He brushes his cheek against my cheek, and I can just see the shadow of his face, his dark eyes black in this night. He drags his lips along my cheekbone, then closer to my ear, not quite kissing me. This is something else.

“You didn’t what?” he asks.

I swallow because what I hear in his voice is not any different than the contempt I heard in the other man’s voice. In the voices of The Councilors when they spoke, condemning me before my trial even began.

Contempt.

Hate.

The only one at The Tribunal who seemed conflicted was Mercedes. It surprised me. Although conflict wasn’t what The Councilors heard. They heard fact. And maybe I’m grasping at straws because Mercedes has no love for me.

“What’s the matter, sweet, Poison Ivy?” he asks, then bends his head to lick my neck, to close his lips over my beating pulse and suck, his mouth wet and hot and his cock when he thrusts inside me unforgiving.

I gasp, the breath forced out of me.

“Tell me,” he says low and quiet, but not quite a whisper.

“I didn’t…” I grunt with his next thrust. He’s released my bottom and has got my jaw in his hand now, fingers digging into soft flesh.

“Tell. Me.” It’s a command. Voice loud. Firm. Angry.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” I say it wrong. It comes out all wrong. It’s not what I meant. I meant…but it doesn’t matter. Santiago laughs. He just laughs this dark, ugly laugh and shifts his grip to my hips and draws back, lifting me, bending me to fuck me. To hurt me.

And he does.

This is a punishment fuck. The first of many punishments. I know it. I feel it. And as my legs quake and my insides go raw, I realize how stupid I’ve been. How naïve I’d been thinking he’d come for me, come to rescue me.

When did I forget that he was the devil?

And what will he do to me now that he thinks I tried to kill him?

His thrusts come harder, his fingers agony on the flesh of my hips, my shoulders aching with his tugs, wrists raw and bleeding.

I don’t come, but that’s the point. He takes me. Takes his pleasure from me. Lays claim to me. And even as he comes, I feel his rage. I feel his hate.

And I know that now, not like before, I am finished. I know that how it was before will be a thousand times preferable to what I have coming. To what he’ll do to me now.

He pulls me close with his final thrust, and I feel him throb and shudder, releasing inside me. I hear his breath, his groan, and I think about what it is between us. What it is that binds us.