Page 130 of Arrow

She tilted her chin up, her eyebrows sharpening, nostrils flaring.

I wanted to ruin her.

I wanted to take her hate and wire it permanently to my own.

I wanted to fuck her, then kill her, then fuck her again in whatever afterlife we both ended up inhabiting.

Holding my ground, I never left the magma well of her gaze, until she reached out and wiped her bloody fingers down the lapel of my jacket, like she was sketching the outline of a target.

“The next time you touch me without asking,” Harlowe murmured in a hush that didn’t reach even Frank’s ears, “I’ll put a knife between your ribs. There’s no security check you can invent that will slow me down.”

A honeyed smiled, then she vanished into the crowd.

I wanted to watch her try. Wanted the old Virelli blood feud to combust right there in the center of New York, with her naked on my bed, a knife to my throat as the room watched, or, better, we just didn’t let them see it at all.

Frank cleared his throat. If anyone else had dared, I’d have let him die for disrespect, but in the Virelli kingdom, Frank was part of the myth. He locked eyes with me, and in a single flicker of muscle, communicated everything you’d ever need to know about what it would take to make this girl kneel.

The answer was, nothing in my power. But maybe . . . maybe if I were lucky enough, everything would be hers.

He trailed after her with the posture of an undertaker, and I had no doubt that if he ever guessed I wanted her more than I wanted to end her, he’d shoot me in the head and then make me dinner after.

The only people left beside me were memories and rivals.

My father watched from the mezzanine, a specter in the blue light, flickering a sardonic half-salute as the evening’s currents realigned. The clockwork of the city—always shifting pieces, always recalculating incomprehensible debts. I toasted him with the same glass she had marked me with, her lipstick ghosting the rim.

Jesus Christ, my cock was so hard I wanted to laugh.

It should’ve ended there. I should’ve walked away, pretended it hadn’t meant anything. But something inside me cracked open that night, something I didn’t know how to put back together.

Because in a room full of polished puppets and poison smiles, she was real.

Untamed. Reckless. Divine.

She didn’t just look like chaos. She was chaos. And I’d been hungry for it my entire life.

I remember the exact moment it hit me—somewhere between her third lie and her death threat—that I’d never get over her.

That I wouldn’t even try.

I was seventeen the night Luca Virelli was murdered.

The warehouse smelled like rust and cold blood. The kind of scent that sinks into your lungs and stays there, no matter how hard you scrub. Chains hung from steel beams like decorations in hell, and the only light came from a single overhead bulb, swaying slightly from the wind slithering through the broken windows above.

My uncle insisted I be there.

He stood in the middle of it all like a conductor about to cue a symphony of violence. He always wore black leather gloves—expensive and unnecessary. He didn’t like fingerprints. Didn’t like mess, except when he did.

“Get over here, nephew.”

I didn’t move fast enough, so his hand found the back of my neck and shoved me forward, closer to the boy tied to the chair.

Luca Virelli.

He couldn’t have been much more than twenty. His face was a ruin of blood and swelling, one eye sealed shut. But he looked up at me with the other, defiant even through the split lip and shattered nose. My uncle and his men had done a number on him.

Considering the amount of blood he had lost and the fact that he still had the strength to look up at me, unafraid, was impressive. Luca wasn’t scared of the death he knew was coming. He was old enough to understand that the Romanovs didn’t leave survivors; we sent messages. And the death of the Virelli prince would shudder through Manhattan like a mass-grave earthquake.

He spat at my shoe, a bright red arc. “Go on,” he rasped. “Do it.”