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ADRIAN

M y little lamb talked about stabbing me like it was an art form. My body and blood, her canvas and paint. Put us together and the result was as beautiful as it was dangerous. Disastrous.

I was too smart to throw it all away for a woman.

Too talented to risk everything I had planned for myself on a few stolen moments in the shadows.

Yet here I was. Sneaking off with my brother’s bride.

At their own damn engagement party. Taking her by the hand and dragging her through the halls and into the first empty bedroom with a lock on the door.

It wasn’t by chance either. It was by design.

The handful of sedatives I’d tossed into Tate’s glass thirty minutes ago meant big brother was ass-up before his pants made it around his ankles.

His face buried in his mattress and his cock buried in no one.

Fucker deserved more than a bad case of blue balls.

But I didn’t want to think about him when I could be thinking about her .

About the woman whose darkness matched my own. Who was as sanctimonious as she was sadistic. As smug as she was savage. Her arms crossed over her chest and her hip cocked like I was an inconvenience. Like she didn’t want me.

Marisela was good at pretending. I’d seen her do it all night. What she wasn’t good at was believing her own lies. Which meant her body betrayed her.

That’s what my game had been about downstairs. Why I’d risked us being seen together. To prove to her—and myself—that she wasn’t as unaffected as she tried to appear.

I pulled her little red pocket knife from the lining of my vest. Jerking it open and locking the blade. Watching Marisela’s eyes flick from my hand back to my face as I took a step forward and flipped the handle in her direction.

“Go on, take it.” I grinned.

“Why? What is it that you really want from me, Adrian?” she questioned, her fingers wrapping around the hilt and tugging it free without much resistance.

“Nothing, everything.” I shrugged, my hands finding their way back to my pockets. “Whatever you wanna give me.”

“What if all I want is for you to fuck off?” She didn’t mean it. She wasn’t angry at me. She was angry at the world. At how it’d wronged her. More than that, she was testing the waters. Seeing if there really was anything I wouldn’t do for her.

“Mmm, can’t do that. What else you got?”

“Fine, what if I want your head on a spike? Would you give it to me?” She stalked forward, close enough to press the tip of her blade to my throat. And I leaned into it until she drew blood.

“No…” I told her before dropping to my knees. “But I’d let you take it. I would let you saw through flesh and bone, tendon and muscle, and I wouldn’t do shit to stop you.”

“Why?” Now that was a fair question. It was also one I didn’t have an answer to.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.” Marisela lowered the knife to the collar of my shirt, wiping it clean before snapping it closed again.

“With you, always.”

“Always?” She lifted a challenging brow and I couldn’t suppress another grin.

“Almost always,” I clarified.

She was studying my face, like she was trying to figure out what I wasn’t telling her.

As if the possibilities were far more exciting to her than the reality.

They probably were, but that didn’t mean I was ready to reveal all my secrets to her.

Not yet. Not until every last piece was positioned just right.

And then she was pressing on my shoulders, shoving at my chest until I was sprawled out flat on my back while her hands tugged at the buttons of my fly.

Her palm soft and warm as it wrapped itself around my cock.

Yanking almost too hard but not hard enough that I didn’t enjoy it.

Or maybe so hard that I couldn’t help but enjoy it more.

I wanted to touch her. To flip her ass around so that she was riding my face at the same time she was gagging on my cock. But I also wanted her to maintain her control. Use and abuse me and my body until she found a rhythm that had her screaming my name again. Until she found a way to fix herself.

I would be whatever this woman wanted me to be—her test subject, her fuck toy, her oral fixation—as long as she kept doing that thing with her tongue.

The thing that had me biting on a knuckle and lifting my hips to meet her lap for thrust. That had the muscles in my thighs vibrating and my balls contracting so tight against my body they were practically inside me again.

Marisela didn’t just suck cock. She worshipped it.

Punished it. Soothed it. She used her tongue like it was an extension of her palm.

Like it could wrap around and grip me. Her teeth like a prod.

Meant to sting and mark me so that the neuropathways that distinguished pain from pleasure didn’t know which way to go anymore.

Alternating between fast and demanding and slow and torturous.

Switching it up whenever I was dangerously close to coming.

This was about her, not me. Even though it was so very much about me. And bringing me to that brink. To controlling when I would be tossed over it.

I was so distracted by the feel of her warm wetness twisting itself around my cock I nearly missed the most important part.

The fact that Marisela had her free hand pressed between her thighs.

Her fingers working in sync with her mouth as she circled her own clit.

Choking me down at the same time she fucked herself.