Page 60 of Arrow

Minimalist as the bedroom was, the bathroom had black tile and chrome fixtures that gleamed in the low light. I’d been traded between territories––a spoil of war with no say in my fate.

The shower hissed to life under my trembling hands, and I stripped off my clothes, letting them fall in a heap on the floor. The water was scalding, just how I liked it.

Steam rose in thick clouds as I stood motionless, letting the spray pound against my shoulders until my skin flushed an angry pink. I scrubbed myself raw, as if I could wash away the fingerprints of every man who’d ever touched me without permission.

When I emerged, a towel wrapped around my body, I half-expected to find Arrow waiting in the bedroom. But the room was empty, the door still cracked open just as he’d left it.

Rummaging through my bags, I found a silk nightgown at the bottom. The cool fabric slid over my heated skin like a mercy.

The window beckoned me. Six inches of freedom—that’s all Arrow allowed.

My fingertips pressed against the glass, testing the narrow gap, and below, the Hudson became a ribbon of black reflecting city lights like fallen stars. I wondered if I could squeeze through that narrow opening if I were desperate enough.

Probably not without breaking bones.

The bed swallowed me—sheets cool against my skin, my racing thoughts warring with my body’s demand for sleep. My eyes grew heavy, and I drifted off to the sound of rain against the windows.

Exhaustion won.

10 p.m. glowed on the nightstand when I jolted awake, heart thundering. The room held only darkness and the faint glow of city lights through glass, and the absolute certainty that I wasn’t alone.

A shadow moved by the door.

“You talk in your sleep,” Arrow said quietly.

I sat up, clutching the sheets to my chest. “What are you doing in here?”

“Checking on you.” He stepped into the room, moonlight catching his profile. He’d changed into sweatpants and a thin T-shirt that clung to his chest. “You were screaming.”

“Was I?”

I couldn’t remember my dreams, just the lingering sense of terror.

Arrow moved to the edge of the bed—not sitting, just hovering there like some dark sentinel. He waited for me to ask what he wanted.

So I asked, my voice still scraped raw from before.“Why didn’t you kill him?

He didn’t pretend to not understand. “I don’t need another dead Virelli.” No pride in it, no mercy, just tactical clarity, like he was reciting a rule of the jungle so obvious it barely counted as an answer. “You’re harder to break if you hate me for it.”

I turned to face him, my arms protectively knotted just beneath my sternum. “Is that the point, then?” I said. “To break me?”

“You were born broken. I’m just refining the art.”

“I’ll save you the trouble. It’s hereditary.”

Arrow smiled with one corner of his mouth, but there was nothing kind in it.

He let the tension coil.

“You’re stronger than him.” A nod toward the thumbprint on my cheek, bruised deep and blue. “Giovanni’s hands couldn’t tame you. Why would you think mine would be any different?”

“Because you’re a Romanov,” I whispered back, then snapped my lips shut at the confession I’d let slip out.

His fingers found the bare skin of my hands, turning them over, exposing the scars shaped like barbed wire on my palms. He traced them in a motion more clinical than caress.

“We’re not the ones who start the cycles,” he murmured. “Just the ones who finish them.”

The healed ridges became a map beneath his thumbs—traced with a reverence that belonged to no man capable of strangling me on the marble without hesitation. The contradiction stopped my breath.