Page 53 of Ruthless Desire

He shoves me onto the bed, pouncing like a savage beast. I feel his hardness pressing against me, his hands fumbling at his belt.

But all I feel is a strange, surreal calm. An icy clarity crystallizing in my heart.

He will hurt me, violate me. But he cannot break me. Not anymore.

I am more than the scars he's carved into my skin, more than the shadows he's seared into my soul. As he sinks into me with a bestial roar, as pain and hateful pleasure war within my ravaged body, I lock eyes with my tormentor.

And I laugh.

The sound startles him, his rhythm faltering. Confusion wars with fury on his aristocratic features.

"What's so goddamn funny?" he pants, fingernails sinking into my hips.

"You," I rasp out, my split lip curving in a bloody smile. "Thinking you've won. Thinking you can erase me with the sheer force of your fucked up desires."

I reach up, smearing crimson across his perfect cheekbone. A morbid claiming, mirroring his attempts to brand me.

"But I'm still here, Dante," I whisper. "Still breathing, still fighting, despite everything. And that kills you, doesn't it? Knowing that in the end... you'll never truly own me."

Something flickers in his gaze - uncertainty, maybe. Or a glimmer of respect. Then his eyes shutter, the cruel mask clicking back into place. He slams into me harder, deeper, chasing his pleasure even as he seeks to obliterate me.

But it's too late. The seeds of defiance have been planted. Even as my body shatters beneath his brutal onslaught... my soul remains intact. Bruised and battered, but unbroken.

He collapses atop me, spent and panting. I lie there, sticky with sweat and blood and his release, staring at the ceiling. Waiting for whatever fresh hell he'll conjure next.

But he surprises me.

Rolling off, he sits up, running a hand through his disheveled hair. For a long moment, he simply breathes, his profile limned in the waning light.

"There's something you should know," he says at last, his voice uncharacteristically soft. "About the shelter you took that mutt to."

I tense, bracing for some new cruelty. But his next words steal the breath from my lungs.

"I own it," he murmurs, staring at his hands. "That shelter, and a dozen others like it across the city. No-kill rescues, sanctuaries for the broken and discarded."

My heart stutters. "What? Why would you... how could you possibly...?"

He sighs, a sound of bone-deep weariness. "Because I know what it's like," he says quietly. "To be shattered, left to bleed out on unforgiving streets. To have nothing but the fading hope that someday... the pain will end."

He turns to me, something raw and haunted in his gaze. Something almost... human.

"I see myself in them," he rasps. "The strays, the ferals, the ones the world has given up on. And I couldn't... I couldn't just stand by and watch them suffer. Not when I had the means to help."

I stare at him, this man I thought I knew. This monster who's violated me in every conceivable way, broke me down to my basest elements. And for the first time, I see a glimmer of something beneath the cruelty. A flicker of the broken boy he must have been, before the world turned him into this.

It doesn't erase what he's done. Doesn't excuse the pain he's inflicted. But it cracks the foundation of everything I thought I knew about Dante Corleone.

And in that crack, something dangerous begins to grow. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But understanding. And with it, the terrifying possibility that beneath the monster and the man... there might be something worth saving.

Chapter 18 Dante

The scent of linseed oil and turpentine hangs heavy in the air, clinging to the back of my throat like bitter regret. Everywhere I turn in this godforsaken mansion, I'm haunted by my own face staring back at me. But not my true face, never that. No, the man gazing out from the dozens of canvases scattered around Natalie's studio is a stranger—features blurred and distorted, as if viewed through a veil of tears.

It sets my teeth on edge, a muscle ticking in my jaw as a potent cocktail of frustration and dark fascination seethes in my veins. Is this how she sees me? A shadowy figure, more nightmare than man? Or is it all part of her game, another tactic to keep me at arm's length even as she surrenders her body to my darkest desires?

Damn her. Damn her and the twisted spell she's woven around my blackened heart. I should be reveling in my victory, savoring her submission like the rarest of vintages. But instead, I'm haunted by doubt, by the insidious certainty that her obedience is nothing more than a calculated facade. A means to an end I can't see, let alone control.

It's enough to drive a man to madness—or to violence.

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