Page 129 of Ruin
The same way they settled on me in the office, letting me lead, letting me decide the pace and the pressure and the terms.
I cup his face, stubble under my palms. Gray eyes in the dark, watching me with something that looks fragile for a man who has never been fragile a day in his life.
"I choose this," I say. "Not because you made me. Not because I don't have options. Not because Emilia walked out and you're what's left." I brush my thumb across his lower lip, the one I've split with my teeth twice now. "Because this is what I want.Youare what I want. And I'm tired of hating myself for it."
I kiss him. Slow. Deep.
No anger, no teeth, no punishment.
I kiss him the way I've wanted to kiss him since the moment I found out the truth and realized that the truth didn't kill what I feel—it just stripped away every excuse I had for feeling it.
I undress him, pull his shirt over his head, and my hands move over his chest the way they've moved a hundred times, but it's different now because there's nothing between my skin and his skin except honesty.
The scratch marks from our reunion, faded to thin white lines. The scab on his throat. The scar on his ribs from something that happened before I existed in his world. I trace them all with my fingers, then my mouth, pressing my lips to each mark like I'm reading the history of him through his skin.
He reaches for my shirt, and I stop him.
"Let me."
I pull it over my head, unhook my bra, step out of my pants and stand in front of him in the dark living room wearing nothing but the collar.
With the city lights painting my body in blue and gold and the key glinting on the coffee table beside us like an exit sign I'm choosing not to follow.
He looks at me.
Not the quick, hungry appraisal of the early days.
Slow. Thorough.
His eyes move over me the way his hands will in a moment, touching everything, missing nothing, and the attention is so total and so focused that I feel it on my skin like heat.
"You're the most terrifying thing I've ever seen," he says.
"Good."
I sink onto him. Slow. Taking him in inch by inch, and the feeling of him filling me, of his body inside mine, is something I let myself feel without fighting it for the first time.
No resistance. No shame spiral. No mental arithmetic about what this makes me or what my parents would think or whether the girl I used to be would recognize the woman with her knees on either side of a killer's hips.
I roll my hips. Slow, deliberate, the kind of rhythm that lets me feel every inch of him, and his hands grip my waist but don't guide. He lets me set the pace. Lets me take what I need.
"I choose this," I say again. My forehead against his. My hands on his shoulders. Moving on him in a rhythm that belongs only to me. "I choose you. The monster. The murderer. The man who destroyed my world and then built me a new one inside it."
"Selene—"
"Shut up. I'm not done." I clench around him, watch his composure fracture, watch those gray eyes go dark and unfocused. "I choose all of it. The collar. The empire. The blood. Every ugly, broken, irredeemable piece of what we are together."
I increase the pace. His fingers dig into my hips, hard enough to bruise, and the controlled exterior starts to crack the way it only ever cracks with me.
The jaw tightens. The breathing goes ragged. A muscle in his neck twitches, and I can feel him straining beneath me, holding back, trying to let me lead when every instinct he has is telling him to take over.
"Say it," I tell him. "Say what you said to me the night I told you I loved you."
"You're everything to me." His voice comes out ruined. Shredded. The voice of a man who built an empire on control and is watching it dissolve under the hands of a woman who asked him to be honest. "Everything."
"Then give me everything. Not the version you show the world. Not the strategist, not the crime lord, not the man who has an answer for everything. You. The real one. The one who paces in the middle of the night and makes me coffee before he leaves and sent a female doctor because he thought about what Emilia needed before anyone else did."
Something breaks open behind his eyes.
