Chapter 12
Siobhan
Spark
* * *
My phone rings at nine in the morning while I'm rebuilding a risk matrix for a healthcare startup whose board still thinks ransomware is "an IT issue." Finn's name on the screen. I pick up without pausing my typing.
"Your husband's people visited that Romano kid who was chatting you up at dinner last night."
My fingers stop on the keyboard. "What?"
"Marco. The one with the jaw and the expensive watch." Finn's voice is light. Conversational. The way it gets when he's delivering information he knows will detonate. "He's walking. Mostly. But he'll think twice about touching a married woman's elbow again."
"Mostly?"
"Lex was persuasive."
I close my laptop. The healthcare startup and its ransomware vulnerability and its incompetent board can wait. "How do you know this?"
"Declan heard from a Romano. The Romanos heard from Marco's bruised ribs. News travels. Just thought you should know, sis."
He hangs up. Finn always hangs up before you can argue.
I sit at the kitchen island for thirty seconds.
Coffee cooling. Laptop closed. The anger building in my chest isn't about Marco — I don't care about Marco.
I barely registered Marco. The anger is about a decision made without me, about me, regarding a threat I could have handled myself with a sharp look and a turned shoulder.
The anger is familiar. It has a shape I recognize from every year of my life before this one: men deciding what happens to Siobhan O'Brien's body and the bodies near it without asking Siobhan O'Brien what she thinks.
I stand up. I know exactly where to go.
* * *
His office door is closed. I don't knock.
The room hasn't changed since the first time I sat in it — the lighting that favors him, the power position behind the desk, every detail calculated to intimidate.
Except I've sat in this chair before. I've negotiated in this room.
And the man behind the desk isn't a stranger anymore — he's the man whose knuckles traced my spine last night, whose mouth hovered over my shoulder, who said "you're welcome" in a voice like gravel and wanting.
He looks up when I walk in. Reads my face in under a second. His expression doesn't change, but his body shifts in a micro-adjustment, weight forward, the way he repositions when a situation requires management. He knows why I'm here.
He's in shirtsleeves. Rolled to the forearms, the way he wears them when he's been working, reviewing ledgers, signing orders, doing whatever it is a man does when he runs an empire before breakfast. The informality should soften him.
It doesn't. It makes him more dangerous because I can see the corded muscle of his forearms and the way his watch sits against his wrist and I'm furious with him and I'm noticing his forearms and that makes me more furious.
"Sit down, Siobhan."
"I'll stand."
Something crosses his face. Not annoyance, but recognition. He knows what standing means in this room. It means I'm not here to negotiate. I'm here to fight.
"You had him beaten?"
"Warned. There's a difference."
"Over a conversation?"
"He was touching what's mine."
The word detonates in the space between us. Mine. Four letters. The room changes temperature.
"I'm not yours. This is an arrangement."
He stands. Moves around the desk toward me. Slow. Deliberate. The way he always moves when he wants someone to understand the scale of what they're dealing with, except I'm not someone. I'm his wife. And I'm not afraid of him. I'm furious with him.
"You're wearing my ring."
"A ring I agreed to."
"You live in my home."
"A home I chose."
"You bear my name. You are mine."
"I agreed to a marriage, not ownership."
"In my world, they're the same thing."
"Then your world is fucked."
"Yes. It is. And you're in it now."
We're two feet apart. I can see his pulse in his throat, hammering. The gold in his eyes has gone dark — not cold, not calculated, something else entirely. His chest rises and falls harder than it should for a man standing still.
He reaches for my wrist. Not hard, not rough, just firm. I go still. Look at his hand on my skin. Then at his face. I could pull free. He'd let me. I know that with absolute certainty — if I pulled, he'd release me, and the argument would continue on different ground.
I don't pull free.
He places my hand flat on his chest. His heart is hammering fast, hard, and undeniable.
"Whatever this is between us, you feel it too."
It's not a command. It's not a performance of dominance. It's an admission. This man who controls everything is standing in front of me with my hand on his racing heart telling me he can't control this.
He kisses me.
Not like the wedding — that kiss was a question, gentle, giving me room to retreat.
This kiss has no room in it. This is weeks of wanting, of hallways and zippers and 3am kitchens and the almost that never quite became a yes.
