Page 23 of Velvet Thorns
He swallows hard, eyes focused on me as if I’m the last thing tethering him to sanity. His pupils are blown so wide that there’s barely any silver left.
“Take it off,” he rasps. “That dress. I want it on the fucking floor. I want to see every inch of the body you’ve been using to torture me with since the second you walked into that room tonight. I want to memorize it with my mouth.”
I grind against him harder, dragging a ragged gasp from deep in his throat. His hips buck between us, and I rake my nails down his forearms, biting back a smile as angry red marks bloom across his skin.
“What else?” I purr, watching the cracks start to form.
“I want your pussy on my face. I want you to sit on my tongue and ride it like it’s my cock. Smother me. Let me choke on how wet you are. I wanna be buried so deep inside you, we both forget how to fucking breathe.”
I hum like I’m considering it, rocking my hips again anddragging the head of his cock against the soaked lace between my thighs. “You want to make me come?”
“So fucking bad,” he growls, straining against his binds, his chest rising and falling like he’s about to shatter.
“Then beg for it. Beg me to give you my body. Beg me to ride you.” He sucks in a shaky breath, and the last of his pride burns out in his eyes.
“Please, Annie. I need it. I want to split you open with my cock.” He’s shaking now, chest heaving like the thought of me grinding on him is enough to push him right to the edge. “I need you to ride me until I’m a fucking mess beneath you. Let me feel how tight you are, how wet your cunt is. Let me taste you until you’re shaking and screaming. Let me fuck you until I’m so deep inside you that we both forget who we are. Use me. Let me ruin you—or just ruin me. I don’t fucking care. Just let me in.”
In another life, this might’ve been our reality.
But in this one, I lean in and drag my tongue along his jaw because, hell, I need to taste him, just once, just one last moment of weakness before I twist the knife. I press my mouth to his ear, inhaling his scent and memorizing the way he shivers beneath me, allowing myself this stolen second of intimacy before I sink my claws in.
“I wouldn't let you inside me, Phoenix, if you were the last dick on earth.”
I sit back, straddling him like a queen preparing for execution. My fingers lift the mask from my face, peeling it away and letting it fall to the floor. The colored contacts follow, revealing the gold-flecked eyes that once looked at him with adoration.
Gone is the disguise and the anonymity.
His silence is immediate, and the color drains from his face as the truth hits him harder than any slap ever could.
“Remember me now,quarterback?” I sneer, sliding off his bodyand reaching for my phone without breaking eye contact. “Say cheese, asshole.” The flash goes off, and I don’t know if the look on his face is shock or horror. It could be both. I don’t care. “Now you know what it’s like to be humiliated, to have someone shove a camera in your face and become an even bigger joke than you already were.”
I toss the phone onto the bed like I can’t stand the sight of it. Maybe I can’t. Maybe holding onto it makes me feel dirtier than anything I just did. My hands move to his pants, and I zip him back up with a finality that feels like closing a chapter I should’ve burned long ago.
I want him out.
I need him gone.
“Shannen…” he breathes out, my real name hitting me like a fist to the chest. I swallow hard against the sudden tightness in my throat, forcing myself to ignore how it sounds falling from his lips.
“You thought you’d fuck a stranger tonight. Instead, you get to be rejected and reduced to the same powerless, pathetic mess you turned me into ten years ago.” I untie his wrists, and his eyes never leave my face—storm gray and burning like he’s trying to understand how this happened. “You’re going to walk out that door with your cock hard and your pride shredded. You don’t get to touch me. You don’t get to talk to me or rewrite our history.” I step back, breath tight in my chest, and cross the room to the door like I’m walking through fire. “All you get is to live with the memory of what you almost did here tonight—which, if you’re honest, would’ve just made you sick anyway, given our past.”
He sits up slowly, as if every bone in his body has turned to stone beneath the weight of what I’ve taken from him. I stand in the doorway, my fingers wrapped tight around the handle, holding it open even as some sick, twisted part of my soul yells at me to close it, just to keep him here a little longer.
Instead, I draw in a breath, look him dead in the eyes, and I smile.
“Happy fucking Halloween, Phoenix.”
He remains seated as long seconds pass. I don’t know what I expected—rage, a cruel laugh, maybe even that same smirk he’s worn a hundred times before—but I didn’t expect this.
Something about his stillness unsettles me, and the longer it lasts, the more I realize I don’t know this man anymore.
Why the fuck hasn’t he said anything?
Finally, he rises to his feet. He picks up his jacket from the edge of the bed like he has all the time in the world and starts walking toward me with a look that turns my blood to ice. Without warning, his hand slams the hotel room door shut so hard the walls shake, and something in the bathroom crashes.
I flinch, my muscles tightening with adrenaline as every instinct screams at me to run.
“Get out, Phoenix.”
