Page 10 of Arrow

After a night of drinking my father’s expensive wine, I woke up in my bathtub with a half-drowned cigarette and a perfect hangover. My phone was full of texts from the wedding planner, and one from a number I didn’t recognize.

Sober up.

I licked a stripe of ash from my wrist and stared at the text. When I didn’t reply, my phone immediately began to ring. I answered, and to my unpleasant surprise, it was Arrow. I would have to block the bastard, but not before I heard him try to keep me in line from miles away.

“Good morning, Harlowe,” Arrow said after two rings.

His voice, as always, belonged on the other end of a confessional.

“It’s a little early for marital bliss.” I shoved myself upright, water slick on my arms, and tried to keep the tremor from my voice.

“My sources say you haven’t eaten in three days.” A pause. “Would you prefer I send a nurse to your house and dose your IV with something more decisive?”

“I’d prefer arsenic. Family tradition.”

He almost laughed. Not quite. “You make it too obvious,” he murmured, almost fond. “If you’re going to poison something, you have to be patient. Otherwise, there’s no pleasure in the anticipation.”

The line went silent. For a heartbeat, I imagined Arrow sitting alone in some penthouse, staring out at the city and savoring the moment.

“I have to go,” I finally managed, stretching my knees so tight against the tub wall that the wine bottle fell, shattering loudly against the marble floor.

“You’ll eat,” he said.

“We’re not married yet, so you can’t tell me what to do.”

“This is the last time I’ll ask,” Arrow said, tone precise. “Disobey me, and I’ll show you just how creative a Romanov can be when denied what’s his.”

He hung up before I could tell him to go fuck himself with a fish fork.

* Princess

4

FOUR

ARROW

Harlowe Virelli. The Daughter of my father’s enemy. The family I’d grown up hating, never knowing why. Since the engagement party, she’d made it her mission to defy me. I found it amusing to watch her squirm under the weight of expectations.

The way she wore the collar I’d gifted her to dinner—a deliberate provocation—had sent a thrill through me I hadn’t felt in years. Women cowered or simpered in my presence, eager to please, terrified of disappointing.

Not Harlowe. She was fire and fury wrapped in a dress that cost more than most people’s lives. She was a study in contrasts that shouldn’t work together but somehow created something devastatingly perfect. Something that made my fingers itch to possess, to mark, to own.

Her eyes were the first thing that had caught me—sapphire blue, the kind of blue you only saw in the Mediterranean at depths where light barely reached. Deep. Dangerous. They held secrets and defiance in equal measure, and when she looked at me, I mean, really looked at me, I felt the impact like a fucking gunshot.

Most people couldn’t hold my gaze for more than a few seconds. Harlowe stared back like she was daring me to blink first, those blue depths lit with challenge and something darker—something that matched the hunger I’d kept leashed inside myself.

Jet-black hair fell in a sleek curtain past her shoulders, so dark it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. I’d watched it catch the chandelier glow at dinner, watched it slide over her bare shoulders like water, like silk I wanted to wrap around my fist while I⁠—

I’d imagined it spread across my pillows more times than I cared to admit. Imagined threading my fingers through it, using it to tilt her head back, to expose that elegant throat she kept so carefully guarded.

Her lips were full, obscenely so, the kind that made men stupid. The kind that looked like they were made for sin and secrets whispered in the dark. I’d watched her press them together when she was angry with me—which was often—watched the way she’d bite the lower one when she was thinking, leaving the faintest impression of teeth.

She wore deep reds that made her look like she’d been drinking blood, and I wanted to know if they’d stain my skin when I finally claimed that mouth the way I’d been fantasizing about since the first time I’d seen her.

Her nose was pert, aristocratic, the kind that spoke of generations of careful breeding and old money. She had a habit of tilting her chin up when she was being particularly defiant, looking down that perfect nose at me like I was something she’d scraped off her Louboutin. It should have infuriated me. Instead, it made me want to see that haughty expression shatter into something desperate and pleading.

Everything about her was refined, polished, and expensive. From the sharp cut of her cheekbones to the graceful column of her throat to the way she carried herself like she owned every room she entered. She was bred for this world the same way I was—raised to be beautiful and ruthless and utterly untouchable.