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“Indeed.” Azriel’s wide, amicable smile was back, and he clapped the policeman on the shoulder. “Now, my good fellow, I wish you an uneventful night, and peaceful rest once you return home to your family.”

The policeman doffed his hat at Azriel, then at me. “Ithank you. A pleasant evening to you both.” He turned on his heel, his footsteps echoing down the long passageway away from our room.

Azriel closed the door and turned to me, the smile on his face dissolving almost instantly. “And I suppose we can guess who summoned him.”

I realised that my hand was clutched to my chest, and I took a deep breath. “I cannot believe they would do such a thing. To claim I was here as an unmarried woman?”

“They are not afraid of ruining you, as they already see you as ruined.” He tucked his hands into his pockets and sidled towards me. “Spoiled. Unclean goods.”

“Stop it.” I smoothed my hands over my dress to wipe away the sweat that had erupted on my palms. “Do not say such things.”

“I do not, beloved, they do.” He moved even closer. “Just as they said you were nothing but a pretty face when they sold you to my father.”

“Azriel, don’t.” I turned my head, wishing I could somehow avoid the cruelty of his words, and even more than that, the truth of them.

But he did not stop.

“You see what they do now? Send the law after you. These people have no scruples.”

“You have no scruples!” I rushed into the bedroom, clutching my hands to my face.

“I would never do what they have done,” Azriel said, pursuing me slowly.

I turned on him with wide eyes. “You? Who has blackmailed me? Who has ruined me?”

“I who have kept your secrets and guarded them.”

“You have used them! You are just like them!” I pointed at the door, vicious, angry tears spilling down my cheeks. “Yousaw something in me that you could twist to your own ends, and you used it! You are no better than them!”

He rushed at me, grabbing me around the waist and throwing me down on the bed. I thrashed at him, my nails slashing across his face, and he seized my wrists, pinning them down to the bed.

“And what am I? What am I, beloved? The man who would cover up his father’s murder to protect the woman who no one else would?”

I spat in his face, kicking my legs to try and shift his weight from me, to no avail. “You used me! You used me like everyone else!”

“I. Protected. You.” His voice was laced with stern desperation, his eyes searching my face. “I could have thrown you to the wolves, I could have left you to rot in Newgate, I could have sat by and watched you dangle from the gallows like that poor wretch, but I did not. I destroyed everything, I gave up everything, what little good name I had, to protect you, to possess you, to take you as my bride, because I could not bear to watch the other half of my heart die in the streets.”

“Stop saying such things when you do not mean them!” The anguish was terrible, like hot embers, burning into my very being as the weight of his words melted into me. “You cannot mean them! I am nothing to you, nothing but a prize, a trophy, something to be set on the shelf and admired!”

“You are my wife!”

The words rose and fell around us, filling the room, and then he kissed me. Violently, passionately, hard and punishing, biting my lip and plundering my mouth with his tongue. Perhaps this was his declaration of love, given in the only way a man like Azriel Caine could give it - with brutality. I knew I could never expect anything sweet from this man, nothing gentle. Only hard edges, sharp, upon which to cut myself.

But as he hitched up my skirts, and drove himself into me, sending my back arching off the bed, I knew that I would return to him again and again, and bleed without a second thought. The bliss that flooded my body as he stood before me, impaling me upon him, it was the forbidden essence of which I could not get enough.

He looked down as he sank into me, his teeth gritted. “You have ruined me, Evie,” he said, hissing in a breath. “You have ruined me, and I would do it over and over again for you. Only for you.” He looked up at me, panting. “Do you still hate me, beloved?”

“Oh… Oh… Yes.” I moaned, and he lifted one of my legs to sling it over his shoulder. I clawed at the bedsheets, the intrusion so deep that I had to remember to breathe, to just breathe as the pain bit through my pleasure. “I will always hate you.”

“But love lies so close to hate, does it not?”

“What do you know of love?” I pushed myself up on my hands, and Azriel leaned down to me, his lips meeting mine in a feverish frenzy.

“I know I love you,” he murmured against my mouth. “I know that I have loved you from the minute I laid eyes on you, when that veil was lifted in the church.”

I bit my lips together as I began to tighten around him, shaking my head. “No, it is not love.”

“What do you know of love?” He kissed my jaw, my neck, reaching down between us to stroke his thumb over my bud, engorged and sensitive. I bucked against him, and within a few strokes, I came undone, throwing my head back and crying out as he sucked the delicate skin on my neck.