I stopped. The sentence had too many possible endings, and all of them revealed more than I was ready to show. If you'd actually follow through. If you'd actually care. If you'd actually be different from every man who made me promises and then shattered them like they were nothing.
Dante reached for my hand.
His fingers threaded through mine with deliberate care, each one slotting into place like a key finding its lock. His thumb settled against my pulse point—I knew he could feel it hammering—and he held on.
"I will always mean it, Gemma."
He said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like something that existed whether I believed in it or not.
My eyes burned. I blinked hard.
He didn't let go of my hand. His thumb traced a slow circle against my wrist, tracking my heartbeat, and I had the unnerving sensation that he was monitoring me. Reading my body the way he read rooms—cataloging responses, noting patterns, filing away information for later use.
"Good," he said quietly. "That's good."
A pause. The morning light shifted, warming the leather between us, gilding the edges of his profile. I watched a muscle in his jaw work—not tension, exactly, but something deliberate. A decision being made.
"Now." His eyes met mine. Dark, direct, seeing everything. "Tell me—did you touch yourself last night?"
The air left my lungs.
Heat flooded my cheeks so fast it felt like a slap. My hand twitched in his grip, an involuntary jerk toward escape that he absorbed without comment, his fingers tightening just slightly. Just enough to saystay.
How could he know?
But even as the question formed, I already had the answer. Of course he knew. He knew everything. He'd been watching me for weeks with that quiet, devastating attention, reading the things I didn't say, noticing the things I tried to hide. He'd probably cataloged the exact shade of my flush when I was embarrassed versus aroused versus afraid.
He'd told me about the contract's intimacy protocols.Certain pleasures, certain releases—you ask. I hadn't asked. I'd pressed my face into my pillow and—
I could lie. The old Gemma would have lied. Would have ducked her head and saidof course notand buried the truth so deep it would never see sunlight.
But I'd just told him the truth about the food. And the sky hadn't fallen. The earth hadn't split open.
"Yes, Daddy." My voice came out rougher than expected, scraped over the rawness of the admission. "I did."
The word still felt new in my mouth.
Daddy.
Dante shook his head. The movement was slow, almost rueful, and when his mouth curved it wasn't a smile of displeasure. Itwas the expression of a man who'd laid a trap and found exactly what he expected in it.
"I knew it." His voice held a warmth that made my stomach flip. "Another little transgression."
Little.The word landed differently when he said it. Not diminishing. Not mocking. Tender. Like he was holding something small and precious in his hands and marveling at the weight of it.
"You were supposed to sleep," he continued. His thumb hadn't stopped its slow circles against my wrist. "Eight hours. That was the instruction."
"I tried—"
"What were you thinking about?"
The question was quiet. Intimate. Asked with the calm authority of a man who already knew the answer but wanted to hear me say it anyway.
I couldn't look at him. My eyes dropped to our joined hands—his large, dark against mine, steady where mine trembled.
"You," I whispered. "Your voice. The way you—" I swallowed. "The way you looked at me when you said there would be consequences."
Silence. Heavy and charged, like the air before a storm.
