Chapter 7
Vivi
Someone is in the apartment. That someone is Caden Byrne. I am not in danger.
He's at the kitchen table in last night's trousers and a clean grey t-shirt, tablet in front of him, coffee at his elbow. He looks up when I come in.
His expression does the thing it does. That full attention that takes me in completely and gives nothing back. I watch him register the shirt and something moves briefly in his jaw and then goes still.
"Coffee's ready," Caden says.
"I can see that."
I pour a cup. Stand at the counter on my side of the island and hold it and look at him and wait.
Because men like Caden Byrne do not simply wake up and continue.
They have a system. A way of fitting what's happened into the operational picture.
And I have been in enough rooms with enough men to know that the morning after is always when you find out which kind you're dealing with.
He looks back at his tablet.
There it is.
The careful professional distance settling back into place, everything rearranged into its correct order, last night filed somewhere I'm not going to be given the address of.
And I know this feeling. I know it with my whole body, the way you know a room changing temperature, the specific cold of realising you have misunderstood your position.
I tell myself I'm misreading it.
I look at the set of his shoulders and I know I'm not.
"So that's how this goes," I say.
He looks up. "Vivi."
"Back to normal." My voice is level. I hate that my voice is level.
I hate that I have so much practice at this that I can stand here with his handprints still on my body and sound like I'm discussing the foundation accounts.
"I just want to understand the parameters.
I find it's easier when things are named. "
He puts down the tablet, looking at me with the full weight of his attention and I feel it land in my chest and stay there.
"You're still a client," he says. "The threat is still active. I haven't neutralized it yet. Last night—"
"Was a mistake." I say it before he can. Pre-emptive. I know how to do this.
"I wasn't going to say that."
"It's what you mean."
"It isn't what I mean." The first edge in his voice, quiet but there. He shakes his head and runs his fingers through his hair. "I'm trying to say that I have a job that isn't finished and until it is I can't—"
"Can't what?"
He stops.
"I know what this is," I say. "I have been in this position before. I know what a man looks like the morning after he's had what he wanted and is working out how to put everything back where it was."
"Don't do that." There’s an edge to his voice. Did I hurt him?
"Then tell me what I'm looking at."
He says nothing. The silence stretches and I feel every second of it in my throat.
"I didn't love him."
It comes out low and I don't plan it and I don't stop it. It's been inside me for so long it has no weight left, it's just a fact I've been carrying in a sealed room for ten years and the door is apparently open now and I can't close it again.
"I know people assume. The widow, the grief, all that shit.
I know what it looks like from the outside.
But I didn't love Dominic Ferraro. I endured him.
I built things inside that marriage because building was the only territory I was given and I needed somewhere to put myself or I was going to disappear entirely — and I was twenty-three years old when my father decided I was a useful connection to make and I didn't know yet that I was allowed to want something different. I didn't know that for a long time."
"I didn't mourn him." My voice is still level and I hate it, I hate the composure that sits in my throat like a stone even now, even saying this out loud to another person for the first time.
"I mourned the years. I mourned the girl who walked into that marriage not knowing how long she'd be in it.
But I didn't mourn him." I stop. The kitchen is very quiet.
"I have never once been chosen by someone who didn't want something from me.
My father wanted the connection. Dominic wanted the face, someone to stand beside him at foundation galas and not ask questions.
I have been useful and I have been decorative and I have been managed and I have been very, very careful not to ask for anything that wasn't already on offer. "
Something in my chest pulls tight and I struggle to breathe. I will not cry in front of this man.. "And last night I thought — for the first time in years I thought I was allowed to have something that was just mine… I'm sorry for making that your problem."
I turn toward the bedroom.
"Vivi."
I stop but I don't turn around. I can hear him standing and then his hand is on my shoulder, turning me, not hard, just turning me, and I go because I've run out of the thing that was keeping me from it.
He's close enough that I have to look up.
He doesn't speak immediately. I watch him not speak and I understand that this costs him something, that whatever lives behind the operational surface of Caden Byrne doesn't come out without effort, and I wait.
"I'm not reorganizing," he says. "I'm sitting at that table trying to figure out what a man like me does with what happened last night. That's all it is." His jaw works. "I don't have a system for this. I have a system for everything and I don't have one for this."
I look at him for a long moment.
"Neither do I," I whisper.
The phone on the table buzzes.
