My thoughts.
The foundation of the life I’d stood on steadily for thirty years.
All of it eviscerated by the crashing, brutal wave of pleasure that rocked through me, breaking chains and bones, until I was untethered and floating. I spilled down her throat in a rush of come, jerking again and again like a drowning man fighting for air seconds before the end.
Vaguely, I was aware of her groan as the taste flooded her tongue, some spilling out her stretched-wide lips, a pearl of salty spend rolling down her chin.
And then the tension; the shaking, clenching mouth as she groaned long, low, almost mournful like the call of a bugle at a funeral as she succumbed to her own climax and juddered against my leg. Cum seeped through the fabric, ruining my thousand-dollar trousers, sticking to my leg hairs, rolling down my shin into the rim of my sock.
It was the single hottest thing that had ever happened to me.
So incendiary, I felt scarred by it, my entire body covered in mottled flesh like Walcott.
In the aftermath, we both panted harshly, chasing oxygen into wrecked lungs. My hands were still in her hair, soft now, the pads of my fingers digging gently into her skull. She’d tipped her head against the side of one thigh, breath wafting cool over my wet, spent cock.
In the silence of the room, amid the relics my grandparents had collected over their eccentric travels, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d done something right no matter how wrong I told myself it needed to be.
It felt…if not preordained, then something like holy.
Something that felt right in the echoing, empty spaces of my soul.
Something that whispered softly, yes.
Even quieter, mine.
I let her go abruptly, stepping away as if scalded, shocked by the turn of my untamed thoughts. My hands fucking shook as I tucked myself away and buttoned up my trousers.
Bianca blinked up at me dazedly, utterly ruined by our encounter. There was spit and cum on her cheeks, chin, and chest, her eyes unfocused as she swam down from a submissive high, hair a mess from my clenching hands, salt tracks down her cheekbones.
So gorgeous my fucking teeth ached.
I took another step back, then another, suddenly feeling cornered, my skin too hot and too tight. The flesh she’d sewn back together over the angelic cherub on my hand throbbed acutely. Irrationally, I felt like ripping out the stitches and throwing them at her feet.
There was no oxygen in the room. Bianca had robbed me of it like a little thief.
“Congratulations,” I said, the words forced out of me, scraping my throat to ruin before I thrust them over my tongue. “You’re already better than your mother.”
I turned on my heel in a flash, but not fast enough to miss the crumbling devastation my words wrought on her pretty, tear and cum-stained face. My heartbeat too hard, too slow. I felt like I was dying.
Still, I stalked to the door of my office, knowing I’d avoid it for days, until the smell of her Lucky Charms and teenage-girl cum evaporated from the air, until I could shut my eyes and not see her there on her knees, crying as I left.
This time, the tears weren’t anything but ugly.
As ugly as my words.
As ugly as my heart.
When I closed the door on her, it felt final, fatalistic. Something newborn in my chest, tender and small but growing since Bianca entered this house, withered and then died.
I staggered against the closed door, a hand braced against the lion statue flanking the office. I gave myself one single moment, brief as a lit emergency flare, to feel panic and grief, despair and yearning.
When I straightened after that, adjusting my diamond cuff links, the ones Bryant gifted me after my first and second kill, I walked down the hall the same man I’d been before.
Before the office encounter.
Before the Belcantes lit Lion Court up from within.
Before that fated evening, what felt like eons ago, when Bianca opened the door to her pitiful house and accepted my rose.
Tiernan Morelli, the monster, and not Tiernan Morelli, the man.
Chapter Eleven
Bianca
We didn’t speak for two weeks.
I couldn’t even blame it entirely on Tiernan, because I was avoiding him just as assiduously as he seemed to be avoiding me.
Fourteen days and I still didn’t know what to make of the incident in Tiernan’s office.
I wasn’t so much shocked by my reaction to his domineering manner as I was by the extent of my longing for it to happen again. I’d always harbored dark, wicked thoughts. Always dreamed of being bent and twisted like origami into the shapes of a man’s choosing. It shamed me, because I was a smart, independent, young woman with a spine and a healthy dose of self-respect. What kind of woman loved being throat-fucked until her voice was ragged for days? What kind of woman loved to be used like a wet hole for a thick, gorgeous dick? What kind of woman thought being called “a good little thing” was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard?