Chapter 4 #4
He finally pulls off and kisses his way up my body. Tongue tracing my hip bone, teeth grazing my ribs, mouth hot and open against my chest. By the time he reaches my lips, I’m a trembling mess.
He kisses me, and I taste myself on his tongue. Salt and musk. The kiss is slow and filthy, his tongue fucking my mouth in a lazy imitation of what’s coming, and it claims me more thoroughly than any kiss ever did.
“Better?” he asks against my lips.
“Worse.” Because it is. This deliberate seduction is worse than the frantic fucking. I can’t dismiss my reaction as just a heat-induced response. Enzo is choosing to pleasure me. Taking his time to make it good for me when he could just take what he wants and leave.
It would be so much easier if he were cruel. If he just used me as a hole to satisfy his lust.
I stop him when he leans in to kiss me again.
“Why are you doing this?”
His brows draw together. “Doing what?”
“This.” I gesture vaguely between us, at the cum still glistening on his lips, at the gentle way he’s caging me with his body. “You could just fuck me and go. You don’t have to—”
“Don’t have to what?” His hand cups my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone. “Make you come so hard you forget you hate me?”
“Stop it, you evil son of a bitch.”
“Evil?” He huffs something close to a laugh. “Maybe.” Then his gaze hardens. “But I’m not a fucking rapist. And if I’m going to fuck you through your heat—if you’re going to hate me for it afterward—then I’m damn well going to make sure every orgasm I give you ruins you for anyone else.”
He reaches for the water, and this time I don’t fight him when he puts the bottle to my lips. I drink until he’s satisfied, throat working around each swallow while he watches me with hungry eyes.
When I’m done, he settles back between my thighs, cock against my entrance, still slick and open from before, and my body clenches greedily.
“Ready?” he asks, like he’s giving me a choice.
Like I have any choice at all with the heat already burning through me building again.
“Just do it.”
He pushes in with a single deep thrust, and I stop thinking entirely.
The fourth wave blurs into the fifth. Or maybe it’s the fifth into the sixth. I lose count. Day bleeds into night and back again, and I have no idea how long I’ve been in Enzo’s bedroom.
The only constant is the cycle. Need and satisfaction. Enzo inside me or on me or around me, his scent soaking into my pores until I can’t tell where he ends and I begin. Until I’m not sure I exist outside of this room, outside of his hands and his mouth and the relentless drive of his hips.
For a man pushing forty, he fucks like someone half his age, with a stamina that should be illegal.
But he’s also careful in ways I didn’t expect.
He makes me eat during the brief respites, holds water to my lips until I drink.
Carries me to the bathroom when my legs won’t work.
Wipes me clean with warm cloths, gentle over the places where I’m raw and oversensitive.
Checks me for injuries before his gentle touch turns hungry again.
At some point, I realize he’s barely slept. Every time I surface from the heat-haze, he’s awake and alert, responding to my body’s demands before I can even voice them.
“You need to rest,” I tell him during one of the calmer moments. We’re tangled together on the floor, his cock softening inside me because neither of us has the strength to separate. The carpet is rough against my cheek, and I’m too wrecked to care.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re exhausted.”
“So are you.” His fingers trace idle patterns on my hip. “This is your first heat with an alpha in three years. Your body is going to demand more than usual. I can handle it.”
First heat. Last heat. Only heat, if I have anything to say about it.
“I don’t want this,” I say quietly. “Any of this.”
“I know.” He presses a kiss to my temple, unbearably soft. “When this is over, we’ll figure it out.”
I open my mouth to remind him I’m still planning to kill him the second this is over, but the next wave slams into me like a freight train, and I'm lost again. Burning. Begging. Taking his cock like I was made for nothing else.
Three heat waves after that, something shifts.
I’m on my hands and knees, face pressed into the mattress, ass in the air. Enzo is behind me, driving into me with a rhythm that’s almost meditative. My body is sore in ways I’ve never experienced, but still the heat demands more. Always more.
“Please.” I don’t even know what I’m begging for anymore.
His hand slides up my spine, tracing each vertebra, gentle despite the brutal pace of his hips. The contrast makes me shudder.
I glance over my shoulder and meet his eyes. “Bite me now,” I gasp. “Really, bite me. Make it permanent.”
Because my body’s already made the choice for me, hasn’t it?
I’ve given myself to my brother’s killer.
Spread my legs for him, begged for his cock, come apart on his fingers and his tongue and his dick like a desperate whore.
There’s no coming back from this. No washing away the shame of how good it feels, how right he smells, how my traitorous body has claimed him even while my mind screams that he’s the enemy.
If we’re bonded, at least I’ll have an excuse. At least I can tell myself it wasn’t a choice. That I was forced. And if I’m tied to him permanently—well. I’ll have the rest of my life to make Enzo Valerio miserable. Or put a bullet in him once the bond makes killing him hurt me too.
Either way, I won’t have to live with the knowledge that I wanted this.
That I wanted him.
He stills. Completely. His cock buried to the hilt, his hands frozen on my hips.