His mouth covers mine and the anger in my chest converts to heat so fast I lose my breath.
I kiss him back. Fist his shirt. Pull him closer. His hands — God, his hands. My waist. My back. Gripping my ass through the dress and pressing me against him and the sound I make into his mouth is involuntary and undignified and I don't care.
He lifts me onto the desk. Papers scatter. A glass tips and neither of us flinches at the sound of it hitting the floor. He steps between my legs and I wrap them around him and I can feel him — hard against me, straining, the evidence of what this is doing to him pressed exactly where I need it.
"Nico —"
"Tell me to stop."
"Don't you dare."
His mouth finds my neck. My head falls back. His teeth graze the spot below my ear and my hips rock forward against him without permission from my brain. His hands slide up my thighs, pushing the dress, and I'm reaching for his belt —
A knock on the door.
Lex's voice, flat and professional. "We have a problem."
Nico freezes. Forehead against mine. Eyes closed. Both of us breathing hard enough to hear it, tangled on his desk with scattered papers and a broken glass and the taste of each other on our lips.
"This isn't over," he says.
"No," I say. "It isn't."
He pulls back. Straightens his shirt. His eyes are still dark, still burning, but the boss is reassembling over the man like armor clicking into place.
I slide off the desk. Smooth my dress. Walk past Lex in the doorway with my face flushed and my lips swollen and my thighs still feeling the ghost of his hands.
Lex's expression doesn't change. Professional. But his eyes flick to the desk — the scattered papers, the broken glass — then back to me. He knows. Of course he knows. Lex knows everything.
I make it to the bathroom down the hall before I stop walking.
Lock the door. Press my palms flat on the marble counter and stare at myself in the mirror.
My reflection is a mess: flushed cheeks, swollen mouth, hair where his hands were.
I look like a woman who was just kissed within an inch of her life on a desk in a crime boss's office.
I am that woman. And the terrifying part isn't that it happened — it's that if Lex hadn't knocked, I wouldn't have stopped it.
I would have let him push the dress further.
I would have reached for his belt. I would have let him take me right there on the mahogany with the door unlocked and the empire five feet away and I wouldn't have cared.
I splash water on my face. Straighten my hair. Put myself back together the way I've been putting myself together since I was sixteen — efficiently, ruthlessly, piece by piece. By the time I walk out, I look like a woman who had a heated argument with her husband.
Only my pulse knows the truth.
* * *
My room. Door locked. Back against the wood.
I can still feel him. His mouth on my neck. His hands gripping my thighs. The hard press of him between my legs and the sound he made when I rocked against him — low, rough, a sound that came from a place he doesn't show anyone.
I'm shaking. Not from the argument. Not from the interruption. From the wanting that didn't resolve, that has nowhere to go, that is filling every cell of my body with the specific torture of almost having what you need.
I close my eyes. Press my head back against the door.
My hand slides down my stomach. I know what I'm doing.
I'm choosing this, not because I can't help it but because I want to.
Because the memory of his hands is still on my skin and I need to follow it to its conclusion even if he's not here to take me there.
I think about his heart hammering under my palm. I think about the way he said "mine" — not like a claim but like a confession, like the word was dragged out of him against his will. I think about his mouth on my neck and his hands pushing up my dress and the hard length of him pressed against me.
My fingers find the ache. My breath catches.
I think about Nico. Only Nico.
His hands on the desk, pulling me forward.
The way his voice dropped when he said "Tell me to stop" — not a dare, not a game, a genuine offering of control that made me want to give it right back to him.
The weight of him between my legs. The way he held my wrist — firm enough that I felt it, gentle enough that I chose to stay.
That's the thing about Nico Konstantinos.
He holds you just tight enough that the staying is always your decision.
My fingers move faster. My breath catches, breaks, catches again.
And when I come, his name is caught in my throat — silent, bitten back, mine.
It doesn't help. It makes it worse. Because now I know exactly what I want and I'm alone in a room thirty feet from the man who could give it to me, and the door between us is the only thing keeping me from walking down that hallway and taking what we both know is inevitable.
I look at the door that connects our rooms. My hand moves toward the handle.
I stop.
Not tonight. But soon. God help me…soon.