Chapter 2: The Collaring
The bruise on her hip had faded to a yellowish-green, a permanent bloom beneath her skin. Scarlet traced it absentmindedly as she worked, the dull ache a comforting anchor. A week had passed since he’d left her on the dining table. She’d cleaned up the shattered vase, washed the table with disinfectant, and gone to work. Life, apparently, went on. But everything was rendered in a different light now, the colors saturated, the edges sharper. She was waiting. She knew it. The polite world had become a waiting room.
That night, she dreamed of the alley. The knife was cold, his hands were hot, and she woke with a start, her heart hammering, her body slick with sweat. The digital clock read 3:17 AM. The apartment was a tomb of shadows. She kicked the damp sheets off, stripping her t-shirt over her head, leaving herself naked in the humid dark. She lay back down, staring at the ceiling, one hand drifting between her legs. Her own touch was frustratingly timid. She couldn’t replicate his ruthless certainty. She fell back into a fitful sleep on her back, one arm flung above her head, the other resting on her stomach, her legs falling open in the complete surrender of deep exhaustion.
The click of the lock was softer than a heartbeat.
He moved through her apartment like a ghost, a skill born of necessity. He stood in her bedroom doorway, a silhouette carved from the night itself. The streetlight from the window painted a stripe across the bed, across her. She was naked, golden in the low light. One nipple pebbled in the cool air. Her pubic hair was a pale gleam. And her legs were spread, not wide, but openly, vulnerably. An unconscious offering.
Razor felt his breath catch in his chest. He hadn’t planned to come back. He’d told himself it was a mistake, a dangerous complication. But he’d been circling her block for two hours, the memory of her taste, her sounds, a fucking siren song in his blood. He’d picked the lock out of a perverse need to prove he still could, to prove he was still the threat in the dark.
But this… this disarmed him.
He crossed the room, the old floorboards silent under his weight. He stood over her, looking down. Her lips were parted, her breathing deep and even. In sleep, she looked younger. The careful graphic designer was gone. This was just a woman. His. The possessiveness of the thought was a live wire.
He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping. He didn’t touch her. Not yet. He just watched. Her hip gave a tiny twitch, a dream reflex. A soft, incoherent murmur escaped her lips. Her legs opened another fraction, the inside of her thigh gleaming.
“No…” she breathed in her sleep, the word a sigh. But her back arched slightly, pushing her breasts up. Her hand on her stomach slid lower, fingertips brushing her own mound before going still.
He couldn’t help it. A low, dark chuckle escaped him. “Liar,” he whispered to the sleeping woman.
His finger, calloused and rough, traced a path from her sternum down, over the flat plane of her stomach. She shivered but didn’t wake. He circled her navel, then let his fingertip dip into the soft, sparse hair below. He found her folds, slick with sleep and dream. He parted her with a single finger, finding the swollen, silken heat of her. She was soaked. Moaning in her sleep, her hips lifted gently, seeking the touch.
“Such a filthy little dreamer,” he murmured, applying a slow, circling pressure to her clit.
Her breath hitched. “Mm… stop…” she whimpered, even as her legs fell wider, her heels digging into the mattress.
He added a second finger, sliding them deep into her tight, clutching heat. Her body accepted him greedily, even in sleep. She began to move against his hand, a slow, drowsy undulation. “No, no, no…” The whispered denial was a rhythmic chant against each gentle thrust of his fingers.
He leaned over, his mouth close to her ear. “Wake up, Scarlet.”
Her eyes flew open. For a second, there was only disoriented panic. Then she saw him—the dark eyes, the hard line of his jaw in the gloom, the feel of his fingers buried inside her. Reality and dream collided. A shockwave of pure, unthinking arousal detonated in her core. She came instantly, her body seizing around his hand, a broken cry tearing from her throat as the pleasure, sharp and bright and stolen from sleep, ripped through her.
He watched her convulse, felt her inner muscles flutter and grip his fingers. He didn’t stop moving them, drawing out the pulses until she went limp, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and locked on his.
“You,” she gasped.
