Then he knelt beside me.
Not on a bath mat. Not on a cushion. On the hard tile floor, his knees against the cold stone, this man who ran a criminal empire kneeling on bathroom tile to wash his wife.
His hands found the bar of soap. Worked it between his palms until a lather formed, then set the bar aside and began.
My shoulders first. Long, slow strokes, his soapy hands gliding over the curve of muscle, the ridge of bone. My arms—wrist to elbow, elbow to shoulder, each one lifted from the water and attended to with the same methodical care he brought to everything. My collarbone. The flat plane of my chest. The swell of each breast, handled gently, his thumbs circling but not lingering, cleaning rather than arousing. Taking care.
His hands moved beneath the water. My stomach. My hips. The tops of my thighs, where the muscles were still trembling faintly from what we'd done.
Then he lifted my foot.
I hadn't expected it. The motion pulled me slightly from the haze—the strange sensation of my foot emerging from the warm water into the cooler air, his large hands wrapping around it, his thumb pressing into the arch.
He scrubbed between my toes.
A sound escaped me. Bright and sudden and completely undignified—a giggle. An actual giggle, the kind that belonged to a child, the kind I hadn't made in so many years I'd forgotten my body was capable of producing it. It bubbled up from somewhere beneath the floating and the warmth and burst out of me like a bird from a cage.
"Ticklish," I mumbled. My voice sounded strange. Young. Softer than I recognized.
"Of course you are." He was smiling. I could hear it before I saw it, and when I tipped my head to look at him—really look—there it was. The smile. Not the controlled curve he offered associates and allies. Not the measured acknowledgment thatpassed for warmth in boardrooms and sit-downs. The real one. The one that transformed his face from something carved and intimidating into something beautiful.
I loved his smile. I'd been collecting them for weeks, hoarding each one like a miser counting coins. This one was the best yet. Warm and unguarded and directed entirely at me, at my giggle, at the small ridiculousness of a grown woman squirming because her husband washed between her toes.
He set the first foot down. Lifted the second. I braced for the ticklish scrub—tensed, grinning—and he was gentler this time. The corners of his mouth still curved.
"Lean forward, sweetheart. Let me get your back."
I obeyed. Drew my knees up and rested my cheek against them, arms wrapped loosely around my shins, my spine curved toward him in an offering of trust. The water lapped at my sides. Steam rose in lazy curls.
His hands found my shoulders again. This time there was no soap—just his palms, warm and wet, pressing slow circles into the muscle along my spine. He worked his way down. Shoulders to shoulder blades. Shoulder blades to the middle of my back. The middle of my back to the small of it, where he pressed both thumbs in and held, and I heard myself make a sound that was almost a purr.
The tension I hadn't known I was carrying—hadn't known I was always carrying, the background hum of vigilance that had been running since I was twelve years old—began to dissolve. Not disappear. Dissolve. Like sugar in warm water. Like something that had been solid and heavy becoming part of the liquid around me, carried away by the current of his hands.
My eyes closed. The floating deepened. I existed as nothing but sensation—warm water, warm hands, the smell of lavender and vanilla, the quiet sound of Dante breathing beside me.
Safe. Held. Tended.
For the first time in my life, I wasn't performing anything. I was just being.
He lifted me from the water like I weighed nothing.
The towel was warm. The cotton was soft and warm and he wrapped it around me like swaddling, tucking the edges under my arms, pressing the fabric against my skin with his palms until the water was absorbed and all that remained was clean warmth.
He dried my legs. Each one lifted, held steady, the towel run down from thigh to ankle with the same unhurried attention he'd given the washing. He dried my feet. Gently this time—no scrubbing, no toes, just the soft press of cotton against my soles while I stood barefoot on the heated tile and swayed slightly, drowsy as a child kept up past bedtime.
Then the brush.
He found it on the bathroom counter—my brush, the wide-toothed one I used for wet hair, and he knew it was mine because he knew everything. He'd memorized the layout of my things the way he memorized everything else. With precision. With care.
"Turn around, sweetheart."
I turned. Felt his hand gather my hair at the nape of my neck—the weight of it, heavy and wet, darker when it was soaked. He started at the ends. Long, slow strokes, working through the tangles with a patience that made my throat ache.
No one had brushed my hair since my mother died.
The thought arrived without warning, rising up through the floating like a stone breaking the surface of a still pond. So many years since anyone had stood behind me and drawn a brush through my hair with this kind of tenderness.
The brush moved higher. Through the mid-lengths, working from ends to roots the way someone who'd studied this would do it—not yanking from the top, not forcing through knots. Learning the grain of my hair and moving with it. Each stroke pulled the tension from my scalp and replaced it with a tinglingwarmth that traveled down my spine and settled somewhere in my chest.
