“Tell me why,” I coax gently, sliding my fingers up the inside of her arm where her pulse thunders beneath fragile skin. I lean closer, lips near her jaw, my voice a vow sealed in heat.
“Tell me why you killed him.”
Her breath stutters. Her gaze flicks to my mouth for a traitorous second before she snaps it back to mine.
“You don’t know what I’ve done,” she argues back.
“Oh, I do,” I answer, my grip tightening ever so slightly on her armt. “And I’m not here to punish you for it.”
Her chest rises in a quick, sharp breath. “Then why are you here?”
I let the truth slip free, dark and quiet and irreversible.
“To make sure you never have to kill alone again.”
The silence shivers. Her eyes widen but not in horror. It’s relief that swirls there. And want.
She should push me away and scream or run or threaten me with the sharpness she hides behind her calm. Instead, she simply closes the breathless distance between us in surrender. The kind that happens deep beneath the skin. A shift in the air, a loosening in her spine, a single breath that stops being resistance and becomes invitation.
My hand slides from her wrist to her waist, fingers fitting into the fragile dip just above her hip. She stiffens with, I suspect, the shock of wanting something she never thought she’d be allowed to want.
“I don’t need protection,” she whispers, but her voice betrays her. “Not from you.”
A lie she wishes were true. I can feel the tremor of it vibrating through her bones.
“No,” I murmur, my lips brushing the edge of her cheek. “You need to be shown there’s a place for you in this world. And that it’s beside me.”
Her inhale shivers against my mouth.
I tilt her chin up with two fingers. She doesn’t break eye contact. If anything, her gaze sharpens, crystal blue and furious that her body has already begun to make decisions her mind hasn’t approved.
“You think you see me,” she says almost too quietly for me to catch.
“I do see you.” I drag my thumb across her lower lip, slow, deliberate. “You killed a man who deserved to die. And you saved yourself in the meantime.”
Her breath ghosts over my skin, hot and uneven.
“And now?” she manages.
“Now,” I tell her, leaning in until the darkness between us disappears, “I’m the one who decides what happens to you next.”
Her pulse jumps. She holds her ground.
“You don’t want me,” she argues. “I’m nothing.”
“I do want you. Because you’re everything, but more than that, you’re dangerous,” I correct. “And you’re already mine.”
Her lips part on a soft gasp, and I take that as my invitation.
I close my mouth over hers.
The first touch of her lips is a collision, not a kiss. Teeth and breath and a desperate, furious need neither of us meant to feel. She grabs the front of my coat as if she needs the anchor, as if force is the only language she knows how to speak anymore.
I cup the back of her neck and press her harder against me, taking the kiss deeper, claiming every hidden tremor in her body as mine. She tastes like citrus and defiance. Sweet heat wrapped in danger.
When she kisses me back, it hits like a shot to the spine.
Not tentative or afraid. Hungry.
