Page 50 of Arrow

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?” he asked, so softly it stung. “You spent your whole life perfecting the role.” His fingers tapped an idle pattern on the table.

The implication was a slap. I flinched, more inside than out. I wanted to upend the table, shatter the greasy plates, and grind my heel into his jaw, except a thread of something held me still. An ancient self-hatred that liked being seen, even if the witness had a knife for a gaze.

I dug my claws in. “Is that the best you can do, killer?”

His eyes flared, the first honest flicker of heat, but it shuttered down fast.

“You already know how this ends. As a matter of fact, it’s already over for you. I can see it in your hands. In your mouth. You need a god to kneel to, Harlowe, and you’d choke before you ever say it out loud.”

He was right, in the way poison is always right. It knows the shortest path to your organs. I pictured his hands at my throat, counted the ways I’d let him end me, and hated myself for how each vision made me warmer, steadier, more calibrated to the pain of being seen.

Arrow didn’t break eye contact. He reached across and took my chin in two fingers, tilting my face up. The gesture should have been humiliating, and it was, but there was a reverence to it.

“You want a leash? Say the word.” His voice was barely above the hum of the refrigeration case.

“Go to hell.”

“I own the deed.”

Letting my jaw go, he waited a breath, then brushed his thumb—slowly, almost a caress—over my lips, wiping away the icing from the donut, then sucked the residue off his thumb.

Heat rushed through me at the gesture, my sinful body betraying my hatred in an instant. I jerked back, nearly knocking over the coffee. The smirk on his face told me he knew exactly what he’d done to me.

He withdrew, and laced his hands again. “After you become my wife, the fun stops. You don’t get to run. You don’t get to hide in your little sex church, or behind Frank, or in your father’s shadow. You’re mine.”

The words landed with the slow, acidic clarity of a prophecy. I didn’t bother to argue.

I drew in a shaky breath. “You done?”

Arrow smiled, but it wasn’t amusement. It was hunger.

“If you were smart, you’d try harder to please me.” And then, he smirked. “But I’d be disappointed if you did.”

Maybe this was what Zephyr meant when he said pain was its faith—you could hate the man with the whip, but you belonged to the sensation long before he ever touched you.

“Get up,” he said. “We have a cake tasting in thirty minutes.”

“I’d rather eat glass.”

“That can be arranged too, but it would be a shame to ruin that pretty mouth before the wedding.”

He stood and rounded the table, scraping the chrome against the checkered floor until he was behind me. He slid his hand into the hair at the nape of my neck, a show of dominance so cliché it should have bored me, except it didn’t. It set every nerve ending in my body on fire. He bent so his lips hovered by my ear, his breath hot and minty.

“Eat your donut,” he ordered.

I thought he was joking, but he squeezed his fist, not painfully, but as clear a warning as I’d ever received.

Slowly, I lifted the maple bar to my mouth and took a deliberate bite, gritting my teeth so hard that icing stuck to my canines.

He watched, head cocked, like a dog trainer waiting for the animal to heel or snap.

I chewed, swallowed, and didn’t blink.

“Good girl,” he murmured, a phrase I never let anyone use on me, not even Zephyr.

I ripped a bite bigger than I could chew and stuffed it in, hoping to make him flinch. Arrow only smirked and, without moving his hand, let the weight of his presence melt down the back of my spine.