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“What kind of question is that?”
“Like that jacket is yours. Am I yours?” She points to the jacket I’d tossed aside. I’m not sure where she’s going with this. “Because you discarded that easily enough. Am I like all your possessions? Easily discarded?”
“Christ, Madelena,” I say, the beginnings of a headache throbbing against my temples. I shake my head, lift her. She yelps when I do, but I carry her to the bed and sit her on the edge of it, standing close enough so she can’t run away. I undo more buttons of my shirt, hearing it tear as I tug it off.
She sets her hands on my stomach, gaze moving over me momentarily and her eyes widening as she takes in the map of a violent past. She tries to push me backward to stand, so I let her, holding her close, skin to skin. She is still for a moment, and I take in the warmth of her, lean in to kiss her neck. But what I smell is another man’s scent on her. Brother or not, I don’t like it.
I meet her eyes, wrap my hand around the back of her neck, and weave my fingers into her hair to tug her head backward and sniff like I’m a fucking dog. I draw back, and she stares up at me.
“Why do I smell my brother on you?”
“Because you weren’t here, remember?”
“What did he do?”
“Do you care?”
“What. Did. He. Do?”
Her gaze falters. I hear how I sound, and I know how I must look because she looks wary of me. “He took me to the dinner.”
I grip her jaw, see that smear of lipstick. I touch it, wondering suddenly if it was her who wiped it away or if it’s smeared from kissing because Thiago’s damning words keep going around and around in my head.
Caius wouldn’t touch what’s mine. Would he?
“Did he see you?”
“See me?”
“Like this.” I draw back, sweeping my gaze over her. Her nipples pebble, and her arms are dotted with goosebumps. “Did he see you undressed?”
“Would you care if he did?”
“Damn it! Did he see you?”
“Would you care if he did?” she asks again, dropping into a seat, no longer fighting. Just quiet. Just sad.
It’s that sadness that makes me pause. “You are my wife, Madelena. You belong to me. Only me.”
“I’m your possession.”
I study her. And I see her. Beneath that sadness, I see her—and I see hurt.
I draw her up to stand, pull her to me, because I realize something as I look into those honey-colored depths and see the stain of tears. I know it as I caress her hair, my touch gentle. Careful. It’s a thing I’ve always known about her on some level. And I know it now in the twisting of my gut.
“Are you so unaccustomed to being wanted?” I hear myself ask, and it’s those words that make her go perfectly still, that have tears streaming from the corners of her beautiful eyes. Those words that have her resisting, fighting, but also giving in, hands coming to my shoulders not to push me away but to hold onto me.
She looks at me through that veil of sadness, touches my face, pushes my hair back. And then she kisses me. Eyes open, she kisses me. It’s the first time she’s done that, the first time I haven’t taken the kiss. And that kiss, it moves something in my gut. My chest.
That kiss, it’s everything.
My exhale is her name as I lay her on the bed, stripping away her panties and pushing into her. She clings to me, arching her back with an audible exhale as I watch.
I’ve only fucked one other woman apart from her. I’ve never wanted anyone else, not even for simple release. What I want with her now, it’s not sex. It’s not to come. It’s more, so much more. I need to be inside her, to be close to her. It’s raw and full and I can’t get close enough to this woman.
What we’re doing, me moving inside her, her clinging to me, it’s love making. Deep and soft and hard at once. And needy. So fucking needy. I can’t fucking stop kissing her, looking at her. I can’t stop breathing in her breath, and I can’t fucking look away from her eyes, from the brokenness, the openness. The vulnerability inside them. She’s giving it to me like a gift.
That thought and the damage I can do is more terrifying than any game the Commander could play, any sadistic punishment he could think up.
Because in my arms, beneath me, is my redemption.
But it’s a double-edged sword because I know I can break her.
Madelena sucks in a ragged breath and her teeth find my lower lip. When the walls of her pussy throb around my cock, I feel the pain of this knowledge. The only relief is the fact that just as I can break her, so can she break me.
I know it as I draw back to look at her soft face in the aftermath of our love making.
She and I have always been destined to be together. For better or worse. Even before our blood oath. We can each be the other’s savior. Or the other’s destruction. This is our destiny. Until death do us part.
