The rhythm built. Slow becoming steady. Steady becoming urgent. My nails found his back—scored lines along the muscle there, pressed crescents into the skin beside the scar he never talked about. His name fell from my lips like something sacred. Dante. Daddy. Please. A litany of need that I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
His hips snapped harder. Deeper. The angle changed and I gasped—a sharp, bright sound that broke open the quiet—because he'd found the place inside me that made everything go white at the edges.
"That's it." His voice was wrecked. Rough and low and barely holding together. "That's my good girl. Come for me."
I shattered.
The orgasm tore through me—vast, annihilating, a wave that started where our bodies were joined and radiated outward until I couldn't tell where I ended and the pleasure began. I cried out—his name, or something wordless, some sound pulled from the same deep well that my tears came from—and my body clenched around him, pulling him deeper, holding him inside me as the aftershocks rolled through in diminishing waves.
He caught me. Held me through every trembling second, his mouth against my temple, whispering words I couldn't parse but understood anyway—good girl, so beautiful, mine, mine, mine—and then he followed me over the edge with a groan that sounded like surrender.
Not the surrender of defeat.
The surrender of a man who'd finally stopped fighting what he wanted.
His weight settled onto me. Heavy, warm, his face buried in my neck, his breathing ragged against my skin. I held him. Wrapped my arms around his back and held him the way he always held me—completely, without reservation, with everything I had.
We lay there. Tangled together. His heartbeat hammering against my chest, slowing gradually, finding its way back to steady the way Dante always found his way back to steady.
He lifted his head. His eyes found mine.
"I love you, Gemma."
Four words. Simple as breathing. Heavy as everything we'd survived to get here.
No hesitation. No qualification. No measured delivery, no carefully chosen phrasing. Just the truth, offered with the same raw honesty he'd shown on the lakefront when he told me he was lost.
My eyes filled. My hands found his face—cupped his jaw, thumbs against his cheekbones, holding him the way he always held me.
"I love you too."
Iwasfloating.
That was the only word for it—the soft, hazy space where my edges went blurry and the world turned to cotton. I couldn't feel my bones. Couldn't feel the boundaries of my own body, the places where I ended and the sheets began. Everything was warm and golden and very far away, like watching the world through a window streaked with rain.
I was aware of Dante. That was the one fixed point—the gravity that kept me from drifting away entirely. His heartbeat beneath my cheek. The weight of his arm across my waist. The slow rise and fall of his breathing, steady as a tide.
I didn't want to move. Didn't want to exist as a separate thing from this moment. Wanted to dissolve into the warmth and stay there forever, boneless and safe and held.
He recognized it before I did. He always did.
"Come on, little one." His voice was soft. Close. The words brushed against my hair like something physical. "Bath time."
I made a sound. Not a word—something smaller, a protest that hadn't fully formed before it escaped. My fingers curled into the sheet. Held on.
"I know." His mouth pressed against my temple. Warm. Patient. "But you need this. I need to take care of you. Up we go."
He lifted me from the bed the way he'd lifted me in the foyer—one arm under my knees, one around my shoulders, my body gathering against his chest like something folded carefully for safekeeping. I tucked my face into the hollow of his neck and breathed him in. Salt and skin and the fading ghost of cologne. The scent of us.
The bathroom was cool at first, then warm. He'd left the heated floor on—I felt it against his bare feet as he carried me, though I couldn't feel my own. The soaking tub sat in the far corner beneath a window that looked out on nothing—frosted glass, private, the kind of design that said you are unseen here, you are safe.
He set me on the edge of the tub. Held me steady with one hand while the other turned the taps. Water rushed into the basin, loud enough to fill the room with white noise, and the sound was soothing in a way I couldn't have explained. Like rain. Like the ocean. Like the steady shushing of a parent calming a child who'd cried too hard.
He added something to the water. Lavender and vanilla—I recognized the scent as it bloomed through the steam, familiar and sweet, and some part of my floating brain registered that he'd bought this. Had chosen these specific scents, had placed them in this specific bathroom, had planned for this exact moment.
He lifted me again. Lowered me into the water.
The warmth closed over me. I sank into it—let it swallow my shoulders, my chest, everything but my head, which he cradled with one hand until I was settled against the curved back of the tub.
