“You’re huge,” she breathed, running her thumb over his head. The shaft pulsed and strained in her hand. He leaned down and suckled her breast again, nudged himself against her, groaned when he felt her heat and tantalizing wetness against the most sensitive part of his body.

“Oh, baby girl, flattery will get you everywhere,” he whispered, and shoved inside her.

He did it hard and he did it fast because he wanted to shock her out of her head, he wanted her to forget, to focus only on him. She cried out and arched against him, her breasts crushed against his chest, her body a taut bow from the couch to his. Before she could recover from that, he began to thrust, long, slow rolls of his pelvis that sank him deep inside her, stretched her wide.

She moaned his name, guttural, her thighs tightening around his waist. He lowered his head again and bit her on the neck, drowning in the feel of her, his beautiful rebel bare and wild beneath him. Her hips met his every thrust. Her nails dug into his lower back.

He growled something in Latin, he didn’t know what, his immersion in her was so total.

“Please, please, please, oh, please,” she begged in a broken whisper, nearly sobbing.

He stilled, framed her face in his hands. “Not yet.” He was panting, biting her lips, her jaw, her throat, little nips that left a trail of pink behind on her skin. Her shoulder was a delicious heat against his tongue. “Not yet.”

She writhed beneath him, demanding, clawing at his back, but he put a hand on her hip to still her. “Open your eyes,” he whispered. “Look at me.”

She did as he commanded, and they lay like that for a moment that spun on and on, breathless, beautiful, their eyes locked together, noses inches apart, the only sound their labored breathing, their bodies drenched in moonlight.

He flexed his pelvis, once, and her lids fluttered. “Open,” he softly warned and ran his thumb across her lower lip. “Keep them open for me.” He reached down and hooked his thumb around the back of her knee, slid her leg up around his waist, and then thrust deep into her again, watching her face. She made a sound, a low moan of pleasure, and slid her hands up his back, but she kept her eyes trained on his, unwavering.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Like that, baby girl. Keep your eyes on me.”

She nodded and bit her lower lip as he thrust again, slow and deep, burying himself to the hilt. Still buried deep inside, he made a slow circle, grinding against her pelvic bone, and she gasped, then moved with him, matching his slow, small motions with her own, building the pleasure to a gathering, exquisite peak.

Looking into his eyes, she whispered his name. Her fingers dug into his shoulders.

He slowly righted himself to his knees, pulling her along by her hips, and then he took the leg hooked around his waist and slid it up over his shoulder. She opened to him even more, and he took advantage of it by sliding partly out of her and then slowly all the way back in; he could not go any deeper.

On the very edge of orgasm, she shuddered. Her chest rose and fell in short, uneven bursts.

He stilled because he knew how close she was, and he didn’t want this to end. Not yet. He knew as soon as she went over, he’d go over with her. So he ran his hands over her breasts, her hips, turned his face to her leg and kissed a trail up her calf to her ankle, resting against his shoulder, and all the while she kept her gaze on his, half-lidded and shining with heat.

He reached down and stroked her, just above where they were joined, the nub of her sex wet and swollen beneath his thumb. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her hips jerked.

“No,” he warned, and she answered with a groan of objection. She made a move as if she was going to push out from under him, but he captured her wrists in his hands and pinned them over her head, pushing them down into the cushion. She protested, but he crushed his lips against hers and thrust hard and she moaned, bucking beneath him, biting his lip. Panting, his threadbare control unraveling with every movement of his body, he pulled away to look at her and found her staring right back at him, her brows drawn together, her face contorted in something like agony.

“Please.” So urgent it was nearly a plea, she said it in a hoarse, broken whisper, and it unwound the very last shred of his will.

He took both her wrists in one of his hands and cupped her face in the other. He let his hips take over, a primal thrusting that had her moaning her approval beneath him, but he never took his gaze from hers.

“Yes, Ana. Now.”

And because her eyes were open he saw the exact moment it happened, when she tipped over the edge and went spinning beyond pleasure into ecstasy, even before her body clenched and arched beneath him. Even before her eyes slid shut and her moans formed the shape of his name.

“Baby girl,” he whispered, fierce, fire licking along every nerve ending, electricity snapping up his spine. “My beautiful girl…”

When it hit it stole his breath and sent shockwaves through his body. Pleasure, so acute it was almost pain, rocketed through him, and he jerked, spilling himself into her, growling and grunting like some kind of wild animal, his face against her neck, the beast inside him screaming, Yes yes yes yes yes! Mine! All mine!

Her nails in his back. Her heart against his chest, pounding wildly. Her body, plush and warm beneath him. The moonlight sketching shadows on the walls and the leafless winter tree in the yard and the car passing by, unseen, somewhere far off in the night. Every little detail of the moment seared itself into his memory like a brand so that even beyond his shaking and hoarse panting and the roaring in his ears, he was aware on some level that this moment would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Sometime later, when their breathing had slowed and their heartbeats returned to normal, she murmured his name. Dazed, he raised his head and blinked at her, and she stroked his face, smiling.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she whispered, her eyes soft. “I still hate you.”

And he had to laugh. Weakly, his forehead pressed against her chest, he laughed.

It was a long, long while before they spoke again.

At some point in the night he’d carried her to the bedroom, but she wasn’t awake for that. She wasn’t awake when he tucked her into his side and pulled the blankets over them both, his arm around her, holding her close. His body was heat and muscle at her back, his legs drawn up behind hers. She came awake only when she became aware of his deep voice at her ear, murmuring something that ended with “…forever.”

“What?” She blinked into the unfamiliar room. A candle in a little saucer on a dresser across the room sent up a merry flame that flickered and spun, a warm yellow spot of light in the darkness.

He pressed his lips to the back of her neck. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

But she couldn’t, now that she was awake and the ice storm was howling inside her head again.

He was right, before. His crass way of informing her exactly how she needed to “work” things out had been successful. He had taken the sharp edge of her anguish and dulled it with his body. And for that she was profoundly grateful, because she wasn’t sure she would have survived the night without it.

The pain of betrayal is a physical thing, a deep, hollow ache in the pit of the stomach that spreads to every organ, corrosive and black. If it spreads to the brain it might even cause insanity, and Eliana was convinced she was halfway there already, but she couldn’t possibly care less.

Her father had been her idol. She knew on some level he was damaged—she’d seen the way her kin sometimes shrank away from him, blanched and trembling; she’d seen the dark, dangerous light that sometimes crept into his eyes—but she also knew he was gentle and good to her, and though he was within his rights by law to put Caesar to death because he was unGifted, he’d spared his only son. From all accounts, he’d loved her mother and treated her well, he protected the colony, he gave them whatever they needed in order to survive, to thrive.