Page 122 of Arrow

I drifted into sleep with my hand at my throat, gripping the chain like it was a thread connecting my pulse to his, wherever he’d gone.

* Princess

26

TWENTY-SIX

HARLOWE

Blinking awake at midnight, I found the glass panes showing a city already gone to black, the skyscraper lights casting everything in icy silver.

I wandered into the living room. The city was so loud, even fifty stories up, that I could hear a persistent, oceanic hush, as if all the breath in Manhattan was trying to siphon itself through the glass and into my lungs.

Arrow had left the lights low. The only illumination came from the city outside, washing everything in hard angles and monochrome. At the kitchen island, I drank a glass of water and paced slowly, letting the cold marble chill the bottoms of my feet.

Pulling a throw blanket from the couch, I wound it around my shoulders. The storm that had threatened all week finally peeled open above Manhattan, fat drops smashing the glass in rapid-fire percussion. Traffic blurred into rivers of headlights moving through the rain.

The keypad beeped outside the door.

Arrow walked through the door soaked, a ballistic vest strapped across his chest, a gun at his hip, blood coating his bare forearms.

I didn’t move.

He blinked, registering, and surveyed the room with a soldier’s efficiency before his eyes landed on me—standing there naked except for the shirt, the chain, my hair loose. I looked less like a bride and more like a prisoner in some pagan ritual.

I said nothing, only watched as he peeled off the vest. The black fabric stuck to his skin with a wet sound.

Blood—most of it too dark to be new—spread in arcs on his arms, his stomach, and there was a fine-mist pattern at his collarbones. The splatter painted his tattoos and his face, dripping on the white marble. I stared at his skin and the Rorschach of violence mottling it, a language in blood.

My nose filled with the iron tang, and I realized my body had no negative reaction. If anything, I wanted to lick the blood from his chest, taste the proof that the devil could touch death and not even lose his pulse.

Shutting the door with his heel, every muscle mapped by shadow, he unbuckled his gun and set it on the entrance table with a gentleness I’d only seen in the way he sometimes touched my hair.

For a moment—maybe a little longer—he just rested both palms against the wood and breathed, letting whatever happened elevator up his spine and switch off behind his eyes. Only then did he look at me, through the dark, with a gaze so private it was almost a crime to witness it.

Padding closer, silent in the blanket, I stopped an arms-length away. The bloodstained musk of him pressed the old panic button in my brain and settled in my chest.

Arrow didn’t reach for me. Instead, he dragged one hand across his jaw, thumb digging into his cheekbone hard enough to leave a streak.

“That yours?” I asked softly.

He considered it. “Some of it.” He hooked a thumb in his waistband, then let the hand fall slack. “This time, only a little.”

I nodded. He smelled like rain, cordite, and the deep, resinous woods of expensive cologne. Without bothering with towels, he stalked to the bathroom, leaving a trail of death and rain behind him. I shuffled after him, magnetized.

The lights in the glass fortress turned on automatically as I stepped into each room, painting me in ethereal spotlights.

At the sink, Arrow scrubbed his hands and arms, water blooming pink, then red, then clear. Splashing his face, he wiped his neck with a towel, then turned to me, lips pressed flat, color high in his cheeks.

For several seconds, he just stared at me.

He took in my wild hair, the way the blanket drooped off my shoulder to expose the hollow at my collarbone, and the fresh finger marks streaking blue up my neck.

Arrow looked at me like a man with a loaded gun at both temples, unable to decide which he preferred.

“Did you have to kill someone tonight?” No inflection, just a quiet need to break the silence.

Stepping closer, dripping, he said, “Needed to send a clear message. You want details?”