“Please,” he said, his eyes wild with terror. “Please, you’re—you’re better than this. You’re not the kind of person who would do something like this. You aren’t like Francis. You’re a good person, Vera.” She clenched her fingers around those silky fistfuls of his hair, and she breathed in the smell of him, all foul smoke and clean sweat and smooth soft skin, and she finally let herself feel the hunger she’d been fighting since the first moment she’d laid eyes on Duvall. She let herself feel it, every inch of that starved yearning, that hollow pit of need. She let herself want him exactly the
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