Page 86 of Take Me Darkly

He surged off the mattress, his arms wrapping around my back like iron bands, crushing my chest to his. He buried his face in the crook of my neck as his climax hit him like a physical blow. The sound that tore from his throat was unlike anything I had ever heard from him—it was a low, wrecked, guttural roar of pure, undone humanity.

The feeling of him shattering inside me triggered my own release. My inner walls clamped violently around his pulsing shaft, a blinding wave of ecstasy crashing over me that left me screaming his name, shaking uncontrollably in his arms.

“Ti amo,” I panted into his neck, the Italian words tearing from my soul before I could check my pride. “Ti amo, ti amo...”

He didn’t speak the words back. I didn’t care if it was by choice or because he didn’t know the translation. I had promised him I wouldn’t demand he say he loved me just because I’d said it, and I meant it.

Because when his arms tightened around me so hard I could barely breathe, holding me as if I were his absolute salvation, I received my answer. He couldn’t give me the formal words yet, but he had given me the man—every dark, broken, beautiful piece of him that no other living soul had ever been permitted to see. He pressed his lips to the frantic pulse in my neck and held them there, breathing me in. It was a confession written in a language far deeper than words.

We stayed tangled together as our hearts slowed in tandem. Eventually, he eased out of me, pulling my back flush against his broad chest, wrapping one heavy arm over my waist to hold me anchored against his heat. The cool night air drifted over our damp skin. Below, Club O continued its faint, rhythmic pulse, where strangers sought empty pleasure in the dark.

“You took something from me tonight, princess.” His lips brushed my shoulder, his voice not quite steady. “Every time, I told you to trustfall. I never once did it myself.”

“And now?” I asked, turning my head slightly to look at his sharp profile.

“Now I’m still falling.”

I closed my hand over his where it rested against my stomach, lacing my fingers through his. For a man who had built a fortress to ensure no one could ever take anything from him again, it was the most magnificent surrender I would ever receive.

His breathing slowed against my back, the tension bleeding out of his dense muscles until his weight went heavy and even. He drifted into sleep first, but I remained awake in the quiet room.

I lay in the dark, feeling the amethyst pendant warm against my throat, letting reality creep back into my mind.

I had spent the evening listening to his horrors, holding him, telling him he was brave for surviving. Every word I’d spoken had come from the absolute depths of my soul. But I hadn’t had a single second to process the stark, terrifying truth at the core of his confession.

There was a dead man buried beneath the concrete of this building, and Anton had put him there.

I turned those facts over in my mind, waiting for the visceral recoil I knew a civilized, moral woman was supposed to feel.

It didn’t come.

The complete absence of horror unsettled me far more than the murder itself.

I thought of the legal cases I’d read about over the years—women who had killed their abusers and walked out of courtrooms acquitted because a jury recognized that the arithmetic of self-defense changes when a human being is forced to live in terror. But then I thought of the ones who hadn’t walked free, and how the law drew arbitrary lines in the dirt.

There were supposed to be systems for this—courts, judges, and evidence. It was the slow machinery of justice built so that no single man could play God. I had been raised by a righteous mother to believe in those rules.

And yet, I knew with absolute certainty that justice had never existed for the fourteen-year-old boy Anton had been. He’d survived by making himself into something the darkness couldn’t reach, and the grave beneath us was the price of it.

Before Anton, my life was simple. Some might even describe it as boring. Right and wrong were solid, unyielding stones. Tonight, those stones had dissolved into sand beneath my feet, and I couldn’t find the boundary anymore.

I didn’t try to resolve it. I didn’t want to—not tonight.

When I finally allowed my eyes to close, I carried the moral paradox down into sleep unanswered. But I knew, with quiet certainty, that it would be waiting for me when I woke.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Serena

* * *

The hot water beat relentlessly against my skin, as hot as my flesh could bear, yet it failed to penetrate the deep, marrow-cold ache that had settled inside me during the dark hours of the morning.

I stood under the streaming shower in the ensuite off Anton’s bedroom, my forehead resting against the cool, wet tile. Steam billowed around me, softening the sharp edges of the stone, the air rich with the heady fragrance of jasmine soap. My body carried the visceral, exquisite memory of the night before—a deep, thrumming ache between my thighs, the tenderness along my throat where his mouth had devoured me, and the phantom weight of his massive hands holding me as if I were something precious.

He had surrendered to me.

The thought made my pulse race. The most dominant, uncompromising man I had ever known had relinquished his absolute control, yielding his body and his dark soul into my hands. In the dark, wrapped in his heat, whispering that I loved him in my mother’s tongue, everything had seemed so pure. So simple.