Page 101 of Watch Me Burn
He remains still. Frozen. Not even the rise and fall of breathing. Then he moves, lowering himself until the mask hovers inches from my face, and solid warmth presses against me from chest to hips.
For the first time.
Every point where our bodies meet ignites. His chest crushes my breasts, his stomach is flush against mine, warm and solid, and his weight settles over me like he’s claiming all the space he’s always kept between us.
My nerve endings fire in rapid succession, electricity arcing across every inch of contact. The dam I’ve built around my heart cracks. This is what I’ve been begging for through countless nights. What I’ve pleaded for in whispered desperation when he maintained that barrier, that distance.
Emotion slams into me with the force of a riptide, dragging me under. My throat seizes around a sob that won’t stay down. Vision swimming, eyes burning,I struggle to comprehend the enormity of what he’s giving me. This intimacy he’s guarded as fiercely as his identity. This closeness he’s denied us both.
My thighs grip his hips, ankles locking at the small of his back, pulling him deeper. Tears break free and slide down my temples, disappearing into my hair. Not from hurt. From the devastating perfection of finally having what my soul has been screaming for.
“Don’t try to remove my mask.” His breath is hot against my lips—so close, so fucking close—each word edged with warning. “Don’t betray my trust, Luna.”
My lungs stutter, catching on the inhale. “Never.”
Whatever demons hide behind that mask, whatever scars or secrets he’s protecting, I won’t violate that boundary. Not when he’s offering me everything else.
My hand moves without conscious thought, sliding between our pressed bodies until my palm finds his chest. Heat bleeds through his cotton shirt, and underneath my fingertips, his heart hammers out a violent rhythm. The hunger to see his whole face consumes me, burning under my skin like a fever I can’t break. An ache that’s settled into my bones. But this—his weight, his heat, his trust—this is more than I dared hope for.
Through the mask’s eye slits, his stare finds mine and holds. The hardness there softens, cracks, and a fragile uncertainty flickers in the dark depths, maybe fear of what I’ll do with the vulnerability he’s handing me like a loaded weapon. Then his voice roughens, dropping into a low rumble that vibrates through both our bodies.
“Fucking touch me.”
The permission unleashes something wild in me. The sound that rips from my throat tangles triumph with relief and hunger so sharp it cuts. My fingers claw into his shirt, grabbing fistfuls of fabric. He hauls me upright as he stands, his arms banding around me like steel, like he thinks I might disappear if he loosens his grip even a fraction.
This embrace rewrites everything I thought I knew about touch. My body molds against his from chest to hip, and all of a sudden, I understand why I’ve felthollow all this time. The emotions threaten to tear me apart from the inside—too much joy, too much rightness, too much everything at once.
The tears won’t stop, tracking hot paths down my face. My breath stutters as every hard ridge and plane of his body presses against the soft curves of mine.
He’s still thick and hard inside me, but he’s gone motionless. Just holding me, watching and waiting for whatever comes next. I drag my tongue across my bottom lip and pull back just enough to see, my pulse hammering as my shaking hands reach for his buttons. The first one resists my fumbling fingers before surrendering with a soft pop.
His touch whispers across my temples, fingers catching the moisture that reveals too much of my heart.
“Don’t cry, little doe.”
But I can't stop.
I attack the next button, and then the next. One by one, I work my way down, and the fabric parts under my touch, revealing more of his skin to my hungry gaze. The tattoos flow across his chest and stomach, intricate designs that beg my eyes to trace their patterns. A smattering of dark hair dusts his skin, and my lips curve of their own accord.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I just expected my wolf to have more fur.”
I twirl my fingers through the sparse hair. He grunts, though I catch his lips twitching beneath the mask. Then he drives into me, one punishing thrust, deep enough to steal my breath, hard enough to make my toes curl.
When his shirt finally falls open, revealing his naked chest, I can’t contain the sound that spills from my lips. He’s more breathtaking than I imagined, all hard muscle and warm flesh. Darkness swallows most of him, but the moonlight coming through the window paints silver across his skin. Just enough.
“Jesus.”
The word whispers out as I slide the fabric from his shoulders. His hands abandon me long enough to allow the shirt to fall and join the growing pile ofclothes at our feet. Now he stands bare before me. Every inch of him exposed. Every line, every shadow, and every detail.
Finally.
The sight steals more than my breath—it leaves me speechless. My chest constricts so tight I forget how to breathe. My vision blurs again, emotions crashing over me in waves as the magnitude hits me. He hasn’t just let me remove his clothes. He’s lowering walls and barriers he’s had in place since we began.
Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe him. But it’s the tattoos that stop my heart. They cover his chest, his shoulders, and his arms—a masterpiece of ink that tells a story I’m not sure I’m ready to understand. At the center of it all is a wolf, magnificent and terrible, standing defiant against a backdrop of flames and hellish landscape.
The wolf’s fur is shades of gray, with burning embers seeming to dance along its coat where the hellfire touches. But it’s the eyes that capture me. Ice-blue, unnaturally bright, piercing straight through to my soul. They’re pupilless and otherworldly, creating a shocking contrast against the reds and oranges of the inferno surrounding it.
