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Instead, I said, “Scared of losing track of your fucking heartbeat for longer than a minute.”

She grinned, wild and radiant. “I knew it. You’re a romantic.”

I topped off her glass and let the wine find the cracks in my self-discipline, filling them until neither of us could tell whose pulse was whose.

“What about you?” I asked, voice softer than I meant. “What’s your worst fear?”

Harlowe considered this question as if she were expecting a better one. She bit her thumb and let the silence stretch until even the night paused to listen.

“I’m afraid of being bored,” she said, too quick to be a lie, but too easy to ever be the whole truth.

I watched her profile sharpen in the angular blue of the window light, eyes already somewhere else.

“No, really,” I pressed, forcing it with the lazy brutality of a dare.

She swirled the wine in her glass, sloshing it until rivulets ran perpendicular to gravity, then looked up at me.

“I’m afraid I’ll get used to hurting people—that I’ll get good at it. That I’ll get so good, I’ll forget how to stop.”

There.

There it was.

I felt my pulse harden, not in the expected places. She took a sip and watched me over the rim of her glass.

“You were always going to get good at it, Harlowe,” I said. “It’s genetic.”

Her mouth did a twist—half amusement, half regret. “Do you think we’re monsters?”

I thought about Luca, the eye, the absolute clarity of bone and blood. I thought about myself in the mirror. I thought about her, the way she’d held that razor blade smile in the ballroom, the way she’d unspooled me for parts and then put me back together in a slightly different order.

“Only on the days we try to be good people,” I said.

She bit her lip, looked at the purple-blue moon over the East River. “Then let’s never be good again.”

Sliding across the couch, she straddled me, legs bracketing my hips with a lack of hesitation. She pressed her mouth to mine, wet and open, no prelude, just the heat of all her old boredom burned up and replaced by a new, meaner appetite.

Harlowe moved like she had me clocked.

She knew what I’d like and how close I was to fucking fracture. I let her ride me, my hands braced on her ass, letting her grind down until the wet heat of her bled through the thin gray of my sweatpants and the raw edge of my self-control.

Harlowe let me see her hunger, no mask, her gaze dead center on my face as her hips worked a slow, cruel motion. My cock was hard enough to ache.

“Do you think they’re watching?” she said, breathless in my ear.

I kept my hands on her hips. “Who?”

She stuffed her palm under the waistband of my pants and pressed a nail into the skin above my cock, scoring it until I flinched.

“The city. My father. The devil himself. Anyone who’s been waiting for this.”

I wanted to say no, but we both knew the answer, so I just took her by the chain at her neck and twisted it hard. She moaned, loud and ragged, the sound of a wolf testing the leash. I knew she liked the pain, maybe more than she’d admitted being drunk. Maybe more than she ever would at all.

She leaned in, her bare skin hot on my chest, and bit my mouth like she’d been counting the hours since last time. She licked the blood when she pulled back.

“Do it,” she said, her breath a dare. “Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t hold back.”

So I didn’t.