Chapter 27 #2
It’s messy and desperate but with zero hesitation.
Good girl.
She’s breathing faster than I like, gripping a Beretta in one hand.
There’s something feral in her eyes. A ragged, dangerous focus. Until they find mine.
Then she focuses. And breaks.
She doesn’t cry but her shoulders sag like she’s finally been given permission to feel the weight of everything she’s done.
I walk forward and pull the gun from her hand. Toss it behind me. Then I cup her face, the side the fucking bastard – the now delightfully fucking dead bastard – hit, and I kiss her like I’ve been dying for it. Because I have.
Every second she went dark on me. Every fucking hour I didn’t know if I was tracking a body or the woman who became mine when she pumped two bullets into my chest, then fucking bit me.
Her fingers twist into my shirt. The kiss turns brutal. Salt and copper. A moan I feel deep in my spine.
She’s shaking when I pull back. Her voice is hoarse. ‘How did you find me?’
‘Let’s save that for when you can be appropriately outraged, hmm,’ I rasp. ‘Let’s just say, I found out what DeLuca did and I knew him triple-crossing you would lead to excited tempers.’ I nod over her shoulder. ‘Guess I was right?’
She flinches. ‘I had to do it. I didn’t have a choice.’
I nod. ‘I can tell.’
I drag her closer and brush hair off her face. ‘Be kind to yourself. We were both born into a battlefield. And you, you’ve adapted beautifully.’
She lets out a breath. ‘Don’t say things like that to me.’
‘Why, because you’ll kill me?’
‘Because I’m scared I’ll like it. Too much. And I can’t afford to.’
And isn’t it the fucking hell of a thing that I want to afford it for her? Offer it to her on all the silver platters she can handle. And the million more she can’t?
My thumb drags over a smear of blood on her cheek. ‘I’m taking you home with me. You can tell me on the way, yeah?’ Then, quieter, because neither of us needs loud right now, ‘And maybe we can start to bury the past.’
Sofiya
We can start to bury the past.
The words echo in my mind as I stand in the middle of Rafa’s suite in the Fallbrook Estate, a place I’d sneered and resisted coming to just a year ago, while Maddie was gleefully planning her wedding to the heir and we were on the brink of war.
A floor lamp casts warm light across the Venetian walls.
White sheets are peeled back on a wide, low bed and dark silk drapes spill onto the floor like liquid shadow.
My pulse thumps so hard I can feel it behind my collarbone.
I breathe in – deep, slow – trying to steady the tremor I always feel before we cross that threshold from hunter and prey back to… whatever this is.
Rafaelle emerges from the bathroom, hair damp, his bare chest silhouetted by the warm glow behind him. He wears black silk trousers, low-slung, narrow hips that have driven me to madness more than once.
I swallow, aware of how my own body responds – heat pooling low as always when he stands bare and certain.
He crosses the room, each step measured, and stops an arm’s length away.
The ache between us is a familiar thing.
Especially tonight. He flirts with my boundaries like a predator, and I let him because I crave his restraint as much as I fear it.
Tonight, it tastes like fresh adrenaline on my tongue.
I toss aside the cold compress he gave me for my face and let my robe slip off my shoulders, silk rustling to the floor.
He inhales sharply as my bare skin is revealed – the high swell of my breasts, the hollow of my throat, the faint scar at my right hip I earned during training myself to be what it turned out wasn’t good enough for my grandfather.
The debrief to the Salvatores of what happened tonight and over the past two days after my father’s men snatched me, was brutal.
Cesare’s face as he listened to my hushed accounting, the proposal to ‘wipe the slate clean’ by starting over with Maddie’s newborn son, made every bone in my body go cold.
And made me ecstatic I wasn’t his enemy. Not any more.
Rafa’s flinty look and the string of snarled Sicilian under his breath told me that, and heaven help me, I’ve seized that lifeline with both hands.
