Sasha
The hazy tendrils of morning light did little to chase away the storm of turmoil raging within me. I stared sightlessly at the ornate canopy overhead, my body bearing the lingering imprints of last night's reckless abandon like brands seared into my very soul.
Luca's scorching caresses...the breathless melody of our joined bodies...the overwhelming wave of ecstasy that had whited out any semblance of higher reasoning, leaving only blind instinct in its wake. I could still taste the bittersweet tang of his kisses, the primal claiming possession that had unlocked something ravenous and long-denied inside me.
But in the harsh light of day, the weight of my actions awoke a maelstrom of chaotic emotions I couldn't begin to untangle.
How had I allowed myself to become so recklessly unraveled in the arms of the very man I'd sworn to destroy? Luca Moretti embodied everything I had sacrificed my life to eradicate—corruption, violence, and the unchecked craving for power that crushed anyone foolish enough to stand in its path. His family's poisonous legacy had already robbed me of so much...and yet I had succumbed to his seductive intensity like a shipwreck yielding to the maelstrom.
Shame swirled through me in dizzying eddies, closely followed by searing tendrils of self-recrimination. I was better than this loss of control, stronger than these base desires that had overridden every carefully cultivated principle. My cause, my vengeance, should have been the only unyielding constant steering my actions. Not...this. This unraveling surrendering to the tantalizing unknown of his drugging touch.
And yet, as my mind inevitably slipped back to the memories of last night—his large frame blanketing mine, the scorching slide of satin skin against satin skin—something low in my belly clenched with a yearning that had nothing to do with hatred or fury.
Luca had awoken something primal and long-buried inside me. Something ravenous and all-consuming that even now demanded to be sated further, consequences be damned. I could still feel his maddening presence hovering at the edges of my awareness like a phantom caress, sending delicious frissons of anticipation shivering through me.
A harsh exhale rent the tense silence as the bedroom door opened with a groan, and the source of my warring turmoil prowled into view. My breath hitched despite my best efforts, instinctive yearning momentarily overriding everything else as I drank in Luca's whiskey-eyed regard raking over me with naked hunger.
"Good morning, Sasha," he purred every rich syllable a blatant seduction that strummed my nerves like the plucking of harp strings.
I should have hurled venom at him, lashed out with every ounce of the vicious hatred still simmering in my marrow over what his family had wrought. Snarled like the wounded, vengeful beast I was born to become, ready to rend and ravage anything that dared cross my path.
But as Luca sank onto the mattress beside me, his sheer masculine presence washing over me in intoxicating waves, any coherent recriminations withered on my tongue. My very bones seemed to thrum in harmony with his predatory proximity, every cell in my body crying out to yield, to surrender myself over to the searing unknown of his merciless intensity once again.
"Did you sleep well?" His fingertips trailed over the fine bones of my ankle in a scorching caress. "I trust you have no...lingering regrets over our activities last night?"
The rough timbre of his graveled tones detonated a cyclone of frissons along my nerves, stoking the bewitching awareness unfurling through my veins into searing need. Words failed me entirely, my mind growing hazy beneath the onslaught of rekindling desire. So instead, I allowed my actions to speak the reckless truth whirling through my psyche.
I slid fractionally closer, savoring the molten path of sensation blazed by each new point of contact between us. "Regrets?" The words emerged on a breathless rasp, unguarded and laced with smoky yearning. "I can assure you, Luca...I never do anything by halves."
His pupils blew wide, devouring me with a look of such rapacious intensity that it stole what little restraint remained. Then Luca was looming over me, every powerful inch radiating an unyielding dominance and banked menace that should have had me fleeing in unadulterated terror.
Instead, a sinuous shudder of purest visceral craving cascaded through me as his hand cradled my jaw, holding me immobile even as his lips brushed mine in a caress somehow more devastatingly intimate than any of the searing instances of possession last night.
"Good," he growled against my mouth, the rough rasp vibrating straight to my molten core. "Because I'll never allow you to regret belonging to me, Sasha."
Then his mouth slanted over mine in a searing brand, and all remaining tethers of sanity, of restraint, of reason itself, disintegrated in the wake of our explosive joining.
Rational thought became an archaic notion as Luca's insistent mouth moved over mine in a soul-searing duel. My fingers knotted in the crisp hair at his nape, pulling him deeper into the wild maelstrom of our joined passion as a low, desperate keen echoed from somewhere in the back of my throat.
This was madness, pure and visceral, to be surrendering myself so completely to the very man I'd sworn to despise. The man whose tainted legacy had robbed me of everything, leaving me a hollow revenant consumed by vengeance. Each scorching slide of his hands over my fevered skin should have awakened a resurgence of that all-consuming fury.
Instead, I arched shamelessly into his unyielding embrace, glorying in the exquisite agonies he coaxed from my traitorous flesh with every possessive caress. Luca was the poison for which I'd willingly abandoned all forms of hard-won immunity, succumbing to his toxicity with relish.
I was unraveling with each punishing sweep of his tongue, helpless against the rising tide of visceral yearning that threatened to sweep me away entirely. Coherent streams of thought fragmented, skittering like ashes on the errant winds of instinct and primal hunger.
Luca's hand cupped the nape of my neck as he angled the searing trajectory of our joined mouths, imposing his merciless will over mine until I was left dizzy and panting in the wake of his possession. A constellation of bruises from last night's clashing joining blossomed in vivid hues across the expanse of my oversensitized skin.
Each one a shattered promise, a shredded vow to enact the vengeance that had fueled my singular drive for so long. Instead of lashing outward with that hatred, hurling fiery imprecations at the source of my rage and fury, I was mewling like a thing debased by my surrender to this primitive, bone-deep need.
Some distant part of me railed against this unforgivable duplicity, this treachery birthed from giving in to Luca's seductive undoing over and over. But that voice of conscience and restraint grew increasingly muted beneath the driving rhythm of our fused bodies undulating in scorching rapture.
Luca's tongue plundered possessive paths along the thrumming pulse point of my throat as his weight pinned me into the rumpled bedding, branding me with the indelible stamp of his dominance. A low, visceral groan vibrated against my tingling flesh, his velvet tones roughened to an animalistic rasp by towering need.
"Mine," he growled, the guttural declaration lancing through me like a physical caress. "Every intoxicating inch of you was created to be possessed by me, Sasha."
Those gravelly words were my undoing as surely as each wandering caress and bruising imprint of possession. Because in that moment, harsh reality and cataclysmic certainties blurred into insignificance. There was only the merciless, rapacious onslaught of our clashing forms and spiraling surrender.
Perhaps there could be no making sense of the madness that had seized me so completely in his arms night after night. Maybe I was doomed to become little more than a specter consumed by its ghostly thrall, unraveling into mere embers in the wake of this all-consuming blaze.
But as my nails scored along the ridges of Luca's back in mute supplication, as his name ripped from my throat in a sensual litany, any final flickers of resistance crumbled to ash under the onslaught of our unleashed passion.
I was no acolyte of vengeance any longer, not in these moments when I succumbed so utterly to Luca's undoing.
In his embrace, I had become the very embodiment of sin incarnate, and I would gladly let that damnation consume me down to my very marrow.