Chapter 27
Lucia
It takesa long time for the panic inside me to quiet down. There might be guards inside Nico’s room tonight. One sitting quietly in the armchair by the window, another outside the door. But that doesn’t make me any calmer.
I should sleep. My body is wrecked. My nerves feel skinned raw. Every time I close my eyes, I hear the alarm again, see the red lights strobed across marble and art and money like blood.
But sleep won’t come. It never does after fear. I don’t go to the sitting room. Or the study. Or any of the places that feel like strategy and distance and control.
I go to his bedroom. It feels different the second I step inside. Not softer. Just less defended. The lights are low. One lamp on by the bed. The room smells like clean skin and soap and something warm underneath it. He’s showered. Changed. Hair still damp at the nape of his neck. Sleeves rolled up again like he forgot to finish dressing because his mind was already somewhere else.
He’s standing by the window, shirt untucked, hands braced on the sill like he’s holding the house together through sheer will. He turns when he hears me. We look at each other for along moment. I close the door behind me. Deliberately. The click sounds loud in my chest.
Turo’s gaze drops to my hand on the handle. Then back to my face. Neither of us speaks right away. This isn’t urgency. Or panic. Or the aftermath of almost losing something. This is a choice.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say finally.
“I didn’t expect you to,” he replies.
His voice is calm. Too calm. The kind that tells me the adrenaline is still burning underneath.
I take a few steps into the room. Stop just short of him. He doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t crowd me. He waits. That matters more than anything else he could do.
“I keep thinking,” I say, folding my arms like that might keep me upright, “that if I hadn’t come here… if I hadn’t let Nico get close to you… none of this…”
“Stop,” he says quietly.
I swallow. “I’m terrified,” I admit.
He doesn’t interrupt this time. “Of me?”
I shake my head immediately. Too fast. “No. Of losing this. Of losing you. Of Nico losing you.”
The words crack on the way out. Because saying them makes them real.
Turo moves then. He crosses the room in three strides and cups my face in both hands, thumbs warm against my cheekbones, fingers firm at my jaw like he’s anchoring me to the present.
“You won’t,” he says.
I search his eyes. The dark. The depth. The truth he never hides, even when it costs him.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I shake my head. “You can’t promise that,” I whisper. “Not in your world.”
His jaw sets. Something dangerous and devoted flashes behind his eyes. “Then I’ll burn the world down before I let it take you from me.”
The words should scare me. They don’t. They land somewhere deep and solid and terrifyingly convincing. I believe him. That’s what frightens me most.
Then he kisses me. My back hits the wall. His mouth crashes into mine, hungry, sure, devastatingly confident. But his hands… his hands are slow. Too slow. They roam over me, deliberately withholding, mapping me inch by inch, memorizing the places I gasp, lingering everywhere except where I burn most.
He tugs my shirt up, and I help him strip it over my head, the hem tangling briefly in my hair before it lands somewhere on the floor. A second later, his own shirt joins it, my fingers shoving it up and off just to feel his skin on mine. I slide my hands over his bare stomach, dragging my fingertips across the ridges of muscle just because I can. His breath stutters before a low, rough sound tears out of him.
“Careful,” he murmurs against my lips. “You touch me like that again, and I’m going to forget every intention I have of taking my time with you.”
I tug lightly on his shirt. “Who said I need you to take your time?”
His eyes go molten. “Oh, Lucia,” he murmurs. “You have no idea how badly you want me to.”
