Chapter Seven
HE WAS RUINED.
Wrecked.
Jovi had no idea what was happening to him. What had been happening to him ever since Rux had looked up from her book, met his gaze, and held it.
The attraction was bad enough. His body had always been his to command—the only thing that was entirely and only his—until now.
This feeling inside him, this unbearable need, made him feel like someone else, some stranger unbound by the vows that had ordered the whole of his life.
He could not understand how anyone lived through feeling like this, why it didn’t cut them to their knees.
He didn’t understand what his body was doing. It was a wild ride, and on some level, he might have understood it if it was only his cock, but there was all the rest of it, too. That outrageous pain in his chest. The surprising fragility of his own ribs.
Worse still, he felt…hot. Everywhere.
When he’d left her in that room below, he’d climbed the stairs to the living part of this house and had wondered if he was coming down with some kind of fever. If he was actually ill.
Because otherwise, he could not account for this. For any part of this.
His body did not feel like his any longer. It seemed to obey that heat inside him instead, that consuming, outrageous heat that seeped into every part of him, making him edgy. Making him hungry.
He’d tried to shake himself out of whatever spell he was under. He’d tried to remind himself that he was a professional, that this was what he had been raised and trained to do and not some kind of twisted date, and that he had things to accomplish here.
Promises to keep to the man who had allowed him to live.
Promises that were all that differentiated him from an upstart or an enemy, in his family’s eyes.
Jovi could not make sense of the voice in him—some odd, alien voice—that wanted to know why he was allowing this to continue.
Why, when he was by far the most powerful person in Il Serpente if fear alone was the metric, did he continue to bend the knee to those he could end as easily as anyone else he’d been assigned to handle?
These were treacherous thoughts, he’d thought. Dangerous thoughts.
Because Don Antonio had spared Jovi’s life, but he had taken that life and made it his. There was not one thing Jovi had, including the air he breathed, that his uncle had not given to him by virtue of letting him live.
How could he possibly question that? It was the foundation on which the whole of Jovi’s existence stood.
He’d moved around the flat, determined to force himself back to normal by performing the usual tasks he would typically handle at a time like this.
There were always tracks to be covered, competing exit scenarios to be plotted out in case one or another fell through, not to mention the more unsavory details comprising cleanup, disposal, staging if necessary, and all the rest of the things that Jovi had always accepted without the faintest hint of emotion.
Yet tonight—this morning, he corrected himself when he’d realized the sun had already come up outside—none of it sat well with him.
He didn’t sit well with him.
Too many things seemed to be chasing each other around and around inside his head. Scraps of memories he rarely allowed himself to look at and would have denied he still carried inside him.
His mother dancing in the hall of the old villa, back when it was filled with color and life. She’d spun as if she was made of light and laughter and her dress spun out with her, making her look magical.
His father had watched her, a look of sheer delight on his face, before he’d tumbled her down into his arms and kissed her, thoroughly.
Jovi hadn’t thought about that moment nearly forever. He hadn’t allowed himself to remember that they’d been happy.
When he thought about his parents—and he tried his best not to think of them at all, and when he did, only as the traitor and the casualties of the traitor’s betrayal—he thought about the end.
About what their deaths had made his life.
About what his father’s desire for escape or justice or whatever he’d told himself he was doing had truly cost.
What he’d had to do to prove himself to his uncle ever since.
And who he’d become.
He’d found himself standing there in the center of that open living area with the light pouring in, not still at all. Not practicing to be an ice sculpture, the way he normally did, and without effort. But today he’d found himself unable to keep his edginess at bay.
Because all he could think about was Rux.
The taste of her. How was he meant to do his duty when the taste of her haunted him the way it did?
In his head, he heard long-ago laughter. His sisters’ high-pitched voices. He saw himself, just a little boy, walking in the gardens and then looking up—and in the memory, it seemed as if he’d looked up at least seven stories—to take his father’s hand—
He had forgotten that he had been happy, too.
