Page 37 of Dance of Madness

“I… I was scared,” I say quietly. “Terrified. I ran because?—”

“Oh, is that what you’ve told yourself?” he muses. “That it wasfearmaking your feet pound the floor and your breath catch in the shadows?”

I swallow.

“Or was the reason you ran so fast the same reason your panties were a fucking drippy, soakingmesswhen I ripped them off your pussy.”

Shame roars into my face, turning it blood-red in the mirror as my pulse skips.

Nero chuckles quietly behind me.

“A princess like you isn’t used to being spoken to like that, is she?”

My bottom lip retreats between my teeth. Then my entire body jolts, sparks, and writhes when his palm comes slapping against my ass again so hard that I bite down, whimpering as the taste of copper floods my tongue.

I whimper as the heated sensation throbs, needy and demanding, in my core.

The harder he pins me to the counter and the mirror, the tighter he grips my hair, the more he spanks me, the further I sink into this new, all-consuming darkness.

I want more.

The twisted thing inside of me craves it.

My breath catches sharply as he licks a slow stripe up my neck, then scrapes his teeth along the same path, marking me. Heat rushes straight to my thighs.

“You smell like you did that night,” he rasps. “All soft and scared…andsweet.”

I swallow hard. “This is insane. You can’t just?—”

He chuckles darkly. “Oh princess, darling, you haven’t seen insane yet.”

His hand slips lower, possessive and hungry. The weight of it is dizzying.Everythinghe does is dizzying.

“You’re shaking,” he observes.

“And you’re deranged,” I bite back. It only makes him chuckle as his hand wanders over my ass and grips the flirty hem of my dress.

The part that really terrifies me isn’t him.

It’s me.

The way I’m melting under him. Again.

The way my mind is screaming, and my body is…betraying me. Aching.

Wanting.

He tugs sharply at my hair, dragging a mortifyingly needy whimper from my throat. He tilts my head, forcing me to meet his eyes in the mirror. His hand starts to drag the back of my dress up, the hem teasing against the back of my thighs…

“I’m seeing someone.”

It bursts out of me like a gunshot.

“I have a boyfriend.”

Nero stills. His piercing green eyes latch onto mine in the mirror. His jaw clenches with a barely contained violence that chills me.

Then, suddenly, he laughs: a dark, rasping, bark.

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