It was never about him and never about us. Our failure as a couple was always me. Never him. I promised myself I wouldn’t be this woman. Born into this life meant a certain amount of acting. But I never wanted to act with him.

Not him.

Never fucking him.

But Bianca. She came first. It was the only reason the hardwood cut into my knees. The only reason I plastered this fake smile across my mouth. The only reason I’d knocked on Pierce’s door after we’d decided to end things forever.

I hated him as much as I wanted him. And the man had no idea it was never his fault. I hated him for the weakness it gave me. The exploitation my enemies could machinate if they got their hands on him. No one could know. So I hurt him to save him, and I hated us both for the necessity.

I kept the smile in place, the rich hardwood of his floor cutting in to my skin, thankfully giving me a grounding point for the tornado of emotions swirling dangerously inside me. “Is this the kind of wife you want?”

The kind of woman good for crawling and begging and fucking in the dark.

“A proposal should only be delivered on your knees,” he said.

He’d gotten good at hiding his true feelings from me. I had no idea if he meant those words. The Pierce I’d known for ten years wouldn’t, but the tattooed, battle-scarred Pierce in my hands, was something rougher, more dangerous, ragged and weighted with experience.

Fucking bastard.

The uncertainty collapsed the flimsy towers inside me I’d been using to hold up the act. I couldn’t do it anymore. I needed him to gain access to the money I’d earned, the money Daddy locked away from me. But I couldn’t grovel to him. Not like this.

I needed a husband. Was it so wrong to want one who could see me, the darkness and the light? Someone to hope with, to grow with, and someone to wake me up when reality dragged me under.

Pierce could break into my mind with barely a whisper against my skin. When we met the night of senior prom, I knew within seconds of locking eyes across the crowded dance floor, he’d hurt me. And I’d want it over and over.

He hadn’t proven me wrong yet.

Years of heartbreak, of pain, of hating myself and him, had led us here. How did we ruin each other so well?

I released his pants, stood, and pulled my dress down. I couldn’t look at him. Shame beat through me, fear for what I was about to forfeit. For pride?

I wanted to be on my knees for him, but I wanted it to be as equals, not enemies.

“Why are we so fucked up?” I whispered, needing someone to tell me. Why not him?

He stood and cupped himself around me, his arms locking my back to his front. “Everyone is fucked up. We just do it better than most.”

His words trickled through the haze of lust, grief, shame, and the warmth of him heated my chilled skin.

I swallowed, my throat dry from the pent-up emotions and the need sweeping through me, before I spoke. ‘I’m going to leave. I’m sorry I asked you, Pierce. I’ll find another way to get what I need.”

I pulled away, but his hand clamped around my bicep. I trailed my gaze up the tattoos, which started at his wrist and ended at his chest, then up his neck before skipping those gorgeously sculpted cheekbones to meet his eyes. A brown so dark. The kind of dark you could hide in forever and never be found. “Kat.”

One word. It took one word for him to crack my mask. He always accused me of wrapping him around my fingers, playing him like a puppet, but it had always been the other way around.

He could ask me for anything, and I’d make it happen.

He could turn me inside out, and I would beg him for more.

One word.

One whisper.

One caress.

The unspoken secrets between us. We didn’t say it. Over the years, we took what we needed from each other and left everything else in the bed when we walked away.

I turned back and let him wrap his arms around me properly. He could fold me into him completely, and it had always been the only place I felt safe.

We were damned. Doomed from the start.

I pulled back enough to look up at him and shook my head.

“I know,” he whispered. Then he let go, clasped my hand in his, and led me to his bed.

His room was dark, but I could see it in my mind from the dozens of times I’d fallen into his sheets. Drunk, high, sober, crying. More times than I could admit to myself.

Four posters of solid dark wood, his bedding in shades of black and charcoal. The best thread count money could buy, even when he wasn’t so high up in his family business.

I let go of his hand and turned my back. He slid the zipper of my dress down, and I stepped out of it. This part felt perfunctory. We’d done it a thousand times. What came next was the opposite.

There was no logic to us. No plan and no homage. We were pure escape.

The games were abandoned now. I wasn’t the mafia princess, and he wasn’t the hired gun working his way up the ranks. Nothing but human flesh against human flesh. Avatars for our release.

He jerked me to face him, his thighs and knees knocking against mine as he walked me backward. When I hit the bed, he pushed down. I reached out for the warmth of him, his bedroom colder than the living room, and my temperature adjusting to my still wet hair.

He stared at me, his eyes hidden in the dark, but I felt his gaze locked on my bare skin. The ripple of bumps along my hard nipples, the scar down the side of my belly from a missed assassination attempt. He lingered, remembering and reacquainting himself with my body.

I sucked in a breath when he dipped his hands inside his pants and jerked them down to kick away. Naked, his hard cock jutted up to bounce against the outline of his abs.

