I grab her arm and spin her around to face the wall and slam my hands either side of her head, pinning her in place.
“I needed to be free,” she breathes, craning her head around so she can see me.
I press my body against hers.The pressure of real, living body against body is glorious.A relief and a betrayal as much as it is a fucking revelation.
She’s warm.Too warm, but I don’t want to think about the consequences of what she is right now.
I want to own her.Make her mine all over again so that this time, she doesn’t forgive.I need to fuck the runes off her skin and leave my fingerprints there instead.
“You were mine, Lucy.”
“I still am.”
“Prove it…”
She practically vibrates beneath me.Her arms drift around to her back as she squeezes them between our pressed bodies and unbuckles my trousers.She tries to sneak her hand down into them, but I don’t budge.
“Midnight…” she pants, desperate to have me.
But I don’t want to give myself to her.I want her to feel the misery I did.Forced to think she’d murdered the woman she loves.She needs to understand the pain she put me through.
No.She’s not getting to taste me until she’s answered for what she did.I fist my hand in her hair and yank her off the wall, tipping her so her neck is bared.“Do you have any fucking idea the pain you put me through?”
“Yes,” she says.“I’m so sorry.”
But her words are meaningless.My stomach is hard as steel and hot as lava.The foaming mix seeps into my muscles.Everything is tense with too many fucking emotions and no way to release them.I need to punish her, to make her feel an ounce of the anguish she’s put me through.
A decrepit table sits in the corner of this entrance hall.I shove her towards it.
“Hands on the table.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“I’m not fucking around, Lucy.You hurt me more than you could ever know.”
There’s a switch in her gaze; the lust pooling there cools and simmers to the same bubbling poison in mine.
“You think I wanted this?Do you really believe I wanted to die?To leave you?After everything?”
“I don’t know, did you?Because you sure as shit didn’t warn me?”
She flings her hands up.“Oh, like that would have done any good.You’d have tried to stop me.”
“OF COURSE I WOULD.”
“And then what?”She points a pissy finger in my direction.“Stay trapped under Ignatius for the rest of my life?Never free?Never able to breathe for fear of what freedom he’d take from me next?Fuck that and fuck you for thinking I should live like that, too.”
Her skin is ablaze; I see shapes now.Each one glows so bright she lights up the foyer and several floors of stairs above us.
My body fizzes like I’m surrounded by static and electricity and the hum of unrestrained magic.Which… is exactly what she is right now.Completely uncontrolled power in its rawest, purest form.
If I wasn’t so fucking furious with her, I’d be able to take a moment to appreciate her sheer magnificence.The way her body is a tapestry of marble and silk and magic.The way power thrums under her skin and makes her eyes burn with the energy of a thousand souls.
The pair of us face off, breathing so heavy our shoulders heave up and down.
Both pissed.
Both determined.
