Now, it just made the hollow in my chest yawn wider. It felt like standing in the smoldering crater of a dream, holding the still-smoking detonator, and realizing I’d been the one to push the button.
“I’m not trying to soften anything,” she finally said, her voice gaining a fragile edge.
“Great.” I crossed my arms, locking my muscles against the tremor I felt building in my stomach and immediately regretting it when my ribs burned. “Then get dressed and go.”
The change in her face was a brutal, time-lapsed collapse. Anger—familiar, flash-fire anger—first. Then a shock so profound it wiped everything else clean. Then, the one thing I was never prepared for: hurt. A raw, unguarded hurt that made my own ribs feel like they were splintering inward, piercing my lungs.
She let out a laugh that was all broken glass. “You’re kicking me out?”
“I’m telling you to leave before we do something even uglier than fuck our pain into each other.” The vulgarity was a shield. I needed it to be.
“Too late for that, don’t you think?”
I met her gaze, letting her see the full, desolate truth in mine. “Yeah, Aura. It is.”
Her jaw hardened, that famous Clarke steel sliding back into place. “Fine.”
She grabbed the uniform shirt. And her hands were shaking. A fine, violent tremor she couldn’t control. I saw it. I fucking saw it, and the sight was a hook in my gut. The moment she realized I’d noticed, she spun away from me, the movement so swift and sharp it felt like a physical rejection. I was left staring at the tense line of her back, at the bare skin between the twisted strap and the edge of her skirt, at the places my hands had just been and the places I no longer had the right to touch.
The room smelled of us. Coconut lotion and cheap detergent, the ozone scent of rain on her skin, and the thick, unmistakable perfume of sweat and sex. It was the smell of my own addiction, proof that my body was a traitor with a long, detailed memory. My knuckles throbbed where I’d connected with Maddox’s jaw. My ribs burned where he’d landed a hit thatwould bruise deep by morning. The pain was a clean, simple thing. I wished the rest of me could be so straightforward.
She bent to pick up her ripped panties from near the leg of the coffee table, then froze. Her shoulders hitched once, a silent, seismic sob she tried to strangle, but I heard it.
