Chapter 11 Antonia
Chapter Eleven: Antonia
I go to the gym at five in the morning because sleep stopped being an option around two.
The Binding Protocol is in my head. That stupid fucking custodial clause buried under diplomatic language, designed to claim authority over a child I haven't conceived from a marriage I haven't consented to.
My father knew. That is what’s lodged between my ribs and every breath pushes it deeper.
The gym is empty at five. I strip down to a sports bra and training pants and pull Vita and Morte and go to work on the heavy bag with the sheaths on.
Full speed. Full power. Ball of the foot, hip rotation, the corrected X-slash.
The bag absorbs the punishment and swings, and I reset and swing again and the sound of impact fills the concrete room.
My arms burn and my lungs burn and none of it is enough.
The fury has nowhere to go. The Silent is faceless. The system that designed the Binding Protocol doesn't have a body I can put a blade through, and that is driving me out of my skin.
I hear the door open, but I don't stop. I know exactly who it is.
He's in gym clothes. He stops inside the door and watches me work the bag, and I let him watch because the performance is part of the communication.
Look at what I can do. Look at the power in the corrected X.
Look at the woman the Silent wants to turn into a broodmare and understand what she's capable of doing to anyone who tries.
When my arms start burning, I finally stop and turn to face him.
He's standing ten feet away with his hands at his sides and his face doing the thing it does when the diplomat is losing ground to the animal.
He looks rough, sleep heavy in the lines around his eyes, his mouth tense, his shoulders up to his damn ears. He's been up all night too.
"You wrote the amendment," I say.
"I wrote the amendment."
"Emilio told me."
"Yep. Included every loophole I could think of that they’d try work around."
"You spent twelve hours writing a legal document to make sure nobody owns my body or any child that comes from it."
"I did."
I look at him. The man in the gym is not the diplomat and not the lawyer and not the bastard son either.
He's the man who beat someone bloody in a bar for touching my leg and then went home and spent a day writing legal briefs to protect my reproductive autonomy, and the contradiction between those two men is not a contradiction at all.
They're the same man. The fists and the briefs serve the same purpose. Both of them are pointed at the things that threaten me.
"Come here," I say.
He doesn't move. "Antonia—"
"I said come here."
He comes. Three steps, four, and the distance between us closes and I can see the gauze on his knuckles and the tension in his shoulders and the fact that his eyes haven't left my face since he walked through the door.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him toward me. His body follows, surprised, off-balance for the first time since I've known him, and I use the momentum to walk him backward until his back hits the wall beside the heavy bag.
"What are you—"
I kiss him with all the violence pent up inside me.
His mouth opens under mine, and his hands find my waist, and he kisses me back with the same anger, the same hunger, the same ten days of wanting compressed into contact.
His grip on my waist is hard, fingers digging into my hips, pulling me against him, and I can feel him getting hard against my stomach.
The contact sends a jolt through me that starts between my legs and ends in my throat.
I pull back. Breathing hard. His hands still on my waist. My hands still fisted in his shirt.
"Three days are up," I say. "You said when we decided to stop pretending. I've decided. Have you?"
"I decided the minute I saw you."
"Then stop talking."
He spins me. My back against the wall, his body pinning me, his mouth on my neck, and the sound I make is not controlled and not performative and not the sound of a woman who is in charge of the situation.
It's the sound of a woman whose body has been fighting a war with her brain for ten days and the body just won.
His hands pull my sports bra up. Not off, up, bunched above my breasts. His mouth drops from my neck to my collarbone to my chest, and when his lips close around my nipple the noise that comes out of me is loud enough to echo off the concrete walls.
I don't give a fuck.
I reach for Vita. He sees me do it and his body goes still.
"Don't stop," I say. I pull Vita from the sheath and hold her, blade flat, and press the cold steel against his chest, just below the collarbone. Not cutting. Resting. The blade against his skin, my hand on the handle, his heart hammering underneath.
"Is that a threat?" he asks. His voice is rough and low and the sound of it goes straight to my cunt.
"It's a boundary. You want me? You have me with the blade between us. That's who I am. The karambits don't come off. Not for you, not for anyone."
