Chapter 5
Imani
"Eight years." The words hang in the freezing air of the underground vault, jagged.
They bounce off the dead server racks, swallowed by the low yellow backup glow we are left with after killing the power. My body still vibrates from the force of my climax. My legs are weak. My skin is flushed, burning hot against the damp, biting chill of the concrete room.
I lean back against the metal cage of the server tower, pulling his flannel tighter over my sweater. It smells of clean linen, ozone, and faint copper. It smells like him. The scent of a lethal predator who just brought me apart with nothing but his hands and his terrifying focus.
Vincenzo pushes up off the floor and rises over me in the gloom, a shadow carved out of granite and quiet menace. His broad chest rises and falls. The gold cross pendant lying against the black cotton over his sternum shifts with every ragged inhale.
He is a man who operates off the grid, a ghost in the Costa family machine, a weapon who exiled himself from human contact for nearly a decade. Touch is static to him. It is pain. It is an ambush.
And yet his hands find my hips again. His long, calloused fingers dig into the soft flesh above my waistband, anchoring himself to me like I am the only solid thing left on the planet.
My ex-boyfriend stole sixty thousand dollars from me.
He took four years of my life, gutted my savings to cover compulsive sports bets, and left me hollowed out.
He made me feel stupid. Naive. Blind. I took this dangerous, highly illegal tech contract migrating anonymous servers just to survive the fallout of that betrayal.
I walked into a subterranean Federal Reserve outpost with a four-foot-thick reinforced steel door and trapped myself inside a literal tomb filled with mafia blood money. My judgment is objectively terrible.
But looking at Vincenzo Costa right now, my judgment feels dialed in.
He calculates everything. He processes the world through data and threat assessments.
He looks at rooms and sees exits, variables, and targets.
He looked at me, and somewhere in the first minutes of the steel door sealing us inside, I became the only variable that mattered to him.
He decided I belonged to him. That possession slams through me, squeezing the breath from my lungs in the best possible way.
"You haven't touched another human being in eight years," I whisper. The darkness of the vault makes my voice sound too loud.
"No." His voice is gravel and rusted iron. It grates along my nerve endings, sparking fresh heat straight down to my soaked panties.
"And you just…" I wave a shaky hand between us, gesturing to the lingering electricity of what just happened. "You just took me apart against a server rack. You touched me. You tasted me."
"You aren't noise, Imani." He steps closer. The toes of his combat boots bracket mine. The heat radiating off his lean, cut body cuts straight through the freezing temperature of the vault. "Everyone else is static. Everyone else is a threat. You are the one clear thing left."
He thinks he can just say things like that and I will simply nod and accept it.
He thinks he can deliver a world-shattering confession of absolute devotion and then just stand there, fully clothed, keeping his own demons locked down.
Standard brooding, lock-it-all-down behavior.
Please. I survived financial ruin, an oxygen purge, and a terrifyingly silent mafia ghost today.
I am not letting him retreat into his tactical shell. Not a chance.
"You're still wearing your pants, Costa." I inject my voice with enough sass to mask the desperate, feral clawing in my belly.
His jaw locks.
"We are in a dirty, freezing concrete box. You deserve a goddamn palace. All I have is this floor, and I hate that."
"I don't want a palace." I step into his space. The distance between us vanishes. The air leaves the room. "I want you."
I reach for him. I slide my hands under the hem of his black t-shirt and press both palms flat against his bare chest, right over the steady thump of his heart.
He goes still. It is not the calculated, predatory stillness he uses to observe threats.
It is the jarring, frozen hesitation of a machine mid-cycle.
He is a system rerouting everything. I watch the cold logic burn away in his eyes.
The signal collapses. The static disintegrates. He stops calculating. He just reacts.
A low, broken sound tears from his throat.
It sounds nothing like the controlled man who walked in here.
His hands abandon my hips and fist in the fabric at my sides.
He lifts me off my feet. My toes leave the concrete floor.
He pins me against the server rack. The metal bites into my spine, but I barely register the pain because his mouth crushes down on mine.
It is a violent, consuming collision. There is no gentleness.
There is only starvation. He kisses me like a man who has been dying of thirst in a desert and finally found water.
