Crimson Devotion

Chapter 3 : What the Dark Keeps

His apartment took up the entire top floor of a building with no name on the directory, accessible only by a private key card that he swiped without looking, his other hand never quite leaving the curve of her waist. The space was dark and spare and beautiful in the way expensive things are beautiful when someone has stopped needing to prove anything to anyone — floor-to-ceiling windows, black stone, a single low light burning somewhere in the back like an ember refusing to go out.

"No staff tonight," he said, shrugging out of his jacket, draping it over a chair with an economy of motion that told her he'd done this a thousand times and somehow made it feel, in this particular moment, like he'd never done it at all. "I gave everyone the night off. Before I knew you were coming."

"Presumptuous," she said, though her voice had lost most of its edge. Somewhere behind the sarcasm, a truer feeling was surfacing — the unsettling awareness that she'd known this man for less than a day and had already, somehow, made herself at home in the sound of his voice, in the particular quiet of a room he'd emptied just for her.

"Hopeful." He crossed the room to her, slow, unhurried, the predatory grace of him banked now into something gentler, more deliberate. "There's a difference."

She let her coat fall from her shoulders, and he caught it before it hit the floor, setting it aside without looking away from her, like the coat was an afterthought and she was the only thing in the room that mattered. Up close, in the low light, the tattoos on his throat and collarbone told a different story than they had under the studio lights — softer, somehow, the ink shifting like breathing things beneath his skin as he moved.

She let her eyes travel the length of him — the ink, the low light catching on his collarbones, the faint white line of an old scar near his ribs that no camera had ever been permitted close enough to capture. There was a version of Damian Cross the world had built out of headlines and half-truths, and then there was this one, standing barefoot in his own dark kitchen an hour from now, unguarded in a way she suspected very few people ever got to witness.

"Tell me about this one," she said, tracing a finger — not quite touching, hovering a half-inch above his skin — over a black rose inked just above his heart.

His breath caught, barely, at the almost-contact. "My mother's favorite flower. She died when I was nineteen. Around the same time I learned that grief either makes you soft or makes you into something the world can't touch. I chose the second one." His hand came up, finally closing the gap, pressing her palm flat against the ink, against the warm, steady drum of his heartbeat underneath it. "Until tonight, I thought I'd chosen well."

"And now?"

"Now I'm reconsidering everything." His voice had gone rough, quiet, stripped of the polish and performance she'd watched him wear like armor all evening. "You make me want to be touchable again, Mira. That's a dangerous thing to want."

"Dangerous how?"

"Because wanting things," he said, tilting her chin up with two careful fingers, "makes a man weak. And weak men, in my world, don't survive very long." His mouth grazed her jaw, her ear, the sensitive skin below it, and she felt herself sway toward him, every nerve in her body suddenly, urgently awake. "I find, tonight, that I don't particularly care."

He kissed her again, slower this time, deeper, one hand cradling the back of her skull like she was something rare and combustible he intended to handle with exactly the care such things required. She answered him with her whole body, fingers curling into his shirt, dragging him closer, some reckless voice in the back of her mind insisting that this — whatever this was, whoever he really was beneath the ink and the money and the rumors — was worth whatever it cost her.

They didn't make it to the bedroom, not at first. He backed her gently against the cool glass of the window, city lights sprawled out beneath them like a field of dying stars, his mouth trailing fire down the line of her throat while her hands mapped the ink and muscle of his shoulders, memorizing him the way she memorized a good photograph — slowly, thoroughly, aware even as it was happening that she would want to return to this moment for a long time.

"Mira." Her name again, rougher now, almost a plea. "Last chance to tell me to stop."

"Damian." She pulled his mouth back to hers, answer enough. "Stop talking." Whatever caution she'd carried into the elevator, into the apartment, into this whole reckless evening, had burned away completely by now, leaving only the certainty that she wanted this — wanted him — more than she'd wanted anything safe or sensible in a very long time.

He laughed — low, startled, genuine — against her lips, and then he didn't say anything else for a long time.

• • •

Later, much later, they lay tangled together in the dark, her head on his chest, his fingers tracing slow, absent circles on her bare shoulder, the city humming quietly beyond the glass like it was holding its breath along with them.

"I should tell you something," he said finally, his voice different now — careful, weighing each word before he let it go. "Before this goes any further. There are people who would use you to get to me. People who have, before, with others I cared about." His arm tightened around her, not possessive so much as protective, a man bracing against a memory. "I need you to understand what you're walking into."

Mira propped herself up on one elbow, studying the sudden tension along his jaw, the shadow that had crept into eyes that, an hour ago, had been soft as candlelight. "Tell me," she said.

"Not tonight." He pulled her back down against him, pressing a kiss to her hair, gentle, almost reverent. "Tonight, I just want to know what it feels like to have something I'm not afraid of losing." A pause, and then, quieter: "Tomorrow, I'll tell you everything. And you can decide, with your eyes open, whether you still want to stay."

Outside, the city glittered on, indifferent and beautiful, and somewhere far below them, in a car parked across the street with its headlights off, a man Mira had never met and would come to fear very much indeed was already taking photographs of his own.

• • •