Chapter 4
FOUR
I come back to myself in pieces.
I feel sheets. Expensive ones, high thread count, cool against my burning skin.
It’s dark where I am, but not completely. Ambient light spills from somewhere to my left, enough for me to make out the shadows and shapes of a high ceiling, heavy curtains, and bedroom furniture.
The air is heavy with alpha pheromones. So thick I’m drowning in them.
And then there’s the need. Raw, desperate, overwhelming primal hunger that demands to be satisfied.
I’m in a bed. Enzo’s bed, probably, because it smells like him. Cedar-smoke and alpha, soaked into the sheets and pillows.
My clothes are gone except for my boxers, and even those feel like razor blades against my hypersensitive skin.
A breeze filters through, and the whisper of air hitting my skin makes my nipples bead up.
I shift, and a wet squelch sounds between my ass cheeks.
And I’m hard. So fucking hard it hurts.
I reach down without thinking, palming myself through my soaked underwear, and the moan that slips out of me is obscene. My hole clenches in response, and I nearly sob at the emptiness.
I need something inside me, something to fill the aching void, need—
The soft click of a door opening echoes through the room.
My hand freezes on my cock as my head snaps toward the sound.
Enzo appears in the doorway, and whatever air I had left punches straight out of my lungs. He’s still dressed, still perfectly composed, standing there like a statue of ice while I burn. His eyes drop to where my hand is still pressed against myself, and something dark flickers across his face.
I pull my hand away slowly, my skin burning hotter under his gaze.
He steps inside and closes the door behind him. Immediately, the room feels ten times smaller. And with every step he takes toward me, I sense a shift in his scent. It’s growing heavier, laced with the unmistakable musk of an alpha’s arousal.
He stops at the edge of the mattress, close enough that his knees brush the sheets. Those dark eyes rake over me, taking in the sweat-soaked sheets and my trembling limbs before landing on the obvious tent in my ruined boxers.
“How do you feel?”
I let out a strangled laugh. “How do I feel? Like shit.”
I try to push up on my elbows, but the strength isn’t there. My arms buckle, and I drop back onto the sheets with a pathetic thud.
“What the hell did you do to me? Where are my clothes?”
“I didn’t do anything,” he says, his voice smooth and maddeningly calm. “And I took your clothes off because you were burning up and clawing at them. You’re welcome.”
“Fuck you.”
I manage to rise onto my elbows, my vision swimming as I glare at him through the haze. “Give them back. I need to leave. I need—”
“Lie down.”
The command rolls down my spine in shivers, and my body obeys before my brain can catch up. My back hits the mattress, arms falling limp at my sides. I stare up at the ceiling, chest heaving as my mind reels from how wet I just got from two words in that voice.
“What the fuck,” I breathe.
He moves closer, and my eyes betray me, landing on the impressive bulge straining against his slacks.
I bite on my bottom lip to stop the whimper, but it escapes anyway. A pathetic, needy sound that makes me want to die.
“How do you really feel?” he asks again.
I drag in a breath and fix him with a glare. “Like I’m dying. It hurts everywhere. My skin feels like it’s trying to split from my body. Like if you don’t—”
Like if you don’t fuck me right now, I might actually die.
I bite down on my tongue hard, choking back the words before they escape my lips.
No. Not with him.
I won’t beg the man who—
Another wave slams into me without warning, and I curl into myself with a strangled cry. My hole spasms violently, clenching on nothing, slick flooding out of me in a humiliating rush.
“Cazzo.” The mattress dips as Enzo sits. His hand touches my forehead, checking for fever, but the contact shoots through me like lightning. I whimper, and he jerks back like I’ve burned him.
“Your heat is worse than normal. You’ve passed out twice already.”
His hand returns, fingers pressing against the pulse point at my throat, then my wrist. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering.
I watch his face twist into a dark frown.
“This isn’t normal.” His eyes flick to meet mine. “You’ve been suppressing your heats. Haven’t you?”
It sounds like an accusation instead of a question.
I look away, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. “None of your business.”
“Look at me.”
I don’t want to. Every instinct I have that isn’t slave to my biology tells me to cling to some pathetic scrap of dignity. But my body doesn’t give a damn what my pride wants. My eyes snap to his before I can stop them, drawn by the raw authority in his voice like a puppet on strings.
I hate myself for it. Hate him even more.
