God.” She braced her weight on her elbows and rocked back into me in time with my thrusts. “Please... Please make me come. Please...”
I pummeled that spot again and again, rubbing it hard with both fingers. And when her climax hit, I didn’t just hear her release in her cries of ecstasy, I felt it in the way her channel spasmed around my fingers and her pussy gushed with fluid.
She collapsed onto the bed, a sweaty mess of twisted clothing and wild hair. I pulled my fingers free of her tempting body and stared down at her, struggling to breathe in the darkness, her hands still bound above her head so she couldn’t move, the lower half of her body naked from what I’d just done to her. But instead of the satisfaction I’d expected to feel over making her beg, in proving to both of us I was every bit the monster my father had said I was, my lungs grew tight, and an excruciating pain seized my chest, almost as if someone had reached between my ribs, wrapped a hand around my heart, and twisted again and again.
“Luc.”
She exhaled and turned her head toward me, but with her arms locked above her head, she couldn’t see me, and I was glad for that. Glad because a rising panic was suddenly growing inside me now that my anger was slacked. One that was stronger than what had consumed me a week ago in that bathroom. One that made it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to fucking move.
I swallowed with difficulty, managed to lean forward and free the restraint from her wrists, but that was as far as I could go. The fight was leaving me. I felt nothing but weakness. In my legs. In my arms. In every inch of my traitorous body. I managed to scoot back, away from her hands and face, but halfway down the mattress was as far as I made it before the shakes hit.
Fuck...
My eyes grew hot. I was going to fucking lose it, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop that from happening. I wouldn’t even have time to get to the bathroom to hide this time. And she was the last person in the world I wanted to witness my breakdown.
“Luc?”
“Don’t.” Somehow, I managed to throw an arm out and press my palm against her lower spine, preventing her from rolling toward me. “Don’t look at me. I-I can’t take it.”
She stilled against the mattress. Didn’t try to roll toward me. But in the silence, as I fought with everything that was in me to hold it together, I heard her whisper, “You’re wrong. You’re not like them. You’re mine, and I’m not giving up on you. I love you. Every part of you. Always.”
I broke. Completely shattered. Including what little pride I had left inside me.
6
Natalie
Things weren’t supposed to seem quite so grim in the light of day.
Rolling to my back in the big bed in Luc’s room, I stared across the empty mattress in the early morning sunshine coming through the windows and fought back useless tears I was not about to give in to again.
Whoever had come up with that bullshit had never encountered the hell of House Salvatici.
I pushed to sitting and brushed the unruly curls back from my face. I wasn’t sure when Luc had left this bed, but it was pretty clear he still wanted nothing to do with me. For over a week, he’d hidden out in this room, desperate to keep his distance from me. Then last night, after I’d pressured him to deal with me, he had—in an unexpected way.
I still wasn’t sure how things had resulted in rough, dirty sex, but I wasn’t complaining. I liked when he touched me—hard and rough or soft and sweet, I didn’t care. I loved every way he touched me. I just didn’t like how he’d crumbled into himself afterward and hadn’t let me touch him. Or how he’d run as soon as I’d fallen asleep.
A hollow feeling filled my chest as I glanced down at the rumpled sheets. As much as I’d enjoyed that, it hadn’t been mutual sex. He hadn’t gotten any pleasure from it. That had been fueled by his anger and self-loathing and some twisted need to prove to me and himself that he was as vile and degenerate as the monsters in his House.
My own anger pulsed inside me as I threw back the