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His mouth skims over mine as he breathes in my scent, relying on ancient senses to understand us.
“I can’t make sense of this,” he says, our thoughts again perfectly in tune. “Of us. From the moment I saw you at The Rite, you ignited cravings in me that were animalistic yet beyond the animal.”
He pushes me down onto the bed, one hand still on my face while the other one supports his weight. I don’t offer any resistance as his body hovers over mine. My mouth waters from how much I want to touch him, caress him, run my fingers over his skin, and forget all about manipulations and goals. All about the orphanage, the city mafia, the Blood Fist Triad, and Joseph.
I tip my chin slightly upward, my lips giving in to his gentle kiss. When he breaks it, slowly, our eyes lock, and there’s nothing but naked truth between us, raking through our hearts. Words unspoken and feelings so raw it would be hard to put them into the rigid vessels of language. I’m the one who invites him for another kiss, and then another, cupping his powerful jaw with my hands and wanting nothing more than to let him sink into me. Yearning to merge with him at all possible levels, I move under him, all but spreading my legs to take him inside me.
“Ah, Sirenna,” he whispers, and I know he’s struggling to stop. Which is what we should do. After just one more kiss. I nip his bottom lip, moaning with my eyes squeezed shut to keep from biting in too hard. I want him so badly that I need to taste his blood.
He hisses, and a copper tang spreads over the tip of my tongue. Only now do I realize that I couldn’t resist and went all the way.
“You think you want me badly?” I whisper, my heart beating like crazy inside my chest. “If you only knew.” But I stop short when something beyond threat flickers in his eyes. Pure, barely veiled insanity.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to me,” he growls. “But I can’t fucking stop wanting you.”
“Because you don’t drink from the right well.” It’s an effort not to claw my hands into his hair and force him close, kissing him wildly, matching his intensity. But I have to take my own advice and identify the well that we both so desperately need.
“It makes sense that you don’t know how to find it if you haven’t been in a proper relationship before. But I–”
“I don’t want to think about other guys drinking from your essence,” he says through his teeth. “And neither do you.”
I stroke his strong cheekbone, and damn, it feels like petting a tiger between bars. “I haven’t gotten that deep before either.” When he goes completely still, reveling in my touch, I continue carefully. “You were right about me and Joseph. He fascinated me because he was a father figure who gave me the attention my real father never did. I felt invisible to my dad, but, in contrast, I was very visible to Joseph. On the other hand, he was everything I wanted to be. I identified with him more than I wanted to have him.”
“And all he really wanted was to own everything you were, and he was not,” Zayne says like a voice from my own subconscious. My hands move down his neck, his shoulders, caressing him greedily.
“They say there’s always some level of delusion in love,” I continue. “That we are more in love in the beginning because we don’t actually know the person, they are basically just a framework with many gaps that we get to fill in. And Joseph filled those gaps with himself for a while, until he realized I was more than just a vessel he could inhabit.” My eyes rest on his lips.
“And that’s where envy kicked in,” Zayne continues in my place. “He thought that owning you would fix him. You were just an accessory to him, it’s what he wanted to reduce you to. And you played that game for a while because you wanted to make that marriage work, but you couldn’t do that without losing yourself. So you turned to the only coping mechanism you had available–booze.”
Memories swirl around in my head. The bottles of champagne in the corner bar at the apartment I shared with Joseph. The trays that servers swept around at events. How I took another drink every time Joseph dismissed me in a discussion with his friends, or turned his attention to one of the men when they began talking over me. Or how his eye wandered after an ass-swaying waitress on the occasions when he did let me finish whatever I had to say, as if he needed a distraction to get him through the ordeal.
“I am no less possessive,” Zayne says. With us both lying down, and his bulk blocking out the twinkling city lights, the darkness weighs heavier. “On the contrary, my need to own you is even sicker. Joseph never locked you in his penthouse. He was willing to share you with other men by the end, while I’d fucking bite the head off of any guy that got too close. I’d beat them to a pulp to make sure they understand you’re only mine.”
He sounds batshit crazy, and a small voice in my head tells me that I should stop him from going there. But my hands keep wandering over his body, feeling territorial. Every word that leaves his mouth gives me sick pleasure, my toes curling into the silken sheets.
“If you only knew how I fantasized about smashing your bartender’s head into the counter for hitting on you when you first met. For ever thinking that he was good enough for you.”
I open my mouth to reply, but he places a finger on my lips. “I know. He learned his place when he saw the two of us together. But I still don’t feel the offense is cleared. I probably never will.”
“Why?” I whisper against his finger. It’s torture, keeping myself from flicking out my tongue and licking it.
His powerful legs flex against my inner thighs, forcing them wider open. Then his length is pressed against my pussy, a steel rod ready to pierce me.
“Because I can’t imagine anyone touching you without losing my mind.” Removing his finger from my mouth, he licks the seam between my lips. I’m only marginally aware of how I’m shivering against him.
“Joseph never fucking deserved you.” He tilts his head to the side. “But you projected your dreams on him because you needed love, even if you didn’t know it. Even if you believed that love was a fairy tale only the little girl you’d once been believed in. Being raised in a dysfunctional family had killed that fairy tale for you.”
He cups my chin with two fingers, angling my face so I can no longer escape his penetrating gaze. “Yet the little girl is still there. You drink to silence her, hoping that if you keep yourself numb long enough, she’s going to finally die, and there will be silence. Problem is, the stubborn little thing is indestructible.”
While there are several ways someone with his reach and influence could get the details of my past, there’s no way he could have known how I felt. I wasn’t completely aware of it myself until he verbalized it just now.
“That girl you’re talking about,” I whisper, covering his knuckles with my palms. “She knew emotion. I remember perfectly how she used to feel. But you, Zayne–” I suck in a deep breath. “If you look far enough, what do you find beyond the envy?”
After a short pause in which he seems to just relish my touch he says, “If I knew, you probably would, too. You were inside that dream with me.”
His thighs flex against mine and he pushes his length against me.
“I keep thinking that maybe if I fuck you just one more time,” he purrs while grinding himself into me, my body filling with need, “then maybe I could get deep enough.”