He looks down at Vita on his chest. Looks at my hand on the handle, then at my face.
The diplomat is gone. The lawyer is gone.
What's looking at me is the animal, the raw thing, the man who doesn't exist in courtrooms or boardrooms, but who lives in bars and corridors and locked rooms at eleven at night.
"I don't want the blade off," he says. "I want it exactly where it is."
He kisses me again. Harder. His hand goes between my legs over my training pants, and I grind against his palm because the pressure is what I need, direct and firm and exactly where the tension has been building for days.
His fingers press and rub, and I keep Vita against his chest, the blade flat, the cold steel warming from his body heat.
"Pants," I say. "Off. Now."
He hooks his fingers into the waistband and pulls them down. My underwear goes with them. I kick them off one leg, leaving the other tangled around my ankle because I don't have the patience to fully undress and neither does he.
His hand returns between my thighs. No barrier now. His fingers slide through me and the groan he makes when he feels how wet I am is guttural and possessive and I want to hear it again immediately.
"Fuck," he says against my neck. "You're soaked."
"Don't act surprised. You've been winding me up for ten days. This is what happens."
Two fingers push inside me, and I bite down on his shoulder to keep from screaming. He curls them forward, finds the spot, and works it with the single-minded focus of a man who approaches sex the way he approaches law, thoroughly, methodically, and with the intent to win.
"Harder," I say into his neck. "Don't be gentle."
He isn't gentle. His fingers fuck me against the wall, his palm grinding against my clit, his mouth on my throat, and I hold Vita against his chest and feel the blade move with his breathing, rising and falling with every exhale.
"I want you inside me," I say. "Now."
He pulls his fingers out and reaches for his shorts. I grab his wrist.
"Wait.” I push him away from the wall. He steps back, breathing hard, his eyes wide, and I push again until he's standing in the center of the mat. "Down."
He drops to the mat on his knees and that sight will forever be ingrained in my fucking brain.
Then he lays down, on his back. I straddle him, one hand on his chest, Vita in the other.
He pushes his shorts down enough to free his cock and the sight of him, hard and thick and straining, makes me clench around nothing.
Standing over him, I slowly lower myself and sink onto him.
The stretch burns and fills and I take him all the way down in one motion, seating myself on his hips, his cock buried inside me. It takes every fucking ounce of willpower not to scream with the relief I feel being split open on him after days of imagining this moment.
I ride him. Not slow, not tender, not the lovemaking of a couple finding each other.
I fuck him. Hard, fast, my hips slamming down, my hand on his chest for leverage, Vita pressed flat against his ribs.
His hands are on my hips, gripping, pulling me down to meet his thrusts as he drives up from below.
Every thrust causes Vita to make shallow cuts in his skin and the beads of red that form are fucking beautiful.
Pure.
"Is this what you wanted?" I say. "When you followed me. When you beat that man. When you wrote six pages of legal protection. Is this what you were thinking about?"
"Every fucking second," he says, and his voice cracks on the word second, the composure shattering the way I knew it would, the way I've wanted it to since the corridor. "Every second since you put Morte to my throat and told me you're not mine."
"I'm still not yours."
"Then why does it feel like you are?"
I lean down and kiss him, hard, biting his lip until I taste copper, and he groans into my mouth and his hips snap up, driving deeper, hitting the spot that makes my vision blur. I press Vita harder against his ribs, a rivulet of blood dripping from the point.
"Harder," I say. "Fuck me harder."
He grabs my hips and flips us, Vita flipping to the floor beside me.
My back hits the mat and he's above me, still inside me, putting my legs over his forearms, The angle changes and the depth changes and the thrust that follows makes me dig my nails into his back and drag them down hard enough to draw blood.
He fucks me on the gym floor, his eyes boring into mine as that wave starts to build.
His hand slides between us. His thumb finds my clit and presses.
The orgasm builds from there, fast, dragged to the surface by his cock inside me and his thumb on my clit.
He doesn’t change his pace, he doesn’t do anything different once my moans turn into little rasps.
He knows it’s coming and he’s working for it.
"I'm going to fucking come on your cock.”
"Don’t you dare fucking close your eyes because I want to see your face when you break."