Damn.

They didn’t make men like him on my side of town. Polish and circumstance didn’t hone bodies like blood and sweat.

He stroked his length, a few pulls while he looked me over. “Do you like what you see?” he asked.

My throat locked tight with need, and all I could do was nod and reach for him again. He climbed between my legs, up on his knees, and cupped the back of my thighs to situate them up, my feet flat. I allowed him to move me however he liked.

Time stopped. We weren’t part of this world now.

This was us.

Naked.

Honest to the point of a knife under the ribs.

He scooted forward until my legs rattle against his hip bones. I couldn’t help but sigh as the rain strewn light from the window flickered across his skin. “You’re beautiful.” I whispered.

He didn’t answer, but curled his hand around the outside of my left thigh, a simple touch, an acknowledgement he heard me.

“You didn’t come here for sex,” he said, after we stayed that way, staring at each other a while.

It had been at least a year since I’d been underneath him. A year since I promised I’d give him up. A year since I watched him walk out of my restaurant, the entire family’s unfriendly eyes trained on his back.

“I never come here for sex. It’s often the opposite of why I come here. Money, drugs, booze, to yell at you. Never for sex. Why should this time be any different?”

He dropped his chin, and the light caught the crinkle around his eye for a second. They were closed but soft, like he was praying. “You asked me to marry you, Kat. You can’t do that. Why did you fucking do that?” he whispered.

An answer wasn’t required, but payment would be. A rectification.

In a few words, I’d shifted the paradigm. Maybe this would be the last time we could be us. The world would finally wrench between. And maybe it should.

Our relationship wasn’t healthy, and it certainly never did anything good for either of us. We fought more than we fucked, we argued and threw things. I slapped him more than once. He’d punched walls more than once. We were toxic to each other. And yet, laying here in the dark, underneath him, I shivered, waiting between the seconds until he’d be inside me, finally easing the ache I didn’t know I’d harbored since the last time his hands played my body.

He shivered too. I could feel the ripple against my knees, then in his hands as they quaked their way up my stomach to my breast. He stared at me like he’d leapt into a haze, and I didn’t mind.

“Please,” I begged. And I felt no shame in it. No fear and no blame.

He shifted his legs around and lay on his stomach, dragging my thighs toward him with strong fingers. His face inches away from my soaking pussy, I throbbed in anticipation. He hadn’t tasted me for years. The last few times we were together were rushed, frenzied.

He shifted my legs over his shoulders and jumped when my cold feet hit his back.

“Sorry,” I offered. Not fucking sorry in the least.

He chuckled, and I felt the vibration through my core. I couldn’t look away. He transfixed me there while he scraped his stubbly cheeks along the sensitive skin of my inner thighs. Torturing me on purpose for what I’d put us both through tonight.

He flicked his tongue out to lick his lips, and the wet heat barely grazed me.

I held myself still through sheer stubbornness, my damn arrogance the only thing keeping me from arcing up into his face. Grinding my clit against the nearest bit of him within reach.

I dropped my head back on the bed to stare up at the ceiling. He’d do it at his pace, and watching him would only serve to torture me further. Fucking bastard.He knew how to play me, I just had to remember my body would sing for him the second he gave in to what we both wanted.

“Is this what you want, Kat?” His breath not nearly enough sensation for my aching cells.

I dove my fingers over his shaved head, but I didn’t push. I simply let myself drown in the sensation. A touchstone, because if he made me wait any longer, I’d start to fray at the seams. “Please,” I begged again, nothing more than a whisper.

His lip curled at the corner. It wasn’t a smile. Fuck no, it was a promise. And I held my breath as he finally delved his tongue between my legs. One long lick from opening to clit, and I was quaking, barely holding myself together.

He’d hardly touched me, and I was about to come all over his face.

Another lick, and I clutched my fingers around his neck, no longer able to hold myself back. Fucking hell. His hands dug into the tops of my thighs. I knew there would be bruises, and I didn’t care. All I could think about was the end, reaching the black tunnel promised by the sweet pleasure his tongue blasted through me.

I fuck his face now, and sometime between my nails digging into his scalp and his teeth grazing my clit, his fingers were now inside me. Fucking me as I lifted my hips to give him any and all access I could offer.

I fragment, half here and half outside my body until I’m nothing more than the sensation, the scrape his teeth and beard, the heat of his tongue, and my muscles locked tight until I reached the edge.

Just as I was about to let go and dive into darkness I yearned toward, he released me, completely pulled himself from my grasp.

I floated on the wrong side of completion. My breath erratic. It took me too long to open my eyes. When I did, he was on his knees fisting his cock in his hand. Reality broke in.

Everything in me beat in arousal, frustration. I could barely form words through the haze. “What. The. Fuck?” was all I can manage.