She screams as she shatters around me, her body milking mine and forcing my release before I can stop it. I'm coming inside her. Fingers digging into her hips. Teeth scraping along her collarbone. We're sweaty and sticky and hot against each other, and when I glance down, I realize it's because my shirt is off. We’re skin against skin in a way we’ve never been before. Her perfect silk to my gnarled, inked flesh.

She follows my gaze, half breathless as her eyes roam over the designs on my chest. When her palms come up to touch them, I move to stop her, but she shoves my hands out of the way and does it anyway. Her fingers flatten against my skin, warmth sinking into a space I haven’t allowed anyone to touch, and my eyes shutter closed as I consider what a goddamned mess this has turned out to be.

"I need you pregnant," I bite out.

When I open my eyes again, she's staring at me with a strained expression on her face.

"It's a matter of life or death for you." I brush her hair back over her shoulders and sigh. "No more excuses, Ivy. You’ll see a doctor tomorrow. And you better pray that come next month, that test is positive."

16

Ivy

“What?” I ask.

Santiago’s eyes are locked on mine but my gaze shifts between his eyes and the inked, broken canvas of his body.

His expression is hard again, shut down. For a moment, for moments even, he wasn’t closed off to me. He let me look at him. Touch him. And I understand so much more clearly why he lives in shadows.

I knew the damage wasn’t only to his face. But the scars on his body, and the ink with which he has attempted to camouflage them, they tell a story I don’t think he wants told.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” I start, not waiting for his answer. I need to tell him this. It’s been on my mind since the night in his office. Since our blowup.

Since he told me I made him sick.

My stomach twists a little at that.

“What?” he asks flatly with the same tone he used when telling me my life depended on whether or not I become pregnant with his child. It’s strange how unfeeling he can sound when physically, when he touches me, he does so with so much passion. So much rage. So much of himself, even if it is the darkest part.

I force my gaze from a deep groove on his shoulder back to his eyes. When he’s not angry, raging, they lean more toward green.

“You’re not deformed. I never thought that. I just wanted to hurt you.”