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I pressed another finger to her cunt, popping just the tip of it inside her along with the other and my thick cock.

“Fuck!” she screamed, the sound echoing around the room like a gunshot.

Her entire body turned to stone, one long, taut line of tensed muscle before a second later, the tension snapped like a rubber band, and she convulsed, shock wave after shock wave of pleasure scoring through her. Her pussy gripped me so tightly I had no hope in hell of holding on.

So I let go.

Spilling inside her in violent jerks, filling her with my cum, with my blood, with the essence of everything I was that I had lost the words to describe.

After, even though my legs felt like jelly and my head pounded from blood loss, my right arm dangerously numb, I dropped to my knees and hauled Fia’s ass to the edge of the table so I could gently lick her clean of my fluids. She tasted like honey and salt and iron. Something elemental I wanted to keep the flavor of in my mouth for the rest of my life.

When I made her come again on my tongue, it was a gentle, shivering orgasm that left her as limp as a rag doll on the table.

She didn’t protest when I scooped her into my arms after tucking my spent cock back into my trousers. Instead, she looped heavy arms around my neck and pressed her face into my chest as I carried her out of the room and up to her bed.

By the time I placed her between the sheets, she was fast asleep.

My chest ached as I brushed hair away from her face, and it felt astonishingly the same as it had when I was nine years old, and the doctors had restarted my flatlined heart.

Chapter Thirty

Fiammetta

When I woke up the next morning, it was to a looming sense of shame.

I had knowingly fucked a man who was not my husband.

It didn’t matter that I had been unwittingly doing so for years. This was a deliberate act. A salacious one.

I’d wanted Luca with a keen-edged desperation that had consumed me, an almost demonic possession.

There was something about him, unveiled, that compelled me in a way that Dario never had.

It was Luca’s rawness.

His honesty.

He was so like Frankenstein’s monster, oblivious to his sense of self, driven by instinct to seek out and own the few things that moved him.

It was obvious I was one of those things.

The only thing he’d ever wanted for himself.

To be wanted that way, so madly, with every ounce of a person . . . it was addictive.

It was like sunshine on my face after years of captivity underground.

No one had ever wanted me like that.

Romantically or otherwise.

Papà had bargained me away, my brothers hadn’t protested, Niccolo had not fought for our love, and Dario might have been aroused by me, reluctantly moved by me, but it was nothing like this tangible, almost manic passion Luca harbored in his eyes when he looked at me.

When he touched me.

Last night in the basement, surrounded by tools of torture and the shush of blood swirling down a drain, when Luca had fucked me covered in his own blood after taking a life to protect me?

It had felt almost holy.