I blink up at him, lashes clumped together with water and tears, and when I speak my voice comes out broken, a cracked whisper scraped from the rawest part of me.
“Where were you?”
The question barely exists, just air and ache, but Rafe hears it like a gunshot.
His jaw flexes under my fingertips, and his eyes—storm-dark and blown wide, something feral burning behind them—lock onto mine with a focus so sharp it carves straight down my spine as the water pounds against the tiles and his breath comes back in a slow, heavy drag, like he’s forcing his lungs to work again.
For a long second, he says nothing. Then, very low and very quiet—“I was killing the man who touched what’s mine.”
The words vibrate through me, sinking into my bones, my ribs, my throat, so heavy they nearly take my knees out from under me, because possessive doesn’t even begin to cover it, this is something deeper and darker—not claiming, but marking, naming, feeding something in both of us that shouldn’t feel good, but does.
Rafe leans in, mouth brushing my temple, voice a whisper of heat against my skin. “He doesn’t exist anymore.”
Something collapses in my chest—something old and black and rotted. The part that still flinched at locker doors, the part that still believed maybe it was my fault, the part that whispered Nathan was the last person who would ever really want me. All of it is gone, burned out in the raw heat of Rafe’s voice.
My hands seize before my brain catches up. I fist handfuls of his soaked black shirt, the fabric clinging to muscle, heat, and rage, and yank him toward me—no grace, no warning, no breath. I pull him down into a kiss that’s all blood and brokenness and baptism: teeth, tongue, a choked sob buried behind my teeth as my mouth slams into his.
Rafe answers like he’s starving. He growls into me, grabbing the back of my head so hard I feel his fingers knotting in my scalp, nails digging in as if he’s afraid I’ll disappear again. His mouth crashes against mine, wet and furious, teeth dragging my lower lip open like he’s punishing me for surviving without him.
The kiss isn’t sweet. It isn’t tender. It’s a war. He devours me, pressing me back into the wall with all his heat and weight and drenched cotton, tongue pushing into my mouth like it belongs there, like he’s been dying without the taste of me. I moan—desperate—and he swallows the sound whole, pressing harder, deeper, hips flush to mine, chest crushing me into the tile as if I’m something he needs to own just to breathe.
My fingers curl tighter into his shirt as I kiss him back with everything I have left—everything that hasn’t cracked open in the last four days. It pours out now: rage, relief, terror, lust, love. I hate that word, but it’s there, woven into the desperate way my mouth finds his again and again, into the broken whimpers I can’t hold back, into the way I let my body shatter under the crushing weight of his.
He breaks the kiss just long enough to drag in one wrecked breath—then he’s on me again, teeth grazing my jaw, my neck, scraping deliberately over the faint tape mark like he knows exactly what it means to me. “You’re mine,” he snarls against my throat, the words vibrating like a brand searing into skin.
And I let him. Fuck, I let him.
His hands slide down my body in one clean, devastating movement—fingertips tracing bruises, ribs, hips—before slipping under my thighs and gripping tight, possessive, like he’s done waiting for gentle, like the relief finally snapped and something darker surged to the surface.
Then he lifts me like I weigh nothing, like I belong off the ground, like he can’t fucking breathe unless I’m wrapped around him.
I gasp—loud, guttural—as my back slams against the wall again and my legs hook around his hips on pure instinct. Water crashes down on us, steam curling up like smoke, and I realize too fucking late what’s happening—what I asked for—what he’s about to do to me, still clothed, still wrecked, still recovering from almost dying.
Rafe grinds up into me hard, hips slamming forward, and my head cracks against the tile in a wet tangle of hair and moaning teeth.
“Jesus fuck—Rafe—”
Too late.
He growls like a beast finally let off the leash, mouth dragging down my neck, tongue hot against the tape line as he ruts into me with brutal, unrelenting pressure—soaked denim against bare skin, friction and heat and filth exploding under every thrust. The clothes make it worse. Better. Realer. He fucks against me like he’s trying to erase something, grind it out of me, leave nothing but him.
I gasp again, louder this time, my spine arching hard off the wall as he finds that spot, that perfect, punishing angle—his cock grinding against mine with just enough pressure to black out my vision for a heartbeat. My arms fly around his neck, thighs clenching tight, and my body—my poor, shaking, near-dead body—wakes the fuck up, every nerve screaming back to life.
“Oh fuck—fuck, Rafe—”
His mouth is at my ear now, breath heavy and ragged, voice shredded raw. “You feel that?” Another thrust—hard, sharp, deliberate. “You feel me?” He bites down on my shoulder, teeth sinking in like a claim. “No one else. No fucking one. Say it.”
My brain is melting. My body is shaking. I’m so hard it hurts, and he hasn’t even gotten us naked—just wet, just ruined, just pressed so close I can feel his heartbeat slamming against mine through soaked clothes.
And I’ve never been more awake in my life.
22
RAFE
Islam into him again—hard—denim grinding against bare, trembling skin, and he breaks beneath me. His head cracks back against the wall, mouth falling open on a wrecked sound, thighs clenching tighter around my waist like he’s terrified I’ll vanish again, like he still doesn’t believe I’m staying. Like he doesn’t understand I’m not going anywhere. Not now. Not ever.
His body is fire in my hands, breath coming in shattered gasps, cock pressed hot and twitching against mine, leaking, begging without words. He looks so fucking beautiful like this—flushed and ruined in my grip, bare under the spray, moaning like I just hauled him back from the dead. But he didn’t ask. Didn’t beg. Didn’t give me anything except pure, animal desperation and instinct.
