Chapter Thirty-Three
Sloane
Returning to the office at 2:00 AM feels like a fever dream.
Vane didn't take me home. He didn't take me back to the clinic. He brought me back to the sixty-first floor—the only place on earth where he feels he has absolute jurisdiction over reality. The city below is a grid of flickering diamonds, but inside the executive suite, the air is thick, electric, and heavy with the scent of rain and spent adrenaline.
I'm still wearing the sweatshirt and jeans. I look like a trespasser in this temple of mahogany and glass. Vane has discarded his jacket and tie; his shirt is unbuttoned at the collar, his sleeves rolled up as if he's prepared for a physical struggle.
The confrontation at the clinic had cracked the seal, but here, in the dark heart of his empire, the pressure finally blows.
It starts with a look—a sharp, predatory gaze from Vane that I meet with a defiance I didn't know I still possessed. Then, he is across the room. His hands aren't clinical anymore. They are frantic. He pins me against the floor-to-ceiling window, the cold glass a sharp contrast to the furnace of his body.
"You think you can just vanish?" he rasps against my neck, his teeth grazing my skin with a possessive bite. "You think you can just take the heart out of this building and walk away?"
"There is no heart here, Vane," I gasp, my hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer even as my mind tells me to run. "There's just the contract. There's just the debt."
"Then let's renegotiate," he whispers, his voice a jagged promise.
He crashes his lips onto mine, a desperate, hungry collision that tastes of salt and victory. His hands roam under my hoodie, seeking the heat of my skin, and a broken moan escapes me as his palms find my breasts, squeezing with an urgency that says he's terrified I'll disappear again.
He frantically pulls the hoodie over my head, discarding it like the useless armor it was. My hands find his belt, my fingers fumbling with the leather, needing to strip away the CEO until there's nothing left but the man. He shoves my jeans down my hips, his lips never leaving mine, his breath hitching in his chest.
When he finally pulls back an inch, pressing his forehead to mine, his eyes are a storm of blue fire. I gasp as he lifts me, pinning me to the edge of the mahogany desk, and thrusts into me in one hard, devastating motion.
The sex is a war. It is a desperate, wordless attempt to reclaim what was lost in the Hunt and the breach. It happens right there, on the cold marble perimeter of his empire, amidst the scattered files of the Perth acquisition and the "indefinite" contract. There is no "No Emotion" clause here. There is only the blunt, honest reality of two people who have spent three years trying not to love the person they were only meant to "utilize."
When it's over, the silence that follows is heavier than any we've ever shared. We are tangled together on the rug, the city lights reflecting off the glass like a million silent witnesses to the crime of us.
The machine didn't just break tonight. It started to bleed.