Page 88 of Ruin
Fast. Faster than I expected, faster than I taught her, which means she's been practicing something in her own time that wasn't in any of my lessons.
The weight of her hits my chest, and I'm on my back before my hand leaves the air above her jaw.
She straddles me, knees pinning my hips, and a blade appears from somewhere—under the pillow, the mattress, I don't know—and it's at my throat before I can process what the fuck just happened.
Kitchen knife. Eight-inch blade, serrated edge, the kind you use on bread or bone.
She's been sleeping with it.
Three nights running, she's been falling asleep with a knife within reach because the gun on the nightstand wasn't close enough, wasn't personal enough for the kind of killing she's been imagining.
Her hand is shaking. Not from fear. From the effort of holding back.
"You don't get to come here." Her voice is raw, wrecked, stripped down to the wire beneath the composure she wears like a second skin. "You don't get to watch me sleep. You don't get to touch me."
I hold perfectly still, my hands at my sides, palms flat against the comforter.
Every instinct I have is screaming to grab her wrist, disarm her, flip her beneath me and pin her down until she stops shaking.
I override all of it because she needs this.
She needs to hold the blade and feel the power of it and know that the choice is hers, that whatever happens in this room happens because she decides, not because I manipulate it.
"Then kill me," I say. My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. "You've had a week. If you were going to do it, you would have done it."
"Don't tell me what I would have done."
"I'm telling you what I know. You had a gun. You had evidence. You had every reason. And you let me walk out." I tilt my chin up, pressing my throat into the serrated edge. The sting is immediate and specific, a thin line of heat that blooms into wet warmth as the skin parts. "So either use that knife, little wolf, or put it down and let’s deal with what's actually happening between us."
Her eyes are dark in the moonlight.
The hazel’s gone nearly black, pupils blown wide, and the expression on her face is something I'll carry with me regardless of what happens next.
Fury and grief and desire and disgust, all of it churning behind her eyes like weather she can't control.
"What's actually happening between us," she repeats. The blade presses harder. Another millimeter of steel into skin, and the blood is running now, a warm trickle down the side of myneck and into the collar of my shirt. "What's happening is that I'm sitting on top of the man who murdered my parents, and I can't decide whether to cut your throat or?—"
She stops, and Ifeelit.
The involuntary shift of her weight, the way her hips roll against mine in a movement so small she probably doesn't even register it consciously, but I register it.
My body registers it with the same predatory awareness it registers everything about her—the catch in her breathing, the flush creeping up her throat, the tension in her thighs that isn't just adrenaline.
She feels me harden beneath her, and the expression on her face cracks.
Not with desire. With horror.
At me, at herself, at the sickness of this moment and the fact that her body doesn't care about murder or betrayal or any of the reasons she should be driving that knife home instead of grinding against me in the dark.
"You hate me," I say. Not a question.
"Yes."
"You want me dead."
"Yes."
"And you're wet right now."
