The master suite had become a temple of excess. The four-poster bed—once an elegant centerpiece of black mahogany and crimson velvet—was now a war zone: sheets soaked through in irregular dark patches, pillows scattered like fallen soldiers, one crimson drape half-torn from its brass rod and trailing onto the floor.
Candles had guttered down to blackened stubs, their dying flames throwing long, obscene shadows that danced across sweat-slick skin and tangled limbs.
Aiden lay on his back in the center of the wreckage, chest rising and falling in the slow, heavy rhythm of a predator at rest. Sheela draped herself across him like molten silk—naked, glistening, utterly spent. Her sky-blue hair spilled over one massive breast in glossy waves; the other pressed soft and warm against his side, dark nipple still swollen and reddened from hours of teeth and fingers.
