Our Pain Our Pleasure (Last to Fall #3)

Chapter 1

The autumn air bites through my suit jacket as I step onto Mama Bavga's front terrace, the heavy oak door closing behind me on the controlled chaos of Sunday dinner cleanup.

Congratulations, October. You're basically the mob boss of seasons—showing up uninvited, making everyone uncomfortable, leaving a trail of dead things in your wake. Very on-brand.

I stop mid-step—halfway down the stone stairs leading to the driveway.

What the fuck was that?

I replay the thought, dissecting it like evidence at a crime scene. The rhythm. The absurd comparison. The self-aware humor wrapped in cynicism.

I just… created an Emmaleen-ism.

All by myself.

A laugh erupts from me as I continue descending the terrace stairs and start walking towards the Aventador.

Somewhere in the past weeks—between the contracts, and the positions, and the poems she writes in perfect terza rima while I fuck her senseless—Emmaleen Rourke has infected my internal monologue.

Her chaos has leaked into my carefully ordered mind like water.

The corner of my mouth twitches. An expression I don't recognize on my own face. Something dangerously close to amusement.

Oh, she would love this. October as a mob boss. She'd spiral it into a fifteen-minute monologue about seasonal intimidation tactics and pumpkin spice as a protection racket.

The thought of her voice—breathless, rambling, somehow both anxious and confident—settles somewhere behind my ribs.

A place located suspiciously close to my heart.

The front door opens on the terrace above me, leaking sounds from inside, then Jino is skipping down the stairs. He passes me, clicking his key fob to make his car chirp. "Gotta swing by my place," he calls over his shoulder. "Need to grab clothes, some gear for tomorrow's session."

"All right. How long?"

"Twenty minutes, probably. I'll meet ya at home."

Home. He's looking at me when this word comes out. The word lands between us like a loaded weapon.

Jino shrugs up one shoulder—a gesture that splits the difference between acknowledgment and dismissal. Half apology for the slip, half defiance that he doesn't particularly regret it.

The movement is casual enough to dismiss, deliberate enough to notice.

I don't correct him. Don't point out that my mansion isn't "home" in any traditional sense of the word. It's just the current operational base, temporary like everything else in this business.

But I also don't miss the implication threaded through his choice of words.

That Emmaleen has become his gravitational center.

That her space—and by extension, my space—has expanded to include him in its orbit.

We bump knuckles—brief, efficient contact that says everything required without wasting words. Then he slides into his black Challenger.

I turn toward the Aventador.

The matte black body gleams under the estate's exterior lights. The scissor door lifts and when I lower myself into the driver's seat, the cockpit wraps around me like a second skin.

When I press the start button, the engine doesn't roar. It detonates—a sound engineered to remind everyone within earshot that power isn't always subtle.

I Follow Jino down the driveway, then we diverge, turning in opposite directions and Sewickley Heights stretches out before me like a carefully curated museum of old money.

The streets are silent, lined with estates hidden behind stone walls and ancient trees. No pedestrians. No traffic. Just empty pavement and the occasional glow of security lights marking properties owned by families who've been here long enough to forget when they first arrived.

The neighborhood fades behind me as I accelerate toward the highway—four lanes of dark asphalt cutting through the Pennsylvania hills towards Riverview.

My estate isn't Sewickley Heights. It never will be. I don't have Mellon money, but my Victorian-era Gothic monolith of dark brick stone sits on five acres of small-town wooded privacy, restored to a level of craftsmanship most of these inherited fortunes wouldn't appreciate.

The estate in Riverview started as a bribe from my father.

A carefully calculated gesture designed to soften the blow of exile.

Being sent to Riverview felt like banishment at the time, assigned to manage sleepy operations in a dying coal town while my brothers remained in Pittsburgh, close to the real power and real decisions that shaped the family's future.

Salvatore has always been generous with gifts, but his gifts have never been about affection. They are guilt wrapped in expensive paper, apologies he'll never actually speak aloud, and compensation for the emotional distance he maintains with surgical precision.

But now that Emmaleen is there—and Jino, I have to admit, whose presence has proven more valuable than I initially anticipated—the place doesn't feel like a bribe anymore.

Especially now that Dom and Ricky have stopped treating my dungeon like their personal sex club and moved into their own places.

