12. Alessio #2
I lift her off the counter, her legs wrapping around my waist. She pulls at my shirt, fingers frantic.
I slam her back against the wall, the impact making the frames rattle.
I don't care. I open her shirt with shaking hands, slower than the panic wants.
I need to see her. I need to see every inch of her, checking for wounds before I let myself want anything else.
My hands are everywhere—marking her breasts, her ribs, the curve of her stomach.
"Alessio," she moans, her head falling back. "Please."
I stop long enough to see her eyes. “Tell me,” I rasp. “Stop or more?” I drop to my knees, fumbling with the button of her tactical pants. I jerk them down until she’s standing there, exposed and trembling in the dim light.
She’s perfect. She’s the only thing in this world that isn't broken.
I bury my face in her heat. The scent of her arousal hits me like a dropped anvil. She pulls me up her body, her mouth finding mine, and there is no mistaking that she has chosen this too. I lunge forward, my tongue finding her with frantic, rhythmic pressure.
She screams. The sound echoes through the room, a sharp note of surrender. She grips my hair, digging into my scalp as she arches her hips into my face.
"Yes," I growl against her skin. "Give it to me."
I’m relentless. I want to taste the proof that she’s alive and mine. I use my fingers to stretch her, feeling the tight walls of her center clench around me. She’s shaking now, her knees buckling. I stand up, catching her before she can fall, and toss her onto the bed.
I strip in seconds, only looking at her. I’m hard, my pulse throbbing in my cock. I move between her legs, forcing her thighs wide.
"Look at me, Amara."
She opens her eyes. They’re glazed with lust, her pupils blown wide.
“Tell me you want this.”
She doesn't answer with words. She reaches out and grabs me, pulling me toward her.
I reach for the condom on the nightstand—the doctor in me never entirely leaves—and only then do I sink into her.
The first inch is a struggle. She’s so tight, perfectly formed to take me. I groan, eyes closing as the heat consumes me. I push deeper, feeling the way her body yields and then clamps down. I bottom out, buried deep in her slickness.
"Fuck," I hiss.
I stay still for a moment, just breathing. I feel her internal muscles pulsing around me, milking me.
"Alessio," she whimpers, her hands moving to my ass, pulling me closer. "Move. Please, move."
I move.
I start slow, drawing out until I’m almost clear, then slamming back in.
The friction is incredible. Every thrust sends a jolt through my spine.
I’m a force of nature. I pick up the pace, my movements becoming primal.
It isn’t only sex. It is fear leaving my body the only way I know how to survive it.
“Stay with me,” I growl. “Right here. Right now.
“Here,” she gasps. “I’m here.”
The confirmation is my undoing. I lose all control. I’m thrusting so hard the bed slams against the wall. I bite her shoulder, needing to leave a physical reminder of this.
She’s coming. I feel her pussy start to spasm, the walls contracting around me in a desperate grip. She’s crying out my name, her body arching off the bed.
"Come for me," I roar. "Take all of it!"
Her control shatters, and for once she lets me see what it costs her to stay. I’m right behind her. I feel the pressure building, a white-hot tide. I give one final, bone-deep thrust and let go.
I come hard enough to leave me breathless. I come hard, shaking above her, the thin barrier between us the only practical thing I still remember. I groan, my forehead dropping to her shoulder as I empty myself.
I stay there, buried deep, as the world stops spinning. The silence that follows isn't the silence of the vault. It’s the silence of a man who has finally found home.
When I can move again, I gather her closer on the bed—she protests exactly none of it, arms looped around my neck, boneless and warm—on sheets that will smell like her from tonight until the end of the world, if I have any say in it.
"We should sleep," she murmurs.
"We should." I don’t stop kissing my way along her shoulder. The adrenaline is gone. What’s left is worse. Slower. Deeper. A want with no emergency attached to it, which means it’s just the truth.
The second time is quiet, half-wrapped in blankets, her breath going ragged and soft against my jaw, my name a whisper instead of a scream, and it wrecks me more thoroughly than the wall did.
