Chapter 17 #2
"He said my mother would be proud of me," I finally say.
Matteo doesn't respond. He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me against his side, and his body is the solid rock I need to pull me back from the brink.
"I killed my father," I say.
"I know."
"I feel nothing."
"That'll change."
"I know that too."
His hand finds my chin and turns my face toward his. His eyes are dark, but there’s a softness behind them, like he knows what I need before I do.
He kisses me. This one is slow and careful, his mouth on mine, his hand on my jaw, and the gentleness of it cracks me in a way the violence never could.
Then I pull him closer and the gentleness burns off.
I climb onto him. On the floor, in the blood, beside the chair where my father died.
His hands grip my waist through the destroyed dress, and my hands go to his belt and the urgency is sudden and absolute; born from the same place as the violence, from the part of me that needs to feel alive after watching life leave the man who gave me mine.
"Here?" he asks.
"Here."
"Antonia, the blood—"
"I know where we are. I know what's on the floor. I fucking need you here. In this. In the middle of it." I pull his belt open. Unzip his pants. "I need to feel something that isn't death."
He understands. I can see it in his eyes, the recognition that this isn't sex and it isn't grief and it isn't anything that has a name.
It's the thing that happens when a woman kills her father and the only way to process it is through the body of the man she married four hours ago, in the blood of the man she mentally buried four seconds ago.
He pauses, stands and pulls me to the table, sitting on it before I nod and climb onto him, hoisting up the dress. His hands on my thighs, pushing the fabric up, and I'm still not wearing underwear because he took them this morning.
I sink onto him. The stretch is different from before, my body is using his to anchor itself to the living world because the dead world is too real and too cold.
So, I ride him slowly. Slow, deep, my forehead against his, my hands on his shoulders, his hands on my hips guiding me in a rhythm that matches my breathing instead of fighting it.
"I've got you," he says against my mouth. "I'm here."
"Don’t let me go.”
"Never, baby girl, I’m here. You’re it for me."
Tears threaten to spill down my cheeks. “You’re all I have left."
His hips roll up to meet mine and the depth changes, the feeling changes and the numbness I felt five minutes ago is a lie my brain told to protect itself because right now, I'm fucking feeling everything.
The orgasm builds slowly. A wave, deep and low, rising from the base of my spine, filling my chest, reaching my throat. Matteo feels it in the way my body changes, the rhythm shifting, and he adjusts, his thumb finding my clit, pressing in circles that match the wave.
"Let it all go," he murmurs.
I come with my forehead against his and my hands gripping his shoulders.
It’s nothing dramatic, nothing earth shattering.
The sound I make is quiet, a broken exhale, relief packaged into physical sensation.
He follows. A groan pressed into my neck, his hands locked around my waist, his body pulsing inside mine.
We stay like that. His arms around me, my head on his chest, his heartbeat under my ear the same way I felt it the first night in his room when my palm was on his sternum and his pulse was the fastest thing in the building.
"Matteo," I say.
"Yeah."
"I love you."
The words come out without planning and without permission, without the careful thought that usually goes into an admission of this magnitude. They come out because they're true, and the truth is the only thing that belongs in this room right now.
His arms tighten around me, and his lips press against my hair.
"I love you too," he says. "And I'm not going anywhere. Not for the seat. Not for the plan. Not for any of it. You're the plan now. You and the blades and whatever comes next."
Whatever comes next.
The Replication Initiative is out there, a network of placed operatives embedded in every institution that matters.
The Silent is weakening but the product has been delivered, and the product can't be recalled.
The Harrisons are fighting from the inside, but the inside is infiltrated and the infiltration is a century deep.
Marco is dead, which means the Castillo organization is leaderless. The soldiers who attacked the compound will learn that their Don is gone and the power vacuum will either be filled by someone loyal to the Silent or by me, taking my rightful spot.
But that's tomorrows problem. That's the next fight and the next set of decisions that will determine whether the weapon Marco built becomes something more.
Tonight, I'm just Antonia Billone. Not Castillo. Not Bonaccorso. Not the Silent's breeding stock.
Billone.
I close my eyes and listen to Matteo's heartbeat and the hum of the compound around us and the quiet of a room that held a death and a life in the same hour.
Marco's era is over.
Mine begins now.