“Ready?” he asks, like he’s giving me a choice.
Like I have any choice at all with the heat already burning through me building again.
“Just do it.”
He pushes in with a single deep thrust, and I stop thinking entirely.
The fourth wave blurs into the fifth. Or maybe it’s the fifth into the sixth. I lose count. Day bleeds into night and back again, and I have no idea how long I’ve been in Enzo’s bedroom.
The only constant is the cycle. Need and satisfaction. Enzo inside me or on me or around me, his scent soaking into my pores until I can’t tell where he ends and I begin. Until I’m not sure I exist outside of this room, outside of his hands and his mouth and the relentless drive of his hips.
For a man pushing forty, he fucks like someone half his age, with a stamina that should be illegal. But he’s also careful in ways I didn’t expect. He makes me eat during the brief respites, holds water to my lips until I drink. Carries me to the bathroom when my legs won’t work. Wipes me clean with warm cloths, gentle over the places where I’m raw and oversensitive. Checks me for injuries before his gentle touch turns hungry again.
At some point, I realize he’s barely slept. Every time I surface from the heat-haze, he’s awake and alert, responding to my body’s demands before I can even voice them.
“You need to rest,” I tell him during one of the calmer moments. We’re tangled together on the floor, his cock softening inside me because neither of us has the strength to separate. The carpet is rough against my cheek, and I’m too wrecked to care.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re exhausted.”
“So are you.” His fingers trace idle patterns on my hip. “This is your first heat with an alpha in three years. Your body is going to demand more than usual. I can handle it.”
First heat. Last heat. Only heat, if I have anything to say about it.
“I don’t want this,” I say quietly. “Any of this.”
“I know.” He presses a kiss to my temple, unbearably soft. “When this is over, we’ll figure it out.”
I open my mouth to remind him I’m still planning to kill him the second this is over, but the next wave slams into me like a freight train, and I'm lost again. Burning. Begging. Taking his cock like I was made for nothing else.
Three heat waves after that, something shifts.
I’m on my hands and knees, face pressed into the mattress, ass in the air. Enzo is behind me, driving into me with a rhythm that’s almost meditative. My body is sore in ways I’ve never experienced, but still the heat demands more. Always more.
“Please.” I don’t even know what I’m begging for anymore.
His hand slides up my spine, tracing each vertebra, gentle despite the brutal pace of his hips. The contrast makes me shudder.
I glance over my shoulder and meet his eyes. “Bite me now,” I gasp. “Really, bite me. Make it permanent.”
Because my body’s already made the choice for me, hasn’t it? I’ve given myself to my brother’s killer. Spread my legs for him, begged for his cock, come apart on his fingers and his tongue and his dick like a desperate whore. There’s no coming back from this. No washing away the shame of how good it feels, how right he smells, how my traitorous body has claimed him even while my mind screams that he’s the enemy.
If we’re bonded, at least I’ll have an excuse. At least I can tell myself it wasn’t a choice. That I was forced. And if I’m tied to him permanently—well. I’ll have the rest of my life to make Enzo Valerio miserable. Or put a bullet in him once the bond makes killing him hurt me too.
Either way, I won’t have to live with the knowledge that I wanted this.
That I wanted him.
He stills. Completely. His cock buried to the hilt, his hands frozen on my hips.
“Luca.” It’s the first time he’s said my name like that, soft and intimate. Like it means something. And hearing it breaks something in me. “That’s the heat talking. You don’t want to bond with me.”
“I do,” I insist, even though I don’t know if it’s true. “Just—please—do it.”
“No.”
“Enzo, please.” I arch my neck, baring my throat.
