Page 284 of What We Burn

“Hands flat on the mat, Knox.” She doesn’t blink, and there it is—the steel beneath the softness, the part of her that grabs knives and doesn’t flinch. “Don’t move them until I say.”

I put my palms flat on the mat.

She moves over me, straddling my thighs, and leans in. The flannel brushes my bare chest. She’s so close I can feel her breath.

“You like watching?” she murmurs against my jaw. “Watch this.”

She shrugs the flannel off one shoulder. Then the other. It slides down her arms and pools around her knees on the mat. She’s bare from the waist up, straddling me while I sit with my hands where she told me to put them and my self-control hanging by its fingernails.

“Fury.”

“Mm?”

“I’m going to need permission to move my hands.”

She considers this. Takes her time about it. Runs one finger down the center of my chest, between my pecs, over the sage plant and the bees, all the way to my waistband. I feel every inch of it.

“Permission denied,” she says, and kisses me.

Her mouth is slow and deliberate. She tastes like cool water, with heat underneath. She takes my lower lip between her teeth and pulls, and I growl, and my hands flex against the mat because every instinct I have is screaming to pick her up and put her where I want her.

I don’t. She told me not to.

And fuck me, she’s good at it.

She pulls back. Her eyes are dark. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s breathing hard and grinning, and she’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever seen.

“Okay,” she says. “Now you can move your hands.”

I’m on her before she finishes the sentence. My arms around her waist, her body pulled flush against mine, my mouth finding hers in a kiss that’s not gentle and not slow and not anything except exactly what I need.

She laughs against my mouth. It turns into a moan. The moan turns into my name.

I pick her up. She locks her legs around me. Her bare chest is pressed against mine and her hands are looped around my neck and I’m carrying her toward the door because the mat is too thin, the concrete beneath it is unforgiving, and what I’m about to do to her requires a surface that won’t leave bruises.

“Upstairs?” she asks against my neck.

“Upstairs.”

“The bedroom has people in it.”

“I know.” I push through the door and head for the stairs. “That’s the point.”

She pulls back enough to look at me. Her eyes are bright. Her grin is wicked.

“You want an audience.”

“I want them to see how pretty you are when you shatter.”

She cups my face and kisses me once more, softer this time, a private thing between the two of us before we become public.

“Then let’s give them a show,” she says.

SEVENTY-THREE

SAGE

Five weeks after the Kennel goes dark, I let myself through the side entrance of the funeral home and climb the narrow stairs to Dean’s apartment.