His free hand digs into my hip, possessive, marking me as his even as he submits. The power play flips and twists between us—me commanding, him devouring—like the unhinged dance we were always meant to have.
The edge approaches fast, too fast, but I don't fight it. I chase it, riding his face with abandon, my breaths coming in sharp pants. "Don't stop," I order, and he doesn't, his tongue relentless until I shatter, crying out as waves crash over me, my thighs clamping around his head.
He doesn't pull away until I push him, collapsing back against the island, chest heaving. Kent stays on his knees, lips glistening, eyes locked on mine with a feral satisfaction. "Forgive me?" he asks, voice hoarse, but there's a challenge in it now, a spark of the predator peeking through the worship.
I laugh, breathless and dark, reaching down to trace his swollen lips. "Not yet. But it's a start."
The air between us crackles, the past and present tangled in this moment of raw, unfiltered need.
Chapter 20 - Kent
It would be an understatement to say I hadn't intended for things to escalate to this.
I'm still on my knees in her living room, pants uncomfortably tight, tasting her on my lips while she stands above me like some avenging goddess who's just delivered judgment through pleasure and pain in equal measure. The sting on both sides of my face reminds me that Lila North doesn't forgive easily—or at all, apparently.
My hands are shaking slightly as I push myself up from the floor, every muscle in my body wound tight with the kind of tension that comes from being brought to the edge of something dangerous and then yanked back at the last second. She's already moving away from me, pulling her pants back on with movements that are deliberately casual, as if what just happened was nothing more than a particularly aggressive negotiation tactic.
Maybe it was.
The woman standing across from me isn't someone I recognize, even though I can see echoes of Delilah in the set of her shoulders, the way she tilts her head when she's processing something complex. Dr. Lila North is a predator in her own right, someone who's learned to weaponize intimacy the same way I once weaponized surgical instruments. She just used my own desire against me, reduced me to begging, and made it feel like a privilege.
Whatever I had expected when I decided to come to her door tonight, this wasn't it.
I'd prepared myself for anger, for accusations, for the possibility that she might actually pull the trigger on that Glock she'd held with such professional steadiness. I'd even prepared for the chance that she might have become someone completely different, someone who'd look at me with disgust or fear or the kind of clinical detachment that comes from studying monsters until they lose their power to horrify.
But this? This controlled fury mixed with undeniable hunger, this ability to take what she wants while making it clear that forgiveness isn't on the table—this is something I hadn't calculated for. She's become dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with weapons or professional authority, dangerous in ways that make my chest tight with something that might be pride or might be terror.
Still, underneath all that hard-earned power and careful control, I can see her. Delilah Jenkins, the girl who once helped me position her father's body with clinical precision, who asked intelligent questions about methodology and philosophy, who looked at me with understanding that went deeper than words. She's still there, buried beneath the glory of her transformation.
I saw it in the hurt in her eyes. The way she sounded, coming apart beneath my lips. The way she tastes exactly the same.
"I need a shower," she says without looking at me, already heading toward what I assume is her bedroom. The dismissal in her voice is clear—this encounter is over, at least for now. "We'll talk more when I get out. If you're still here."
The conditional hits exactly the way she intended it. Because she's giving me an out, a chance to walk away again like I did once. Testing whether I'll choose flight when things get complicated, when the easy categories of right and wrong start blurring into something more complex.
There's something else in her voice, too, something she's trying to hide beneath the casual indifference. Trepidation, maybe. Or hope? Like she's not entirely sure which choice she wants me to make, and the outcome matters more than she's willing to admit.
Maybe that’s my own wishful thinking.
She pauses at the doorway, not quite turning back but not moving forward either. Waiting. The silence stretches between us, loaded with nine years of history and the weight of whatever decision I'm about to make.
"I'll be here," I say, and something in her shoulders relaxes just slightly.
She nods once, quick and sharp, then disappears down the hallway. A moment later, I hear the sound of a shower starting, water running through expensive pipes in an expensive apartment that represents everything she built after I walked away.
I stand in her living room, surrounded by evidence of the life she's constructed without me, and try to process what just happened. Not just the physical encounter—though my body is still humming with the memory of her hands in my hair, her voice commanding me to beg—but the psychological implications of what she's become.
Dr. Lila North isn't just successful or intelligent or professionally accomplished. She's formidable in the way that genuinely dangerous people are formidable, someone who understands power and knows how to use it without hesitation. She held a gun on me with steady hands, analyzed my motivations with clinical precision, and then reduced me to my knees with the kind of calculated cruelty that speaks to deep understanding of human nature.
She's everything I never knew I wanted and everything I was afraid she might become.
The apartment itself tells a story of careful construction and calculated choices. Expensive furniture that looks lived-in but not personal, art that suggests sophisticated taste without revealing anything meaningful about the owner's inner life, books that span professional psychology, true crime, and what looks like advanced forensic pathology. Everything is clean, organized, designed for someone who values control above comfort.
It's beautiful and sterile and completely unlike the girl who used to write me letters about justice and moral complexity while living in her aunt's warm, cluttered house.
But then I notice the details she probably doesn't realize she's included. The way her coffee mug sits beside a half-finished crossword puzzle, the reading glasses folded next to a forensic psychology journal, the small succulent on the windowsill that's been carefully tended despite her claimed lack of time for normal concerns. Signs that Dr. Lila North might be more human than she wants anyone to know.
Signs that Delilah is still in there somewhere, buried beneath layers of professional armor and emotional distance.
