She nods, and I can’t control the next words out of my mouth. But I wouldn’t want to.
“God, I fucking love you.”
40
BEA
We kiss, and I melt in his arms.
“I love you, Bea Mendez.” He pulls back from my lips just long enough to sweep me off my feet.
“Raffaele!” I can’t help but giggle, even as the blood on him squeaks against my skin.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He carries me across the bathroom.
It’s enormous—I didn’t take it in before, when the only thing in the room was him and what he was doing. Now I see the size of it. And at the far end, away from the corner where it happened, the shower: a glass enclosure standing on its own in the middle of the floor, the size of a small bedroom, four walls of glass already fogged white from the inside. Victor must have turned it on a while ago and never gotten in. The water’s been running hot long enough that the whole room is dense with steam, the mirrors blind with it.
Raffaele doesn’t put me down to undress me. Instead, he kicks the glass door open with his foot and steps inside with me still in his arms, into the heat, into the water, and the spray hits both of us at once.
The blood on him becomes the blood on me, until the water sheets off his chest and his arms and runs pink down both of us.
He sets me down on my feet and starts ripping off my clothes. His hands are fast and rough and certain, and the steam is so thick now I can barely see the glass walls around us.
“Turn around.”
I do as I’m told.
He puts a hand flat between my shoulder blades and gently presses me forward until my palms are against the glass. The glass is hot and slick and fogged, and there’s nothing on the other side of it—no room, no light, just white steam and the pink the water makes of what’s running off us.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. His fingers wrap around my hips. He pushes into me from behind in one passionate stroke.
I whimper with pleasure, the pain melting away under heat and need.
“Mine,” he whispers against my ear. “You’re mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours?—“
“Louder.”
“Yours.”
He groans into my neck, and his hand leaves my hip, sliding around and down between my legs. His fingers find me without slowing the rhythm of his hips, and I come apart almost immediately, embarrassingly fast, clenching around him hard enough that he curses and his rhythm finally breaks.
He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me upright against him, my back to his chest, his other hand sliding up to my throat. His mouth is at my ear, saying filthy things I’ll never to repeat to anyone, low and wrecked and mine. He’s close. I can feel it in the way his rhythm’s gone ragged, in the way his hand has tightened on my throat.
“I’m never letting you go again,” he groans.
He pushes up into me one more time and holds himself there, deep, and I feel him let go—feel the heat of it, feel him shake against my back with his face buried in my wet hair and his arm locked across my chest like he’s afraid I’ll dissolve if he loosens it.
I fall over the edge with him.
Neither of us moves for a while. The water runs clear off both of us now. Raffaele holds me up, his heart beating hard against my back.
It doesn’t matter that there’s a decapitated body lying in a pool of blood only a few feet away. Nothing exists but him. Butus.
And it’s heaven.
