I cringe, my cheeks flaming. I should feel disgust. Weak and at his mercy, I should feel helpless.
Not senseless.
One touch and I forget. This room. This place. His fucking twisted insanity. One touch and he’s inside me, and he feels so different from Robert…
“You fucking see?” he hisses, snapping my attention back to him. “This is what you do. You pretend and you trick, and—” He breaks off, his teeth clanging as he shoves a finger inside me. I barely hear him above the moan that rips from me. “And you make me fucking think for a second that I could have you.”
He sounds crazed. Obsessed. Insane. His voice deepens in ways I’ve never heard, not even at the heights of his rage.
“You’re praying to go back to him, aren’t you?” he wonders, still stroking me from the inside out. “Not that it fucking matters. I’m inside you, Ellen Winthorp. I’ll always be inside you…”
There are no words to describe what he does to me. It’s a torturous style of fucking I’ve never been subjected to, not even at Robert’s most sadistic. Fingers, rubbing…everywhere. Igniting me. My hips writhe, desperate to stifle the flame he ignites. Chase. Evade. Anything to feel more. Feel less.
He’s ruthless, wringing something from me I never thought was possible before him. A high and a fall so mind-blowing that all I can do is wheeze, and pant, and suffer.
His hand is still between my legs when I come back down, punishing me with slow, deliberate flicks of his thumb.
“Tell me what your game is,” he murmurs, but there’s no anger in his voice. Just a naked, terrifying plea. “Tell me. Just fucking admit it. Say it. Tell me!”
His teeth snag my lip—hard. I choke a cry against his tongue, and his lips move harshly, capturing the sound. His tongue does to my mouth what his fingers did to my body. Capture. Control. Claim. But unlike with Robert, he doesn’t want to smother me. Each ruthless, hungry pass strokes something in me, like blowing on a smoking bit of wood. Within seconds, it’s blazing with no end in sight.
“You want to drive me insane,” he suspects against my quivering lips. “You want to. Like him. But I’ll take you down with me,Elle.” He nips again, drawing blood. I swear he does. At the same time, he smooths over the wound with a laving stroke and all pain dissipates. “I’ll make you crave me just as fucking much. I’ll burn you down to the ground and there won’t be anything left for him to steal back.”
We’re fused, mouth to mouth. Soul to soul—and it’s so easy to let him swallow me whole. His fingers return between my legs, stroking and teasing, but never hard enough. Fast enough. He’s always an echo of what I know he can be.
“Not tonight,” he whispers, finally drawing back. “Not tomorrow. Not the day after, but soon. When I’ve decided to put you out of your fucking misery. When I’ve had enough of playing your game—because don’t you forget for a second: I’ve always been playing your game.”
He stands, but he doesn’t leave. Not right away. He stalks to the other side of the room instead. I see him there, a shadow flung against the wall, slinking and blending into the darkness. He moves into a corner and takes up a post there, watching me well into the night.