Page 37 of Pretty Pink Poison
“Bane, can I explain?”
“No.” He thrust up into me, and I gasped at how his length stretched through me at this angle.
He’d pulled me down roughly enough that I took all of him in. So deep. So fully. So intensely that I moaned, “Oh God.”
“There’s no God here. God isn’t making you cry out, baby girl. Scream forme.”
“Wait. We need to talk, and we need—”
He didn’t wait.
He pulled back and slammed into me again, harder this time, his hips a punishing rhythm. The vanity rattled under the force. My breath caught as my forehead bumped the mirror and a hairline crack splintered across the glass, spider-webbing outward like our entire history fracturing at once. My reflection stared back at me in jagged pieces, lips parted, eyes wide.
The flicker of candles danced over the marble countertop, the flames throwing gold light over my skin and his. My cheek hovered just millimeters from the nearest flame. Heat licked my skin as I whimpered, torn between the burn and the pull of his body moving inside mine.
Bane didn’t ease up. He never did. Instead, the hand tangled in my hair tightened until my scalp stung, dragging my head back enough that I was forced to meet his eyes in the cracked mirror. His other hand snatched the candle and set it aside with a sharp clatter, only to press my torso down onto the cold vanity top. The marble kissed my skin with icy contrast to the heat of his chest pinning me there.
“Say you want me to stop, Bianca,” he ground out through clenched teeth, his voice low enough to vibrate against my back.His jaw was tight, his pupils blown wide like a man on the edge of losing everything he’d bottled.
I could feel it in the way he held me—this wasn’t just sex. He was holding onto his rage with me, gripping it like a weapon he couldn’t drop. Holding onto the violence he wanted to unleash while refusing to tip over that edge without my permission. Bane felt pain and emotion differently than I did. He needed to exorcise them physically, through control and impact, through blood and sweat.
He delivered his punishments deliberately, without hesitation. That’s what we’d all seen of him day after day: a man who broke others when he’d been wronged, who left his mark as proof.
His palm slid up my back, fingers spreading at my nape as his thumb traced the delicate notch at the base of my skull. “Say it,” he hissed. “Saystop. Sayenough. Say something.”
I swallowed hard, staring at my own splintered reflection—at the woman bent over marble and candlelight, at the man behind her who was both her tormentor and her love.
God, I still loved that man.
And I didn’t want him to hold back his emotions with me. I was sick of it. Sick of being ignored and forgotten up in a penthouse when all I really wanted was to work out what was between us.
“No,” I told him, voice ragged but certain. “Iwantthe pain.”
His eyes flared, pale and unblinking in the candlelight. For a heartbeat, he didn’t move, didn’t even breathe—like he was making sure he’d heard me right. I loved seeing him that way with the candlelight dancing over his angular face, the blood streaks from the man he’d just killed shining that dark red. Then his jaw flexed. “So be it, then.”
He pulled back, his cock sliding out until just the pierced tip brushed against my clit. The cool metal studs dragged over theswollen nub, back and forth, a slow, teasing torture that had my knees trembling against the vanity edge. My palms flattened against the marble, fingers curling until my nails squealed against the polished stone.
The candle flickered dangerously in his hand. He tipped it closer to my back, his breath grazing my neck as he muttered, “You shouldn’t have been with anyone but me, baby girl.”
Then he poured.
The wax hit my skin in a molten line, a hiss escaping me as the burn flared bright and hot, spreading like wildfire across my nerve endings. My spine bowed, my forehead nearly hitting the cracked mirror as my mouth opened on a strangled sound.
“Us together should have been enough.” His voice was rougher now, splintering on the edges.
I whimpered, the sound breaking, but instead of easing up, he released my hair and slapped my ass cheek mid-pour. The sting of his palm collided with the searing wax cooling on my skin. Pain and heat fused into one dizzying sensation that spiked adrenaline straight through my veins, flooding me until I was shaking. For a moment, it erased everything else—the cold, the silence, the loneliness. I felt it all again: my desire for him, my need for him, my desperate, clawing ache to prove that we belonged to each other even when it was madness.
Tears welled in my eyes and spilled before I could stop them. “We were.” My voice cracked. “We are enough.”
“You think I can just forget?” he rasped, stilling his hips so that the metal piercings rested, pulsing, against my clit. His grip on my hips was bruising; his body thrumming like a live wire above me.
“Please,” I begged. I wasn’t sure what for—forgiveness, for more, for him to take me apart completely.
“Please what, Pink Poison?” His breath brushed my ear as he leaned in close, the low whisper threading through me like velvetand barbed wire all at once. “Be a good girl and show me how much you want this cock.”
I should have stopped. Should have felt shame. Should have tried to force out the truth that I hadn’t chosen his brother over him, that I hadn’t betrayed what we were. But Bane’s pierced cock was already sliding against my slick center, throbbing like it was begging for entry, like it remembered me.
He delivered his emotions the only way he knew how—on my back, through fire and steel, a searing punishment I both deserved and craved. The hot wax marked me like his fingers, like his words, like his name carved into me invisibly.
