Page 117 of Vow to Claim You

“I know.”

“I’m not a good man, Ayanna.”

“I know that too.”

Her hands finish with my buttons. Push the shirt off my shoulders. Her palms flatten against my chest, and her eyes move over the ink, the scars, the whole story written across my skin. She traces the runes at my neck. The skull over my heart. The raised line of an old knife wound across my ribs.

“You’re mine now,” she says quietly. “That makes you good enough.”

Everything in me snaps and turns feral.

I take her mouth again, and there is nothing careful in it, nothing left that remembers how to be. I shove the dress up her thighs, gripping flesh hard enough to mark, needing skin, needing proof. Because that’s what this is, underneath all of it. Beneath the want, beneath weeks of denial finally tearing loose, something in me is howling one word on an endless loop—alive—and the only thing on earth that will quiet it is the heat of her under my hands and her heart slamming against my chest, still beating, still here.

“I almost lost you tonight.” It comes out against her throat, half a growl. “Do you understand that? I walked into that room ready to die getting to you. I would have.” I drag her to the edge of the vanity and fit myself between her thighs, and the heat of her against me tears a groan out of my chest. “So be very clear with me right now, Ayanna. Because if you don’t stop me, I am not going to stop at all.”

Her answer is to reach between us and go for my belt.

Of course it is. She answers a threat with a dare. It has undone me from the first day.

I strip her out of what’s left of the dress, and for one second, I just look—my wife, flushed and wanting and alive, here, mine—and then I can’t look any longer. I have to touch, have to taste. My mouth drops to her breast, and she arches off the vanity with a cry that goes straight through me. My hand slides between her thighs, and she’s soaked, slick and ready for me, and the sound I make at the feel of it isn’t a human one.

“Aric—” she moans, breaking apart. “Now. I need⁠—”

“I know what you need.” I free myself and drag the length of my cock through the wet of her until she’s shaking, until her nails carve half-moons into my shoulders. “I’ve known for weeks. I’ve thought of nothing else.” I catch her jaw and force her eyes up to mine. “You’re a princess, Ayanna. But I’m going to fuck you like you’re not.”

And I thrust inside her.

She cries out, and I swallow it, buried to the hilt in a single stroke. The feel of her clenching tight around me nearly finishes me on the spot. I hold there a beat—forehead to hers, both of us shaking—and then the leash is gone for good.

I fuck her hard, deep, relentless. The vanity slams against the wall with every thrust, and I don’t care. Let the whole house hear it; let the whole world know. One hand fists in her hair, the other clamps on her hip and hauls her into me, and I pour every cold mile of that drive into it—every scenario, every if, every second I spent imagining her dead—I drive all of it into her until there’s nothing left in either of us but this.

“You feel that?” The words scrape out against her ear. “That’s mine. You’re mine. Every part of you. I don’t share, I don’t lose, and I will never—” My next thrust punches a cry out of her. “Let anyone take you from me again.”

Her legs lock around me and drag me deeper, her nails rake down my back hard enough to draw blood, and I don’t care. I want her marks on me. Her hips rise to match every stroke, and through the wreck of her breathing, she gasps my name like a curse and a prayer in the same breath, like she’s been starving for this every bit as long as I have.

“Say it.” It comes out a command, and only I know it isn’t one. “Tell me.”

“I’m yours.” It tears out of her, helpless and honest and stripped of every defense she’s ever raised against me. “God—Aric—I’m yours⁠—”

I feel her shatter. Her whole body bows off the vanity, her thighs tremble against my hips, and my name breaks out of her as she clenches around my cock and comes apart. I hold her through every wave of it, watching her face come undone, because this, her, undone and alive in my arms, is the only thing I have ever wanted and been too much of a fool and a liar to reach for.

She’s destroyed me. Utterly. Completely.

If an undoing had a name, it would be hers.

Ayanna Lilith Almaviri is my undoing… and I stopped wanting to be saved from it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Ayanna

I’m still trembling. His forehead rests against mine. Both of us are breathing like we’ve surfaced from somewhere deep and dark and airless. His chest expands against my breasts with each ragged inhale, and I can feel his heart, hammering behind the ink and the scars, slamming against my own like they’re trying to sync or compete—I can’t tell which.

My hands are still in his hair. His eyes open, and I stop breathing entirely.

Because the pale blue is gone. Swallowed whole by something darker, blown wide with a hunger that should terrify me and doesn’t. His pupils have eaten the frost, the calculation, the careful Scandinavian composure—all of it consumed by something feral and starving that stares back at me like I’m not a person but a craving he’s been restraining from for weeks.

This is the man beneath the ice.