Page 61 of Pretty Pink Poison
I fought him as he took the stairs two at a time, muscles coiled tight under his suit. His jaw was clenched, but under his breath I caught the way he cursed me or himself or all of us.
“Don’t scream like you’re scared,” he barked at me, scanning the hall like a soldier clearing a room.
I clawed at his shoulders but when he stopped in front of the door, I went still. My heart slammed against my ribs. “You put me in there alone,” I hissed, “and I will never forgive you. I promise you, Bane.”
“I’d never make you go in alone again.” His voice was different now. Rougher. Almost…pained. He set me down gently, still blocking the exit with his body. “Open it. Make the choice to endure it, Bianca.Withme.”
It was a dare. A challenge. A test.
He was baiting me, forcing me to stand in front of the thing that had defined my childhood and my fear and maybe he was forcing me to stare it down so that it wouldn’t define the rest of me.Why should I?My hands trembled on the knob but I didn’t turn it. “I don’t have to prove anything to you.”
“No.” His pale gaze held mine. “But you damn sure should prove it to yourself. You’ve lived in fear of him and of silence and being alone too long. You think that doesn’t stem from this?”
“You’re one to talk!” I screamed, shoving at his chest. “You won’t even look at me because of a damn arrangement our parents made. For family, right?”
“You live for you from now on,” he said, voice low and lethal. “Not them. Not even me. Overcome that right now and I’ll do the same.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t push. He waited for me to make the decision.
And that’s when it clicked. This was the real Bane—not the executioner at the dinner table, not the cold stranger that sometimes would come to me in the night. This was the version of him that existed under all of that: The one who forced the people he cared about to confront what would otherwise destroy them.
He wasn’t dragging me here to hurt me. He was dragging me here to show me I could stand in front of it and not break. That the silence and the loneliness would never own me again.
My hand shook on the knob. The lock was still on the outside. My father’s lock.
I turned to Bane. His silhouette filled the hallway behind me, his pale eyes fixed on me but softer now, waiting. He didn’t push. He just stood there, hands at his sides like he was ready to catch me if I ran.
But instead of running, I reached for him. I fisted his tie, yanked him forward and crushed my mouth to his, dragging him into the black with me as I stepped backward over the threshold. We fell into the darkness together, my back hitting cold steel, my heart hammering against my ribs like it wanted out.
Bane slammed the door behind us and the sound hit me as hard as it did as when I was young. Fear and darkness overtook me.
I felt the panic first as I ripped my lips from his to gasp for air, but his hand was at my chin pulling me back to him, so he could take and take and take. He didn’t give me space or a moment to catch my breath.
He was unyielding and unrelenting.
He didn’t allow room for the panic to rattle me or give me time to scream. He chased it away with how he bit at my bottom lip, how he shoved me up against the back of the closet, us so close together that nothing, not even a painful memory could come between us now.
And that’s when the heat of his touch really rolled through me. His presence filled every inch of that closet I used to fear so much and became a solid unyielding force that couldn’t be reckoned with.
I knew we were in the dark, just the way he liked to be. It was his loophole that I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see his eyes. But tonight I didn’t care. Tonight, it wasn’t about Bane Black, the executioner, or Bianca Zarelli, the pawn. This was about a new me now, about how I’d hated this silence, this prison, and this loneliness, but I was making a new sound within it on my own terms. As his mouth crashed over mine again, I realized I wasn’t falling into the closet. I was falling into myself—into the version of me that could finally stand here and not break. I wouldn’t be what any of them tried to shape me as ever again because I was going to shape myself.
Tonight, I’d desecrate the place that used to bring me to my knees. And I’d take what I wanted too.
I bit back at Bane’s lips and clawed at his neck as I dragged my fingertips up and into his hair. I pulled him hard against me, wanting to make my mark. Then, I tore my lips from his and went for his neck, biting so hard I tasted blood as his palm slid up my thigh, fingers curling possessively when they got to my center.
I heard the tremor of his breath against my temple, “You feel that? How you control it? You control every fucking thing around you, Pink.”
“Even you?” I breathed out as his fingers pushed my panties to the side and my hands went to his trousers to undo them and then I wrapped my fingers around his cock. “Do I get to control you from now on?”
“You always did,” he admitted. “You always will even when I’m halfway across the world trying to make sure you don’t.”
I shoved him against the door and got on my knees then. I felt his pre-cum against my thumb as I brushed over it, but I wanted all of it. I wanted to taste and hear and feel how he completely unraveled for me alone in this space. I wanted to rewrite the memory of it.
I wasn’t a little girl locked away doing what everyone told me now. I was a woman who had power over a man that not even my family could reign in.
“Tell me how you like it, Bane,” I whispered before I took his length into my mouth. I didn’t do anything like this much at all, but I knew to take him all the way back. My body wanted all of him in any way I could have him. I sucked him into the back of my throat and moaned.
His fingers found the pulse at my throat, thumb stroking once before moving to my neck and groaning, “I like the feel of my cock at the back of your throat, Pink. All the way down it. You take it so good.”
