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My nails dig into his shoulders. He groans louder.

“I like this,” I whisper, breathless. “The way it feels.”

His voice is wrecked. “I got it for you. So you'd feel it every time you fucked me.”

Something inside me cracks. The devotion. The sheer knowing. That he’d do that—alter his body just so I’d feel him more. So I wouldn’t forget.

So I’d want more.

“I’ve watched you,” he confesses, his teeth scraping down my throat. “For a year. I used to come to the sound of your moans. Your vibrator humming. Your fingers between your thighs.”

A cry of pleasure spills from me, thick with heat and hunger and the smallest, sweetest ache of belonging. Shame and desire war inside me, but shame doesn’t win.

Not tonight.

He thrusts up harder, faster. I meet him stroke for stroke, my body greedy, frantic. The sound of us fills the room—wet, obscene, gorgeous. Our gasps. Our curses. Our need.

“You think you’re riding me right now,” he growls, “but you’ve owned me since the first time you smiled at me in court.”

It hits me all at once.

The branding. The way he looks at me like I’m the center of gravity. The man who has always held the power giving it to me like it’s a gift.

My orgasm tears through me, sudden and violent—like lightning. My whole body locks down, every muscle tightening as I cry out his name.

Declan.

I collapse against him, trembling, my mouth pressed to his neck as he pushes me through it.

One last thrust.

Then another.

He spills inside me with a guttural groan, his head dropping back, his entire body shuddering beneath mine. He clutches me like something holy, like I’m the only thing anchoring him to this world.

And maybe I am.

We don’t move for a long time. We just exist. Tangled together in a room built for violence but made sacred by what we’ve done here. What we’ve chosen.

His hands slide up my back, then down again, holding me to him like the world might disappear if he lets go.

“You okay?” I murmur into the curve of his neck, brushing my lips against his damp skin.

He laughs—wrecked and breathless. “You branded me and rode me like a stolen car. I’m fucking incredible.”

Then I pull back just enough to look at the mark.

His chest is red, blistered in the shape of my first initial. Right above his heart. Where the cranes fly.

I press my fingers gently to the wound—his breath catches.

“You’re mine now,” I say softly.

He looks at me like it’s the first time he’s ever seen sunlight.

“I always was.”

Another crime scene no one would ever know existed.