“How long have you been suppressing your heat?”
I press my lips together in an act of defiance.
He leans forward, and his scent washes over me before his hand grabs my jaw in a grip so firm I couldn’t pull away if I tried. Which I don’t because I’m pathetic and desperate, and his touch feels like the only thing keeping me from coming apart.
“How long?” It comes out as a growl this time, low and dangerous, and I feel the vibration of it in my bones.
My throat works around a swallow. “Three years,” I choke out.
The Italian that pours out of him is absolutely blistering. I don’t understand the words, but the meaning is clear enough.
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
Before I can answer, he’s off the bed so fast the mattress lurches beneath me.
“We need to get you to a hospital.” He’s already reaching for his phone. “They can stabilize you with IVs, fluids—your body could go into shock, your organs could—”
“No.” I force the word out through gritted teeth. “No hospitals, please. No records.”
“You could die.”
“Then I die.” I look at him through the haze, and even now, even like this, reduced to a shaking mess of need and slick and desperation, I hate that I notice how beautiful he is.
How right he smells. How badly I want to bury my face in his neck and breathe him in until I suffocate.
“It’ll pass. I just need to ride it out. I just need—”
My body seizes again without warning, making my spine bow off the bed in a violent arch. Another wave of slick floods out of me, drenching my boxers. I’m making sounds I’ve never heard myself make, broken pleading whimpers and desperate keening moans, and I can’t stop. Can’t control any of it.
Enzo is beside me in an instant, one hand bracing my shoulder, the other gripping my hip to hold me down.
His touch makes everything worse. Everything intensifies. My cock jerks hard and my hole clenches air.
I need something inside me. Something to fill the emptiness until this unbearable pain goes away.
“Please,” I gasp, and I don’t even recognize my own voice. “Please, I want—I need—”
“Need what?”
My gaze drops to his mouth, watching the way his lips move. My tongue darts out to wet my own, a silent, primal admission of everything I can’t find the pride to put into words.
I catch the exact moment Enzo’s eyes register understanding. They go pitch black, and a slow, knowing smile curls his thick lips.
“You tried to kill me.” His hand on my hip slides down my thigh, and a filthy moan rips out of me at the friction.
“Earlier tonight, you had a gun pointed at my chest.” His grip tightens suddenly, fingers digging into the meat of my thigh with a bruising strength.
“And now you’re here. In my bed. Soaking my sheets. ”
He leans closer, his breath hot against my ear. “Begging me to fuck you.”
Tears prick the corners of my eyes from the pain and the sheer, humiliating frustration of it.
“I know,” I choke out. “And I still want to kill you. But right now I need you to either fuck me or put an actual bullet in my head because I can’t—the pain—”
A sob wracks my body, and I writhe under his grip, hips grinding up against nothing, desperate for friction, relief, anything it can get. “Help me. Please. Please, I’m begging you, please—”
His grip on my thigh tightens almost painfully. I watch his throat work as he swallows. Watch the war play out across his face. Control versus instinct, restraint versus want. I see the exact moment the alpha in him wins.
“Fuck,” he snarls, and then he’s on me.
The relief is so intense I nearly blackout.
His weight, his scent, his hands on my skin. It’s everything my body has been screaming for.
“You’re going to regret this.” The words are a growl against my throat as his teeth scrape my pulse point. “When you come to your senses, you’re going to regret every bit of this.”
“Stop talking,” I grate out, but the command is thready and weak, broken by the sharp gasp that escapes me as his hands yank my boxers down.
The sudden bite of cool air hitting my slick, over-sensitized skin makes me cry out. I claw at his shirt, nails raking down the fabric, tearing at buttons.
I need skin. Need to feel him against me with nothing between us.
He captures both my wrists in one hand and slams them above my head. The casual display of strength coaxes a moan out of me, and my cock jerks between our bodies, a fresh stream of precum leaking onto my stomach.
“So fucking responsive,” he mutters, his voice thick with a dark, twisted kind of pride.
His free hand drags slowly over my chest, pausing to brush a thumb across one aching nipple.
I gasp, squirming into the touch, my head tossing back as the air leaves my lungs.
He doesn’t stop, catching the peak between his fingers and rolling it with a pressure that is borderline painful, pushing me right to the edge of a sob.
“Fuck.” I arch off the bed with a choked cry, my entire world narrowing down to the point of contact where he’s methodically undoing me.