He kissed me as if he hated himself for needing me too deeply like someone who’d buried his love in a tomb and found it clawing its way back out.
“Say it again,” he whispered against my lips.
“Make love to me.”
His hands were slow and almost trembling when they slipped beneath my dress. His mouth left a trail down my neck, my collarbone, pausing at each place where pain had lived in silence. He didn’t speak, he simply touched me.
I arched into him.
To feel something real when everything else felt like smoke and mirrors and half-buried lies.
My fingers tangled in his hair. My tears wet his shoulder. He kissed them on my cheeks like absolution.
And I prayed to the lord to let me find salvation, if I was considered eligible for it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Reaching Salvation
His hands were still on my neck. Firmly controlling. The way a storm pins a tree in place before it decides whether to uproot it. He was deracinating me in the same manner.
The edge of the table bit into my spine, cold wood searing through the thin barrier of fabric that was no longer entirely whole. My breath came in sharp, unsteady bursts; every exhale and inhale seemed to tangle in the fist he had buried in my hair.
I was shivering, though my skin burned.
Tears streaked down my face, carving black rivers through the ruins of my mascara. I didn’t care how I looked, only how it felt to be held like this. To be broken open by someone who had studied the architecture of my defences long enough to know exactly where to strike.
He was my enigma.
“More,” I choked out, though I couldn’t name what I meant. More of what? I wanted to ask myself. More of who? I didn’t know. “Hurt me. Destroy me. Don’t stop until you’ve emptied every last piece of me…”
His eyes caught the light. If steel could burn, it would burn like that. My tormentor didn’t speak a word. He didn’t need to. The air between us was enough. It’d been loaded for some time, and now it was detonating.
He moved against me like a never-ending war. Like every motion was a siege and every pause a test of whether I’d surrender or burn. My body answered before my mind could think. My voice cracked hymn to ruin.
I clung to him as though holding him tighter would make him crueller. I wanted cruelty. I wanted him to be the blade and me the skin. I wanted pain that rewrote me.
Relief hit me. Lighting splitting the tree open. My vision blurred, my body buckled, and I bit back a cry that still escaped, ragged and too human.
But in the same breath, he was gone.
Not gone entirely; his hands were still there, steadying me, but the war had stopped. The storm had passed. My body, still caught in the aftershock, searched for the rest of him, confused and empty.
I looked for him, and then at him. Lips parted to ask why, but he was already adjusting the cuffs of his shirt, fastening himself back into the pristine calm that always came after his tempests. His movements were deliberate, measured and maddening.
Before I could speak, he bent and swept my brokenness into his arms. I should have fought it, demanded answers, clawed at the silence, but my limbs betrayed me. He fucked me like a madman. Rearranged my guts. Sucked my soul.
My head found its place against his shoulder, and the scent of him seeped into my lungs like a drug I didn’t want to recover from.
The room spun, not from dizziness, but from the whiplash of him; how he could strip me to bone and then cradle me as though I were the last holy thing in his keeping.
I closed my eyes. The world narrowed to his steady heartbeat beneath my ear, the faint rasp of his breath above my head. Somewhere between waking and the dark pull of sleep, I felt cool water against my skin, the ghost of his touch as he wiped away the evidence of my ruin.
Fabric whispered around me as he dressed me in something soft. My mind was too heavy to hold questions anymore. His warmth pressed against my back, the gravity of his arm securing me against his chest, staking a claim in my dreams as well as my waking life.
Just before I slipped under, his soft, low, and rough voice brushed my ear subtly.
“Sleep, Dolcezza. Your husband will chase away your demons.”
