The tears won’t stop. They slide down my face, and I can’t bring myself to be ashamed anymore.
Something in my chest feels cracked wide open. I’m naked, but it’s not my body that feels exposed anymore. It’s everything underneath; the six months of grief I’ve swallowed instead of letting myself feel. The fury that’s been eating me from the inside out. The loneliness of carrying Marco’s death alone, of having no one to tell, no one who understood what I lost when I lost him. How unmoored I’ve been without my brother. How lost. How fucking terrified I’ve been this entire time.
And now Enzo has seen all of it. Every broken piece I’ve kept hidden behind anger and revenge.
“Hey.” He shifts, pulling out of me carefully, and I whimper at the loss. His hand comes up to cup my face, thumb wiping the tears away. “Hey. You’re okay. You did so well.”
I shake my head, unable to speak.
I’m not okay.
Nothing about this is okay.
But his arms are around me, solid and warm, pulling me down onto the mattress and curling around me like a shield.
FIVE
The heat finally breaks on the third day, sometime in the gray hours before dawn.
I wake up clearheaded for the first time in seventy-two hours. I’m exhausted down to my marrow, and sore in places I didn’t know could be sore.
I’m still in Enzo’s bed, with his arm draped across my waist. But the desperate, clawing need that’s been driving me out of my mind is gone.
My body is finally, mercifully quiet, and for the first time in three years, I can smell myself properly; my natural omega scent I’d suppressed for many years. But threaded through it now is cedar and smoke. Enzo.
I smell like I belong to him.
The thought should make me sick, but it doesn’t. Which is oddly… weird. Wrong.
I mean, it’s completely fucked up that I’m lying here breathing in cedar and smoke mixed with my own scent and thinking it smells… complete. Like puzzle pieces that weren’t supposed to fit but somehow do.
I should leave.
Which I try to, but Enzo’s arm is pinning me in place. Our legs are tangled together, his thigh wedged between mine, pressing against parts of me that are still swollen and sensitive. My back is flush against his chest, and I can feel every slow breath he takes.
His hold tightens when I try to shift, fingers digging into my hip.
“Don’t.”
“The heat’s over.”
“I know.” He pulls me closer, eliminating the millimeter of space I’d managed to create. His morning wood presses against my ass, and the pressure sends a traitorous spark of heat through my belly. “Stay anyway.”
“Why?”
“We need to talk.” His thumb traces slow circles, and my body naturally leans into the touch. “And because if you try to leave right now, I’ll have to stop you, and I’d rather not do that by force.”
There it is. The cold water I needed.
The reminder of what he is. Of whatthisactually is.
I’m not his lover. Not his partner. Not anything close to an equal. I’m a threat he’s neutralized through my unfortunate circumstance, that's all.
“What do you want?”
His hand slides from my hip to my stomach, his palm spreading wide over my abdomen. “Breakfast first. Then we talk about your brother and Viktor. And what happens next.”
His lips brush the back of my neck, and I bite down on my bottom lip to stop a whimper from escaping.
