Page 64 of The Kingpin’s Bride

The larger, more dangerous part kept circling the same thought I could not make stop. For the first time since I was ten years old and sitting under a white tablecloth while a man in clean gloves ended my world, someone had looked at the people who hurt me and decided they did not get to keep breathing.

The realization sat in my chest like a live coal. I hated how safe it made me feel. I hated that my body had clenched around him harder because of it. I hated that the cream and the denial and the murder had tangled together into something I could not separate cleanly no matter how hard I tried.

Camilla’s photograph was up on his wall now, but time was passing. The numbers felt suddenly unreliable. Matteo’s voice from the car played on a loop in my head. No sign of them yet.

The door opened. Matteo walked in carrying a tray. He looked at me for a long moment, dark eyes moving over the way I sat with my bare feet tucked under me on his dark sheets. Something unreadable passed behind his expression. Then he set the tray down on the mattress and sat on the edge of the bed close enough that his thigh brushed my knee.

“You have earned the run of the penthouse,” he said. His voice was quiet. Absolute. The same tone he used when giving orders that ended lives. “You will not try to leave. You will not make me regret this. Clear?”

“Yes,” I nodded quickly. Before he changed his mind.

He studied my face for another long second as if looking for any crack in the answer.

I held still. I did not look at the tray. I did not look at the door. I looked at him the way he had taught me to: enough to prove I was listening, not enough to pretend I was brave.

“Eat something,” he said.

Coffee steamed in a heavy white cup. He did not feed me. He did not comment when my hands shook lifting the plate. He just sat there with his thigh against my knee and watched me swallow.When I set the cup down he reached for my wrist.

“You stay inside these walls,” he said, his tone carrying a warning. “You stay where I can find you. ”

“I understand.”

He nodded once, as if the matter were closed. Then his gaze dropped to my chest.

The cream was still there. I had felt it the whole time he spoke, a slow, relentless heat under the thin sheet, turning every breath into a reminder. My nipples were tight and oversensitive against the fabric. He knew. He had put it there after the event last night.

“Why don’t you lie on your back for me?”

I did.

He drew the black sheet down to my waist with the same unhurried precision he used for everything that belonged to him. Cool air hit my skin. The cream made it worse. My nipples tightened further, shiny and flushed, and the empty ache between my legs sharpened in answer even though he had not touched me there.

He looked at them the way he looked at a problem he had already decided how to solve. “Put your hands above your head. Keep them there.”

I lifted them. The position pulled my chest up.

“You came last night with my cock in you again,” he said, voice low. His thumb hovered over one nipple without touching. “I think I’ve been spoiling you. You’re making me too soft. So today, I have to deny you. Sorry, baby”

Heat flooded my face. I hated how fast my body understood him. I hated that I was already wet from the threat of not getting what I craved. The first wet heat of his mouth on my nipple dragged a cry from me that I could not swallow. The cream and his tongue and the careful scrape of his teeth combined into something sharp and overwhelming. He sucked slowly, deliberately, while his fingers worked the other nipple with the same focused pressure, rolling and pinching until the dual sensation built faster than I was ready for.

Heat coiled tight under my skin. My clit throbbed in time with every pull of his mouth. I was so empty between my legs that the need felt like a separate heartbeat, mean and insistent and completely unanswered.

“Matteo!” The yelp left my lips before I could stop myself.

He switched sides. The cool air hit the nipple he had just left and the contrast made me shake.

He sucked harder this time, rolling the sensitive peak against the roof of his mouth while his fingers pinched and tugged the other with precise, relentless rhythm. The cream turned every movement into a pure concentrated sensation that radiated from my breasts down through my belly and straight to the empty ache between my thighs.

I could feel the orgasm building in my chest and the tips of my breasts, strange and intense and completely outside my control. My hands stayed above my head only because he had told me to keep them there. My fingers dug into the sheets hard enough that my knuckles ached.

“Please,” I whispered. The word came out broken. “I can’t like this!”

“You can.” His voice was low against my skin, the vibration of it another form of the cream. “You will. Come for me like this. From nothing but my mouth on these pretty nipples. Show me how ready you are for this life. Show me how much you belong to me.”

The order pushed me over. cried out, back arching hard off the sheets as my head tipped back.

Matteo did not let up. He kept sucking and rolling and pinching through the entire climax until the sensitivity bordered on pain and a second, sharper orgasm tore through me right on the heels of the first. Tears slipped from the corners of my eyes and ran into my hair. My clit pulsed emptily. The space between my legs felt soaked and neglected and so desperate that I sobbed once from the force of the need.