Page 45 of The Bargain

But why? I don’t want him to stop.

Freedom, I always believed, is control over oneself.

Freedom, I’m starting to realise, is also giving up that control.

It’s letting Elias Lennox part my thighs and dip his fingers between my legs. Not because of some bargain, or because it’ll help us trick the Inquisitor, but because, in this exact moment, I want to. I want him. The thought feels like tripping with nothing to hold on to and falling catastrophically away.

Oh, I think the lines are blurred, love.

He hums deep in his throat when he finds me wet—like he’s even more surprised than I am. He touches me softly, at first, a delicate exploration, like mapping a part of me he wasn’t even sure existed a moment ago.

His voice is low, his words weaving a net around me, a deadly trap.

“They think you’re too beautiful for touching, that’s why they’ve never dared leave a mark on you.”

His fingers glide against me, parting delicate flesh, pushing in, stretching me, pain and pressure mingling. My stomach muscles tense and I catch my breath, teeth digging deep into my bottom lip, bracing against the pleasure pooling low in my stomach.

“But beautiful things are meant to be handled and dented and chipped. What’s the point of a shiny thing if you don’t get to dull it with your touch?”

His fingers move in and out of me, and I can’t help but arch into the touch, impatient for more.

Through the gloom, Elias meets my gaze, tilting his head in a silent question.

I lick my bruised lip, tasting blood. “I’m not a shiny thing for you to corrupt.”

“No?”

I shake my head. His fingers still their rhythm, but his thumb, slick with my own wetness, comes to rest against a sensitive point, stroking slowly, almost absently, over a bundle of nerves that’s never felt so violently, vividly alive before.

“You don’t get to leave a mark all over me,” I rasp out haltingly, “because I’m not this pure shiny thing you’re imagining.”

I’m just like you. I lie and dissimulate and I try to stay afloat. I can be unkind and I can be manipulative. I would’ve slept with you if you’d asked me to just like you slept with Elodie. I’m flawed and failing and flailing.

“No?” he repeats, his voice barely a whisper.

I shake my head once more. Sweat beads on my forehead, and the long strands of my hair have begun to stick to my neck, my cheeks. My thighs tremble as my entire body becomes an elastic band stretched taut, waiting for the jolting spring of release.

“You don’t get to corrupt me,” I bite out.

“But it’d be so much fun to try,” he replies.

And because his thumb is gliding so steadily over me, and because I’m so wet and ready and my body is so tense it feels as if it could shatter, the muscles in my legs quivering uncontrollably, like I’ve been running suicides for days and I’m about to collapse—I have to hiss in a sharp intake of breath before I can even reply.

“Maybe I’ll be the one to corrupt you.”

You think you have the power to drag me down to my knees, Elias Lennox, but don’t think I won’t take you with me.

“Yes,” he says warmly. “I’d like you to try.” And, his eyes glinting like distant stars in an impossible darkness, he says, “Now come for me, love.”

The taut line running through my entire body snaps loose—I come with a strangled cry, with a keening whimper that sounds more animal than human, my own voice unrecognisable to my ears.

I slump back onto my desk, suddenly exhausted, legs still shaking with tremors, a rasping sigh ripping out of my throat. Elias. His name is coiled tight in my chest.

His fingers slip out of me, leaving me with a sudden, terrible sensation of loss, of regret—not for what’s just happened, but because it’s about to be over—and I already want it again, already want more, a gaping greed for pleasure and oblivion.

Elias stands over the desk, staring down at me through the shadows. Night has fallen, by now, and rain beats against the windowpanes. The only light in the room is from the dirty orange lamplight seeping through the wet glass, a murky, surreal light that makes Elias seem both monstrous and angelic.

“From this angle,” he says, wiping his hand on his trousers, “you look well and truly corrupted, love.”