Epilogue #2
“On your stomach,” he says, rough, and I know what that means. He wants my back. He wants my throat bared and my hands out of reach.
I turn, skin burning with friction from the sheets, and hear the wet, animal sound of his belt unfastening before I feel the bite of leather wrapping my wrists.
I don’t fight. Not really. Not in the way that matters.
I tense, testing the restraint, feeling the pulse of blood under it, the tremor of anticipation.
My face is mashed to the mattress, breath coming quick and bright between gasps, but my body is already pushing helplessly back, eager, open, empty in the way that makes me both hate and worship him.
His palm slides down my spine, slow and firm, as if resetting each vertebra, reconstructing me from the outside in. When he enters me, it’s brutal by design. One hard, claiming thrust splitting me so suddenly, I fumble for air, mind blanking to a single, shameless need.
He teases my entrance, the tip of his cock circling, then thrusting, then withdrawing just enough to make me sob into the sheets.
I try not to beg, but I do, anyway—no words, just need.
He shoves deeper, punishingly deep, and I can feel the length of him rearrange everything inside me that has built up over years of control, composure, all the things I built to survive.
He undoes me with rhythm and violence and undiluted intent, fucking me hard, fast, holding my hips in place like anchors on a shipwreck.
The belt bites, a small and perfect pain.
I press my forehead to the mattress and let myself dissolve around him, let the world outside the room vanish, let the only thing that matters be this.
Skin, muscle, sweat, the press and drag, the collision of bodies built to destroy and forgive each other in the same hungry breath.
He says my name. Not as a question. As a fact, and I come apart, soundlessly at first, then choking out his name like a threat, like a prophecy, like the answer to every question I never got to ask.
He doesn’t let up. He chases me through the aftershocks, through the raw spasms that crack along my spine and wipe my mind blank.
I claw at the bedsheet, eyes streaming for reasons I’ll make up later, and he grips my hip harder, dragging me back onto him as if the whole world is measured in the depth of this collision.
His breath turns ragged, matching the slap of skin and the wet noises that fill the room.
One hand snakes into my hair, anchoring me to the moment, and the other works at the wrist restraint, loosening it incrementally, as if the knowledge that I can fight is more important than the reality that I won’t take it.
I want him to have it. All of it. I want him to come inside me with the same violence that broke me from my old life. The same violence that made me his, made me a mother, made me someone new and ferocious and alive.
I sob again, wordless, crushing the pillow with both hands as he shoves inside so deep, my vision whites out.
He finishes with a shudder, his whole body locking against mine. For a moment, the only sound in the room is our breathing, a low and brutal tide. Then he lets go, sliding out with a wet heat and leaving the burn of emptiness, of after, of nothing that matters but right now.
He collapses beside me, not touching me at first. I roll onto my back, wrists bright with the belt’s familiar kiss, hair tangled and face hot. My lungs rattle. My core aches, hollowed out and filled up at once.
“Better,” I rasp, my voice half wrecked, half victorious.
He studies me with the quiet of a man who is not sure if he should apologize or be proud. I don’t say anything. Not at first. He always wants words, but I don’t have any at the moment.
That I let him strip them out of me, bruise after bruise, until we’re left with something that’s not owed an explanation.
He gathers my hair at the base of my skull, twisting it into a makeshift rope, and drapes it over my shoulder. Wipes my face with his thumb in a gesture so clumsy and so deliberate, it could only be love or the closest variant our family has permission to use.
He kisses my mouth. Warm, then rough, then soft again. Always like he’s remembering something, or saving it for later.
I bite at his lip just enough to draw a sound from him, a low growl that vibrates through my jaw and down my neck to every part of me that remembers the girl I was before I knew what it was to want someone like this.
I push his hand away. Not because I want distance, but because I need to own the next moment. I roll on top of him, straddling his hips, my thighs bracketing the dangerous territory of our truce. He keeps his arms at his sides in an old, unspoken dare, waiting to see if I’ll take advantage.
I do. I always do.
My hair falls around his face, a blackout curtain for the rest of the world. His mouth is swollen, a line of bruises blooming up his shoulder where my teeth remembered old debts.
“Your turn,” I say, threading my fingers through his, pinning his wrists to the mattress just to prove I can.
Alessandro grins, all wolf this time. “You’re insatiable.”
I settle myself against him, grinning down, daring him to resist because I know he won’t. His cock is hard again, already hungry for round two. I drag myself along the length of it, teasing us both, watching the muscles flex in his arms as he pretends not to strain against my grip.
He thinks he’s letting me win. The joke is that he never stood a chance.
I line him up and push down, slow, savoring the stretch, the echo of the last time still electric and alive inside me. I arch my back and ride, rolling my hips, digging my nails into his forearms to warn him not to move, not to take back control before I’m ready to give it up.
His jaw clenches. His eyes darken, becoming molten. I keep going, all grind and friction, until I can feel what he wants, what I want, building. A chemical burn radiating outward, melting everything except the slick, perfect pressure of him inside me.
Our bodies heat and tangle, a new war in miniature, a treaty backdated and signed by sweat and sound and the press of my thighs pinning his sides. I fuck him like I’m erasing every debt, like the only history that survives is the history I choose to write with my body, my voice, my rules.
He begs. I make him. He doesn’t use words—I don’t let him have them—but his eyes are wild, unshuttered. And when he tries to thrust up into me, I squeeze down and don’t let him.
I come again first, sharp, animal, biting at his skin until I draw blood.
It’s never enough. He gives in only when he has to, and I feel the moment he loses, his whole body shuddering as he empties into me, head thrown back against the pillow, throat bared.
I ride out every last tremor. I want to fall apart.
I want to dissolve and stain the sheets and ruin us both.
Instead, I let the world return piece by piece.
My forehead collapses into his chest, breathing him in like a benediction.
We stay that way for a long moment, wrists tangled, sweat drying on skin, the noise of the house returning like surf at high tide. Lucia’s shrieks filter up the stairs, joined by Sofia’s laughter and the deeper, untranslatable pulse of family. Home.
Alessandro strokes my back, slow, lazy, like he’s not sure whether he’s petting a cat or defusing a bomb. It’s both—always both. I bite his shoulder once more, hard enough that he hisses, but he just cups the back of my head and pushes my face into the hollow of his neck.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he murmurs.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” I reply. “I’m going to be the life of you. Even if there are eight exits. Because still, I stay.”