23. Marisol
23
MARISOL
I roll over on the bed and come into contact with something hard and warm. Eyes closed, my hand traces over Salvatore’s chest, sifting through coarse hair and reading his raised scars like braille.
It feels good to lie like this. When he’s asleep, I have zero worries. No expectations about doing or saying the right thing.
He shifts to sling an arm and a leg over me, trapping me against his chest. For a few blissful moments, his deep, steady breathing almost lulls me back to sleep. Then the ache in my shoulders grows too unbearable, and I have to slip out from under him.
Yesterday, I didn’t need to think about sore shoulders and tender wrists and where I got them from.
I was flying. Kicking ass and taking names. Eating lightning and shitting thunder. Once I found the tricky little bug in one of Framh?rda’s libraries, it was just a matter of experimenting and developing a Trojan that would allow me to push malicious code to the bank’s database and give us control. I smile at the memory of Worm’s surprise. He’d burst out laughing when I suggested using the exploit in ransomware bots against other companies. He’d already done exactly that, and we nerded out for a couple of hours until he tore me away from the computer to sleep.
I twist to grab my phone from the nightstand, flicking it on so I can check for a message from Worm, and as I do so, my gaze snags on the fresh, white gauze covering my wrists.
My heart stutters.
I lean back to spread my fingers over Salvatore’s chest, wishing I could wrap my entire self around him, but just like this, when he’s asleep and not so… much . He put his reputation on the line for me last night. He prioritized my work. He took me to bed and bandaged my wrists.
So far, all I’ve done is get kidnapped and made him wait around all night so I could play at being a hacker.
I trace one of the tattoos on his chest, a wide-open eye in the center of a starburst pattern. At least this one’s easy to understand. An all-seeing eye for my husband who sees everything, all the time.
My computer parts come in today. After I start with whatever Worm plans to assign me, I’m going to do a little research on District Attorney Rekhson. If Salvatore wants to know everything that goes on, I can help with that.
My phone buzzes violently against my side.
“Who is it?” Salvatore mumbles without opening his eyes.
The contact flashes Unknown , but it’s an Appleton area code. “Grant.” I want to hurl my phone at the wall.
“What does he want?”
I sigh. “To harass me. He keeps sending messages to warn me about you and threatening to call the police. I’m going to let it go to voicemail. He’ll give up eventually.”
Salvatore’s smile is sleepy and self-satisfied. “Oh, really? Answer it. Let him know he’s got nothing to worry about.”
Maybe he’s right. Better to tell Grant off than let him spiral further. I take a deep breath and shamelessly rub a hand along Salvatore’s hard chest muscles before answering and setting the call to speaker.
“Mari!” Grant sounds breathless. “Are you okay? Where are you? I went by the apartment, but they said you closed the lease!”
I glance up at the ceiling like it’ll hold an easy answer for me. Salvatore rolls over and rubs his face into my lap. I suck in a moan and arch my hips toward him. I could use the distraction.
“I’m great. I just wanted some distance after the breakup.”
“Yeah… I’m sorry for all the mean stuff I said. That wasn’t okay. Mom wouldn’t have wanted us to end it like that. I still want to be friends, you know, after some time’s passed. When we’re ready.”
“Friends?” I gasp. Salvatore just ground his jaw against my clit. He tugs at my underwear while Grant talks.
“I mean, you don’t have to sound so surprised. We both cheated. But I still love you—as family. I think if I can move on, so could you.”
Salvatore flings my underwear to the side of the bed and wrenches my thighs open while I squirm underneath him and try to focus on whatever dumb shit Grant’s saying. I never cheated?—
“Mmm,” I strangle out as Salvatore shoves his face between my legs and digs his tongue into my pussy.
“Anyway, I wanted to say I’m still worried about you. You’re… alone right?”
“Mm-hmm.” Two of Salvatore’s fingers replace his tongue, stretching me out. Now that his mouth is free, he presses it to my inner thighs and sucks, sparking electricity up my spine. I grit my teeth to keep from groaning out loud.
“Terrence was going to fire me since you didn’t want to give me that data.” Grant pauses, as if to give me a chance to jump in and offer to rescue him with a cooed poor baby . Maybe old Marisol would’ve done that, but new Marisol?—
Salvatore yanks me down the bed, and my head thumps against a pillow. My phone’s lost to the sheets. He clamps a hand over my mouth before pistoning a third finger inside me as his mouth seeks my clit. Fuck . I am drowning in him.
Distantly, I hear Grant sigh and continue in a muffled voice, “But when I told him about how I was having a hard time, and I mentioned that guy I saw in your apartment, Terrence sounded like he recognized him. You know how he was always saying the Mafia was hacking him. Mari, that’s what I’ve been trying to warn you about. I think that guy you’re seeing is in the Mafia.”
