My hands were in his hair, on his bleeding jaw, against his chest where I could feel his heart pounding beneath my palms. The nest I’d built surrounded us, my scent and his mixing in the tangled sheets. Some terrible, traitorous part of me recognized this as right even as the rest of me screamed that it was poison.
Alexander didn’t try to fight me. He didn’t push me off or use his Alpha strength to reverse our positions. He just sat there, bleeding from the scratches I’d carved into his skin, looking up at me with an intensity that made my chest hurt.
“What now, Andromeda Cross?” His voice was low, rough, but there was no smile on his face. No mockery. Just something dark and raw that I didn’t know how to name. “Here I am. What will you do now?”
The question paralyzed me.
My hands were still on his chest, feeling the rapid thud of his heart. I’d attacked him, drawn blood, climbed onto him like I had every right to his body—and he’d let me. Was still letting me.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“Fuck you,” I whispered, the words breaking halfway through. “I hate you.”
Something flickered across his expression. Pain, maybe, or recognition. “What a coincidence.” His hands came up slowly, carefully, wrapping around my wrists where they rested against his sternum. “I hate myself too.”
He lifted my hands, guiding them up his chest, over his collarbone. Finally, my palms rested against the sides of his throat. “But what do you know?” he murmured. “I have a solution.”
His grip on my wrists tightened, pressing my hands more firmly against his neck. “Come on.” His eyes held mine, storm-gray and utterly serious. “Squeeze. End it.”
I knew I could do it.
He was an Olympian Alpha, and his body was designed to withstand damage that would kill lesser men. But there was something burning through my veins right now—something unnatural and wrong that made me so much stronger than I should be. The curse, maybe, or just the culmination of every moment of lost control since I’d met him.
I could break him. Destroy him. Remove the source of all this poison from my life with just the right amount of pressure in the right place.
My fingers flexed and squeezed a little tighter. It was not enough to cut off his air completely, but enough to make breathing difficult. Enough to hurt.
His pulse hammered against my palms, frantic and vicious. His hands stayed on my wrists. Not fighting, not pulling me away, just holding on. It was as if he was anchoring himself to me even as I killed him.
“Do it,” he said, the words coming out strained but clear. “If it’ll make you feel better. If it’ll give you peace. Do it.”
The heat around us intensified. I could feel my own heartbeat in my fingertips, pounding in time with his. I could see theabsolute surrender in his expression—not defeat, but choice. He was choosing this. Choosing to let me decide whether he lived or died.
And I hated him even more for it.
I snatched my hands away from his throat, suddenly more angry than before. My skin was crawling, like thousands of ants were marching beneath the surface.
“You would want that, wouldn’t you, you coward?” I snarled. “You want to run. Well, I won’t let you.”
“What will you do then?”
He shifted beneath me, his hips grinding up against mine in a slow, deliberate roll. The friction sent sparks through my nervous system, and I realized with a jolt of shock that he was hard. Fully, obviously aroused despite—or maybe because of—everything I’d just done to him.
“You’re sick.” My voice shook with the force of emotions I couldn’t name. “You’re the one who’s insane, not me.”
His eyes flared with something dark and consuming. “Maybe.” His hands slid from my wrists to my hips. “Or maybe I don’t mind it if I die. As long as it’s by your hand.”
I couldn’t stand hearing him speak anymore. His words burrowed under my skin and made homes in places I didn’t want them. So I did the only thing I could think of to shut him up.
I kissed him.
I crashed my mouth against his, swallowing whatever else he might have said. For one glorious second, he went silent, shocked into stillness beneath me. I felt a surge of vicious satisfaction that I’d finally found a way to stop the flow of words that seemed designed to unravel me.
Then he kissed me back.
His mouth opened under mine, one hand coming up to tangle in my hair, angling my head so he could devour me more thoroughly. His tongue slid against mine with a hunger that matched the fury still burning through my veins.
It was too much. Too consuming. The wrongness in my skin intensified. It spread outward until I couldn’t tell where the curse ended and my own desires began.