The penthouse felt different with him inside it. The glass walls, which usually felt like a cage, suddenly felt like the boundaries of a private universe. Dante didn't let her go when the kiss broke; he kept her pinned against the wall, his forehead resting against hers, both of them breathing the same ionized air of the high-rise.
"You're trembling," he whispered, his voice a low, jagged vibration.
"I'm cold," Anna lied, though her skin was burning everywhere he touched.
Dante's eyes, dark and bottomless, searched hers. He reached down and caught her hand, his thumb tracing the callouses she'd earned from weeks of typing his manifestos. "You're not cold. You're terrified of how much you wanted me to walk through that door."
He didn't give her a chance to deny it. He picked her up, her silk robe fluttering like the wings of a trapped bird, and carried her toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. The city of country Z lay beneath them, a sprawling carpet of amber lights and dark alleys.
"Look at it," Dante commanded, standing behind her, his chest a wall of heat against her back. He wrapped his arms around her waist, his large hands splaying over her stomach. "That city belongs to me now. Every light you see is a life I control. Every shadow is a place where my name is whispered with fear."
He leaned down, his lips ghosting over the sensitive curve where her neck met her shoulder. "But in this room, I am just a man who has been starving for weeks. And you, Anna... you are the only thing I didn't have to kill to own."
The toxic teasing began then. He spent the next hour reclaiming her, not with the quick violence of the island, but with a slow, agonizing attention to detail. He moved her to the oversized leather armchair, sitting her on his lap so she was forced to look down at him.
He talked to her about the deaths. He told her, in graphic, chilling detail, how he had watched the light leave Silvio's eyes. He told her how he had ordered the burning of the docks. He wanted her to know exactly what kind of man she was holding onto. He wanted her to be repulsed, and yet, as he spoke, his hands were moving—tracing the hem of her robe, lingering on the silk of her inner thigh, making her breath hitch in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
"You think I'm a monster," he murmured, his fingers grazing the edge of her lace underwear.
"I know you are," she gasped, her head falling back against his shoulder.
"Then why are you still here?" he goaded, his voice dropping to a husky, predatory silk. "The door is unlocked, Anna. The guards have been told to let you pass. You could walk out right now. You could go back to the slums, find a room in a boarding house, and try to forget my face."
Anna looked at the door, then back at the man who had turned her life into a beautiful nightmare. She knew it was a test. She knew if she left, he would let her go just to see how long it took for the world to break her—or for her to come crawling back.
"I can't go back," she whispered.
"No," Dante agreed, his hand tightening on her thigh, pulling her closer until there was no space left between them. "You can't. Because the slums are gone, Anna. I burned them. I bought the land. I'm building a new Vane headquarters on the very spot where your bar used to stand. You have no home but this. You have no god but me."
He kissed her then, a deep, possessive claim that tasted of victory and absolute ruin.