His tongue sweeps into my mouth, claiming every inch, tasting of dark coffee and male aggression.
I open for him immediately. I want him feral.
I want the monster he keeps chained up inside his head.
"Mine," he snarls against my lips, his teeth scraping my lower lip hard enough to sting. "You are mine. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." I gasp the word into his mouth. I wrap my arms around his corded neck, scraping my fingers through the short, salt-and-pepper hair at the base of his skull. "I'm yours. Show me."
That is all the permission he needs. His restraint snaps. The gold chain around his throat swings and hits my collarbone as his mouth closes on my neck. His mouth moves over my skin, his teeth nipping, his tongue soothing the bite.
He drags the pad of his thumb up my throat, jaw to collarbone, then sets his mouth to the soft skin below my ear and marks me there. Heat crawls violently up my neck and floods my cheeks.
He drops me back to my feet, but his hands do not stop moving.
He grips the hem of the flannel and the sweater beneath it, pulling both layers sharply over my head.
The cold vault air hits my bare skin before he replaces the chill with the blistering heat of his hands.
I am left wearing only my bra and my jeans.
His stare locks on my chest. Grey-green eyes pitch black, swallowed by dilated pupils. "You are so fucking beautiful," he rasps, his chest heaving. "Your scent is driving me insane. Warm amber. Soft musk. It's all I can breathe. It's all I want to breathe ever again."
Behind my back, a single deft flick of his fingers—the clasp of my bra gives way. The scrap of lace falls to the concrete floor, forgotten.
His large, heavily tattooed hands cup my bare tits. The contrast is staggering. His hands are rough, scarred, marked with ink and violence, yet he holds me with a reverence that makes my throat ache. His thumbs drag across my hardening nipples. A sharp moan punches out of my mouth.
"Vincenzo." His name tastes like a demand on my tongue.
He drops to his knees. The lethal mafia enforcer, a man who bows to no one, kneels on the freezing, filthy concrete floor of an abandoned federal reserve vault just to press his face into my cleavage.
He kisses the valley between my breasts, then opens his mouth and takes my right nipple between his lips.
Hard suction. The sensation wires directly downward, clenching tight between my legs.
My knees buckle. I grab his broad shoulders to keep from collapsing.
The heavy sleeve tattoos covering his arms flex beneath my grip.
There is zero wasted mass on this man. He is coiled muscle and lethal intent, and right now, all of that intent is focused on my pleasure.
Then to the other nipple, his tongue lashing over the sensitive peak before drawing it deep into his mouth. I arch my back, offering him more. My fingers dig into his shoulders.
"Please," I beg, the sass burned out of me. I am nothing but raw, shivering need.
His hands move to the button of my jeans. He rips them open and pulls the denim down my hips, dragging my soaked panties with them. I kick the clothes away. I stand naked in front of him, shivering from the cold, but burning from the fire he lit inside my blood.
He looks at my pussy. The slickness of my arousal coats my thighs, gleaming in the dull yellow backup glow.
"Soaked," he murmurs, his voice dropping an octave. "All for me."
"Only for you."
He leans forward. He presses his mouth directly against my wetness.
A high, broken sound escapes me. His tongue parts my swollen lips and finds my clit with unerring, devastating accuracy.
He does not hesitate. He does not ask. He just takes.
He laps at my slickness, drinking me in like I am the only sustenance he will ever need.
His hands grip the backs of my thighs, holding me in place, forcing my legs wider.
I writhe against his mouth. The sensory overload is staggering. The rough scrape of his stubble against my sensitive inner thighs. The wet, hot slide of his tongue over my clit. The cold air of the vault biting my skin. The scent of ozone and copper mixing with my own musky arousal.
He sucks my clit into his mouth and applies steady, rhythmic suction. His tongue lashes against the sensitive nub. Two of his fingers slide up and push inside my drenched pussy.
I scream his name. The sound ricochets off the metal server racks. He thrusts his fingers deep into my walls, stretching me, mimicking the rhythm of his mouth. My body bows like a taut bowstring. I am on the edge again. The climax he gave me earlier was just a tremor. This is a full tectonic shift.
"Come for me, Imani," he orders against my slick flesh. "Let me have it."