No more stumbling over their weekly rotation of Pittsburgh girls.

No more finding discarded lingerie in my kitchen or hearing headboards slamming against walls at three in the morning.

So… Jino's characterization was right.

It's home.

As the highway stretches ahead, dark and mostly deserted this time of night, my mind lands where it's been landing for weeks.

Emmaleen.

Waiting for me in the dungeon.

Kneeling in Position One. Naked, thighs pressed together, hands resting on her knees, eyes down. Or maybe she's already in bed, anticipating I'll want her rested and ready instead of postured and formal.

Either way, she's wet.

She's always wet.

Jino's training has rewired her nervous system into something extraordinary.

A woman who responds to discipline the way most people respond to affection. She craves structure now. Needs it. Her body has learned to translate punishment into pleasure, and watching that transformation has been the most satisfying acquisition of my entire life.

The monster inside me—the one that rattled its cage for years, hungry and unsatisfied by the parade of women who never quite understood what I needed—has finally found its match.

Emmaleen doesn't just tolerate my darkness.

She feeds it.

It terrifies me.

I shift gears. The engine sound climbs, then settles into a purr as I ease back on the throttle.

I've successfully trained a woman to orgasm on command, write poetry while restrained, and kneel in perfect submission after being fucked by two different men in the same afternoon.

I'm basically running a very exclusive graduate program in sexual Stockholm syndrome. The tuition is her submission, and the diploma is… what, exactly?

Christ. The woman has colonized my brain like some kind of literary parasite, and the truly disturbing part is that I don't hate it.

I should hate it.

I should be concerned that my carefully constructed internal monologue—honed over decades of survival, sharpened by necessity into something cold and clinical—now occasionally sounds like a nervous English major having a panic attack in a coffee shop.

But instead, I find myself… smiling.

The expression feels foreign. Dangerous. Like a tell I can't afford to show.

Because here's the thing about Emmaleen's complete submission…

It's not complete.

Not really.

She kneels when commanded. Spreads her legs on cue. Recites her demerits with perfect recall and accepts punishment with a gratitude that makes my cock hard just thinking about it.

But underneath all that trained compliance, there's still her.

The word collector. The poet. The woman who writes seventy-three-page love letters in terza rima and looks directly into security cameras with defiance burning in her pale green eyes.

Jino thinks he's breaking her down and rebuilding her into something better.

I know the truth.

She's letting us reshape the surface while keeping her core intact.

And that—more than her obedience, more than her body, more than every orgasm I've wrung from her trembling form—is what I can't stop thinking about.

How, through it all, she thrives.

Of course, this is my plan. The absolute last thing I want is to dismantle Emmaleen Rourke.

That would be a travesty on par with mortal sin. Which is ironic in, and of itself, since we're talking about sexual debauchery here and that's definitely sitting in the top five of sins that can be mortal.

But we're careful. I am, at least. And I'm many levels down the ladder of careful compared to Jino.

He trains her during the day—drills her posture, evaluates her performance, tests her limits with precision that borders on clinical. And he keeps meticulous records of this training. He tracks her progress like she's his dissertation on dominance.

He's molding her into something flawless. Forcing her beyond her limits just enough to ensure she fails so that each night, I can punish her.

Though calling it "punishment" feels almost dishonest at this point.

Because Emmaleen doesn't endure my discipline. She craves it. She comes over and over when I administer what should be consequences—writhing against restraints, moaning like I'm giving her exactly what she needs instead of what she deserves, her body shaking with orgasms that leave her incoherent.

And recently… she's started squirting.

The first time it happened, I thought I'd discovered religion.

Watching her unravel, her body betraying her so completely that she soaked the punishment bench, my hand, the floor—my God.

I stood there in the aftermath, my palm still pressed against her trembling thigh, and knew with absolute certainty that I was fucked.

This woman is perfect.

Not in spite of her brokenness, but because of how beautifully she's learning to weaponize it.

My cock hardens at the memory of the last time I bent her over the punishment bench.

Spreader bar locking her ankles wide, forcing her legs apart until her pussy was completely exposed—slick and swollen, practically begging to be filled. Her ass elevated at the perfect angle, the curve of her spine arching down to where her hips pressed against the leather pad.