Chapter 16 #2
That breaks whatever last, careful distance he was trying to hold. His hand comes up, catches my wrist where it rests against his neck, and he presses into the touch instead of away from it. The movement is small and devastating.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” he says. “I saw you react and I…” His mouth flattens. “I wanted to see if I still affected you.”
I bark a short, disbelieving laugh. “You really are shameless.”
“Yes,” he says. “Usually only with you.”
The answer should infuriate me, but it makes something in my chest go painfully soft and violent at the same time.
“You pout, you provoke, and you throw little rich-boy tantrums in public because you know exactly what it does to me, and you want me stupid with wanting you.”
His face flushes darker, which tells me I’m right.
“And then you stand there, looking all offended when I decide to remind you where that gets you.”
His eyes go molten for one sharp second—there. That. The reaction is immediate and brutal enough to satisfy something vicious in me.
He tries to glare at me through it, and only manages to look more dangerous, more beautiful, and more like the exact sort of trouble I was built to fall into.
“You are not calling me a brat at my wife’s charity gala,” he says, and the fact that his voice goes a little hoarse only makes me more satisfied.
“I’m not?” I ask. “That’s strange. It sounded exactly like what I just did.”
His lips part as he prepares another smart answer, but I cut it off by tightening my hand enough to make him swallow the first syllable.
“There you are,” I murmur. “Pretty King of the Five Families, all dressed up and still pouting because I caught you misbehaving.”
I know I should stop, but I don’t. The words come easier now that I’ve found the old pattern again. Easier, because I know what they do to him.
“You put on a lovely show out there,” I say, thumb brushing once against the side of his throat.
“Very convincing. Kissing foreheads, draping hands, smiling like some polished husband from a magazine spread. And then the second I react, you come apart enough to try this?” My mouth curves, mean and private.
“You’re spoiled when you want attention. ”
He inhales sharply. “You left me alone,” he says, and there it is beneath all the sharpness, the actual wound. “What the hell did you expect?”
The anger goes out of me in one strange rush, and I loosen my grip slightly.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
That gets his full attention faster than anything else tonight.
His startled eyes lock with mine, and I don’t blame him. Nikolaj Dragovich doesn’t apologize easily. He apologizes even less to the people who matter most because those are the ones who can make the admission hurt.
“I’m sorry, Vincenzo,” I say again, running my thumb over his pulse. “It was never my intention to break your heart for eight years. None of that was by design.”
He stares at me like I’ve switched languages, but I force myself to keep going.
“I needed time because everything they buried came back wrong—too much at once, and not enough in order. I was angry at you, at them, at myself, at the whole fucking world and what it had done with our lives. None of that changes what it costs you.” My jaw tightens because this part is harder.
“I know what I asked of you in my kitchen. I know what obeying me did.”
His eyes shine briefly, and he laughs once under his breath, wrecked and disbelieving all over again. “You really do remember me.”
“Unfortunately,” I say with a scoff.
That earns me the ghost of a smile. A miserable one. Better than nothing. I look at him properly again—at the hurt still in his face, at the stubborn pride holding him upright under it, at the way he’s still letting me hold his throat—and the emotion rising in me bypasses language entirely.
I lean in until my mouth is just above his ear and say, “Your heart has always been treacherous, and it still beats in the wrong direction—mine. It belongs to me, and you know it. Don’t test me with another body just because you want proof I’d still tear through a crowd to get to you.”
I drop my hand from his throat, and sink to one knee, head bowed. The position is a surrender and a vow in one—something no ruler in this bloody underworld gives lightly.
The floor is hard beneath me. My tuxedo trousers will be ruined at that knee, but I don’t care. Vincenzo stares down at me as if the world has tipped sideways, all sarcasm stripped out of him at last.
I brace my hands lightly at his hips, not pushing or taking more than I’m given. Trembling fingers thread into my hair, tilting my face up again. His eyes shine too bright for the dim room.
“Get up,” he says, the order brittle. “Kings don’t kneel.”
“I kneel for mine,” I answer, staying exactly where I am. “My King. Let me make up for some of what I took from you.”
His breath catches hard enough to be audible.
My pulse roars in my ears, but I keep my grip gentle, thumbs circling the silk at Vincenzo’s hips. He’s marble-still, chin lifted like a man expecting a sword, not a mercy.
A tremor ghosts through his thighs when I mouth the crease of his trousers—only pressure, no demand—so I wait, breath warm against fabric, until he gives me permission the way he always does: with silence and that faint, involuntary tilt forward that says, ‘Take what you already own.’
“Tell me to stop, and I’ll stand. Tell me to stay, and I’ll worship.”
A shudder racks through him, and I watch the war play out in his eyes: pride, rage, and wrecked devotion that never learned how to die.
“Stay,” he says so softly I almost miss it. But the command is in the grip he takes at the back of my head, the way he tilts my face up so he can see everything breaking open in me.
I mouth him through the trousers, and his head falls back against the wall with a dull thud.
