“She told you to leave. You don’t listen well, do you?”
He spits blood. “Fuck you, man. She’s just a—”
My knee finds his ribs and something cracks. He howls.
“Say one more fucking word about her,” I growl, my face inches from his. “Just one. See what happens.”
Sophie’s hand on my arm is tentative. “Vin. He’s done. Let him go.”
I want to break every bone in his worthless body for talking to her like that, for touching her, for—
For what? For fucking her and not making her come? Why the fuck do I care?
I shove Rocco away from me so hard he stumbles into the wall. “Get the fuck out. If I see you within a mile of this place again, I’ll kill you. That’s not a threat. It’s a fact.”
Rocco staggers toward the door, clutching his ribs, blood dripping from his mouth onto Sophie’s floor. He doesn’t look back.
The kitchen falls silent except for my ragged breathing and the hum of the industrial refrigerator.
Sophie moves past me, grabbing a mop like nothing happened, like I didn’t just beat a man half to death in her kitchen.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says quietly, dunking the mop in soapy water.
“He was disrespecting you.”
“He’s been disrespecting me for months. I handled it.”
“By letting him call you a dead fish?”
She pauses mid-swipe with the mop, looking up at me, her big brown eyes holding mine. “He was just trying to hurt me because I fired him. It doesn’t matter.”
“And what about you? Were you trying to hurt him by telling him he never made you come?”
Pink floods her cheeks, but she doesn’t look away. “I told you the sex with him wasn’t great.”
“If you weren’t coming, that’s one hell of an understatement, princess.”
She goes back to mopping. “It wasn’t personal. I’ve never come with anyone.”
The words hang in the air between us like smoke.
“Never,” I repeat slowly.
“Never.” She wrings out the mop, the water running red-tinged down the drain.
My mind is racing through every time I’ve fucked her, the way she moaned, the way she begged. The way she saidsì,signoreand opened her mouth for me and let me do whatever the fuck I wanted. And she never came. Not once?
“Even with me.”
“Even with you.” She says it like it doesn’t matter, like it’s no big deal that I’ve been pounding into her for days and never once made her—
“Bullshit.” I grab the mop from her hands, toss it aside. “You’re lying.”
“Why would I lie about that?”
“I don’t know, Sophia. Why would you?” I crowd into her space, backing her against the counter. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Her brow furrows in genuine confusion. “I have no reason to lie.”