I don’t say a single thing, because that Mafia man is currently finger-fucking me so hard I’m seeing stars. Salvatore presses his fingers against the seam of my mouth and when I open, he hooks two fingers inside, filling me up deliciously at both ends.
“Look, I know it sounds crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I don’t know how long you’ve been seeing this guy, but I think he might be using you to get to me.”
If I wasn’t almost gagging on Salvatore’s fingers right now, I’d laugh.
“I want to meet up. In person. I want to make sure you’re okay, and if you haven’t already, I really think you should run a background check on this guy…”
Grant’s voice drones on as Salvatore licks and sucks against my clit. Pleasure skitters up my belly and my spine until I’m tumbling, careening over the edge. My vision flashes white in an explosion of pleasure—I have to latch onto Salvatore’s fingers so I don’t cry out. Wave after wave of euphoria courses through me as I shudder and bow underneath him. I’m a passenger—no, the captain—and he’s the sea, vast and mysterious and generous and cruel.
“Mari?”
For cripes’ sake, what the hell was Grant saying?
Salvatore reaches over and hangs up the call.
“Sal!”
“You can call him back,” Salvatore says evenly from between my legs. His jaw glistens with my arousal. “Invite him to dinner at Nahash, tonight at six. My treat.”
I gape at Salvatore. Did coming fry my brain or did he really just suggest that? I can’t fathom why he’d want to. My phone rings as Grant starts calling back.
A thought strikes me, and I narrow my eyes at Salvatore. “Are you going to hurt him?”
He rubs his hands over my breasts and kisses my hipbones, sending aftershocks of arousal through me. We both moan at the same time. “No, passerotta, I’m not going to hurt him. I’m going to help set his fears aside. I’ll be very well-behaved, I promise.”
Another thought. I’d been trying to get Grant to go with me to Nahash for months, but he’d either say it wasn’t in the budget or that he didn’t have the time. “Did you know I wanted to go there?”
Instead of an answer, Salvatore smiles with perfect innocence as he taps my phone.
“Mari? Did you hang up?” Grant asks.
“Sorry, I dropped my phone in water, and it’s been acting weird since. We can meet for dinner at six. Let’s do Nahash.”
“Oh…” The hesitation in Grant’s voice makes me grin. He recognizes the restaurant too. “Okay. We’ll be there.”
After I hang up, I realize he said we , meaning him and Lilah. My smile falls. Awesome .
Salvatore doesn’t seem to care as he stirs between my legs and rises to kiss me, his arms boxing me in on either side. We’re supposed to be focusing on Rekhson and Junior, so why would he want to have dinner with my ex? He dips his head down to lash his tongue into my mouth the way he did between my legs. Even as my pussy squeezes eagerly, my mind won’t shut up, and I blurt out, “Are you worried about the cops?”
He smiles against my mouth. “What makes you say that?” he says in a low rumble.
“Is that why you invited Grant to dinner? Because he said he’d call the cops?”
“I’m not worried about the police.”
“Oh.” I frown. I should just shut up and get back to whatever treat Salvatore clearly has in mind, but I add, “So why…?”
He pulls back to meet my eyes, and the significance in his gaze makes me want to hide away. He scrubs his thumb along my cheek until his hand wraps fully around my jaw. “To claim you, passerotta.”
My cheeks burn. “From Grant? You… you don’t have anything to worry about there.”
“Either he doesn’t understand you’re mine, and I’ll correct that mistake tonight, or he does, and he’ll learn to respect my wife’s wishes.”
I try to twist my face to the side, but he doesn’t let go, and that little show of force sends a gush of wetness between my thighs. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him.”
“I won’t need to hurt him to teach him a lesson.”
My skin crawls as Salvatore’s gaze travels over me, clinical and detached. Why is it that I’m flooded with desire, and he gets to keep his cool? I ride through an explosive urge to shove him off me. I want a real reaction from him.
“That’s… petty.”
His smile is small and hard. “Yes.”
He kisses me again, this time pushing me into the bed with all of his weight and gripping my face with both hands. I buck up hard against him, but he doesn’t let go, so I do the only thing I think to—I suck his lip into my mouth and bite . All that weight disappears from on top of me at once, and then it’s just the two of us staring at each other and breathing heavily.
His tongue darts out to touch his swollen lower lip. His gaze is electric. Feral.
Trapped under his boxers, his cock is rock hard.
“You bit me,” he says. It’s not an accusation. It’s a challenge.
I exhale a small puff of air. “Take those off.” I nod to his boxers.
In an instant, he’s naked before me, long, muscled, fierce, and judging by the flex of neck and abs, barely restraining himself.
