Chapter 9 Sienna #3
Dominic groans loudly, a deep, primal sound of triumph.
Feeling my body clench around him is all it takes.
He drives into me three more times, fast and brutal, before burying himself as deep as physically possible.
His entire massive body locks up, his muscles turning to stone as he unloads inside me.
Hot, thick pulses of his seed flood my pussy, filling me to the brim with his heat.
It is a claiming that sears through my body, leaving me occupied by his weight and marked by his seed.
He collapses against me, his heavy chest pressing the breath out of my lungs, but I don't care.
I wrap my arms around his broad, sweat-slicked shoulders, holding him as he rides out the violent aftermath of his climax.
His breathing is ragged, tearing through his throat in harsh, uneven gasps.
He buries his face in my hair, his lips pressing blindly against my temple.
He stays there—buried deep, unmoving, his weight a living anchor.
When he finally withdraws, it is slow and deliberate, a wet slide that leaves me feeling hollow in a way I am not ready to examine.
He immediately pulls me flush against his chest, one arm banding across my shoulders, his hand pressing warm and possessive against the back of my neck.
We lie there for a long time, tangled in the ruins of the silk sheets. Eventually, the adrenaline begins to ebb, replaced by a deep, profound exhaustion. Dominic pulls the duvet up, covering my bare shoulders, his hands performing the motion with a practiced, obsessive care.
He doesn't speak for a while. The man who just confessed to caging his own sister and refusing to hold his niece is the same man who is now carefully tucking the blankets around my shivering body.
He is a paradox of violence and absolute devotion, and I have chosen to anchor myself to the center of his storm.
Then Dominic reaches over to the heavy mahogany nightstand. He opens the top drawer and pulls out a small, sleek burner phone. It isn't his encrypted compound device; it's completely unmarked.
He lies back down, keeping me pulled flush against his side. He stares at the blank screen for a long, heavy moment. The silence in the room shifts, dense with a confession I can feel gathering in his chest. I watch the muscle in his jaw flex as he taps the screen, unlocking it.
There is only one number programmed into the device.
He presses the call button.
I hold my breath, watching his face as he brings the phone to his ear. His eyes are dark, completely unreadable, but the sheer tension radiating from his body is deafening.
The line rings once. Twice.
A click. And then a voice—a woman's voice, low and guarded and unmistakably Costa in its cadence.
"Dom."
One syllable. His name, spoken by the sister he just confessed to destroying.
The effect on Dominic is seismic. His entire body locks, every muscle in his massive frame going rigid against me.
His throat works visibly, the tendons straining as he swallows whatever wall has been sitting behind his teeth for a year.
"Lucia." His voice is a gravel-heavy rasp, stripped of every weapon he usually wields. He sounds exactly like what he is: a man calling the person he hurt most in the world.
A beat of silence on the line. Then: "Are you eating?"
Despite everything—despite the blood, the fire, the confession still hanging in the air of this room—a sound escapes Dominic's throat that might, in another man, be called a laugh. It is brief, rough, and entirely devoid of humor. But it is real.
"I'm eating," he says.
"You're lying. You forget I lived in that compound for twenty-three years. You don't eat when you're at war. You drink espresso and pace." Another pause. "How bad is it?"
"We took the South Side docks on Tuesday. Fabio hit the Ashland warehouse line." He stops. The next words come harder. "He lost two men."
Silence. When Lucia speaks again, the guarded edge has softened into something raw. "Vittorio and Sal?"
"Yes."
"God, Dom." A long exhale. "Their families—"
"I'll take care of it."
"I know you will." The words are quiet, loaded with a complicated understanding that stretches across twenty years of shared blood and separate prisons. She knows her brother. She knows his version of love is a check delivered to a widow's door at midnight.
Dominic's arm tightens around me. I feel the shift in his body—the bracing, the gathering of nerve. His jaw works for several seconds before he speaks again.
"There's a woman in the brownstone."
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear the faint hum of the phone's connection.
"Say that again," Lucia says.
"A woman. A florist." His voice is clipped, the words dragged out of him by force. "She delivered flowers to L'Ombra and witnessed an interrogation. I couldn't let her leave."
"You couldn't let her leave," Lucia repeats, and there is something in her voice—not accusation, not anger, but a stunned, almost disbelieving recognition.
She knows the Costa men. She lives with three of them.
She knows exactly what "couldn't let her leave" means in the language of men who process love through absolute control.
"Her name is Sienna," Dominic says, and his hand finds my hip beneath the duvet, his fingers pressing into my skin as if anchoring himself to my presence while he speaks my name to the one person whose judgment he fears most. "Sienna Marchetti.
She had a flower shop on the North Side.
Petal and Stem. Her grandmother built it. "
"Had?"
"The Bellantis burned it to the foundation.
" His voice goes flat, the way it does when the rage is too big for tone.
"They've had surveillance on L'Ombra for weeks.
