Just follow-through. Just accountability. Just the steady, unshakeable presence of someone who cared enough to hold her to her word.
"Good girl," I said softly.
She shivered.
Chapter 10
Gemma
Icouldn'tsleep.Notbecausethe bed was wrong or the room was cold or the house made unfamiliar sounds—none of that. I couldn't sleep because my body had become a traitor, humming with a frequency I couldn't tune out, every nerve ending lit up like a wire stripped bare.
The clock on the nightstand read 1:47 AM.
I pressed my face into the pillow and tried to think about something else. Caravaggio's use of chiaroscuro. The chemical composition of oil paint. The periodic table. Anything other than the way Dante's voice had dropped when he saidwe need to talk about that.
It didn't work.
The words kept replaying. Not just the words—the whole of him. The way he'd stood in the library doorway, jacket removed, tie loosened, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to his forearms. The way he'd taken one look at me and known. Not guessed.Known. Like my disobedience was written across my face in a language only he could read.
And the expression he'd worn while calling me on it. That was the part that undid me.
No anger. I knew anger. I'd grown up with anger—my father's cold disapproval, Enzo's calculated fury, the sharp backhand of disappointment from men who expected compliance as their birthright. Anger I could handle. Anger I could survive.
Dante hadn't been angry. He'd been resolute.
Calm, steady, immovable certainty. Hadn't tightened his jaw or gone cold or withdrawn into that punishing silence my father wielded like a blade.
He'd just looked at me. Held my gaze. Told me exactly what would happen, and when, and what he expected in the meantime.
You're going to eat. You're going to have a bath. You're going to get eight hours of sleep.
And I had. I'd done all of it. Walked to the kitchen on legs that felt like jell-o and eaten Rosa's chicken piccata standing at the counter because sitting felt like too much effort. Drawn a bath and soaked until the water went lukewarm. Climbed into bed at a reasonable hour like a good girl, because he'd told me to, and my body had obeyed before my brain could form an objection.
Good girl.
The heat that had been simmering all evening flared.
I rolled onto my back. Stared at the ceiling. My skin felt too tight, too sensitive, every brush of silk against my thighs registering as something more than fabric.
I could admit it now, in the dark, with no one to see my flush. I'd broken the rule on purpose. Not out of rebellion or spite or the reckless self-destruction that Enzo had once accused me of when I'd dared to push back. I'd done it because I needed to know.
Every man who'd ever made me a promise had broken it. My father promised to protect me and sold me instead. Enzo promised to cherish me and—
No. Not now. Not his name. Not in this bed.
I'd needed to know if Dante was different. I'd needed to test the walls he'd built around me, to throw my weight against them and see if they held.
They held.
And now my body was responding to that knowledge in ways I hadn't anticipated.
I almost never touched myself. Years of Enzo had left my relationship with my own pleasure complicated at best, broken at worst. Sex was something that happened to me. Desire was something I'd learned to suppress, to view with suspicion, to treat as the enemy's weapon rather than my own birthright.
But this—this wasn't about sex. This was about the sound of his voice sayingconsequences. The weight of his gaze when he'd called megood girl. The promise of his hands. The image of myself across his lap that I couldn't stop conjuring, no matter how hard I tried.
My fingers slid beneath the waistband of my pajamas before I consciously decided to move them.
I thought about his forearms. The way the muscle shifted under his skin when he rolled his sleeves. I thought about the steady press of his hand against the small of my back—all those weeks of small touches, each one a brand I'd pretended not to feel.