I tug my shirt off and throw it to the side of the bed.
We’re caught in a staring contest, or a trance, watching the other from across the bed, neither of us moving an inch. I don’t know why, but I’m fucking terrified. Terrified that there might be no one else on Earth that makes me feel the way he makes me feel. Terrified I’ll mess this up.
His breathing is ragged, but he’s slowly straightening, like he’s coming to his senses.
I let my leg fall open to the side, exposing myself.
Salvatore lunges.
He yanks me down the bed by my thighs and, with one hand around the base of his cock, shoves himself inside me. I’m so wet that it slides right in with a filling, burning stretch that has me arching up against him.
“Salvatore,” I groan, pushing against his thighs with my fingertips. “You’re too big?—”
Slap.
I gasp. He just slapped me—hard enough to shock—across my inner thigh. He stops where he is, only moving with a barely-there rocking of his hips.
“Spread your legs.” Even with his swollen lip, his voice is soft and in control. Always with his precious fucking control.
After a beat, I relax and let my knees fall to the sides.
“What do you call me?” Dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, firm mouth. The picture of disappointment.
Fuck his disappointment.
“I call you sir—” I barely get the word out before he pushes deeper inside me at the same time his thumb strums over my clit, driving a choked gasp out of me.
“There’s a good girl,” he purrs as he shoots arcs of electricity through every cell of my body with every swipe of his thumb. “What did you want to tell me?”
Fuck , I love his praise.
My fingers spasm against his thighs. “You h-have to go s-slower. You’re too big, sir. I… need a moment to adjust.” I hastily add another “sir” at the end for good measure.
He smiles indulgently and then even wider as my pussy clenches hard around him at that. God, he’s fucking beautiful. I’m putty in his hands.
“Good girl, asking for what you need.” He grips me by the back of one knee and looms over me, close enough to kiss. He doesn’t stop circling my clit. “Is this slow enough for you?”
“Yes, sir.” I can feel every delicious spark of friction, but now he’s too close. Too intimate. It’s making me frantic. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on breathing, on taking him all. If I can do that, the knot in my belly will loosen.
I exhale a low moan once he’s fully seated inside me, skin-to-skin.
“Open your eyes.”
I screw my eyes tighter and shake my head. If I look at him, I’ll burst out crying. He’s too much. Too intense, too possessive, too attentive.
I suck in a breath as his mouth finds my breast and kisses it, trailing up to my nipple where he circles it with his tongue and sucks it into his mouth. I squirm underneath him, heaving like I’ve just sprinted a mile. It’s too much—the nervy sensation of his mouth on my breast, the incessant circling of my clit, and the heavy pressure of his thick cock inside me.
He lifts. “Open your eyes, Marisol.”
My eyes snap open. Dark, wavy hair halos his face with shadow, but his amber eyes are fixed on me. Always on me.
“I’m going to fuck you now,” he says gently. “Are you ready?”
Some of that wild emotion inside me reduces from a boil to a simmer. I want this. I nod.
“Use your words.”
“Yes, sir. Fuck me, please.”
His eyes flash. He drags out of me with excruciating slowness and pushes back in with a snap of his hips. For what feels like an eternity, he torments me with the rhythm of a long, slow emptying, and then an almost punishing filling.
I can barely keep my eyes open, barely think past the all-encompassing fullness of him inside me, past the immense pressure building just behind my navel, but I force myself to look. I watch him the entire time. I lose myself in him, gripping his thighs hard enough to leave crescent-moon marks. He says he knows me. Says he’ll claim me.
I want that so badly. I want… I want…
My eyes are glued to his as heat races through me, coalescing in my core, and finally, I’m collapsing into myself like a dying star before exploding into pleasure as a powerful, raging orgasm roars through me. Salvatore thrusts his hips to mine and groans as he empties himself, his cock hardening and jerking inside me, and he’s muttering my name like a curse.
I melt into the bed, boneless and smiling. My head is empty, my body is sated, and I’m floating on a white, fluffy cloud of nothingness.
Salvatore folds over to kiss me softly. He looks almost boyish right now, with a flush over his face and a smile playing at his lips.
“Let’s shower. I have a surprise for you.”
Turns out “showering” also included a trip to Salvatore’s home gym downstairs where he compelled me through Dr. Macaluso’s rehab exercises with barely-there touches and clipped commands. By the time he let me retreat to the treadmill, I was soaking wet again, and getting to watch him lift heavy weights and sprint next to me did nothing to help my poor underwear.
After we cleaned up, he takes me to my real surprise—his upstairs room with the electric lock. I bite back a grin. About time.
“Watch,” he says softly and keys in four digits.
That’s my phone passcode . I glance at him. Salvatore looks back at me with a glimmer in his eye.
