Page 9 of Bred By the Masked BRATVA
“And the cost?” she presses.
“You.”
Silence folds around the word. A pressure almost heavy enough to make my ears pop.
“You talk like a man who expects obedience,” she says.
“I talk like a man who expects reality.” I finally touch her, just the edge of my thumb at the corner of her mouth, catching theghost of a smirk before it forms. “You won’t bend. Good. I don’t want bent. I want bound.”
“Bound,” she repeats, tasting it, cataloguing it.
“Bound to me, bound to this—” I gesture loosely toward the closed door, the city beyond, the empire my father thinks he can dangle on a string. “—for as long as it takes to make the rest of them irrelevant.”
Her lashes lower for the first time. Not submission. Strategy. When she looks back up, the air between us is tighter, thinner.
“You still don’t know my name,” she says.
I lean in, and the silver of my mask nudges the black lace of hers until our field of vision is just breath and heat and the faintest sheen of her skin. “I don’t need your name to choose you.”
“And if I don’t choose you back?”
“You already did,” I murmur. “When you took my hand on the floor.”
“That was camouflage.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” I straighten, just enough to see her mouth curve in irritation…and something else. “The ball ends at midnight tomorrow. You’ll walk out on my arm. Or I’ll carry you. Anonymity is over when I say it is.”
Her laugh is quiet and incredulous and a little wild. “You really think you can order me?”
I take her wrist, my grip tight but not cruel. A hold that saysyou can pull away, but you’ll have to mean it. Her pulse kicks against my fingers, certain as a verdict.
“I don’t think,” I say. “I decide.”
A beat passes. Another. She doesn’t pull away.
“Then you’d better be worth the story,” she says.
I smile, slow. “I’m the only story you won’t survive without.”
Her eyes flare, just a fraction, at my words. That sharp mind of hers is already parsing them, weighing arrogance against truth, predator against prey. She doesn’t understand that with me, those lines don’t matter.
She tilts her chin, defiant even when my fingers tighten fractionally around her wrist. I can feel her pulse kicking, steady but faster now, as though her body betrays what her mouth refuses to say.
I step in closer, until the space between us is nothing but breath and tension. Her perfume is faint, clean and sharp, not the heavy cloying sweetness the others bathe in. She smells like defiance.
Her lips curve, that same dangerous almost-smile. “You think you’ve already won.”
“I don’t think,” I murmur. My mask brushes her lace one. “I know.”
And then I kiss her.
Not gently, not politely. A claiming. Her lips part beneath mine, startled, but she doesn’t pull back. She pushes, answering with the same fire that’s burned in her eyes all night. The clash of it sears straight through me.
I taste champagne, salt, the faintest trace of something bitter she’s been holding on her tongue. Secrets. Lies. Hunger. She gives them all away in the press of her mouth.
I free her wrist and frame her face instead, thumb grazing the edge of lace, holding her still as I deepen the kiss. She should shove me off. She should slap me, scream, flee. Instead her hand fists in my shirt, dragging me closer, like she’s as furious at herself as she is at me.
When I finally break away, it’s only to look at her. Her lips are kiss-swollen, her breath uneven, her mask slightly askew. But her eyes, they’re brighter, fiercer, daring me to try again.
