I snort. “Oh, absolutely not.”
“Shame,” he murmurs. “You’d make formidable ones.”
I step closer, jabbing a finger into his chest. “I’m not a womb with legs, Giovanni Dragoni.”
His hand closes gently around my wrist, stopping me without force. “And I am not a man who would cage you.”
“Yet.”
His eyes darken. “Yet,” he agrees. “But don’t mistake my desire for you to be mine with a lack of respect for who you are.”
I search his face, unsure whether to believe him, unsure whether it matters that I want to.
He leans in, kisses me, slow, claiming, familiar, and before I can regroup, he swings me up into his arms like I weigh nothing at all.
I yelp, then laugh despite myself, clutching his shoulders.
“Time to take you home,” he says against my temple. “Mia mugghieri.”
I should argue.
I don’t.
And as he carries me out of the office, past the empire that is now unavoidably part of my life, I know one thing with bone-deep certainty.
Whatever comes next, whatever the streets have planned, whatever La Fratellanza is sharpening in the dark, I will not face it as an ornament.
I will face it as myself.
Giovanni
Morning comesto me in fragments.
Warmth. Breath. The faint press of skin against skin.
Lucia is half tangled with me, one thigh thrown over my hip, her hair a dark spill across my chest, her mouth parted in sleep like she trusts the world not to hurt her while she rests.
The thought pushes harder than it should.
I lie still for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house, to the distant movements of guards changing shifts, to the steady rhythm of her breathing.
This…this is the part that unsettles me.
Not the danger. Not the war coming like a tide I can already taste in the air. This quiet intimacy that asks nothing and gives everything.
My hand moves almost of its own accord, tracing the curve of her spine, down to the small of her back, memorising her again as though I haven’t already done so a hundred times. She stirs, murmurs something incoherent, presses closer.
We have not consummated our marriage.
The irony would make my father laugh himself hoarse.
Any other woman would have tested my patience beyond reason by now. I have never been a man who tolerates being strung along, teased without resolution, kept waiting while desire sharpens into something ugly.
Sex has always been simple to me: take, give, move on.
Lucia has undone that certainty completely by not being a vessel or a convenience. She’s not a warm body to be used and discarded.
She is… everything else.
