The scar split without warning.
One moment Evelyn's fingertip traced the raised white line along his ribs—the next, a thin seam of red opened beneath her touch, welling up in a perfect line like ink from a fountain pen. Theo felt it before he understood it: a sting so sharp and clean it cut through everything else, through the heat of being inside her and the thunder of his own pulse and the wet sound of her breathing.
He froze.
His hands went still on her hips. The air in his lungs turned to glass. He watched her pull back just enough to see what she'd done, her gray eyes dropping to the wound, and he couldn't read her face, couldn't tell if she was horrified or fascinated or something else entirely, something he didn't have a name for.
She lifted her fingers from the cut. Blood smeared the tips—his blood, dark and wet and shockingly warm where it touched the cooler air of the study. He started to speak, to say it was nothing, an old wound, too old to reopen like this, but the words died in his throat when he saw the look in her eyes.
Not horror. Not pity.
Her pupils had blown wide, swallowing the gray. Her lips parted, and something moved across her face—a shadow, a shift, a hunger so naked it made his stomach drop. She looked at his blood the way she'd looked at his confession, the way she'd looked at him when he'd first knelt at her feet: like she was seeing something she wanted to consume.
She brought her fingers to her mouth. Slow. Deliberate. Her tongue touched the blood before her lips did—a flat, warm press that made his cock twitch inside her, a reflexive jerk he couldn't control. She tasted him. Closed her eyes. Let out a breath that hitched at the end, soft and broken, like she'd been holding it for years.
"Evelyn—"
She didn't answer. Her eyes opened, and they were wet, and furious, and starving, and she lowered her mouth to his chest before he could say another word. Her tongue pressed flat against the wound, hot and wet and steady, and the sensation was so intimate, so invasive, that Theo's vision whited at the edges. She wasn't kissing him. She was tasting him—taking something from inside him that he'd never offered anyone.
His release hit him without warning. No buildup, no crest—just a violent, full-body clench that tore a sound from his throat, something between a sob and her name. He came inside her, pulse after pulse, while her tongue pressed harder against the split scar and her fingers dug into his ribs and the desk groaned beneath them like it might finally give way.
She didn't stop. Her mouth stayed on the wound, drawing the taste of him out of the broken skin, and he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but shake and hold onto her and let her consume him until there was nothing left to give.
Her mouth lifted.
The blood was on her lips—his blood, dark and wet, smeared across the lower curve like she'd been eating something rare. Her tongue swept across it, slow, collecting the last taste, and her eyes found his. Gray and blown and utterly calm. The tears that had been gathering there hadn't fallen. They just sat on the rim of her lashes, catching lamplight, turning her gaze to glass.
She leaned back. Her spine straightened. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders, and her thighs tightened around his waist—a clamp, a seat, a throne of muscle and bone and the wet heat of her still holding him inside. He was soft now, emptied, but she didn't let him slip free. She held him there like a kept thing.
He couldn't stop shaking.
"Theo."
Her voice was low. Scraped. The same voice she'd used when she'd first listed the rules in the foyer—no touching the books, no noise after nine, meals in the kitchen—but now it carried something else beneath the precision. Something that made his stomach clench.
"You touched my books," she said.
The words landed like a stone in still water. His brain struggled to place them—the books, the library, the rule she'd given him on the first night when he'd stood dripping on her floor. Weeks ago. A lifetime ago. He'd touched the spines. Run his fingers along them like a trespasser, testing the boundary. She'd seen. She'd always seen.
"Page forty-three," she whispered. Her thumb traced his collarbone, painting a thin stripe of his own blood across his skin. "The passage where the narrator confesses she's been teaching her lover to leave since the moment he arrived. You'll read it aloud."
He stared at her. His breath came in short, useless pulls. Her face gave nothing—no cruelty, no mercy, just the calm of a woman who'd decided exactly what he needed and was prepared to deliver it.
"Tonight," she said. "On your knees. Until I tell you to stop."
His cock twitched inside her. Involuntary. A betrayal he felt to his bones. She felt it too—her eyelids flickered, her thighs tightened, and something moved in her expression that was almost a smile.
"Yes," she breathed, and the word wasn't a question. It was recognition. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? To be seen. To be handled. To be worth the trouble."