Page 81 of Arrow

The word “court” made her mouth curl in contempt. It was an idea so alien, it might as well have been a threat.

I closed the gap.

The space was sacrosanct, but her body drew me in like a weather system. She twisted, tried to rise, but the knee gave way, and she ended up folded at my feet. She looked embarrassed, then angry, then nothing at all, as if the effort of switching emotion had finally stripped her down to the marrow.

“Get it over with,” she said, refusing to meet my eyes. “If you’re going to kill me, do it right here. It’ll be the only honest thing anyone’s ever done in this church.”

Her certainty in my darkness was something to envy—the way her voice shook, not from fear, but from absolute fucking exhaustion. Instead of answering, I reached for her leg and peeled back the ruined material. She tried to pull away, but I pinioned her shin to the stone with a palm and thumbed the bloody edge of her cut, inspecting the depth.

“It needs to be cleaned,” I said. “Otherwise, it’ll get infected, and you’ll die slow and ugly—not my style.”

She scoffed, looking off toward the shattered rose window, the way people look for rescue in the dark. “You’re a fucking doctor now? That’s cute.”

There was something raw in the way she said it, something almost pleading, but she hid it fast.

Without answering, I took a rag from the altar, and pressed it to her shin. She yipped, the first real sound she’d made that wasn’t calculated to being wounded, then glared as if I’d personally offended her ancestors with the gesture.

“Where’d you learn how to incapacitate my alarm system?” I asked.

She sniffed, hiding a grimace. “Trade secret. Maybe I remembered something my brother taught me, in all the years we spent stealing cars and not murdering each other for promotions.” Her hands trembled. “I ran away from you, not your alarms,” she muttered, voice distant and almost childlike. “If you’re going to force me to be the next Mrs. Romanov, the least I could do is make you work for it. Not that you’ve ever actually wanted anything that didn’t scream.”

I patted her shin and let the blood-stained rag fall to the marble with the lilies. “You’re wrong about me.”

Sitting on the edge of the altar rail, I reached into my coat for the flask, unscrewed the cap, and poured a touch of whiskey over the gash.

She hissed, but her hands didn’t so much as twitch. I watched her tuck the pain away, cataloguing the shape of it for another day. Harlowe Virelli’s pain was her only real inheritance, and she wore it with pridefully bad taste.

“Why’d you send your psycho cousin to babysit me?”

I laughed. “Natalya was a precaution. You, on the other hand, are an anomaly. You make loyalty inconvenient.”

“Fuck me.” She winced. “Do you keep me alive to parade around or to torment me?”

I considered the question, unhurried as ever.

“Neither. I want you alive because I like the way you resist.”

“You could chain ten women to this table and it wouldn’t fix the hole in the Romanov kingdom.”

My head tilted. “You think I want peace? I want unrest, Harlowe. I want a city ready to tear itself apart at the first wrong move, but built exactly in my image when it’s done.”

She looked up. “Then let me go.”

I took her chin in mine, slow and steady. “I could.” My thumb traced the cut on her lip, still wet in the candlelight. “But then you’d have nothing left to want, and I wouldn’t wish that on even a Virelli.”

Harlowe trembled—not from pain, not from fear, but from the effort of holding herself together. And I saw, in the glint of her eyes, the ghost of every woman who’d survived in spite of everything designed to break her.

“You think it matters if you win or lose?” she said. “There’s nothing left on the other side.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, little viper.” I moved my hand from her chin to the back of her head, threading through the soaked hair, pulling her close enough that we were one organism, breathing in the same oxygen.

She didn’t lean in. She didn’t pull back, either. She hung in the balance, perfectly taut, as if daring me to make the first move so she could hate herself for it later.

“Do you want to know the truth?” I pressed my lips to the shell of her ear. “I asked my father for permission to have you. I told him I’d rather a city at war than a kingdom of sheep.” I pressed two fingers against her pulse just to feel it skitter. “I think you’d rather bleed than heal, and I can’t decide if that’s mercy or just a flaw in the breed.”

“You want to be my messiah, Arrow? Then die for my sins.”

She kissed me then—or maybe I kissed her, hard to say, because it was teeth and heat and the sanctified violence of two species extinct but refusing to admit it.