Page 160 of Arrow

I jerked away, suddenly angry again. “You know what? You’re right. This started as business. A transaction. Your family wants mine, and mine wants yours. But don’t pretend this is still just about family politics. Not after what we’ve done to each other.”

His eyes darkened. “It was never just business. Not from the first moment I saw you.”

“Bullshit,” I yanked the final bandage tight, making him wince. “You hated me.”

“I wanted you,” he corrected. “Hating you was just easier.”

I finished cleaning his wound and stood up, my body aching in places I’d forgotten existed. Arrow caught my wrist before I could walk away, pulling me between his legs. His hands settled on my hips, surprisingly gentle compared to minutes before.

“Why did you go to her tonight?” he asked again, voice low. “The truth.”

I stared down at him, at this man who’d torn me apart and put me back together so many times I’d lost count. My fingers traced the bruise forming on his jaw where I’d hit him.

“Because I wanted to hurt you the way those photos hurt me,” I admitted finally. “I wanted you to feel what I felt when I saw her hands on you, her mouth at your ear. I wanted you to imagine someone else touching me, making me come, hearing the sounds only you should hear.”

His grip tightened on my hips. “It worked.”

“Good.”

He swept me up, carried me to his bed, stripping the ruined clothes from my body, and tossed them onto the floor, then slid alongside me under the sheets, our bruises and blood mixing together. Arrow wrapped a leg over my hips and buried his face in the back of my neck while the city finally exhaled below us.

For a long time, we lay that way, just breathing, the lull between wars. My head spun. I didn’t know if I needed water or a priest. I only knew that his arm around me was the only thing that made me feel shaped at the edges, like a body and not an afterimage.

He dozed first, the fucker. I watched him, memorizing how his face looked when it wasn’t fighting or performing. I wondered what love would look like if either of us survived, if we staggered to the far side of marriage with our throats unslitted and a city worth ruling still under our feet.

Arrow inhaled, voice hoarse with sleep. “If you ever want out,” he muttered. “You ask me, not the city.”

I thought about what that meant and whether leaving was even possible. If, in my lifetime, that door would ever actually open.

I bit my tongue, let the raw, healing silence gather, then murmured, “Deal.”

I curled my body around his, felt the tatters of sleep pick at my vision. The city would try to end us, just as it had the generations before—but maybe, just maybe, Arrow was right. If I needed an exit wound, I’d let him make it on his own terms, or, if I was very lucky, on mine.

* Baby girl

34

THIRTY-FOUR

HARLOWE

Arrow was gone at dawn. No note, no scent lingering in the sheets, nothing but the faint blue arc he left traced across my inner thigh and the stairs still warm where he’d run off to violence, or business, or more likely, both. The air was full of his absence.

I dragged myself to the shower, let cold water sluice the dreams from my scalp, and took ten full minutes to catalog each bruise, each bite, each scrape I’d earned. My reflection had the look of a girl coming off a bender with god, or at the very least an excommunicated saint.

The shower didn’t fix me. I wasn’t looking to be fixed. It stung in all the best places, carving redder outlines over the stripes Arrow had rendered into my skin. I towel-dried my hair, twisted it up into a bird’s nest, and then, barefoot, still dripping, I flopped on the couch with a black coffee and a stolen scroll through the pre-dawn TikTok feed that chronicled my city’s ongoing collapse.

Before I finished the mug, Isadora FaceTimed. She wore a silk turban and a gold mask under her chin, which made her look—no lie—like a villainess straight from a late-stage Bond movie.

“You alive?”

I rolled my eyes. She must have known the answer from the way my shoulder peeked bare in frame, with a fist-wide, wine-dark bite at the collar.

“Barely,” I said. “Why? Are you planning my funeral?”

“No one would come. They’d all be too busy gloating.” She pouted a little. “You missed the afterparty.”

I shrugged. “I was the afterparty.”