Chapter 10
Gemma
Icouldn't sleep. Not because the bed was wrong or the room was cold or the house made unfamiliar sounds—none of that. I couldn't sleep because my body had become a traitor, humming with a frequency I couldn't tune out, every nerve ending lit up like a wire stripped bare.
I pressed my face into the pillow and tried to think about something else. Caravaggio's use of chiaroscuro. The chemical composition of oil paint. The periodic table. Anything other than the way Dante's voice had dropped when he said we need to talk about that.
It didn't work.
The words kept replaying. Not just the words—the whole of him.
The way he'd stood in the library doorway, jacket removed, tie loosened, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to his forearms. The way he'd taken one look at me and known.
Not guessed. Known. Like my disobedience was written across my face in a language only he could read.
And the expression he'd worn while calling me on it. That was the part that undid me.
No anger. I knew anger. I'd grown up with anger—my father's cold disapproval, Enzo's calculated fury, the sharp backhand of disappointment from men who expected compliance as their birthright. Anger I could handle. Anger I could survive.
Dante hadn't been angry. He'd been resolute.
Calm, steady, immovable certainty. Hadn't tightened his jaw or gone cold or withdrawn into that punishing silence my father wielded like a blade.
He'd just looked at me. Held my gaze. Told me exactly what would happen, and when, and what he expected in the meantime.
You're going to eat. You're going to have a bath. You're going to get eight hours of sleep.
And I had. I'd done all of it. Walked to the kitchen on legs that felt like jell-o and eaten Rosa's chicken piccata standing at the counter because sitting felt like too much effort.
Drawn a bath and soaked until the water went lukewarm.
Climbed into bed at a reasonable hour like a good girl, because he'd told me to, and my body had obeyed before my brain could form an objection.
Good girl.
The heat that had been simmering all evening flared.
I rolled onto my back. Stared at the ceiling. My skin felt too tight, too sensitive, every brush of silk against my thighs registering as something more than fabric.
I could admit it now, in the dark, with no one to see my flush. I'd broken the rule on purpose. Not out of rebellion or spite or the reckless self-destruction that Enzo had once accused me of when I'd dared to push back. I'd done it because I needed to know.
Every man who'd ever made me a promise had broken it. My father promised to protect me and sold me instead. Enzo promised to cherish me and—
No. Not now. Not his name. Not in this bed.
I'd needed to know if Dante was different. I'd needed to test the walls he'd built around me, to throw my weight against them and see if they held.
They held.
And now my body was responding to that knowledge in ways I hadn't anticipated.
I almost never touched myself. Years of Enzo had left my relationship with my own pleasure complicated at best, broken at worst. Sex was something that happened to me. Desire was something I'd learned to suppress, to view with suspicion, to treat as the enemy's weapon rather than my own birthright.
But this—this wasn't about sex. This was about the sound of his voice saying consequences. The weight of his gaze when he'd called me good girl. The promise of his hands. The image of myself across his lap that I couldn't stop conjuring, no matter how hard I tried.
My fingers slid beneath the waistband of my pajamas before I consciously decided to move them.
I thought about his forearms. The way the muscle shifted under his skin when he rolled his sleeves. I thought about the steady press of his hand against the small of my back—all those weeks of small touches, each one a brand I'd pretended not to feel.
I thought about tomorrow morning. His study. Nine o'clock.
My fingers found the wetness between my legs and I gasped. Quietly. Pressing my face into the pillow to muffle the sound, even though there was no one to hear.
I circled my clit with shaking fingers, thinking about Dante's hands—large, capable. Steady hands. Hands that had cupped my face at the altar like I was something precious. Hands that would hold me accountable because I mattered enough to hold.
The orgasm hit me fast. Too fast. A sharp, bright thing that crested and broke before I was ready, leaving me trembling in the aftermath, my breath coming in ragged bursts against the damp cotton of my pillowcase.
I lay there afterward, stunned.
When had I last felt this? This raw, desperate wanting?
Not the muted tolerance I'd learned to substitute for desire.
Not the performative arousal I'd faked for years before my body shut down entirely.