And that suggested that he was not anything like happy now.
She had broken something in him, he’d told himself, roughly.
That was clear. Rux had somehow found a weak spot in him that he would have sworn did not, could not exist. All over the world, people spoke of him in hushed, fearful tones, and for good reason.
Every single one of them would have sworn up and down that there was no way into him.
That there was no weakness and no access.
That Giovanbattista D’Amato was an impermeable block of ice and stone, a nightmare made flesh.
He did not know what to do with the discovery that he was as mortal and fallible as anyone else. What was next? Would he lose his head completely? Would he challenge his uncle? Betray his family?
It was unthinkable. This was all unthinkable.
He had repeated that word again and again until he’d decided that the fury growing within him was just that. Temper. Outrage.
He told himself that was a good thing. He told himself he was relieved.
Jovi had never experienced temper before, but in this case, it was clearly warranted.
And that was why he’d stormed downstairs, determined that he would put an end to this. She might not be afraid of him, but she would be. He would see to it.
But then, instead, he’d seen her.
Her dark gray eyes had found his and something about that had made that sharp, impossible pain in his chest worsen. He’d walked toward her and with every step, he’d realized that what he wanted to call temper was something else.
Something hotter. Something far more molten and dangerous.
And the next thing he knew, he’d brought her upstairs, out of that room that was more properly a cell, and into this flat.
Then he’d really blown it all to shit and pulled her into his arms.
Jovi supposed that somewhere, deep inside, he had the notion that he could treat her like every other woman he’d ever had, summarily discarded, and never thought of again.
Surely he could do the same with Rux.
Even though she made his heart pound, each jarring thump another indication of how ruined he was. Kissing her had changed him—melted him in ways he did not wish to look at more closely—but he was certain he could fix that.
He had to fix it.
So he took her in his arms and got his mouth on her once more. And then everything seemed to burn even brighter.
Especially him.
Because this time, she melted into him without any chains to hold her back. This time, she wrapped her arms around his neck, something Jovi would normally never allow, but it was different when it was Rux.
For many reasons, but most crucially, because the way she held on to him allowed him to kiss her that much more deeply. And he found that there was very little he wouldn’t do for a result like that.
He kissed her and kissed her, and the flames that roared through him nearly took over everything—but he had the presence of mind to remember that they stood near windows. And that he knew better.
With what small part of him remained, he picked her up again and this time she held on and crossed her legs around him so her ankles dug into the small of his back and her thighs gripped him too. And when he made a groaning sort of sound that, she pulled her head back to look at him.
“Jovi—” she began.
“Quiet,” he muttered, and kissed her, but he didn’t let himself linger.
He also didn’t put her down. With one hand, he cupped her spectacular ass as he went to make sure the door was locked and bolted. Then he walked through the main room with all its windows and into the dark cave of the bedroom in the back.
“You really do have a thing against windows, don’t you?” she said as the darkness of the bedroom swallowed them whole.
“I have a thing against snipers,” he replied shortly.
And he supposed it was a reminder of what kind of people they were and what kind of lives they’d both led that all she did was nod.
Jovi didn’t need any lights to know where he was going, or any time for his eyes to adjust. He simply walked forward, waited until his shins found the bed, and toppled them both straight down into the mattress.
He didn’t land with all of his weight on her, but he gave her some of it and felt that melting sensation inside intensify when she made a little sighing sound, a softer echo of the noise he’d made before.
And it was possible—probable—that lying down with her like this was a mistake, he acknowledged, but he didn’t give a shit.
They were on a bed together and she was beneath him and he thought that if he didn’t make her come at least three times, he might explode.
He told himself that there was truth in that, anyway. There was only honesty in a woman’s orgasm and men like his cousins who joked about not letting their women finish, or suspecting that they were faking—
All you’re doing is telling on yourselves, he had told them once, and had only shrugged at the chorus of invective and character assassination. If all you do is disregard a woman’s pleasure, you might as well use your hand.