CASSIAN
The car was a silent, pressurized cabin as it cut through the early morning fog of the city.
Outside, the world was beginning to stir, but inside the leather-bound interior, my mind was still back in the villa. Specifically, it was centered on the mattress where I had left Noah Bennett barely three hours ago.
Leaving him had been a physical struggle.
I'd stood in the doorway of the master suite for ten minutes, watching the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.
He was completely dead to the world, sprawled out in a way that suggested his bones had turned to liquid.
His skin was a canvas of my ownership, red flowering marks on his neck, the dark purple of my thumbprints on his hips, and the faint, angry bite marks I'd left on his shoulder when he'd been screaming my name.
The urge to crawl back into those charcoal sheets, to wake him with my hands and feel him tremble into me again, was a visceral, thrumming ache in my gut.
