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I picture her with that split lip pressed around my dick, tongue as sharp as her wit, taking me to the hilt and not even blinking, just locking eyes and waiting to see if I’m going to look away first.

I imagine her biting me, hard, leaving a mark, daring me to mark her back, to bruise her up inside and out and pin her down in a way nobody’s ever managed.

I want her to be the first to try, and the last to succeed.

And now I’m moving way too fast, can’t slow it, not that I want to.

The edge is a cliff and I’m running straight at it, her voice in my ear, her teeth in my skin, her scent melting every synapse. My hand is raw, too rough, but I need it that way—I want it to hurt, want to feel it the way she’d make me feel it, like a threat and a promise all at once.

My balls draw up tight and I groan, this time not bothering to bite it back, let the fucked-up acoustics of this vault carry it wherever. I hope she hears me, wherever she is.

The climax rips through me, full-body, like a cord yanked out of a wall. For a second I blank out—just pure white burn behind my eyelids, no sound but my own ragged breath and the thunder in my chest—and then I’m hunched over, wet and shaking, shots of my release mixing with the cold water pooling at my knees. It’s not satisfying. It’s not enough.

It doesn’t even come close to clearing her out of my head.

If anything, it just sets the hook deeper.

I lean against the wall, panting, forehead pressed to the damp stone, hand still sticky and numb. I can feel the cut on my neck throb, the raw skin, the bruises up and down my arms from a dozen encounters with security and discipline teams who never stood a chance.

I think about her, and I know:I’ll crawl through whatever hell they want to throw at me for another shot in the ring with her.

I’d let myself be burned down to the bones if it meant even one more second up close, one more rush of that scent, one more look at the crazy in her eyes.

I’m not sure if I can call it obsession yet.

What I do know, is it’s going to ruin me…and I can’t fucking wait.

Then it floods back in, and I’m just a wet animal kneeling in the dark again, biting my bottom lip hard enough to taste copper, wondering—idiot that the want has made me—whether she’s wild in bed.

She has to be.

A creature like that, all coiled grace and live-wire defiance, doesn’t go quiet and obliging when the lights drop. She’d fight me for the wheel. She’d laugh in my face and dare me to keep up.

Though there’s the rub, isn’t there. Prisoners don’t get beds for that kind of thing. Mental cases get less. We get padded corners and supervised hours and a camera angled to make sure nothing private stays that way. There’s no soft place anywhere in this building for a man to lay a woman down and take his time.

For her, though—I’d find a way.

I’d make a way out of solid rock with these hands if it came to it. She deserves better than a wall and an audience. She deserves to be laid down somewhere that doesn’t echo, somewhere warm,somewhere she could close those mismatched eyes and trust the dark for once.

She deserves tenderness.

Says the man who had her locked in a death grip an hour ago with broken glass kissing her pulse.

The hypocrisy’s rich enough to choke on, and I laugh at it, low and rough, the sound swallowed by the running water.

This must be the thing they’re always going on about.

The dangerous folklore of it—a certain woman who walks into a man’s life and rearranges the furniture of him without asking. She can’t change me; nothing changes a man like me, the bones are set, the cement’s long dry. But I’d let her think she had.

I’d play remade if that’s the price of standing close to her. I’d wear whatever shape validates the simple brutal fact of what she is.

A dangerous queen.

The realest thing I’ve scented in a building full of liars.

Vex. Sweet Violet.

A puzzle, and I’ve always had a weakness for the kind that bites back when you reach for it.