He's not in bed when I open the door, but rather sitting on the edge of it, papers fanned across the duvet. He's wearing gray sweatpants and nothing else, hair pushed back from his face like he's been running his hands through it.
He looks up when I come in, those dark eyes sweeping me head to feet and back up in a single pass, reading my face, my posture, the set of my jaw, the fact that I'm awake at two in the morning in nothing but an oversized t-shirt I dug up from his closet. He's doing that thing he does. Processing every variable, running calculations I can't see, deciding whether to speak or wait.
He waits.
Good.
Crossing the room, I watch his eyes track me the way they tracked me through the hedge maze, steady and focused and completely, utterly still.
The papers are spread across the bed like he's been studying them all night, even though I've been gone less than half an hour. Typed documents, photographs, something with a map, no, a layout of a building I don't recognize. He sees me looking but doesn't move to cover them.
I push them off the bed, watching them slide off the duvet and scatter across the floor. Elio doesn't react, his gaze drifting once to the papers now on the floor, then back to me.
Putting both my hands on his shoulders, I push him back onto the mattress.
He goes.
Six-foot-five, two-hundred-twenty pounds of violence wrapped in muscle, and he lets me push him back onto the mattress like I’m the only force that matters.
I straddle him. My knees on either side of his hips, palms flat on his chest. His heart is slamming under my hand, steady and heavy and alive. My fingers find his wrists and I drag them up, pressing them into the pillow above his head. His hands are twice the size of mine. Corded forearms, dark hair, tendons shifting as he fights the instinct to take control.
He could break my grip one-handed. A flick. Less than that.
He doesn't.
"Don't move."
His eyes go black. Not the polished, controlled dark I know. The dark think behind that. The one with no leash. His fingers spread wide against the pillow, straining as his pulse hammers under my thumbs.
"Violet?" My name sounds like a question and a surrender at the same time.
"Don't. Move."
His jaw sets. Every muscle in his arms and chest locking into place, the effort rolling through him like a tremor. The sheer visible cost of holding still when every single thing about this man is engineered to take.
I hold his gaze, and he lets me.
You'd think that wouldn't be the thing that does it. You'd think it would be the feel of him under me, hard and warm and barely contained, or the way his breathing has changed, shallow and rough and not quite under his control. And those things matter. But he's looking at me like I'm the only person who's ever asked this of him.
And he's giving it.
I lean down and kiss him slowly. My mouth opening, my tongue finding his. He strains upward for half a second before he catches himself and presses back into the mattress. His hands flex under mine. Not pulling, not resisting, just there. Alive with all the things he's not doing.
I sit up and pull the shirt over my head.
His eyes drop to my body, his expression shifting to raw, hungry and desperately controlled. I watch the muscles in his arms cord as his fingers dig into the pillow above his head.
Good.
My fingers drag across his chest. His heart slams against my palm so hard I swear it shakes the bed. The skin under myhands is warm and smooth over hard ridges of muscle and old scars, and I'm... I'm a stranger to myself right now. Every point of contact registering at twice the volume it should. My skin too aware of itself, of him, of the heat between us. My nipples are tight, almost painful, and I haven't even taken my underwear off yet.
I've had sex before. With him. And before him, with people who don't matter enough to name right now. But my body has never done this. This full-system override, where every nerve ending is dialed up to a frequency that makes my soul ache. Six weeks of damage working its way to the surface, probably. Weeks of someone else controlling what happened to me, and now every nerve is over-correcting, flooding me with any sensation it can find.
Because Elena can't choose anything anymore.
Swallowing back a sob I rise up on my knees. Reach between us. His cock is hard against my hand through the fabric, and the sound he makes when I touch him sends a pulse of heat through me so sharp it almost hurts. I pull at his sweatpants, and he lifts his hips to let me push them down without being asked. His cock springs free, thick and heavy, and I take him in my hand, making his hips jerk once before he locks them down. His wrists twist under my grip. Not trying to escape. Fighting himself.
"Eyes on me," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine.
