Page 155 of Bound By Darkness

She gasps my name, her nails dragging down my back, branding me with every desperate scratch.I thrust deeper, harder, setting a rhythm that’s less about fucking and more about staking a claim.

Aoife meets me stroke for stroke, her body greedy for it, for me, her mouth pressing frantic kisses against my throat, my jaw, anywhere she can reach.Every moan, every breathless whisper, every shattered gasp is a prayer that only I get to hear.

"You’re mine," I growl into her skin, my voice breaking with it.

"Yours," she sobs against my mouth."Always."

I drive into her harder, rougher, chasing the edge we both know is coming fast, brutal, inevitable.Her body locks around mine, trembling, burning, and when she comes, she shatters completely.

Beautiful, wild, and fucking mine.

The second she breaks, I follow, groaning her name into her skin like it’s the only truth left in me.The world falls away, and for the first time in a long, long time, there’s nothing but this.

Nothing but her.

Nothing but us.

We collapse together, tangled and trembling, breathless and wrecked, but still here.

Still standing.

Aoife presses her hand to my chest, right over my heart."We made it," she whispers like she's almost afraid to believe it.

"We did," I say quietly, the finality of it settling between us.

She tilts her head, eyes catching the low light, soft but blazing with the fire they never managed to kill."What now?"she asks, voice steady, certain.

I drag my thumb across her lower lip, slow and reverent, savoring the feel of her.

"Now," I murmur, "we rebuild everything they tried to burn to ash."

A slow, wicked smile curls her mouth, the kind that promises kingdoms rising from ruin."Together," she breathes.

"Always."

The world tried to break us.

Tried to scatter us into dust.

But we didn't bend.

We sharpened ourselves into something deadlier.

We became the blade.

And now, in the ashes of everything they destroyed, we rule.

Epilogue

Aoife

The paper is old now—yellowed,delicate, the ink faded to a ghost of itself.I stand in Ruairi’s office, staring at it, framed behind glass like something sacred.A scrap of lined notebook paper, written in my messy, childish scrawl.

We promise to run the Quigley Syndicate together, side by side.

The words are stained with our blood where Ruairi, with all the recklessness of a boy who thought pain proved something, sliced both our fingers open and pressed them to the page.The mark we left that day, raw and clumsy, outlasted everything.

We didn’t understand what we were promising.

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