Page 136 of Ruin
I flip her.
She lands on her back on the black silk, and now the glass is beside us, a full-length window showing the audience everything from every angle.
I hook her leg over my shoulder and drive into her, and the sound she makes reverberates through the room and out into the corridor and the people watching press their hands against the glass.
She pulls me down.Mouths against my ear, words meant only for me, lost beneath the sounds she's making for the room. "I love you. I've loved you through every horrible thing you've done and every horrible thing I've done and I will love you in the dark and in the light and in front of anyone who wants to watch."
I bury myself in her. Deep. Hold there. Her body arches against mine and her nails rake down my back hard enough to draw lines that will show for days.
"Again," she breathes. "Say my name."
"Selene."
"Louder."
"Selene."
She wraps both legs around me and pulls me in so deep I lose the ability to think in complete sentences. The rhythm turns urgent, graceless, two bodies chasing the same edge with the single-minded focus of people who have been through too much to pretend this is anything other than what it is.
Need. Raw, uncut, witnessed need.
The audience doesn't exist. The glass doesn't exist. The empire and the bodies and the war we just won don't exist.
There is only her beneath me, the heat of her around me, the sound of my name in her mouth and the feeling of falling that I've spent my entire adult life avoiding and am now surrendering to completely.
She comes first. Her whole body tightens, her back lifting off the silk, her thighs clamping around me with a force that borders on pain, and the sound she makes is my name tangled with a moan that hits every register between whisper and scream. I feel her pulse around me, the rhythmic clench of her body pulling me deeper, and I hold on for three more strokes before I break.
The orgasm rips through me.
Not the controlled release I've trained myself to deliver, not the modulated performance of a man who doesn't let anything take him by surprise.
This is total. Complete. The kind of surrender that leaves you blind and breathless and gripping the sheets with white knuckles because the alternative is losing your grip on something more fundamental.
I come inside her with my face pressed against her throat, my mouth on the collar, the vibration of her name against the diamonds, and for a moment the world narrows to the two of us and the heartbeat I can feel through the metal and the skin beneath it and nothing else matters. Nothing else has ever mattered.
The glass is still clear.
The audience has thinned but not disappeared.
Some of them are watching us in the aftermath the way you watch the last embers of a fire—not for heat but for the memory of it.
Selene lies on the black silk. Wrecked. Beautiful. Mine.
She reaches over and flips the switch.
The glass goes dark and the audience vanishes.
"Just us." She curls against me.
I pull the sheet over both of us, a gesture so domestic it feels absurd in this room, in this place, in the context of everything we are.
But she presses her face into my chest and sighs, and the sigh is the sound of someone who has arrived somewhere and doesn't plan to leave.
"Vincent called me by my first name today," she says. "Not Miss Deveraux. Selene. First time."
"I noticed."
"Marco told me my restructuring plan was, quote, annoyingly good."
