Finally, I come to a stop, forcing her facedown onto the cold marble as I dig my knee into her back and wrangle her arms behind her. When I've got them in place, I hold her down with my weight as I unbutton my dress shirt and use it as a makeshift bind, knotting her wrists together with one sleeve and her ankles with the other. She's hogtied and thoroughly exhausted when I hoist her up again, carrying her down the hall like an animal headed for the slaughterhouse.
"You don't have to do this," she sobs.
"Stop. Fucking. Crying."
She doesn't listen. The entire way, I have to hear those pitiful sobs. That panicked wheeze that sounds like a death rattle as she struggles to regulate her breathing. It's doing something strange to me, and I don't like it.
"Stop!" I demand. "Stop fucking crying."
She keeps at it, and when I finally reach my room and toss her body onto the bed, her sorrow only seems to amplify.
She's struggling against the ties, trying to break free when I head for my closet and grab what I need. When I return, she's halfway across the mattress. I grab her by the ankle and yank her back, wrapping my belt around her face and forcing it between her teeth before I secure it behind her head.
She mumbles around it, a fresh wave of tears falling down her cheeks. But for now, at least the sound is muffled. Once that is done, I remove the knots of my shirt only to replace them with a length of rope, which I use to tie her to the bedposts, one at a time. When I am finished, she is stretched wide, arms and legs pulling in the direction of each corner. She's a panting, sobbing mess, and I can't seem to look at her for more than a second as I force myself to follow through the preparations.
Perhaps I should have thought to drug her first. Knock her out cold. It would be so much easier. I reach for the case where I keep my gun and begin my preparations while Ivy continues to squirm.
“Hold still,” I tell her. “Or it will hurt more than you could ever imagine.”
She closes her eyes, tears clinging to the edges as I loosen the grip of the belt, sliding it down beneath her chin.
“Don’t talk, and don’t move,” I warn.
I go through the motions of cleaning her face roughly and forcing her head down into the mattress with my palm as I apply the stencil from my case. She's staring up at me. I can feel her eyes on me, burning a hole in my flesh.
Another solitary tear falls down her cheek, and I close my eyes, dragging in a ragged breath before I prepare the ink. When I am finished, the fight appears to have gone out of her. She is so still I have to force myself to look into her eyes to make sure she's even conscious.
When our gazes clash, something tightens in my throat and chest. A vise, squeezing me like the smoke in that godforsaken fire.
"You did this," I snarl at her. "This is your fault."
She shudders, a silent sob the last sound I hear before I turn on the gun and hover above the stencil. Her entire body tightens, her chest falling into stillness, jaw clenching.
The needle hovers for long seconds that turn into a full minute. I'm breathing hard. Trying to force my hand to cooperate. This needs to happen. There can be no alternative. She will be the other half of my dead soul, chained to me for eternity. My skeletal queen.
But when I lower the needle into her flesh, piercing her with the first dot of ink, I make the mistake of glancing at her eyes and am rattled by the emotion I see there. I flinch back without thinking, grunting out a frustrated curse as I power off the gun and toss it aside.
"Fuck!" I yank the candelabra from my nightstand and throw it against the wall. The crash does nothing to satisfy my rage. This frustration has no cure.
I can't deny she's made me weak. She's seen it for herself now. She's seen what her fucking tears do to me.
I turn back to face her and crawl onto her body, mounting her with mine as I wrap my hand around her throat and begin to squeeze. She tries to shake her head, and I tighten my grasp.
I'm choking the air from her lungs as I lower my bloody lips to hers, smearing the evidence of her hatred across her mouth. My tongue breaches her lips, and she cries out when I relax my grip on her throat. I swallow that sound, and she drags the breath from my lungs into hers. Greedy. Desperate. Poisonous.
"Santiago," she sputters against me.
She's yanking against the restraints, and I want to see what she will do, so I release one of her wrists before I focus my attention on her throat, biting and sucking my way down the flesh. Her free hand comes to my hair, yanking and gripping and pulling me closer as she continues to repeat my name like a prayer.
"Thank you," she pants. "Thank you."
I close my eyes and shudder when her fingers caress the back of my neck, feeling the scars there. She doesn't flinch away. She's stroking them like she wants to heal them somehow.
"Tell me how much they disgust you," I whisper in her ear.
"No." Her voice trembles.
"You can't pretend otherwise." I pull back to stare down at her, and she uses her free hand to drag me back, forcing my lips against hers.
I don't know how it happens. One moment, she is bound beneath me. And the next, I
