His Crimson Bride

I crossed the threshold of his house the way you cross into cold water, one inch at a time, hating that I had come at all.

Lucian had sent the car. I told myself I went because of the debt, the one my brother left rotting in some ledger that men like Lucian kept the way other men kept photographs. Forty thousand. A number that could swallow a person. I had walked into the foyer ready to beg, ready to be reasonable, ready to be the calm one in a room full of dangerous men.

He met me alone.

No guards. No lawyer with a folder. Just him at the foot of a staircase that went up into dark, in a black shirt with the collar open, and the first thing that went wrong was my own breath. It caught. I covered it with a cough and he watched me do it, patient, like he had all the time anyone could ever have.

“Mara,” he said. He made my name sound like something he had been keeping in his mouth.

“I came to talk about Danny.”

“I know why you came.” He started toward me, unhurried, and I held my ground because running is what prey does and I was not going to be prey in this man’s hallway. “It is not why you will stay.”

I should have laughed at that. The line was too smooth, the kind of thing a man says when he has said it before, to other women, in other foyers. The thought came sharp and ugly: he practices this, he practices the way I move my mouth. And underneath the thought my stomach had already gone soft and low and warm, traitor that it was, because he was close now and he smelled like cold stone and something darker, iron, and my body did not care about Danny or the ledger or the smart thing to say.

“The debt,” I started.

“Is paid.” He stopped an arm’s length away. “I paid it this morning. Your brother owes me nothing.”

The floor seemed to tilt. “Then I can go.”

“You can.” He said it gently and it was the cruelest thing he could have said, because we both heard the hook in it, the way a door left open is its own kind of lock. “Danny owes me nothing. You are a separate matter.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“No.” His eyes moved over my face, my throat, down, slow, and I felt it land on my skin like a hand though he had not touched me. “You are not a payment, Mara. I do not want you as a payment.”

“Then what.”

He lifted one hand and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, and that was all, just that, the pad of his finger grazing the shell of my ear and the side of my neck, and the sound that came out of me was not a word. It was small and it was want and I would have given a year of my life to take it back.

His mouth curved. He had heard it too.

“There it is,” he murmured.

Heat climbed my face. I stepped back and hit the wall, the cold plaster against my shoulder blades, and he followed, not fast, just closing the space I had made until there was none. Both his hands came up and rested flat on the wall on either side of my head. He did not press against me. He just stood there, caging me with his arms, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his chest, and the not-touching was worse than touching. My hands had curled into fists at my sides. My thighs had pressed together on their own, a slow clench I could not stop, and the wet that bloomed between them made my face burn hotter than his eyes ever could.

This is a man who buys debts to own people, I told myself. He bought you the way he bought the silence in this house. The thought was clean and true and I clung to it like a railing, and my hips tipped toward him anyway, looking for the body I was telling myself to fear.

“You are wet already,” he said. Not a question. He said it the way a doctor reads a chart, certain, mildly interested. “You walked in here to talk about money and your cunt decided otherwise before you got through the door.”

The word out loud, in that calm voice, made my knees go loose. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what. Don’t say what is true.” He dipped his head and his mouth came to the side of my throat, not a kiss, just his lips resting against the place where my pulse was slamming. He breathed in. “Your heart is going like a rabbit. You think I cannot hear it. I can hear everything, Mara. I can hear how much you want this and how much it disgusts you that you do.”

I hated that he had the word for it. I hated that it was the right word. The disgust was there, hot and bright, curdling in my chest right alongside the ache, and the two of them together were somehow more than either one alone, the shame feeding the want, the want feeding the shame, a loop with no bottom.

“I don’t even know you,” I said, and it came out ruined, breathy, nothing like the flat refusal I had built it to be.

“You will.” His teeth grazed my throat. Just grazed. The points of them, sharper than teeth should be, dragging light over the thin skin, and my whole body lit up wrong, a long pull low in my belly that had no business answering a thing that should have made me scream. “You will know me better than you have ever known anyone. I am going to take my time with you. I am going to learn every sound you make and then I am going to make you make them for me until you forget you were ever ashamed.”

“Lucian.” His name broke in half coming out.

“Say it again.”

“Please.”

“That is not my name.” His hand left the wall and found the hem of my dress, his knuckles brushing up the outside of my thigh, slow, giving me a hundred chances to knock it away. I did not knock it away. That was the thing I would have to live with. His fingers slid higher and I let them, my breath stuttering, and when they reached the soaked edge of my underwear he went still and made a low sound in his chest that I felt more than heard.

“Look at that,” he said against my ear. “All this. For a stranger. For a dangerous man you came here to outsmart.” He hooked one finger under the fabric and drew it slowly to the side. “Tell me to stop and I stop. I will pour you a drink and call the car and you will never see this house again. Say it.”

The whole smart half of me stood at the edge of that sentence. Say it. Two letters. I had outrun worse than him. I opened my mouth and what fell out of it was the opposite, the surrender I would spend the rest of my life turning over in the dark, trying to understand.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered.

Something changed in him then. The patience went out of his eyes and what came into them was older and hungrier and fixed entirely on me, like I was the only warm thing in a long cold winter and he had decided I was his. His thumb found the swollen knot of my clit and pressed, one slow circle, and my hips bucked off the wall into his hand with a noise I had never made before in my life.

“Mine,” he said. Not a sweet word. A fact, laid down. His mouth came back to my throat, and this time the points of his teeth set against my skin and did not lift, two cold pressures right over the place my blood was beating its loudest, and his thumb kept its slow merciless circle while I shook apart against the wall of a man I had known for four minutes.

“That is it,” he breathed into my neck. “Come here. Come into my hands. And when you do, I am going to take the first taste, and after that, Mara, there is no door in this house that opens for you.”

His teeth pressed harder. My pulse leapt up to meet them.