Page 89 of Ruin
The knife shakes.
I wrap my fingers around hers, not pulling the blade away, just steadying her grip.
Her blood-warm hand sits inside mine, the handle between our palms, the blade still kissing my throat.
My blood is on both our fingers now, slick and warm, and the intimacy of it is more obscene than anything I've ever done to her in the dark rooms of Hell.
"That's the part that's killing you, isn't it?" I murmur. "Not what I did. What you still feel."
She kisses me.
Except it's not a kiss. It's a collision.
Her mouth crashes into mine with teeth and fury and the copper taste of my blood from the cut on my throat, smeared between our lips like a sacrament.
She bites my lower lip—hard, hard enough to split it, the same place she split it on our reunion night—and the sound that comes out of me is something I don't recognize.
Raw. Pained. Hungry in a way that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with the woman on top of me who is tearing me apart with her teeth and her grief and the knife she's forgotten she's holding.
I flip her.
One movement.
Hip bridge, shoulder rotation, mechanics my body learned before it learned anything gentle.
The knife skitters from her grip and clatters across the hardwood, spinning into the darkness under her dresser, and then it's my weight pressing her into the mattress and my hands pinning her wrists above her head and her legs kicking against mine with genuine, furious force.
She fights me.
Not the performative resistance of our games in Hell, not the choreographed push-and-pull of dominance and submission that we both understood was theater.
She actually fights.
Nails raking down my forearm hard enough to tear skin.
Knee driving toward my groin—I block it with my thigh and the impact sends a jolt of pain up my hip.
Her teeth snap at my jaw, my ear, anything within range, and I pin her wrists with one hand and use my weight to press her into stillness.
"Get off me."
"No."
"I said get off?—"
"I heard you." I settle between her thighs, and even through the thin fabric between us, I can feel the heat of her, and she can feel me, and the way her breath catches is a confession her mouth would never make. "Your mouth says one thing. Your body's saying something else."
"My body is a liar."
"Your body is the only honest part of you right now."
I don't undress her gently.
I hook my fingers into the waistband of her shorts and pull them down in one rough motion. She kicks, connects with my ribs—a solid hit that makes me grunt and will leave a bruise by morning—but I don't stop.
I pin her legs apart with my knees and run my hand up the inside of her thigh, and the sound she makes when my fingers find her is somewhere between a sob and a curse.
She's soaked.
