“But you did!” Her voice rose to a near-hysterical pitch. “And you didn’t tell me! I went around in ignorance for my entire life, and you knew he was a monster, and I’ll never forgive you for that, never, never, never!”

She broke away from him and began stalking around the room, wild-eyed and enraged. She tore a picture from the wall and threw it with a scream across the living room. A lamp met her wrath next, destroyed in an explosion of flying ceramic and splintered wood as it was slammed against a desk.

“Everything was lies! My entire life—lies!”

She was beyond herself, beyond rational thought, beautiful and violent like an avenging angel, a whirlwind of destruction. D watched her tear through the room with a calm that didn’t match the circumstances, because he knew on some basic level that this was exactly what she needed at this moment. She needed to get it out. All that rage and betrayal and pain needed to come out.

He’d fix the house later.

She swung around and faced him, breathing raggedly, fixing her livid black gaze for the first time on his face. “Did you kill him?”

His answer was swift and emphatic. “No.”

She took a step closer, eyes unblinking. “Did you and the others plan to take over the colony?”

“No.”

Her lips twisted. She took another step closer. “Did you make fun of me, behind my back? Knowing what a fool I was?”

He took a step toward her, and his voice grew dark. “No, Eliana. No.”

“How can I believe you? How can I believe anything? I can’t trust anyone—I can’t even trust myself. I can’t trust my own judgment!”

She was distraught, working herself up again, her voice rising where only moments before it had fallen. He closed the distance between them, took her roughly by the arms, gazed deep into her eyes, and said, “You can trust this.”

And he kissed her.

She didn’t fight him as he expected. She melted against him with a low sound in her throat and her mouth soft and warm against his. Her arms came up around his neck, and his arms wound around her body, and they stood there like that, tasting each other, fused together in the darkness of the ruined living room, wreckage all around them. It went on and on until his breath was short and his body was hot and inflamed. His fingers dug into her hips, her waist, her bottom. Beneath the cold leather she wore, her flesh was soft and yielding, and imagining it beneath his fingers, beneath his tongue, made him moan into her mouth and kiss her even harder.

She broke away with a horrified look. Then she slapped him, hard and stinging, her palm open against his face.

He sent her a ruthless smile that drained the color from her cheeks. He said, “You know what you need, baby girl?”

She stared at him, breathing erratically, her dark eyes huge.

His smile grew darker. “You need to fuck it out.”

She blinked, huffed a little astonished breath, and said, “I really hate you, you know that?”

“You hate me because I’m right.” He fisted a hand into her hair at the base of her neck and pulled her back to him. He kissed her again but she struggled, she pushed against his chest. He ignored it and deepened the kiss. It was hard and rough and greedy, their teeth clashing. She bit him on the lip, and he tasted the salty tang of his own blood.

“That’s it,” he whispered against her mouth, and kissed her again, deep and demanding.

She pulled back and stared at him for a beat, panting, a strand of blue-black hair caught at one corner of her mouth, a smear of his blood across her full lower lip.

Then she leapt on him.

He caught her around the waist as she locked her thighs and arms around him, kissing him with an unchecked hunger that took his breath away. He staggered, knocked into a table, the desk she’d broken the lamp over, until finally one leg hit the couch set in the nook of the bay window and he dropped them both to it.

She rolled on top of him, tore off her leather jacket, tore off his shirt, tossing it all to the floor in between frantic kisses. She was as starved as he was, heat and shadow above him, their ragged breathing matched. He shoved a hand beneath her shirt and cupped one breast in his hand, pinched her hard nipple, and thought he would come when she moaned into his mouth and rocked her pelvis against his. She sat up and moonlight from the paned window above them painted her ghostly pale, banded in checkerboard shadow. She looked down at him, her cheeks flushed, her lips red with his blood and swollen from his kisses, and his breath caught in his throat.

He’d never seen anything so lovely.

She lifted her arms and pulled her shirt over her head, dropping it to the floor. She wore a black lacy bra, delicate and feminine, which ripped apart like tissue paper when he took it between his teeth. He cupped her breasts in his hands and nuzzled them, reveling in her little mewls of pleasure as his lips closed over one nipple and he drew it into his mouth.

He was rock hard, throbbing, and she ground against him, her hips rocking in a rhythm that had his heart pounding. She bent down and took his earlobe between her teeth, and he thought his heart might fail when he heard the words he’d longed for so many years to hear.

“Yes,” she whispered, her lips against his ear. “Demetrius, yes.”

He flipped her over so her back was on the couch and she was stretched out beneath him, squirming. He shucked off her boots and peeled her out of her pants and then she was naked, gloriously naked except for a pair of panties. He leaned down and kissed her again, sucking on her lips, running his hands all over her heated skin. She felt like silk and velvet and nothing else he’d ever touched, and he was so greedy for her he didn’t know if he was bruising her or hurting her, and he couldn’t stop himself in any case.

He was on fire. Every cell, every muscle, every nerve. Every breath he took was fire.

He kissed her breasts, drew his tongue down to her stomach, bit her there because she was so tender, her flesh so soft. She shivered and arched against him, her hands at his shoulders, nails clawing into his skin. He put his face between her legs and inhaled deeply and she gasped, shocked.

She gasped even louder when he shoved aside her panties and slid his tongue inside her.

Musk and salt and woman, already soaking wet, she tasted incredible. They moaned at the same time. His erection twitched in his pants, aching to be set free.

He pressed her thighs apart and began to stroke her with his tongue, licking and sucking greedily, swallowing her taste, learning what made her twitch and what made her moan. He slid two fingers inside her, and she arched sharply against the couch and cried out.

“Not yet, baby girl,” he whispered, stroking his thumb where his tongue had just been. “You don’t get to come yet. Not until I say so.”

“No, no, no.” She squirmed beneath him, and he put his forearm over her stomach and pressed down. He lowered his mouth to her sex again and began, slowly, rhythmically, to lick her. He slid his fingers in and out, and his other hand fondled her breasts, pinched her nipples.

“Please, oh, please,” she gasped, arching. Her hands clutched at the couch, the back of his head.

He drew back and blew a breath over her swollen lips, smiling when she shuddered and called him a dirty name.

He freed himself from his pants and rose above her with his leathers falling open to his hips, balancing his weight on an elbow. He leaned down and kissed her, hard, letting her taste herself on his lips, teasing her with the head of his shaft which he held in one hand, stroking himself back and forth across the wet entrance to her sex. When he ignored the demands her hips were making, she reached down and grasped him herself.

He gasped, stilled, closed his eyes at the feel of her hand on him.