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Something had changed in Roma’s expression. Juliette inhaled sharply, a small, quick breath. It might have gone unnoticed, if Roma hadn’t been so close. He noticed.
He always noticed.
“Why do you flinch?” Roma asked. His voice dropped to a conspiring, merciless whisper. “Do you fear me?”
A hot fury swept into Juliette’s stilled veins. Such an insolent question reawakened all of her dulled senses, sweeping back the numbness of the alcohol.
“I have never feared you.”
Juliette reversed their bodies in one deft push. Bitter and resentful and aggrieved, she hooked her legs around his and twisted her hips until Roma was the one flat on his back and she loomed over him, kneeling on the sheets. Though she attempted to pin his shoulders down as he had done to her, it was a half-hearted, head-spinning attempt. Roma merely looked upon the ire in her manner and responded in kind.
He sat up fast, shaking her grip loose. But he did not act further. They remained as they were—too close, too entwined. She was straddling his lap; he was hovering merely inches away.
One of his hands landed on her ankle. Her hand came down on his neck.
“Perhaps,” Roma said, his words barely audible, “you do not fear me. But”—his hand was moving higher and higher, brushing her calf, her knee, her thigh. Juliette’s palm sank lower, until it was gripping the space underneath the smooth collar of his white shirt—“you have always feared weakness.”
Juliette snapped her gaze up. Their eyes met, murky and drunk and alert and challenging all at once, the loosest they had ever been and sharper than ever, somehow—somehow.
“And is this weakness?” she asked.
She didn’t know who was breathing harder—her or Roma. They hovered a gasp away, daring the other to make the first move, daring the other to give in to what neither wanted to admit they wanted, what neither wanted to admit was something that was happening, what neither wanted to admit was a mere replay of history.
They both gave in at once.
Roma’s kiss was just as she remembered. It filled her with so much adrenaline and exuberance that she could burst. It made her feel too ethereal for her own body, as if she could tear out of her own skin.
The alcohol had tasted terrible in its glass, but its remnants were wholly sweet on Roma’s tongue. His teeth grazed her lower lip, and Juliette arched against him, her hands running across his shoulders, down the hard muscles along his sides, up his shirt, and against the burning warmth of his bare skin.
Her blood was roaring in her ears. She felt his lips move from her mouth to her jaw to her collarbone, burning everywhere he touched. Juliette couldn’t think, couldn’t speak—her head was spinning and her world was spinning and she wanted nothing else in this moment than to continue spinning, spinning, spinning. She wanted to veer off course. She wanted to be out of control forever.
Four years ago, they had been innocent and young and good. Their love had been sweet, something to protect, simpler than life itself. Now they were monstrous; now they were pressed against each other and giving off the same heady perfume of the brothel they hid inside, drunk off more than just cheap tequila. Hunger and desire fueled their every move. Juliette tore at the buttons down Roma’s front and she was pushing his shirt off, gripping at the scars and the old wounds that ran down his back.
“Call a truce,” Juliette murmured against his lips. They needed to stop. She couldn’t stop. “You are torturing me.”
“We are not at war,” Roma replied softly. “Why call a truce?”
Juliette shook her head. She closed her eyes, let the sensation of his lips brushing against her jaw roll through her. “Aren’t we?”
We are.
The realization hit Juliette like a bucket of ice, sinking into her bones with a sort of cold found six feet underground. She burrowed her face into the crook of Roma’s neck, forcing herself not to break, not to cry. Roma sensed the change before Juliette had even realized it herself, his arms coming around to hold her.
“What are you doing, Roma Montagov?” Juliette whispered, her voice only a rasp. “What are you doing to me?”
Wasn’t playing with her heart once enough? Hadn’t he already torn her in two and left her to the wolves once before?
Roma did not say anything. Juliette could read nothing from him, not even when she lifted her head and looked at him with wide, blinking eyes.
Juliette lurched away suddenly, scrambling to stand. Only then did Roma react. Only then did he reach out and grab her wrist, whispering, “Juliette.”
“What?” she hissed back. “What, Roma? Do you wish to explain what this is between us, when you made it achingly clear four years ago where your heart stands? Shall I hold you at gunpoint until you have no choice but to admit you are once again playing me—”
“I am not.”
Juliette reached into her dress, tore out the gun she had hidden in its folds. With the hand she had free, she pulled the safety and pressed the barrel to the underside of his jaw—to the soft part where her mouth had been merely minutes before—and all Roma did was lift his chin so the gun would sink in further, until the muzzle was only another press of a kiss against his skin.
“I cannot fathom it,” she breathed. “You destroy me and then you kiss me. You give me reason to hate you and then you give me reason to love you. Is this a lie or the truth? Is this a ploy or your heart reaching for me?”
