Page 114 of Arrow

The words set off an incendiary chain inside my skull. I could feel the rush blazing up from my center, every stroke ratcheting another bolt loose. It was mortifying to be fucked so naked—so helpless against the hard grain, spit pooling on the closet door while every impact stamped the future into my spine, but it was also an exorcism, a violence that felt the most like love.

I fucking needed it, and he knew it.

Changing the angle, his hand shoved my hip into a new alignment and drove into me at a slant. I shrieked, the sound ripped raw and unfiltered. The only way to answer was to bear down, fuck him back, and meet every thrust with a hunger that refused to let the brute win without a fight.

“My name—my fucking name, Harlowe,” he gritted out, teeth bared at my ear, both of us reduced to the language of animals. When I came again, I bucked so hard we almost toppled, my legs giving out from under me. The only thing keeping me up was the pressure of his body against mine.

“Arrow, fuck. Don’t fucking stop.”

Jesus fucking Christ.

I came so hard my vision went white at the edges, then flooded with color. My body locked down on him, muscles clenching so tight I couldn’t breathe. It was a baptism by the devil’s dick.

Arrow’s rhythm fractured—once, twice—and then he was shouting my name, raw and unhinged, like I was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth.

My legs failed, knees scraping down the door, palms splayed for purchase, sobbing—yes, sobbing—caught somewhere close to surrender. He followed me down, not gently. We collapsed in a wet heap, my hair wild and matted to his cheek.

Arrow pressed his forehead to my bare shoulder and stitched our hands together.

He eased out of me slowly, and every ruined nerve re-fired. There was a noise—a shivering, half-delirious laugh—maybe from him, maybe from me. My body convulsed once, twice, then let go. He rolled us until I was on my back, his weight pressing down but not crushing.

Thumb finding my jaw, he wiped away the blood from where I’d bitten my bottom lip. His pupils were saucers, the color ringed in pale blue, and the smile this time wasn’t a weapon, but a gift.

I gently kissed his neck, then nibbled his earlobe. He groaned, more animal than man, and with it, the world realigned. Not Romanov, not Virelli, not even the ancient ledger balanced between the two, but simply us, two bodies locked together in the infinite currency of violence and need.

We crawled from the floor to the bed—impossible to say who propelled whom, just a tumble of limbs and heat. He mounted me again, his cock still hard, the chain wrapped around his fist like a leash. He tugged only when I tried to raise my head and look away from the eye contact he demanded.

“Eyes on me, moya prekrasnaya gadyuka.”⁠*

He pushed inside me again, slower this time, letting me feel every thick inch as he filled me. Arrow fucked me with the intention of obliterating the world outside, slowing only to taste the salt at my temples, and to press his mouth to the bloom of each bruise as if to name them after himself.

This time, when he came inside me, it wasn’t a surrender but a benediction.

His body convulsed, and for a split second, the look on his face was pure, almost religious, as if it cost him as much as it gifted me. Arrow shuddered, collapsed, then buried his face in my neck as his breath skittered out in ragged, hungry surges.

We lay like that, fucked together in a wet tangle, long enough for the sweat to cool and the shudders to turn loose and maybe, just maybe, for the possibility of forgiveness to crawl in through the seams.

I let my pulse slow. The air was thick with the smell of sex. Stubble had scraped my skin raw. The chain at my throat caught every pulse point, a rhythm that matched my slowly steadying heartbeat. I studied the arc of his spine and the quiet violence in the curve of his jaw.

Arrow settled next to me, before pulling the covers over the both of us. He rolled to his back and dragged me with him, so I sprawled half-on, half-off his chest. His hand never left my neck or the chain. He hooked a finger around it and tugged, light enough to make me smile, and I realized he wasn’t trying to keep me in place. He just wanted to be reminded, every second, that I was real. That I was here, and breathing.

“Tell me the truth,” he rasped. “Did you like it? Or is this still just survival?”

I pressed my nose to the hollow of his throat. “What’s the difference? I survived it, didn’t I?”

His fingers gently stroked my ribcage. “I need to know what you felt. Otherwise it’s all just⁠—”

“Performance?” I finished for him.

He nodded.

I understood now that Arrow’s hunger demanded something real from me—not performance, not survival tactics, but the truth of what I actually wanted.

So I told him. Everything. Throat still raw, I listed every spike of pain, every rush of pleasure, every moment my body tried to escape and ended up right back inside the skin he’d marked. I told him how the chain thrilled me, and how even after my bones wanted to give out, I never wanted it, us, all of this, to stop. I terrified myself with the honesty of it.

He listened so hard his whole body went still, as if every word might be the secret that outlasted any dynasty.

By the time I finished, he slid his arms around me, pressing a soft kiss to my neck.