“Me.” He slowly withdrew his glistening fingers. He brought them to his mouth, his eyes holding hers, and sucked them clean. The taste of her, salt and sweetness, was more potent than any drug. “Dreaming of getting fucked, princess? Your body was begging for it.”
She couldn’t speak. She just stared, the last tremors of her orgasm still echoing in her nerves.
“Open your legs.” The command was quiet, absolute.
Without hesitation, she obeyed, spreading herself wider for him, the sticky evidence of her climax glistening in the dim light. The submission was total, and it ignited something feral in him.
He stood, his movements deliberate. The sound of his belt buckle unlatching was obscenely loud. The zip of his jeans. He pushed them down just enough, his erection springing free, thick and ruddy in the low light. He knelt on the bed, between her thighs, his hands planting on either side of her head, caging her.
“Look at me,” he growled. “You look at me while I take what’s mine.”
He positioned the blunt head of his cock at her entrance, already swollen and slick from her sleep and her climax. He didn’t ask. He didn’t tease. He drove forward, burying himself to the hilt in one savage, claiming stroke.
“Fuck!” she cried out, her nails digging into his forearms. The fullness was shocking, exquisite. She was so sensitive from the waking orgasm, every nerve ending was raw and singing.
He set a punishing pace from the first thrust, each one a deep, brutal piston stroke that shook the bedframe. It was different from the alley, different from the table. This was her bed, her sanctuary, and he was defiling it, making it his. The intimacy of it was more violent than any public act.
“You like this?” he snarled, his hips slamming into hers. “Like me crawling into your bed? Fucking you awake? You’re so goddamn wet for it. Your cunt’s gripping me like a fist.”
She could only nod, her head thrashing on the pillow. “Yes… yes…”
“Say it. Tell me what you are.”
“I’m… I’m yours,” she sobbed, the truth of it breaking her open.
“Damn right you are.” He hooked his hands under her knees, pushing her legs back almost to her shoulders, folding her in half, exposing her completely. The angle was devastatingly deep. He fucked her with a focused, relentless brutality, the wet, slapping sounds of their joining filling the room. “This cunt was made for me. This pretty, tight little cunt just needed a real man to ruin it. To fuck it proper.”
His words were filthy, degrading, and they poured gasoline on the fire in her belly. She felt another climax building, a terrifying wave about to crash. “I’m gonna… Razor, I’m gonna come…”
“You come when I say you can come.” He slowed, pulling almost all the way out, letting her hover on the agonizing edge. “You’re just a hole for me. A warm, wet hole to dump my load in. You understand?” He pushed back in, slowly, torturously.
“I understand!” she wailed.
“Then come. Now.”
He slammed home, and it was the permission she needed. The second orgasm was even more violent than the first, a convulsive, screaming peak that ripped a raw scream from her lungs. Her vision whited out. As she pulsed around him, he lost his rhythm, his own control shattering.
“Take it,” he grunted, his body buckling over hers. “Take every fucking drop.” He plunged deep and held, a hot, rushing flood filling her as he groaned, a raw, animal sound of release.
He collapsed on her, his weight crushing, his breath roaring in her ear. They were a tangled, sweat-slicked mess. The room smelled of sex and skin and him. Minutes bled away, marked only by the slowing of their hearts.
Finally, he rolled off her, onto his back. They lay side by side, not touching, staring at the same ceiling. The space between them hummed with spent energy.
Her voice, when it came, was hoarse. “You know my name. You know where I live.”
He was silent for a long time. “Damon.”
She turned her head to look at him. The name didn’t fit the man in the shadows, but it fit the exhausted profile beside her.
“Damon,” she repeated, testing the weight of it.
“Don’t get used to it,” he said, but there was no bite in the words. He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. He dressed in the dark, his movements efficient. He paused at the foot of the bed, looking back at her, a pale shape in the ruined sheets.
“I’m leaving town for a few days. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Like thinking this is anything more than what it is.” He said it like a warning to himself as much as to her.
Then he was gone, the front door clicking shut with a finality that felt like an ending. But as Scarlet brought her fingers to the ache between her legs, feeling the sticky proof of him there, she knew it wasn’t. It was a beginning. And the wait, this time, would be agony.