Cellie's POV
I have never been good at half measures.
It was one of the things my mother had held against me my entire life, the tendency to go all the way into something rather than managing a careful distance from it, to feel things fully when the smarter choice was to feel them at a controlled remove. She had called it recklessness. I had called it the only honest way to live.
Tonight I was going to have to live with both assessments.
Demetrio had his hands on me and his mouth at my neck and we had long since passed the point where either of us was performing anything, the armor gone on both sides, and what was left was just this, the specific reality of two people who had been building toward something for months and had finally arrived.
"Only me," he said against my skin, and his voice had the quality of something said from a place he did not usually speak from, certain and raw in equal measure. "No one else."
I pulled back enough to look at his face.