This was real. This was mine. This was my body waking up after a decade of sleep, reaching for something it finally recognized as safe.
At six, I gave up pretending to sleep. The sky outside my window was gray with early autumn light, the Chicago skyline emerging from darkness like a photograph developing in solution.
I showered. The hot water cascaded down my body, and I stood beneath it with my hands pressed flat against the tile, denying the urge that surged through me when the spray hit sensitive skin.
Not again. Once was a revelation. Twice would be a habit I couldn't afford before walking into his study and looking him in the eye.
I dressed carefully. A soft cashmere sweater in pale gray—nothing provocative, nothing that screamed armor.
Simple black trousers. No jewelry except the wedding band.
Hair down, because he'd seen me with it down and something in his expression had changed, and I wanted that look again even though wanting it felt like handing him a weapon.
At 8:55 I stood outside his study door.
My heart hammered against my ribs. My palms were damp. The hallway stretched in both directions, offering escape routes I didn't want to take.
This was it. The cliff edge. The moment where theory became practice, where ink on paper became skin on skin, where the promises we'd made each other stopped being abstract and became undeniably, terrifyingly real.
I knocked.
"Come in."
His voice was warm. Steady. The same voice from last night, the one that had reached inside me and turned off the noise.
I opened the door.
Dante stood behind his desk, but he was already moving. Rising. Coming around the heavy oak to meet me, his jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows again—and God, those forearms were going to be my undoing.
He didn't touch me. Didn't reach for me. Just gestured toward the leather sofa by the window, the one where we'd negotiated the contract, and waited for me to sit before settling beside me.
Close. Close enough that I could smell his cologne—that expensive, woodsy scent that had rewired something in my brain over the past weeks.
The morning light fell through the window in long golden bars. Dust motes drifted lazily between us. The study was warm, quiet, sealed off from the rest of the house like a world unto itself.
"Tell me why you didn't eat yesterday."
His voice was gentle. Curious. The way a teacher might ask a student to explain their reasoning on a problem—not because the answer was wrong, but because the process mattered.
I'd rehearsed a dozen responses in the shower. Practiced them against the tile while hot water sluiced over my shoulders. Reasonable explanations. Plausible excuses. The kind of careful deflections I'd spent a lifetime perfecting.
None of them made it past my lips.
"I wanted to see what would happen."
The truth landed between us, bare and vulnerable and terrifying. I watched his face for the flinch, the flicker of disappointment, the withdrawal I'd been trained to expect when I stopped performing.
He nodded slowly. No surprise. No judgment. Just that infuriating, beautiful calm.
"You wanted to test me."
Not a question.
"Yes." The word came out smaller than I intended. I tried again, forcing volume into my voice the way I forced steel into my spine. "I needed to know if you meant it. If the rules were real. If you'd actually—"
I stopped. The sentence had too many possible endings, and all of them revealed more than I was ready to show. If you'd actually follow through. If you'd actually care. If you'd actually be different from every man who made me promises and then shattered them like they were nothing.
Dante reached for my hand.
His fingers threaded through mine with deliberate care, each one slotting into place like a key finding its lock. His thumb settled against my pulse point—I knew he could feel it hammering—and he held on.
"I will always mean it, Gemma."
He said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like something that existed whether I believed in it or not.
My eyes burned. I blinked hard.
He didn't let go of my hand. His thumb traced a slow circle against my wrist, tracking my heartbeat, and I had the unnerving sensation that he was monitoring me. Reading my body the way he read rooms—cataloging responses, noting patterns, filing away information for later use.
"Good," he said quietly. "That's good."
A pause. The morning light shifted, warming the leather between us, gilding the edges of his profile. I watched a muscle in his jaw work—not tension, exactly, but something deliberate. A decision being made.
"Now." His eyes met mine. Dark, direct, seeing everything. "Tell me—did you touch yourself last night?"
The air left my lungs.
Heat flooded my cheeks so fast it felt like a slap. My hand twitched in his grip, an involuntary jerk toward escape that he absorbed without comment, his fingers tightening just slightly. Just enough to say stay.
How could he know?