We both look at it. The screen reads LINE 13 in the low morning light and I watch Caden's eyes move to it.
He looks at the phone. Looks at me.
The phone buzzes again.
He reaches out and turns it face-down on the table and the buzzing stops.
The silence that follows is different from all the other silences we've had in this apartment.
It's not charged and it's not careful and it's not the quiet of two people managing distance.
It's the silence of something decided. Completely, without ceremony, the way he does everything that matters to him.
I look at the phone lying dark on the table. At his hand still resting on it.
"That was important," I say.
"Yes."
"You're not going to answer it."
He looks at me steadily. "No."
He comes to me immediately, no hesitation.
His hands frame my face and tilt it up. He kisses me hard, deep, with the full deliberate weight of a man who has made his decision and is finished arguing about it.
His tongue slides against mine and I moan into his mouth.
I feel the counter dig into my back. I feel the thick, heavy line of his hard cock pressing against my stomach.
None of it matters. Only his mouth devouring mine, only his hands gripping me like he owns me, only the overwhelming relief of finally having this.
"I've got you," he says against my lips, voice low and rough.
"I know," I reply. This time I mean it all the way down to my bones.
He picks me up like I weigh nothing. I wrap my legs tight around his waist. He carries me back to the bedroom and I let him. I let every part of it happen. I want to be carried. I want to be taken.
He lays me down on the bed. Before he can speak, I reach up and yank his shirt over his head. I run my hands over his chest, his shoulders, needing skin.
"There she is," he says. Low. Certain. Almost proud.
I pull him down on top of me.
This time he goes slower, but it feels even more dangerous.
His mouth moves down my throat, sucking hard enough to leave marks.
He lingers at my breasts, taking one nipple deep into his hot mouth while his fingers pinch and tug the other until I am gasping and arching.
When his hand finally slides between my thighs, I am dripping.
He groans against my breast as his fingers glide through my soaked folds.
"Fuck, Vivi," he mutters. The rough satisfaction in his voice makes me clench.
"Caden." My voice cracks. "Please."
"I know."
He pushes two thick fingers inside me slowly, stretching me open.
His thumb finds my swollen clit and circles it with perfect, relentless pressure.
He keeps one hand pressed flat on my stomach, holding me down while he fucks me with his fingers.
His mouth stays on my tits, licking, sucking, biting gently until my thighs start shaking uncontrollably.
I come hard. My back bows off the bed. A loud, broken moan tears out of me. He doesn’t stop. He keeps stroking that spot inside me, drawing the orgasm out until I am whimpering, oversensitive, and pulling desperately at his shoulders.
"Look at me," he orders when I try to turn my face away.
I open my eyes. His gaze is dark, intense, and completely focused on me. He watches every twitch, every pulse of my pussy around his fingers, every helpless sound I make. I don’t care anymore. I want him to see it all. I want him to own every second of my pleasure.
He finally pulls his fingers out and moves up my body. When he pushes his thick cock inside me in one slow, deep thrust, I exhale everything. The argument. The fear. Ten years of careful control. He fills me completely, stretching me wide, and for a moment I can’t breathe.
"God," I gasp. My nails dig hard into his back. My hips roll up to meet him. "Caden—fuck—"
"I’ve got you."
He fucks me with long, deliberate strokes. Each thrust is deep and controlled, dragging against every sensitive spot inside me. His hand slides between our bodies again. His fingers find my clit and rub tight, slick circles while he drives into me harder. The pressure builds fast and heavy.
"Give it to me," he growls against my ear. "Come on my cock."
I shatter. I come so hard my vision blurs.
His name rips out of my throat as my pussy clamps down around him in pulsing waves.
He groans low and deep, losing his rhythm.
His grip on my hips turns bruising as he buries himself as deep as he can go and comes hard inside me.
I feel every thick pulse, every hot spurt as he fills me.
We stay locked together, panting, sweat-slick. His heavy body presses me into the mattress in the best possible way. His heart hammers under my palm.
I have spent ten years in a life that was never mine.
Ten years of rooms I was permitted to occupy, choices that were made for me, a version of myself assembled for other people's purposes.
And this morning I said the truest thing I have ever said out loud and a man turned his phone face-down and carried me back to bed, and I find, lying here in the quiet with the city coming up outside and his heart under my hand, that I don't know yet what to do with that.
I'm going to have to figure it out.
I find that I want to.