“Luca.” It’s the first time he’s said my name like that, soft and intimate. Like it means something. And hearing it breaks something in me. “That’s the heat talking. You don’t want to bond with me.”
“I do,” I insist, even though I don’t know if it’s true. “Just—please—do it.”
“No.”
“Enzo, please.” I arch my neck, baring my throat.
“I said no.” His grip tightens on my hips, holding me still when I try to press back against him. “Ask me again when you’re not in heat. If you still want it then, we’ll talk.”
The rejection stings more than it should. A sob catches in my throat, thick and choking. I can’t even trap the bastard in a bond. All this, and I don’t even get to come up on top.
“Luca.” He leans over me just as another sob shudders through me. He pulls me up, my back flush against his chest. One arm bands across my ribs, holding me against him. “Breathe with me.”
I try to match my breathing to his, feeling his heartbeat against my spine, and slowly, his steadiness pulls me back from whatever edge I was teetering on.
Warm lips brush my shoulder, right where a bond mark would go. He doesn’t bite. Instead, he presses slow, open-mouthed kisses there, his tongue tracing the sensitive gland until my whole body shivers.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against my skin. “I’ve got you.”
The tension in my body starts to unwind, muscle by muscle. My breathing evens out. The frantic desperation recedes just enough that I can think again. Feel something other than raw need.
“That’s it,” he says quietly. “Just breathe with me.”
I hate how his voice soothes me. Despise how my body trusts him when my mind knows better. But I can’t fight it anymore. Can’t fight him, can’t fight this, or deny what my body demands.
He starts moving again, slower, each thrust deliciously deeper. I feel every inch of him dragging against my prostate, sliding in and out, torturously, melting my mind completely.
Enzo knows my body now like a weapon he’s mastered. He’s learned every sensitive spot that makes me lose control. And right now, he wields that knowledge with precision, touching me in every place that makes me gasp.
And I take it. Over and over, thrust after agonizing thrust.
One hand reaches around to stroke my cock. His grip is firm but careful, matching the rhythm of his hips. The other stays splayed across my chest, right over my hammering heart, like he’s counting every beat.
“You’re close,” he says against my neck, and it’s not a question.
I am. I can feel it building. It’s different from before, not the desperate, clawing release of heat but something deeper. Something that feels like it might shatter me into pieces too small to ever reassemble.
“Let go,” he murmurs. His hand tightens on my cock, thumb swiping over the head.
But the weight of his words lands differently, with a meaning that goes deeper than the orgasm building at the base of my spine. He’s asking for more than that.
He’s asking me to stop fighting. To stop carrying the weight of Marco’s death alone. To let someone else hold me, even if that someone is him.
“I can’t—” My voice splinters. I don’t know if I’m talking about coming or crying or giving up the only thing that’s kept me going for six months. “I can’t—”
“You’ve been holding on so tight.” His lips find that spot on my shoulder again, pressing soft kisses there. “Carrying so much. You don’t have to do it alone anymore.”
“You don’t understand—” The words choke off into something between a sob and a moan. “If I let go, there’s nothing left. Nothing but—”
“Me,” he finishes quietly. “There’s me. And I know you don’t want that. I know you hate this, hate what I represent. But right now, in this moment, let me carry it for you.”
My throat closes up. My eyes burn with tears I’ve been choking back for six months.
“I’ve got you,” he promises against my skin, his arm tightening across my chest. “I swear to God, Luca, I’ve got you. Just let it go.”
And I realize he’s asking me to trust him. Not forever. Not with my revenge or my future or anything beyond this room. Just this—this moment, this breath, this impossible thing growing between us that I don’t have a name for.
And something in me just… surrenders.
The orgasm rolls through me like a tidal wave, starting at the base of my spine and spreading outward until every cell in my body is vibrating with it.
My vision blurs as tears finally spill hot and fast down my cheeks, and his name tears from my throat.
It’s neither a scream nor a moan. Just his name.
“Enzo.”
I feel him thrust deep one last time, feel his cock pulse inside me as he follows me over the edge with a groan that vibrates through my entire body.
For a moment, everything goes silent. Only our ragged panting fills the quiet room.
The tears won’t stop. They slide down my face, and I can’t bring myself to be ashamed anymore.
Something in my chest feels cracked wide open.
I’m naked, but it’s not my body that feels exposed anymore.
It’s everything underneath; the six months of grief I’ve swallowed instead of letting myself feel.
The fury that’s been eating me from the inside out.
The loneliness of carrying Marco’s death alone, of having no one to tell, no one who understood what I lost when I lost him.
How unmoored I’ve been without my brother.
How lost. How fucking terrified I’ve been this entire time.
And now Enzo has seen all of it. Every broken piece I’ve kept hidden behind anger and revenge.
“Hey.” He shifts, pulling out of me carefully, and I whimper at the loss. His hand comes up to cup my face, thumb wiping the tears away. “Hey. You’re okay. You did so well.”
I shake my head, unable to speak.
I’m not okay.
Nothing about this is okay.
But his arms are around me, solid and warm, pulling me down onto the mattress and curling around me like a shield.