Page 119 of Arrow

Arrow joined me at the window, one hand braced against the glass like a man ready to rupture the whole city below. His other hand snaked around my waist, not hard, but inescapable, as if it mattered that I know, at every moment, exactly where I was supposed to be.

For two beats, the room was silent except for the guttering of Arrow’s breath behind my neck. I flexed my spine backward in slow increments until the fine hairs of his arm tickled my bare skin, and waited for him to speak.

“I didn’t think you’d like the view,” he said.

“I hated it until about six hours ago.” Leaning my forehead against the window, I let the cool glass ground me. “Now, I just wish I were higher up.”

He let out a tight, feral snort. “You always want more.”

“Says the man who owns this city, half its cemeteries, and maybe my soul.” I pressed my cheek to the cool pane, eyes scanning the ten thousand stories unspooling between here and street-level. “You hungry?”

“For what?”

“Something with calories, Romanov. I can’t live on coffee and trauma alone.”

His chin grazed the top of my head. “I’ll make you something.”

He released me, but every surface in the penthouse seemed to lean into the vacant space he left behind.

Prowling the rooms, I took in the open kitchen, two guest suites, a bath tiled in icy lapis, and stopped at the end of the massive Alaskan King bed in his bedroom.

How many orgies had Arrow hosted on this bed? How many girls moaned his name while he drove into them, all devil and violence. Or did he fuck them softly, staring into their eyes, promising them castles and rainbows?

Perching on the overkill mattress, toying with the chain at my throat, I let out a bark of laughter and flopped backwards across the whole width of the bed, arms extended like a corpse at rest, but with a sprawl that made it clear I planned to enjoy being dead.

The sheets smelled faintly of Arrow cologne and tang, linen, and soap. Digging my heels into the plush edge of the mattress, scrunching handfuls of the cooling coverlet in my fists, I let the question fester.

Would this have been enough for me—if Arrow had just fucked me, branded me, and left me to my chain in a glass box above Manhattan? Or did I already want more than he could ever threaten or ravish out of me?

The possibility that I might be the hungriest animal in the room made me smile. Drifting for a minute, half-conscious, the phantom ache of last night and this morning coiled through my legs like a new pulse.

Arrow called for me from the kitchen. “How do you feel about eggs?”

“Depends,” I called back, “did you lay them yourself?”

He snorted. “I do everything myself, Harlowe.”

It was true.

Propping myself up on my elbows, I watched him move behind the granite island through the doorway, his sleeves rolled, his tattooed wrists taut as he held the steel pan.

He beat eggs into a froth, added smoked salmon, then flicked in scallions and a pinch of chili oil, then cranked the gas on the pro stove until the blue tongue roared up in a perfect executioner’s flame.

Watching him work the skillet was hypnotic—the sharp movements, the controlled power of his hands. It was the same intensity he’d used hours before, just channeled into eggs and heat instead of me.

Violence was just another way Arrow moved through the world—sometimes with his cock, sometimes with a gun, sometimes by adding a drop too much fire to the pan so lunch arrived with a note of danger.

I prowled into the kitchen, hungry but also needing to be close to him. “You always attack a skillet like that?” I asked, catching the scent of the chili oil lancing through the air.

He didn’t turn. “You like it? Or are you going to throw it at me if it’s wrong?”

“Depends on how many shells are in it.”

Arrow scraped the eggs onto a plate, tossed them with coarse salt flakes and a flinch of caviar from a tin at the ready. He pushed the plate at me across the countertop, then handed over a fork after licking chili oil from his thumb.

The first bite was delicate, briny, the salt popping on my tongue in a way that made the taste linger on my gums. I made a show of licking my fork after every bite, slowly, eyes fixed on Arrow’s mouth as he watched me polish off the last scraps.

When I finally set the fork down, he snatched it up, tongued the tines with a methodical patience that I pretended not to find deeply arousing. A second later, he tossed the fork in the sink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, looking past me like he’d already forgotten I was there.