Nick laughs. I can see his muscles relaxing, the strain leaving his face. “Glad you held on while you were negotiating for my life, Harvard.”
In the bathroom, I have ateeny tinynervous breakdown as I realize I just talked around the most powerful man in New York to my own point of view. I don’t know if Nicky will ever recover his position in the Family, but I’ll do everything I can to get him what he wants, which seems to me to come down to two things: money and freedom.
Those, I can definitely give him.
Tomorrow, I’ll speak to my father and explain to him how things are going to work from now on. And I will send for a few Morelli heavies to back me up if necessary. I’ll begin as I mean to go on.
Thatthought gives me some pleasure. I wash my face and stare at myself in the mirror again, remembering the previous longest night of my life, when I looked at my own wet face just like this, and wondered if Nick Fontana was going to kill me if I left the bathroom. This time I don’t want to stay away from him any longer than I have to. I join him in the living area, where he’s standing in front of that big black painting and staring at it.
He’s also completely naked. But for the first time ever, his beautiful body doesn’t make me immediately want to jump him. He’s covered in bruises, cuts, scrapes. I came so close to losing him tonight…
“Nicky.”
He turns around with the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen him give me.
“Are you hurting?” I ask him.
“Nah.”
I come closer, put my hand over one of the bruises on his side and look into his face, watching for a wince. But his face stays still. “Do you—do you think Vitali’s bugged the place?”
“I don’t care,” he tells me. “Let them listen. They can get off on the sound of me fucking the smartest man in New York City up against the window over there.”
I blink. “Oh. Well. Okay?”
“Just okay?” He puts out a hand.
I grin and take it, all my tiredness falling away. “Much better than just okay.” He takes me over to the window overlooking the river. It’s black outside still, but the lights from the street below and across the river are pretty and twinkling. I stand looking at the view as Nicky undresses me, positions me pressed up against it with my legs spread, and then tells me to stay there while he gets a few things. I’m happy to wait. I watch my breath condensing on the glass and use my nose to graffiti a heart into the little fog patch before he gets back.
“That’s definitely an improvement on the view,” he says from a few feet back, and I’m reminded of my conversation with Miranda just hours ago, of how this night could have ended with my own blood and brains splattered across her office window— “You okay?” Nick asks, his body warm and comforting as it presses up against mine. “We don’t have to do this if—”
“I want to,” I say at once. “I want something good to remember from tonight.”
“You can remember the fact that you went toe-to-toe with Luca D’Amato and came out on top.” His fingers find my nipples and start teasing them into hard buds. I glance down to see my clover clamps tucked away in his palms and groan. I have a love-hate relationship with these clamps. Nicky must have been snooping through the box of tricks I brought over from my apartment. He nuzzles his nose behind my ear, his breath warm on the side of my neck. “You’re a clever little asshole, Harvard, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” Why lie?
Nick’s gentle chuckle makes me smile. He pinches my right nipple and fits the clamp onto it. I hiss as the pressure turns to pain, but the kind of pain I enjoy. The kind of pain that can be malleable, joyful, exquisite. The second clamp goes on and I let my head fall back onto his shoulder, my lips trailing over his prickly-rough jawline. He plucks at the chain that joins the clamps, and I hiss.Fuck. I forgot exactly how intense these goddamn things could be, like wasp stings with that central point of quick, sharp pain that radiates out through my whole chest.I’m too tired for this, I want to protest, but when he gives another tug at the chain, my eyes open wide and I suck in a breath.
“Nicky,please,” falls out of my mouth, almost without my brain engaging at all.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, prying my asscheeks apart. They’ve clamped together in sympathy with my burning, tortured nipples. He gets his fingers into my crack, swipes a glop of lube on my asshole, and presses his fingers in fast. “It’s okay,” he says again, his voice soothing, and little by little I relax around his fingers, let him open me up. My head starts buzzing and the agony recedes—or maybe it just changes. Pain rises like a red tide until I feel weightless, floating away with it. I’m swimming in endorphins by the time he pushes his dick into me, impales me there against the window, my metal-clamped nipples scraping against the glass.
“It’ll scratch,” I gasp out.
“Hope it does. Nice reminder.”
He fucks me so deep that I’m pushed up onto my toes, one of his hands hard around my wrist and the other hard around my dick, jacking me with a regular, determined stroke that matches the rhythm of his cock in my ass. My balls are tight and throbbing, my nipples are on goddamn fire pressed against the glass, and Nick keeps sending jolts of confused, blissful agony through me when he lets go of my dick just long enough to tug at the clamp chain. It’s too much. It’s a sensory overload that shuts down my brain, so I can’t even tell Nicky how fucking amazing I feel right now. My mouth is hanging open and sounds are coming out, moans and gasps and hisses that will have to substitute for language.
Nick seems to understand my noises, at least. He judges exactly the right time to yank the clamps away from my nipples altogether, snickering at the wail I let out. My whole body goes tight as it tries to process the sensation, and part of me wants to turn around and bite off Nicky’s fucking face for daring to laugh at me, but his hand is wrapping around my throat, his lips whispering in my ear, “Come on, Harvard, spill it out for me.”
I can’t do anything else except what he wants me to do, so I erupt all over the window in surge after surge while he fucks me through it. When it finally ends, I collapse back against him, still skewered on his dick, and his arm snakes around my tender chest as he works his dick inside me. He takes a slower pace now, writhing against my back, my exhausted body moving in tandem with his, until I feel his cock swell and pulse inside me, my ears filling up with his hot-breathed, flattering endearments.
We stay there for a while against the window, sticky and still-joined. “That was fun,” I say at last, but my trembling voice gives me away.
He kisses my shoulder. “Listen: no one but meevergets to hurt you, Harvard. AndwhenI do it, it’ll only be because you enjoy it. Deal?”
Things become clearer. Thelet them listen, the exhibitionist displaying of me up against the window, the clamps. It wasn’t just animal need. He had a purpose with all of this.