The door opens with a soft click, and a multicolored glow flickers through the gap. He guides me inside, shutting the door behind us.
A massive desk spans nearly the entire length of one wall. Above the desk sits dozens of monitors, all perfectly spaced apart and tuned in to different images—an empty basement, a hairy man fucking a much younger woman in a pink apartment, a group of tattooed gangsters gossiping over a table in an empty warehouse. Amazingly, the room is comfortably cool. I can’t imagine how much heat that must spew out to run this many monitors at once. But where’s his computer tower? No way it’d be anything less than an absolute beast.
My gaze lights on the end of the room where a sand-colored cat paradise stretches across the wall. Two towers sit at opposite ends of a house, joined together by a series of bridges and shelves. Buck sits at the top of one of the towers like a little orange prince.
My heart gives a squeeze as I approach Buck and his cat kingdom. “Is this where you’ve been all this time? Fell in love with big, bad Salvatore?”
Buck narrows his eyes but doesn’t hiss at me. Just as I’m considering reaching out to pet him, something brushes against my elbow, and I have to swallow a gasp. Salvatore’s going to get a bell if he’s going to be sneaking up on me like that.
I glance up at him. “Thank you,” I say sincerely, “for taking care of him.”
He smiles a little but doesn’t say anything. Finally, I notice my surprise.
Oh my god.
A matching desk to Salvatore’s sits against the opposite wall, with houseplants and a track of grow lights eating up two tremendous swathes. It’s so close to the vision I had when I decorated my desk back at my apartment that it might as well have been ripped straight from my fantasies. I drift closer to rub my palms along the smooth wood. Six black monitors hang off the wall. Six. I collapse into the computer chair, and a giggle bursts out of me as I realize what I’m sitting on. A fucking Herman Miller? This chair costs more than… well, anything I own.
Except maybe my wedding ring.
Several boxes with my favorite brands sit neatly stacked by my feet. They’re all the new computer parts I’d ordered.
“Sal…”
When I swivel around, he’s right there. I take in his eye-level cock, swallow hard, and raise my gaze to meet his. His look of smug confidence sinks a pulse of arousal through me that pins my limbs to my new thousand-dollar chair. A fleeting moment of panic seizes my lungs.
Please just cut out my heart and eat it already. What else can I offer to repay this feeling of being seen? Is there any part of me he doesn’t own yet?
“What do you think?” he murmurs, watching me with those bright eyes of his.
I think if he changed his mind and discarded me, I’d follow him around in despair forever, like a wraith without a body or a soul, longing for the sweet burn of his recognition.
I swallow past the emotion lodged in my throat. “Don’t you think it’s a little small?”
Salvatore strokes a hand over the top of my head. There’s so much power at his fingertips, but he moves gently, for me. He does everything for me. “Does my wife need something bigger?”
A shiver passes through me at his touch. “N-no. I don’t think I could handle any bigger,” I say with a weak smile. “This is perfect. I love it.”
“Good.”
The computer monitors behind his back glitter and wink like a swarm of fireflies. His all-seeing eye tattoo flashes in my mind. Does he see the potential in me to be another piece in his chessboard? I saw enough to understand Worm is irreplaceable in Salvatore’s team. I run my tongue over my bottom lip. Irreplaceable. I like the sound of that.
“How many cameras do you have?” I ask.
“One hundred and twelve active cameras. Almost two hundred microphones.”
All that data has to be stored somewhere. Fucking databases . “How do you parse through it all?”
“I have alerts set up for specific words. Worm has a small team that sifts through the footage to see if there’s anything useful.”
“But you miss a lot.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “I do.” And at least I know him well enough to recognize it has to sting, even if his voice doesn’t betray him.
His face is cast in shadow from the backglow of the monitors.
“When did you start doing this?”
“When my brother died.”
“Matteo?” I ask.
“Yes.”
Dread settles over me. I imagine two little boys with dark hair and amber eyes who played word games in a church with their mom. Maybe across a wide distance, we were going through the same thing. Avoiding one parent and clinging to another.
I straighten up. At least now, I can better understand how I might fit into Salvatore’s life. He has an entire family’s lost love to offer, and I’m the recipient. I’ll eagerly accept his need to control me, to keep me in one piece, to claim me, if it means I get to keep all that love and affection for myself, and I won’t have to share with another living soul.
“When did that happen?” I ask.
“Thirteen years ago. At the time, we were feuding heavily with the Columbians. They tricked him into a meeting, strangled him with a garote, and then cut him up into dozens of pieces. He was twenty-one.”
“And what did you do?”
“I laid out dozens of cameras and hunted down every man associated with Matteo’s murder.”
“Did it help?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“No, passerotta. It didn’t help.”