“Didn’t you?” Perceptive eyes jumped between mine as I lifted my stare to hers. “Isn’t that why you tried to break my wrist out there?”
A precautionary breath swelled inside my lungs, counting down to five before I answered.
“I didn’t try to break your wrist.”
“But you did want to hurt me,” she tagged on too fast and too certain, not allowing me to sit in my safety net for even a second. Not one goddamn second did she let me try to trick myself about what happened out there.
Her demons were eating her alive and so she called for mine to come and join the feast. Without me, she was just a girl silently screaming in pain. With me, she was finally heard and so was her pain because I could make it bleed.
I could make her skin welt and her blood flow, watching her pretty tears drain from her eyes in a chorus of ecstasy.
I could fuck her and bruise her and imprint my teeth in her flesh and make her pain so fucking good, she’d swear Heaven and Hell were conjoined.
“I’ll let you do it, you know.” Her voice lowered, a poisonous seductress coming alive and slithering around her words. My teeth knocked together, vision blurring at the collision.
“I’ll let you break me in all kinds of pretty ways. Again and again, however many times you want, however many marks you want to leave on my body, I’ll let you,” she breathed, citrus breath coasting my jawline as she towed closer. “You can ruin me, James… and I won’t tell anyone.”
Ruin her.
Ruin her.
She didn’t know what she was asking for.
If I ruined her like she thought she wanted me to, there was no going back. No going back to before I’d tasted and destroyed her, and we’d both be fucked. Forever fucked.
She’d be scarred from the brutal touch of another man she was meant to trust to protect her.
And I’d never get her venom out of my system.
If I took her, I’d be damned for life. It’d be like stealing a drink from Heaven—nothing would ever quench my thirst quite the same ever again or taste half as good, and that would be my punishment.
Lording myself over her, I locked eyes with my damnation and fucking prayed I meant what I was about to say.
“I’m not going to hurt you how you want me to, Scarlett.”
Her pretty face titled slowly. Big eyes glittered up at me, absorbing and considering.
Then, the impulsive brat she was, she pinched my shirt between her knuckles and yanked.
I went forward in surprise, her legs spreading and giving my hips a place to land. My hands flashed to grip the edge of the sink, porcelain whining underneath my fists as I steadied over her.
“Then how will you hurt me, Agent Reyes?” she whispered beneath me.
Fuck.
Too close.
Too goddamn close.
Neon green alarms whirled in my head as her little fingers curled into my shirt, tangling us together like a dying soul clinging to life. Her fruity breath ate away at the front of my brain, chewing up the safe space between her lips and mine.
And, god she had fuck me eyes again, and they were up close and too personal. They were practically in a frenzy, hellfire screaming up at me to be touched, to be doused, to be kissed fucking senseless in a family-size bathroom while her gun smuggling boyfriend sat outside and listened.
She didn’t seem to care, panting beneath me like I’d already kissed the oxygen right from her lungs. Like I’d already spread her cherry red lips with my tongue and deepened whatever the fuck this sick thing was between us.
It was so sick. So twisted and wrong.
And I was the sickest fuck alive for wanting to do it.