I just stand there and feel the water and think about the look on Salvatore's face when he broke. The micro-expression. The tightening around his eyes. The moment the loyal soldier dissolved, and the real man surfaced, cold and calculating and trapped.
I did that. I stood in a room and said his name and the whole thing collapsed.
The power of that settles into me like warmth. Not pride, exactly. Something deeper. The bone-level knowledge that I am not thewoman who ran from Daniel Voss on a Greyhound bus. I'm not the woman who hid in apartments and counted things and told herself that survival was enough. I'm the woman who stood at a window and identified a traitor and kissed a man outside an interrogation room and walked away with her spine straight.
Emma Wren couldn't have done this. Charlotte Richardson did.
Maybe they both did. Maybe that's the point.
I hear the bathroom door open. The cool air hits my wet skin. I don't flinch. I know the sound of his footsteps.
"You're early," I say through the steam.
"It'll take a while. Leone's starting the first round. I have twenty minutes before I go back."
I open the glass door. He's standing in the bathroom doorway, sleeves still rolled, his hair damp from the corridor's humidity. His eyes move over me. Naked, wet, steam curling around my body. He doesn't hide the look. Doesn't pretend he's here for any reason other than the one written on his face.
"Twenty minutes," I say.
"Could be less."
"Then don't waste them."
He strips. Fast. Efficient. The shirt over his head, jeans kicked to the floor, boxers after. He steps into the shower and the space shrinks to nothing, just water and steam and his body and mine.
I pull him under the spray. The water hits his shoulders and runs down his chest in rivulets, and his skin is hot under my hands when I press my palms flat against his stomach. He backs me against the tile. Cool against my spine, his heat against my front, and the contrast makes me gasp.
His mouth finds my neck. Open, wet, his tongue tracing the line from my jaw to my collarbone. I tip my head back against the tile and let him taste me. His teeth graze my pulse point and I moan, the sound bouncing off the tile walls, amplified by the small space.
"I watched you through the glass," I say. My voice is rough. The steam and the heat and his mouth on my skin are turning my brain to static. "I watched you sit next to him and take him apart with words, and I wanted you. Right there. In that room."
He growls against my throat. Low. The vibration travels through my skin and settles between my legs.
"You can't say things like that."
"I'll say whatever I want. You like it."
His hands slide down my body. Over my breasts, thumbs dragging across my nipples, and I arch into the touch. Down my ribs. Over my hips. He grips my waist and lifts me like I weighnothing, and I wrap my legs around him and my back is flat against the wet tile and he's between my thighs and the head of his cock presses against me, hard and thick and slick from the water.
"No condom," I say.
He stops. His eyes find mine through the steam. Searching. Making sure.
"I've got an IUD," I say. "And I'm clean. I haven't been with anyone in three years."
"I'm clean too. Tested six months ago." His voice is strained. Tight. He's holding himself at my entrance and the effort of not pushing forward is visible in every muscle of his arms, his shoulders, the cords standing out in his neck. "Charlotte. Are you sure? I’m not worried about disease so much as filling you with my baby before you’re ready."
"I'm sure. Plus, the IUD is pretty foolproof. I want to feel you. Just you. Nothing between us."
He pushes into me.
The sound I make isn't language. It's the raw, animal noise of a woman feeling a man inside her without a barrier for the first time, and the difference is immediate and devastating. Every ridge, every inch, the heat of him, the pulse of him. He fills me and I feel it everywhere. In my thighs, in my belly, in my chest, in the backs of my eyes.
"Fuck." His forehead drops against my shoulder. His arms are shaking where they hold me against the wall. "You feel. Fuck. Principessa, you are deadly."
"Move."
He pulls back and thrusts in and my spine slides against the wet tile and my nails dig into his shoulders. The angle is deep. Deeper than the bed, deeper than the cabin. Gravity and the wall and his strength holding me open while he drives into me with a rhythm that starts slow and doesn't stay slow.
