Page 21 of Vicious Hearts

Anything.

Even stalking the members and peripheral members of an Irish crime family. Even murdering its leader in cold blood.

Even fucking him.

A knot forms in my stomach as I feel my face grow hot. Again,thatwasn’t ever supposed to be part of what happened earlier tonight.

I didn’t go to a kink club with the intention of losing my virginity to the man I was about to kill.

A man with lethally hypnotic green eyes. A man with a positively palpable darkness swirling around him—a darkness that latched onto and hooked itself into that secret, hidden part of me, and refused to let go.

A darkness that sparked something wicked in me.

I didn’thaveto let any of that happen. I could have killed him in the elevator. Or when we first walked into the room. Or when he was telling me to strip, or first touching me.

Pushing me to the edge.

Shattering my inhibitions and allowing the darkest parts of me I’ve never once explored with another person to come flooding out.

IknowI could have done it before his cock rammed between my legs.

Before he drove into me, claiming me like no one ever has before.

Before I felt everyenormousinch of his thickness filling me, stretching me, even tearing me—a pain that immediately triggered a pleasure response, because that’s how fucked up I am.

That sudden and vicious first penetration, after being wound up by him so tightly, was like pulling a trigger, making me come instantly, harder than I’ve ever come before.

No. I didn’t have to let all of that happen. At least, I don’t think I did. Though, now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it’s better to say I was powerless to stop any of it.

Because the version where Ileta vicious monster brutally take my virginity against the bedroom wall of a sex club seconds before I put a knife in his heart doesn’t exactly paint me in a very positive light.

I close my eyes, shuddering as I remember the savagery of his touch. The viciousness of his kiss. The sheer brutality of his pleasure.

When I shift on the bed, I wince at the pain that cramps between my thighs. I put my hand down there, and my fingers come away smudged with red.

And my face burns with shame.

I wish I could say blood is the only wetness I felt there in this moment. But that would be a lie.

With a groan, I stand and pad into the bathroom, shedding my robe. In the mirror, my eyes drag over the many bruises and marks scattered across my skin—my tenderized nipples, my bitten neck.

The puffiness between my thighs.

From there, as always, my gaze shifts to the other marks that dot my body. Older scars. Older wounds, that run far deeper than my skin. Some are from the brutal monster who was my father—the faded scar on my wrist, the lines across my back.

Others are from my own hand.

Little secret white lines across my thighs.

Places where I could let the pain bleed out. Places where the horrors from my childhood and adolescence could escape. Places I cut to feel anything other than the shadows of the past.

But not all of them come from a place of misery and darkness. Others come from a place of…

Depravity.

They’re the reminders of times I’ve pushed the deviant and fucked-up kinks inside of me to places I shouldn’t go—to cliff edges I shouldn’t look over.

To places where pain and pleasure blend in heady, intoxicating ways.

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