Desperate, a man can excuse. This—the unhurried rock of her hips, her eyes open on mine in the dark, the small smile she gives me right before she comes apart with a sigh—this has no excuse at all.
This is a decision.
Afterward she sprawls across my chest like she conquered it, tracing one of the old scars on my hand without asking about it. Someday she’ll ask. Someday I’ll want to tell her.
"This one," she murmurs, half-asleep, tapping the crescent below my left thumb. Not someday. Tonight. Of course tonight—she has never once waited for a door to be opened.
“Giovanni. He was twelve.” The story comes easier than any story has ever come.
"First winter after the massacre. He put his fist through a window because the grief had nowhere else to go, and he wouldn't let anyone near it—screaming, feral, blood everywhere.
So I sat on the floor across the room and told him I'd teach him to make it stop hurting if he came to me. He came. I stitched him with a sewing kit and shaking hands. Twenty years old. First patient who mattered more than my hands knew how to handle.”
"And the scar?"
“He bit me.” I feel her smile against my chest. “Twelve-year-olds fight dirty.”
“You’ve been holding this family together since you were barely old enough to know how,” she says softly, and it isn't pity—God, anything but that. She's just reading me, line by line, and staying anyway.
"Somebody had to."
"Mm." Her hand flattens over the scar, over my hand, holding it. “Somebody still does. But it’s a two-person job now. Non-negotiable.”
She's asleep before I can answer, which is its own mercy, because I don't trust my voice with what it wanted to say. I pull back just enough to look at her. She’s flushed, her breath coming in short, jagged puffs.
"You're bleeding again," she whispers, her hand moving to my shoulder where the glass nicked me.
I don't feel it. "It doesn't matter."
She wriggles out from under my arm, and before I can drag her back she's returning with the kit from my bathroom—the good one, the one I keep stocked for brothers who bleed on my floors—and she climbs back onto the bed and kneels over me with an expression I know too well because it's usually mine.
"Hold still."
"It's a nick, Amara."
"It's a hole in the man I intend to keep." She wets the gauze and starts cleaning the gash along my shoulder, and her hands—God, her hands. Steady. Unflinching. She doesn't wince at the torn skin, doesn't go pale at the blood the way people do.
She just works, thorough and gentle and a little furious, her braid falling over her shoulder, and something in my chest cracks open so wide I have to look at the ceiling.
I have spent my life being the hands: patching, stitching, holding pressure while everyone else falls apart. Years of taking care of this family, eleven of them inside Vane’s rot, and I can count on one finger the number of people who have ever taken care of me back.
She tapes the dressing down with a precision that would shame half the trauma nurses in Chicago, then presses her lips, feather-light, to the skin just above it.
"There," she says. "Try not to get shot before Thursday. I have plans for you."
"Plans." My voice comes out wrecked.
“The map,” she says after a long moment. “The data… gives us the path. If Vincenzo confirms the relays are dead, we can kill him.”
"I know."
"And the mole?"
Turi. The man who raised me and then betrayed me. “We tell Dominic when the switch is confirmed dead. Tonight, Turi stays locked down,” I say. My voice is hard again.
"Amara?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't ever run from me."
She turns her head, her nose brushing my chest. She looks at the dresser where her clothes are now folded alongside mine.
“I’ve got nowhere I want to go, Alessio. You’ve made that inconveniently clear.”
She says it with a smile, but the truth is there. She’s done running. And I’m done keeping secrets from the only person who matters. I pull the covers over us, cocooning her in my heat. The compound is quiet, the war waiting outside the door.
I press my mouth to her hair and say nothing, because for once she is still here.
She squeezes my hand. It’s enough. I close my eyes, and for once, I don’t dream only of blood.
The animal isn't gone. It’s just waiting. If anyone tries to take her, I know exactly how careful I will have to be. That’s a promise from a man who finally has something to lose. I tighten my grip as she falls asleep, counting her heartbeats. One. Two. Three.
She’s alive. She’s here. She is one more reason this godforsaken house has to survive.