Home.
* * *
Weeks later, the house breathes differently. Not quieter—never that—but steadier. Like it has learned a new rhythm and decided to keep it.
Lucia’s calendar is a living thing now. Galas, openings, charity auctions with names that carry weight in rooms I don’t enter. Legitimate. Visible. Successful. I watch her from the edges sometimes, moving through spaces like she owns them. Not because anyone handed her power, but because she built it and knows exactly how to hold it. The men notice. The women notice. The world adjusts.
Nico adjusts faster than any of us. School starts. New shoes. A backpack, too big for his shoulders. The nightmares come less often, then not at all. When he wakes in the night now, it’susually because he dreamed he could fly and fell just before the landing. We sit on the edge of the bed and talk about gravity like it’s a puzzle, not a threat.
He calls me Papa without hesitation. I froze. Old instincts flared. Fear of claiming what could be taken, fear of touching something too precious. Lucia’s hand found mine under the table. Grounded me. He kept talking, blissfully unaware he’d redrawn the map of my chest.
I answer every time.
One quiet night, after Nico is asleep and the guards have settled into their rotations, Lucia and I are alone. Not isolated. Simply alone together. We sit on the terrace with the doors open, the air warm and forgiving. Privacy screens are drawn, and the nearest guards are positioned out of sight and earshot, as practiced and unremarkable as breathing. The estate hums around us. Distant radios, a car passing the outer gate, the faintchirrof insects brave enough to live near marble. Lucia’s feet are tucked beneath her, a glass of wine untouched in her hand because she keeps forgetting it’s there.
I watch her watch the grounds. “You’re thinking again,” I say.
She smiles without looking at me. “Always.”
I lean back, let the chair take my weight. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like I’m waiting for the next move. The next betrayal. The next price.
“This place,” I say, gesturing to the darkened lawn, the lit paths, the house that has seen too much. “It feels… different.”
“Because it is,” she says. “It’s not just defended anymore. It’s lived in.”
She turns to me then, really turns, and I see it. The ease. Not the absence of fear, but the absence of being ruled by it.
We don’t rush the moment. There’s no adrenaline left to burn off, no ghosts demanding attention. When she reaches for me,it’s deliberate. When I pull her close, it’s certain. We fit the way things do when they’ve stopped trying to prove themselves.
“I love you,” I say into her hair.
She doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t flinch. She just nods, like this has been true long enough to be obvious.
“I know,” she says softly. “I love you, too.”
I turn to her, just to smile, but before I know it, we’re kissing and her hands are all over me. Her mouth tastes like cinnamon and midnight. The next words die in my throat, and I let them, kissing her slow and long, careful not to spill the glass from her loose grip. She laughs against my lips, the sound soft and sleepy, and sets her wine on the flagstone.
Her hand finds the back of my neck, thumb pressing into the muscle there. It hurts in a good way, an electric pressure that scrambles every thought in my head except her. We move together, clumsy from relief, giddy with the unfamiliar safety of now.
I want to go slow. I want to remember every frame of her face in this light. I want, and for the first time, I don’t mourn the wanting.
We fall together onto the lounge chair, awkward and perfect, Lucia’s leg hooking around my hip like she’s claiming territory. Her hair smells of rosemary from the garden, earthy and green and entirely her. She moves my shirt aside and bites my collarbone, not gently. I yelp, half shocked, half thrilled at the pulse of pain. She grins, her teeth white and feral in the moonlight, and I can’t help but grin back.
Her hands never hesitate, never ask permission. They know me now. Every healed scar, every place I flinch, every place I melt. And she loves to dip her hand into my underwear, to feel my rock-hard cock.
Lucia palms me, insistent and delighted by my ragged exhale. She slides her hand further, curling around me with theauthority of someone who knows exactly what she’s holding. I rock up into her, desperate for friction. She hums in approval and keeps her gaze locked on mine. The edges of her irises swim silvery blue in the cold light, and I don’t dare blink, afraid I’ll lose her in the blur of movement and breath.
My hands scrabble at her hips, greedy for skin, and she gives me what I need—she always does—guiding my fingers under her dress so they can leave bruises along her thigh. I’m trembling from the urge to flip her, to fuck her through the canvas of this patio chair until the neighbors call the cops again. Lucia feels it, laughs that whiskey laugh, and tugs my cock out.
The night air bites at me, a dizzying contrast to the wet heat of her palm. She strokes me slow, then faster, wringing a shudder from my spine. I clutch at the canvas edge, knuckles whitening, and she holds eye contact while she works me, as if she can pluck the desire through my gaze and drink it down.
Every movement, her grip, the squeeze, even the veined sweep of her thumb, shows off her ownership. I’m clay in her hands, barely articulated except in ragged breaths and curses.
Lucia shifts, straddling me in one smooth motion, her thigh skimming heat against my bare skin. She hikes her dress to her hips and pulls her panties somewhere aside, and then it’s just us. Slick, hot friction, and the greedy way she drags herself down onto me.
For a second, neither of us moves. Her face is inches from mine, lips apart, eyes wide open. The universe contracts to this point of contact, atomic, holy.
She pulses around me, and I gasp. She laces her fingers behind my head and holds me there, the only anchor in a world spinning off its axis. Every time she rocks her hips, it sends new shockwaves through my body, each one deeper and hotter than the last.
