It’s the clan, always the clan. He’d do anything for the clan and kill anyone if it meant preserving their power and integrity. He cares only about continuing his legacy.
He’d murder a thousand Megans if it meant a thousand more years of the clan.
“We don’t know he was involved for sure. There are a lot of different ways he might know who the girl is without having actually hurt Megan.”
“You’re right,” I whisper, shaking my head. I want to believe him, but I don’t. I take one more sip of wine and put the glass down. “It’s just that, the closer I look at the clan, at all the people in it, at what they do and how they live, I just think it’s all rotten. It’s all rotten to the core.”
“This is what they do to people.” He moves closer. His hands grip my thigh, and I’m trembling as I look at his lips, then up into his eyes. “They take them and they break them.”
“Is that what they did to you?”
He grimaces and only stares at me. He looks like he’s in pain, like whatever he’s holding on to is physically tearing him to pieces, and I feel the same. All my memories of Megan, all my memories of Rian and my father and my brothers, even of Shane—my dead older brother’s face in the sunlight as he shows me the tree house for the first time, laughing—it’s all simmering inside my body and pressing against the edges of my skin. I want to scream, let it out, but there’s no release.
There’s only Rian. Right here, tonight. His body, his mouth. His smell and the way it pulls me toward him. Closer, closer. A stupid, mindless hunger. A brainless, thoughtless wanting. It pierces into my core. It holds me there, still and contained. I want that stillness. I want that emptiness.
Because with him in the darkness, I can find a sliver of peace, a sliver of understanding.
A sliver of pleasure.
My mouth finds his. I don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t want to discuss Queenie or Megan or my father or Aiden or any of it, all the sordid details, the disturbing connections. I want it all gone, banished, sent somewhere else. He growls into my mouth and grabs my hips, leaning back and pulling me into his lap.
I straddle him, back arched. He kisses me hard, bites my lip, fists my hair. I could stop this now and go to sleep, but I’m tired of stopping right when it feels the best.
There has to be something good to hold on to.
When everything else is bleak, there has to be pleasure.
There has to be light.
When the future seems like it’ll never arrive, when life feels like it’ll only get worse, there has to be a spark.
Something to make the struggle worth it.
Rian’s mouth is my spark.
I moan into his kiss. I whimper when he pulls my hair hard and palms my ass, squeezing roughly, like he can’t help himself and needs to make it hurt, just a little bit. A hurt like thunder on a rainy night. A hurt like the smell of wet grass in the morning.
And God, I want that pain, that hurt mixed with pleasure.
He bites my lip roughly, then pulls off my shirt. I’m wearing shorts and a tee, nothing special. It comes free and falls to the floor. My bra next, and then I’m bare in front of him, his lips nibbling my nipples, licking around their pink before kissing my neck, then my lips again. He palms my breasts and teases me as I moan into his mouth, my entire body shivering with ecstasy.
“When I kiss you, it’s like we’re all alone and there’s nothing else outside these walls,” he whispers as he rolls me over onto my back and pins me down. He shoves my arms up above my head and bites my breasts, leaving teeth marks. I groan, wiggling my hips, as he moves down to slowly peel off my shorts. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve done these last eight years? How much pain I’ve caused and how much I’ve suffered? And all that goes away the second I taste your lips.”
I’m in only a pair of black lacy panties. He looks at me with a ravenous stare as he kisses me again. I feel his hardness against my soft, soaking pussy, and he grinds himself into me. I gasp and moan into his mouth as he pins me down tighter.
He’s all power and strength. Raw, animalistic intensity. I’m afraid and I’m excited, and if he wants to hold me down and take me, there’s nothing I can do to stop him.
I like the edge of danger when he bites my throat.
“I don’t think I was alive before you,” I whisper, staring as he kisses down my neck, to my breasts, licking the nipples before he keeps going. I lace my fingers in his hair, grabbing tight. “I don’t think I was really alive at all. I was going through the motions. Drifting through the days. Telling myself I wanted something normal, but I didn’t want normal, not really. I wanted life. I wanted to feel alive for once.”