Page 82 of Rogue’s Mark

"I love you."

Three words, flat and precise, the way Sting says anything that matters. No buildup. No speech. Just the facts.

"I've known it since the night I told you about your father. I wanted to say it then and couldn't," he says. "I don't say things I can't take back. So I waited until I was sure." His hand presses mine harder against his chest. "I'm sure, Vi."

I laugh and my eyes spill over at the same time. Only Sting would treat loving me like something that needed proof before he'd say it out loud.

"I love you too.” I say. “Actually, I love all of you. Just don’t tell anyone, okay?” I laugh.

Then he kisses me.

It's nothing like the way Sting usually touches me. Normally, he's the controlled one, the one who holds me still and sets the pace and gives me as much as he decides to, ferocious and precise and never once unsteady. Not now. Now, he kisses me like the wall's already down and there's no point pretending otherwise. His hands come up to my face, then my hair, then pull me to him.

"Vi," he says against my mouth. Just my name.

He makes a low sound in his chest, and then the careful, contained man I know is gone. He pulls the blanket off the crate and drags me down onto it with him, the cold of the roof at my back and the heat of him over me. He strips my shirt off and gets his mouth on my breasts, sucking a nipple hard while his hands drag down my body and shove my pants off my hips, hands everywhere at once, like he can't decide which part of me he needs first.

So I slow him down. I push him onto his back, get him out of his shirt, open his belt, and free his cock, and when I wrap my hand around it, he groans, thick and helpless, his head dropping back against the blanket. He's hard as iron and already slick at the tip, and I stroke him slow, root to tip and back, watching the most controlled man in the Rot unravel by inches because for once, I'm the one with my hand on the throttle.

"Vi—" he groans.

"Let me," I tell him, and I slide down his body and take him in my mouth, as deep as I can, and the sound he makes is one I'll be hearing for weeks. I work him with my mouth and my hand until his fist is in my hair and his hips are lifting off the blanket. Right before he goes over his edge, he hauls me up his body so I’m straddling him.

"Need to be inside you," he growls. "Now."

He gets the rest of my clothes off fast. Reaching between us, I line the head of his cock up against my pussy. I'm already soaked for him, and I sink down slow, taking him inch by inch until he's buried deep, both of us groaning at the fit. His forehead meets mine and his hands lock on my hips hard enough to bruise.

Then I ride him. Slow and deep at first, grinding down on every stroke, his cock filling me so completely I lose my breath. I watch his face the whole time, this man who never lets anyone see anything. He drives up to meet every roll of my hips, harder now, deeper, his thumb finding my clit and working it in tight circles until I'm shaking.

"That's it," he rasps. "Just like that. Take it."

And I do. I take all of him, faster, in the wind blowing over the Rot, until the roof and the dead city drop away and there's nothing left but the wrecked, wide-open look on his face. I come first, clenching down around him so hard he curses, and that's all it takes. He drives up into me one last time and holds there, buried to the hilt, and comes with a sound I've never heard from him, pulsing hot inside me, his arms crushing me down against his chest as he shakes through every second of it.

And the quietest, hardest man in the Rot holds me a little tighter. I don’t say anything. I don’t have to.

56

ROGUE

I've faced down armed men without my pulse moving. I walked into Lydia Vance's glass tower like I owned it. And here I am on a cracked sidewalk in Rothwell, holding Vi's hand, about to do the most frightening thing I've ever done in my life.

Talk.

"You going to tell me where we're going?" she asks. She's been patient about it, which isn't like her, like she can feel this is something and she's giving me room to get to it my own way.

"We're here," I say.

We've stopped in front of an empty lot.

That's all it is now. A gap between two buildings, weeds coming up through a cracked slab, a chain-link fence somebody put up years ago that nobody's maintained. If you didn't know, you'd walk right past it. Most people do.

"This is it," I say. "Delaney Street."

"The shop was right there." I nod at the empty slab. "Three generations. My grandfather's name on the sign. I told you most of it already—the fire, the man who came around before it, all of that."

I make myself keep going, because the part I've never told anybody is still ahead of me, and I don’t want to change my mind about it. "There’s more to the story, though. The part I've never said out loud."

Vi turns to face me fully. She doesn't say anything. She just waits, and I love her so much in that second, I can barely get the rest of it out.