“Nikolaj—” The word is a ragged exhale.
I drag the zipper down carefully. He’s already hard, dark silk briefs damp where the head presses. I nose along the shape of him, breathing in the salt and smoke that’s uniquely Vincenzo, and the whole time he keeps that fist in my hair, not pushing, not guiding—just anchoring.
When I free his cock, the sound he makes tears straight through me. I lick the dark trail of hair leading to the base of his cock and nuzzle there. He keeps himself trimmed neat—short coarse hair that tells me he still obsesses over appearances even when his world is on fire.
The neatness highlights everything masculine about him: the heavy weight of his balls, the thick vein that ridges the underside of his cock, the foreskin that still covers the head in a soft flush of deeper color.
I’ve always loved that detail, that he’s uncut, that I can tease the sensate edge just by tugging the loose skin down with my lips and letting the dark pink crown erupt slick and wet against my tongue.
I do exactly that now; easing back the shy hood until the gleam of precum smears across my lower lip. His fingers tighten in my hair hard enough to sting and there’s no polite restraint in it; he’s staking claim even while I’m on my knees claiming him.
He groans my name again, and the sound vibrates along my spine, fueling a vicious pride.
I wrap one hand around the base—no games, no teasing—and look up again. His gaze is feral, pupils blown wide, lashes wet. A king drowning on dry land.
“You shouldn’t be on your knees,” he rasps.
I stroke him once and watch his lip curl as if the pleasure hurts. “No other place exists right now.”
He swallows hard. “Don’t—don’t make promises you’ll leave me to keep.”
“I’m giving penance, not promises,” I breathe, and then I seal my mouth over the head.
He curses in Italian, low and vicious, hips lurching before he slams them back to the door. I hollow my cheeks, take him deeper, let my tongue flatten along the underside where I know the ridge is hypersensitive.
“Look at me,” he orders, voice shredded.
I look up through my lashes while I continue to swallow him down inch by inch. His jaw drops, a soft, broken sound escaping as the head bumps the back of my throat.
He’s shaking—powerless and furious about it but yielding all the same. The sight claws pleasure through my own spine so sharp I have to breathe through it.
The scent of him—raw male musk—is dizzying; I could come untouched from the taste of him alone. I pull off with a gasp, lip slick, fist the base, jack him twice just to see the veins bulge.
“Fuck, Nikolaj—” The way he says my name, like a man dying of thirst, burns straight through me. “You still—God—”
I take him down again, finding a rhythm he loves: deep, slow pulls matched with firm strokes at the base. Every time I swallow around him, I feel him jerk, feel his control fray another thread.
He’s close; I know the signs. His fingers turn bruising in my hair, the tremor in his abs, the way his knees lock, how his hand shifts from my hair to my jaw as if he needs the feel of me working him.
I hum around him—approval, devotion, ruin. The vibration punches a growl out of his chest.
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to—”
His warning slashes off into a raw, choking moan. He’s past choosing now; his body decides. He breaks with a guttural cry that dies against the back of his fist.
The hot spill of him hits my tongue, and I take every desperate pulse he gives me as penance paid in full. I swallow everything, keep him deep until the spasms ease, only easing off once he twitches from oversensitivity.
When I finally let him slip free, I rest my forehead against his hip, breathing roughly against sweat-damp skin. His hand strokes my hair once—tentative, shaking—then he sinks to a crouch and meets me at eye level. He cups my face, thumbs brushing spit from my swollen lips.
“Still my ruin,” he whispers, then he kisses me and I taste the eight years bleeding out between our teeth. His hands frame my face as if I might break, and he regrets every second we lost. When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine, breath mingling.
We rise together, and I smooth his trousers, fasten the clasp, and straighten his cuff links. He watches, dazed, pupils blown wide and dark. When I finally meet his eyes, the heartbreak there is quieter, but it’s still fierce enough to level continents.
I lean in, brush my mouth once against the corner of his, tasting the faintest echo of what I just stole back, then reach into the inside pocket of my jacket. A white-and-gold keycard glints between my fingers.
“Suite 2103,” I murmur, sliding the card into his tuxedo pocket, my knuckles grazing his heart. “Hotel Aurelia, two blocks east. The elevator requires the card after midnight—the room doesn’t.”
His breath hitches again.
I flatten my palm against the pocket, sealing the invitation in place. “Come if you want to finish what neither of us ever stopped starting.”
I step back before I can second-guess the offer—or beg him to accept it.
My knees ache, my throat burns, and every inch of me wants to stay. But I force myself to turn, collect the wreckage of my dignity, and head for the service door at the far end of the corridor.
Just before I slip out, I glance over my shoulder. Vincenzo hasn’t moved, not even to fix the bow at his throat. One hand covers the pocket where the keycard rests. His eyes are on me, unreadable, unfathomable… and still, after all these years, catastrophically mine.
The latch clicks shut behind me, and the echo of it rings like a loaded promise down the empty hall.