The pleasure built differently than before. Not the sharp, explosive crescendo of the study or the bedroom. Something slower. Deeper. A tide rather than a wave—rising gradually, filling every corner, reaching places that had nothing to do with nerve endings and everything to do with the quiet, patient reconstruction of a woman who'd been demolished at sixteen.
When I came, it was almost gentle. A long, rippling release that moved through me like sunlight through water—warm, pervasive, reaching all the way down to the foundation where the oldest cracks lived. I trembled against him and he held me, and when he followed—his face pressed into my neck, his breathing ragged, my name on his lips like something he'd been saving—I held him back.
Equal. Mutual. Two people, giving and receiving in the same breath.
Afterward.
The lamp was off. I didn't remember who'd turned it off—maybe him, reaching over in that easy way of his, or maybe the room had simply decided to go dark because what we'd built between us needed no illumination to be seen.
We lay tangled together. His chest beneath my cheek. My leg thrown over his. His hand in my hair, stroking—slow, rhythmic, the motion of a man who would do this forever if I let him. Which I would. I'd let him do everything forever. That was the terrifying, liberating truth of what I'd become.
My finger traced patterns on his skin. Idle. Aimless. Down the midline of his sternum, around the small brown mole beneathhis left pectoral, along the ridge of the scar he never talked about. Mapping him the way he'd mapped me. Claiming him the way he'd claimed me.
Neither of us spoke.
There was nothing left to say. The confessions had been made. The truths had been spoken. The promises—fierce and absolute, the kind that either held or destroyed the people who made them—had been given and received and sealed with something more binding than any contract.
Tomorrow we'd plan.
I knew this the way I knew the sun would rise—with certainty, with dread, with the grim acceptance of a woman who'd married into a world where peace was temporary and strategy was survival. Tomorrow there would be meetings. Folders on white tablecloths. Marco's ruthless intelligence and Santo's barely leashed violence and Dante's measured, devastating calm. Tomorrow they would look at the board and count the pieces and figure out how to fight a war against a man who'd been winning quietly for two decades.
But that was tomorrow.
Chapter 15
Dante
Marcocalledatseven-fifteen.
I was already awake—had been since five, lying in the dark with Gemma's breath warm against my chest and the architecture of a war taking shape behind my eyes. She slept deeply. Completely. The kind of sleep that came after the body had been wrung out by grief and sex and exhaustion. Her hand was curled against my sternum, fingers loose, trusting even in unconsciousness.
The phone buzzed against the nightstand. I reached for it without moving the arm beneath her head.
"I need you at Nero." Marco's voice was clipped. Awake. The kind of awake that meant he hadn't slept. "Eleven. Bring Santo."
"What happened?"
"Nothing catastrophic. Just—come. And don't eat breakfast. Actually, do eat breakfast. You'll need a base."
He hung up.
I stared at the ceiling. Processed. Filed it under Marco being Marco and turned my attention back to the woman sleeping on my chest.
She didn't stir when I slid out from beneath her. I tucked the covers around her shoulders, pressed my lips to her temple, and left a note on the nightstand in handwriting I hoped was gentler than my father's:Back soon. Eat something. Guards outside. I love you.
Nero at eleven in the morning was a different animal than Nero at midnight. The velvet ropes were gone. The lighting was up—flat, institutional, exposing every scuff on the dance floor and every fingerprint on the chrome fixtures. Without the crowd, without the bass, without the careful alchemy of darkness and desire that Marco had engineered, the nightclub looked like what it was: a very expensive room with good bones and a faint smell of last night's spilled champagne.
Marco was behind the bar.
He wore a silk shirt the color of red wine—unbuttoned one too many, because this was Marco and vanity was a constitutional requirement. His hair was styled. His face was fresh. Only the shadows beneath his eyes betrayed the fact that he'd been awake since God knew when, and even those he wore like accessories.
Spread across the bar in front of him were dozens of small glasses. Tasting glasses, the kind you'd see at a whiskey distillery or a perfumer's workshop. Each one held a different liquid—amber, crimson, blush, gold, one that was almost violet. They were arranged in neat rows, labeled with small handwritten cards in Marco's precise script.
Santo stood two feet inside the door with his arms crossed, looking at the display like it had insulted his mother.
"Before you say anything," Marco announced, both hands flat on the bar, "I need you both to taste these. My new mixologist is a genius or a lunatic, and I genuinely can't tell which."
Santo stared. "It's eleven in the morning."
