Page 44 of Shadow Secrets
She raised her eyes to his. They were standing too close, her hand on his bare skin, his breath warm on her forehead, the fluorescent light turning everything stark and honest. No shadows to hide in. No distance to maintain.
He was looking at her the way he’d been looking at her since the previous night on the floor when she’d traced a lynx on his arm. With attention. With hunger he kept leashed.
She rose on her toes and kissed him.
His lips were warm. The split lip was rough under hers, another wound. She kissed him carefully there, feeling him hold very still as if he were afraid that moving would end this.
Then his hand came up. His fingers slid into her hair, cradling the back of her head, and the stillness broke. He kissed her back.
The kiss turned hot and hungry. She dropped his shirt. He backed her against the bathroom wall. She pulled him close, needing to feel all of him.
They moved from the bathroom to the bed in a series of steps with his arm around her waist, her hand on his chest, the narrow doorway they navigated without breaking contact because neither of them was willing to create space between their bodies.
He sat on the edge of the mattress. She stood between his knees, her hands on his shoulders, looking down at him. The lamp on the desk cast amber light across half his face. The other half was in shadow. He looked up at her with those blue eyes, and the expression in them made her breath catch—not desire alone, but something deeper. A question he was asking without words.
Are you sure?
She answered by pulling her shirt over her head and tossing it aside.
His intake of breath was audible. His eyes moved over her—the tank top beneath, the ink on her arms, the collarbone he’d been caught staring at the night before. But he didn’t reach for her. His hands rested on her hips and he waited.
She pulled the tank top off, too, to stand in front of him in her bra and jeans and bare feet on the cold floor, more exposed than she’d been in front of anyone in years. Not just physically. He could see her tattoos now—all of them. The florals on her forearms. The serpent on her inner arm. The dragon on her ribs that she’d done herself at nineteen in her apartment with a hand-poke needle and a mirror. The ink was her autobiography, every piece a chapter, and she was handing him the whole book.
His thumb traced the crescent moon on her ribs. Gentle. Precise. The marks on her body were sacred and he treated them accordingly.
“Turn around,” he said. Not a command. A request.
She turned. Felt his breath on her shoulder blade before his fingers made contact. Penn’s tattoo—the crescent moon caught in branches, the rite-of-passage piece her brother had spent four hours inking while Bowie played in the background. Sebastian’s fingers traced the branches the way she’d traced his scar. Carefully, with full attention, learning the language of it.
“He was talented,” Sebastian murmured against her skin.
The words landed between her shoulder blades and her heart. He touched the place where Penn had left his mark, acknowledging its beauty. He’d killed the man who’d made this art, and he was now honoring it.
She turned back to face him. Took his face in her hands—jaw rough with stubble, the split lip a dark line against his mouth. She kissed him again, deeper this time, and felt his self-control fracture by degrees. His hands tightened on her hips, drawing her closer. She felt the solid heat of his chest against hers, the ridged muscle of his abdomen, the scar pressing against her stomach like a brand.
He eased her onto the bed, his mouth on her neck, tracing the line of her jaw. Her hands mapped the planes of his back, the architecture of muscle and bone she’d been imagining since the first time she’d seen him without his jacket. His fingers worked the button of her jeans with a patience that made her want to scream and savor the moment in equal measure.
The rest of his clothes came off, as did hers. Every place he touched, he touched as if it mattered. Every sound she made, he heard, absorbed, and responded to. He paid attention with his whole self, and the focus of it was overwhelming. She’d never been looked at like this. Seen like this. Known.
When he settled between her legs, his upper body braced on his forearms, his eyes inches from hers, she felt the last wall between them crumble. “Hi,” she whispered.
The corner of his mouth curved—that ghost of a smile she’d been chasing since the compound tour. “Hi.”
She pulled him down. What followed was both slow and urgent. The press of his body against hers. His mouth finding places that made her gasp. His hands—those steady, capable hands moving across her skin with a tenderness that contradicted everything she knew about him. They caressed her breasts, moved lower, parting her.
His fingers were deft, and she moaned as they entered her. His thumb found the sensitive bundle of nerves at her junction and worked it in circles until she pleaded for release.
As he positioned himself to enter her, she ran her fingers over the scar again, the fresh bruise. He shuddered—someone was touching the wound willingly, without revulsion, without the clinical detachment of a doctor. Touching it like it was part of him, because it was.
“Stay with me,” she said. It wasn’t about this moment. It was about all of it. About whatever came next.
He pressed his forehead against hers. “I’m not going anywhere, Ink.”
She believed him.
When he pushed inside her, it was a homecoming. The sound of his breath in her ear and the grip of his hand on her hip grounded her. The way he said her name made her cheeks heat, as if it was a word he’d only just learned and wanted to practice until he got it exactly right.
She held on to the fragile, impossible thing growing between them in the ruins of the past.
