Page 154 of Arrow

“Did she fuck you better than I do?”

I snorted, but his hand increased the pressure, choking the answer right out of my lungs.

“Why do you care?” I managed, and regretted it immediately

He didn’t answer. He braced his palm against my clit and drew slow, punishing circles, the grip at my jaw sharpening until the whole world funneled into his hold, into the bright, pitiless focus of that question. Not did you like it, not how many times. The primal calculus of whether I belonged to him, and if so, if I was worth keeping—how I’d prove it right now.

He pressed his body flush to mine, cock throbbing hard through his jeans, jaw clenched enough that I wondered if he’d break his teeth or just grind through the mandate of feeling.

I locked my gaze on his, reached for the counter-pressure, and pushed back, using the wall for leverage. “What’s it to you, Arrow? You want me to be celibate until our arranged marriage?”

He snapped the grip at my chin, not to hurt, but to pivot my head until our mouths hovered a hair apart. “Yeah,” he said, voice low and ruined, “I fucking do.”

He kissed me, not gently, not like patching up a wound, but with the ferocity of a man who has just been dared at gunpoint to make a point.

“You want to act out, Harlowe?” he whispered into my mouth.

“You think this is acting out?” I spat. “You haven’t seen shit, killer.”

He spun me around, backing me up with his own body to the edge of the antique marble credenza, scattering a stack of his art books and a bloodstained paperweight to the glossy floor. My palms splayed across the chill surface like I was about to be searched. Maybe I was. I could hear my heart thumping behind my ears, and when his fingers wound into the wreckage of my hair, yanking back until my throat bared, it felt less like submission than an exorcism.

He sniffed the space behind my ear and then set his mouth against the place where Harley had first bitten me. “Look at you. You’re still wet,” he murmured, neither accusation nor compliment. “She made you come.”

It wasn’t a question, but I arched my back, pressed my ass into the steel of him, and decided not to lie.

“More times than you ever have.” It came out as less of a snark than a gasp.

His hand snaked around my throat, thumb digging against the chain-shaped bruise there. He retrieved the knife from the console, an obsidian-handled one, and pressed the flat to my inner thigh, trailing up to the root of my slit. I jerked not in fear, but anticipation.

He smiled, ghosting the tip side to side until the edge tickled the seam of my thong. With the decisiveness of a man testing both steel and skin, he sliced upward, shredding the panties from my body in a single, fluid violence. They fluttered to the floor, the pink lace catching on my ankle, humiliating and perfect. He let the blade hover at my ass, rested it in the center, and pressed until the nerves there rang out, warning systems firing in panic and pleasure.

He leaned in until his mouth was at my jaw, the width of his palm spanning my entire throat. “I want to hear you tell me what she did to you.”

I panted, dizzy. He waited. I could lie. I could say nothing. But I remembered Harley’s mouth, the blue crush of the LEDs, the sound of my moans, animal and exposed. I remembered the rod inside me, the way pleasure became a kind of loyalty you can’t retract. I wanted to show him what he was up against, and I wanted to win.

“She made me come on her tongue,” I ground out, voice sandpaper raw. “She put a toy in my ass and made me scream. She made me come until I thought I’d pass out.”

“That so?” His voice was even. “Did she make you beg, moya chortova gadyuka?”⁠* His thumb rotated against my trachea. He pressed the blade in, a careless threat, skirting just below dangerous but nowhere close to safe.

My fucking viper.

“Are you jealous, killer? Jealous that she made me come so hard, my cum ran down her chin,” I hissed, daring him to destroy me. “You will never own me. It doesn’t matter if we’re married, it doesn’t matter if you think you can destroy me, there’s nothing you can do that will ever make me love you.”

He hissed a single, vicious laugh. “You’re not even close to being destroyed, Harlowe. But I’ll get you there.”

He dragged me by the hair to the wide stovetop, spun me to face the island, and bent over my elbows. I tasted kitchen steel and quartz in my mouth before I even clocked his next move. The cold slab pressed to my cheek, hips to my ass, and then, with brisk efficiency that bordered on brutal.

Arrow lifted my skirt up, exposing the bare, still-tender seam of me to the air. His foot swept my legs wider, and his hand forced my jaw to the countertop, pinning me by the neck.

With his other hand, he lined up the head of his cock, already ungodly hard, and jammed it inside me. I hissed a shock of air through my teeth; the ache was exquisite, pain and surrender soldered into a perfect new alloy. My body fought and then gave way, melting into the pressure and stretch as he fucked me with short, snapping thrusts, hips locked tight to my ass, the slap echoing against the glass and tile.

“You want an audience?” Arrow’s voice was breathy, vicious. “You want the world to see what you are?”

“Fuck you, Arrow Romanov,” I managed.

He rammed me so hard my scalp hit the edge of the counter. I braced both hands, grappling for purchase as he twisted me at the waist. He drove his cock deeper, hand locked at the nape of my neck, and angled my head so I could see us, reflected in the glass of the frosted fridge door—my skirt hiked, ass exposed, Arrow’s face a trench of focus and menace, the muscles in his jaw etched in relief. I watched myself come apart, open-mouthed, eyes wild. He saw it too, and that made him drive harder, his snarl brightening with every jolt.

“Tell me who fucks you better,” he gasped, voice gone raw with the animal sting of breath.