They identified her van, pulled her name from city records before Vincenzo could finish scrubbing them.
They took her shop to send me a message. "
Another long silence. I imagine Lucia on the other end—dark-eyed, dark-curled, the woman who taught herself encryption in isolation and stole her brother's master ledger to buy her freedom.
I imagine her processing the image of her brother, the man who caged her for twenty-three years, confessing that he has caged another woman and is terrified of losing her.
I imagine the three men who orbit her life—Nick, Rafe, and Jude—the ones who pulled her out of her brother's compound and into a world where she finally chose her own walls.
"What did you do?" Lucia asks, and the question holds no judgment. It is the quiet, resigned inquiry of a woman who already knows the answer.
"I sent Fabio and Santi to burn their distribution hub. Tens of millions of dollars of Bellanti infrastructure. It will accelerate the war by months."
"For a florist."
"For her," Dominic corrects, and the raw, possessive heat in his voice makes Lucia go quiet again.
When she finally speaks, her voice has changed. The guardedness is gone. In its place is something tender and ancient—the particular ache of a sister who understands that the brother who destroyed her life to keep her alive has finally found something he is terrified of losing.
"You never do anything small, do you, fratello."
It isn't a question.
Dominic closes his eyes. The word fratello hits him like a physical blow. His fingers tighten on my hip, and I press closer against his side, giving him my warmth, my weight, my presence.
"How are the girls?" he asks, and the roughness in his voice takes on a different texture—a grinding, reluctant tenderness, as if the question costs him something.
"Tyra just turned five. She's reading already—actual sentences, not just picture books. She has your stubbornness." A pause. "Sera is three months old. She has Jude's eyes and screams like a Costa."
Dominic's chest moves beneath my cheek, a deep, unsteady breath. He doesn't say anything for a long beat. He is sitting with the name of the niece he refused to hold, the child in tiny shoes, now five years old and reading sentences with his stubbornness in her spine.
"Good," he says finally, and the single word carries every apology he doesn't know how to speak.
"Dom." Lucia's voice is careful now, deliberate. "This woman. Sienna. Does she know?"
"I just told her. Everything. The marriage. Calix. Tyra." He pauses. "She's still here."
The silence on the line stretches. When Lucia speaks, her voice is thick.
"Then she's stronger than either of us."
The call goes quiet again. Not an awkward silence—a Costa silence. The kind that says everything in the spaces between words. Two people sharing the same blood and the same silence, breathing across a thousand miles.
"Keep breathing, Dom," Lucia says softly.
"You too, sorellina."
He hangs up.
The silence in the bedroom is deafening.
Dominic sets the burner phone on the nightstand and lies back, pulling me tighter against his side.
His arm wraps around my shoulders, crushing me against his chest. I feel the violent, rapid thud of his heart beneath my palm, the last tremors of whatever earthquake that phone call opened inside him.
He turns his head, pressing his mouth against my temple.
"That is the first time I've heard her voice in a year," he says into my hair, his lips moving against my skin.
"I texted her four words the night she ran.
It was always you. Then I got on a plane and spent twelve months learning how to kill the men who killed our parents.
Four words in a year. That's my version of love. "
I lift my head, looking up at him. His dark eyes are glassy, stripped of every defense.
"She called you fratello," I say softly. "She asked if you were eating. She told you about her daughters." I press my hand harder against his chest, right over the bruising rhythm of his heart. "That's her version of love, too."
Something cracks behind his eyes. A fissure in the bedrock. He doesn't cry—I don't think Dominic Costa has cried since the night he was twenty-five and watched his parents' caskets lowered into the ground—but the pressure behind his gaze is immense, a dam holding back an ocean.
He takes my hand from his chest. He turns my palm upward and places the small black burner phone into my grasp. He closes my fingers around it, his large hand wrapping entirely around my fist.
"This is for the day you need to understand the price of being a Costa," he rumbles, his voice thick and rough. "This is my sister's line. Only this number is safe. If the walls of this compound ever feel too small, you call her. She'll answer."
I look down at the device in my hand, understanding exactly what he is giving me.
He isn't just giving me a lifeline to the outside world.
He is giving me the only direct line to the sister he caged, the mother of the niece he couldn't hold, the woman who stole his empire and forgave him anyway. He is giving me a piece of his soul.
I nod, slipping the phone beneath my pillow. I curl my body against his, resting my hand flat against the center of his chest, right over his heart.
The first pale light of dawn filters through the reinforced glass, casting long gray shadows across the room.
The Chicago skyline glows cold and distant beyond the ballistic polymer panes—beautiful and unreachable, a world that exists on the other side of architecture he built to keep me in.
In here, the only horizon that matters is the one pressed against my palm, steady and bruising and entirely his.
"I'm not going anywhere, Dominic," I whisper into the dark.
He wraps his arms around me, crushing me against his massive frame, burying his face in my copper curls as the city outside burns quietly on without us.