“Log out of my video feed. I don’t want you to watch in case I change my mind and kill him myself.”

“Do me a favor and give him a big sloppy kiss instead,” Lachlan says.

She responds with an aggrieved grunt and disconnects the call before tossing the phone on the prep table with a clang.

She turns to me then, her eyes blazing and her arms crossed. “I’m counting this as a win.”

“That’s fair.”

“That’s three for me. Best of five.”

“Deserved. Totally.”

“And I’m still very angry with you.”

“I get it, love.”

“I want to stab you.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Please not my dick though. Or my balls. Or my pretty face.”

Sloane’s lips tremble. Her hard expression crumbles and recovers to a stoic mask, only to fall a second time. The red spatters and streaks on her face are so achingly beautiful, her tears so fucking agonizing. “You broke my heart.”

“I know, love. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. You know I only did it to get you away from him, don’t you? I had to get you out of here or he was going to kill you.”

The tears in Sloane’s eyes shift and shine as they gather at her lash line. “I am not unloveable.” She jabs her bloody finger in my direction, punctuating every word. “I am very fucking loveable.”

I’m desperate to just touch her, even for a moment, as though seeing she’s okay is not enough. “Love… please… just let me out of this chair so we can talk properly.” Sloane’s forehead crinkles as she tries to hold on to her ferocity and fails, and when I give her a little smile, she can’t help herself—her gaze drops to my scar and lingers there. “Come on, Blackbird. Let me up so I can prove to you that I fucking love you to pieces. Maybe I’ll take that first aid kit by the door too if you don’t mind.”

Her ferocious glare returns.

“Or I’ll just bleed out on the floor, that’s cool… but getting out of the chair would still be aces. Preferably with no stabbing.”

After another long moment of hesitation, she approaches and starts working the knots free, first the ones that bind the chair to the support post of the counter and then those looped tight around my limbs. The last rope to fall to the floor is the one that straps my impaled wrist to the armrest.

I erupt from the chair the instant it’s gone.

Pain is dulled by need as I yank the implement free and grab Sloane as she backs away, crushing her to me in a desperate embrace. And I thank every god I never pray to when she wraps her arms around my body. She buries her face into my chest and dampens my shirt with all the fears she’s kept buried.

“I thought I was too late,” she says, over and over. “I’m so sorry, Rowan. It took me too long to figure out your clues.”

I take her face in my palms and stare down into her wide hazel eyes. An ache chokes up my throat as I savor this moment to just look at her, to feel her warmth against my skin. I came so close to losing everything. But she’s here, with her ginger scent and black eyeliner smeared in streaks down her skin, her freckles dotted with specks of blood. Creases line her forehead and her furrowed brow as her gaze bounds between mine.

She’s never been more beautiful.

“Not too late, Blackbird. Right on time.”

She tries to smile, but it doesn’t come. Her dimple is only a faint depression on her skin. And I know the lies I told her are the most dangerous kind, because I weaponized her real insecurities. Even if I only said them to save her, cuts like those still run deep and heal slowly.

I lower my head and hold her eyes, keeping her face steady between my palms. “You have never been unlovable. You were just waiting for someone who will love you for who you are, not for who they want you to be. I can do that, if you’ll let me.” I press my lips to hers and taste salt and blood, but pull away before the kiss deepens. “I fucking adore you, Sloane Sutherland. I wanted you from that first day at Briscoe’s. I have loved you for years. I’m not stopping. Not ever.”

Sloane’s gaze drops to my lips and remains there. She nods.

“You might be psycho,” I say with a grin as her eyes narrow, “but you’re my psycho, and I’m yours. Got it?”

When she lifts her eyes from my lips, she finally smiles. “You’re still kind of the worst.”

“And you still love me.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

Sloane rises on her tiptoes and folds her hands around my nape, drawing me closer until her forehead presses to mine, her breath a sweetly-scented caress on my lips.

“I really fucking do,” she whispers. “And you’re going to have to try harder than that to get rid of me, because I’m not going anywhere.”

“Neither am I, Sloane.”

When Sloane pulls my lips down to hers, I know it. I feel it in every beat that throbs in my raw, bleeding flesh. That the world could turn in every direction and shatter every reality, but there’s no other life than the one we choose to build.

OceanofPDF.com

23

OceanofPDF.com

PIGMENT

OceanofPDF.com

SLOANE

“We’re going to be late,” Rowan says. But he doesn’t care. Not really.

Because his hands are threaded into my hair and his head is tossed back as I swallow his cock.

“Jesus, Sloane. How are you so fucking good at this?”

I hum my satisfaction into his flesh and cup his balls with my free hand as I plunge my fingers into my pussy with the other. When I moan again, he looks down, his eyes black with desire.

“Fuck, I love watching you touch yourself,” he hisses. My eyes flutter closed as I swirl my touch over my clit. Precum threads across my tongue. “You’d better make yourself come, because I am right on the fucking edge and we need to go.”

I slow the motion of my fingers, slide my lips to the crown of his erection, and grin.

My insolence is met with a growl. Rowan’s hand darts to my throat and catches the giggle that begs to be set free.

“Are you being a brat?” he asks as I run my tongue along the underside of his erection and pin him with my most innocent eyes. His hand tightens. “Have you forgotten the last time you were a brat?”

I shrug, even though I most certainly have not forgotten. When I decided to push his buttons and disregard most of his orders while riding his cock a few weeks ago, he kidnapped me as I was coming home from drinks with Anna, blindfolded me, and strapped me down on a table in the restaurant to eat a full range of delicacies off my naked body. He edged me for hours, drizzling caramel sauce across my nipples to suck it off as he fucked me, dripping cold whipped cream onto my genital piercings before licking them clean. Every time I begged for mercy, he laughed.

“Good girls get rewards,” he’d said as he turned down the vibration on the anal plug he’d pushed into my ass after he’d tied me down. He slowed the rhythm of his strokes as he thrust into me, pulling me back from the brink of an orgasm. “Brats receive punishment.”

He’d slid out of me, jerked off until he sprayed his cum in warm spurts across my chest, then started all over again.

It probably had the opposite effect of what he intended, because I had the best time that night.

“That’s your answer?” he says now, his eyes lethal and dark. “Just a shrug? That seems pretty bratty to me.”

I sigh and lick my way back to the crown of his erection as I cup his balls.

“I might have lied about the appointment time,” I reply as I stroke the length of his cock and lavish the tip with a swirling lick. “We have an extra hour.”

My eyes stay fused to Rowan’s face as this information settles into his endorphin-flooded brain.