As for Orazio… he came into the Fallbrook library blazing, half enraged, half in awe as I repeated the story, yet again. Threw a glass against the wall. Called Stefano a disgraziato figlio di puttana and Matteo a traitor’s shadow with a coward’s spine. Then he looked at me, dead in the eye.
‘Rest easy, girl. You’ve done what I never could. Cleaned the rot. The war’s not done, picciridda. But I’m glad you struck first.’
I’m still shaking when Rafa steps behind me. His hands graze the inside of my arms, ghosting up to cup my shoulders, possessive and rough. Just the way I’ve discovered I like. No, love. Because it’s the way only he can be.
‘The Salvatores are taking the Mancinelli compound,’ he murmurs against my neck. ‘Cesare’s moving in official assets. Whatever’s left of your grandfather’s reign dies tomorrow.’
I nod, not trusting my voice.
He tilts my chin until our eyes lock in the mirror. ‘But tonight? Tonight, you’re not a weapon. You’re fucking mine. Say it.’
‘I’m yours.’
And when I turn into him now, when our mouths meet, slow and bruising and right, I pray to God to let that be enough.
Rafa’s voice is low, thick with need. ‘Every inch of you is mine.’
My breath hitches, throat tight. ‘Show me,’ I whisper, though a part of me knows it already happened long ago.
His lips brush my shoulder, then the hollow of my neck. I shudder as stubble scrapes against my skin. Each breath is uneven, erratic, edged with the exhaustion of what we’ve both survived – and the raw hunger that’s never gone away.
‘Turn around,’ he growls.
I do. And when I face him, his eyes darken like a storm at sea. One hand cradles my jaw, the other traces the bruise blooming near my collarbone. Gently. Reverently. But there’s nothing soft in the way his body crowds mine.
‘They put their hands on you.’ His voice turns to gravel. ‘Tried to break what belongs to me. Tried to fucking erase you.’
‘They didn’t. Nobody can erase me,’ I murmur.
His gaze flashes. ‘Too fucking right, picciridda. You erase them.’
Then he crushes his mouth to mine.
It’s the most decadent, delicious claiming yet.
Punishing and worshipping at once. I open to him instantly, arms winding around his neck, fingers dragging through damp hair.
He backs me towards the bed, only breaking the kiss to yank his trousers off, to pull me with him as he kneels between my legs.
His hands roam my body like a man memorising his only religion.
‘You’re a fucking work of art,’ he mutters into my breast as he takes it into his mouth.
I arch up, a gasp escaping me as he sucks hard, then soothes with his tongue.
‘Every inch. I will ruin anyone who touches you. I almost missed my shot tonight, Sofiya. Almost lost you.’
‘You didn’t,’ I say, and I mean it with more than just tonight in mind.
He groans, the sound vibrating against my skin. ‘Don’t do that again. Don’t disappear on me. You want to fight? Fine. But let me watch your back while you do it.’
I nod. There’s no point telling him it wasn’t intentional. My instinct tells me he needs to say the words. So I let them wash over me, dizzy with heat, with the press of his hand sliding down my stomach, between my thighs. One stroke – slick, slow over my swollen clit – and I’m already shaking.
‘You’re soaked,’ he says with a smug growl. ‘Fuck. I haven’t even—’ He breaks off, sliding two fingers into me. Deep. Possessive. Curling just right. ‘This wet for me?’
‘You know it is,’ I gasp.
He shifts me down the bed with one hard tug, spreading my thighs around his hips. Then he’s there. Hot and thick and hard, rubbing the blunt head of his cock against my entrance until I’m whining with need.
‘Say it again,’ he demands, voice hoarse. ‘Say you’re mine.’
I stare up at him, at the man who’s killed for me. Bled for me. Found me in the ashes of the only family I’ve ever known and didn’t flinch.
‘I’m yours.’
With a ragged exhale, he sinks into me.
We moan in unison, him for the tight heat, me for the heady, indescribable feeling of home. He holds still for a beat, forehead resting against mine, his breath hitching like he’s on the edge of something deeper than sex.
Then he moves.
Powerful. Relentless. His thrusts drive everything else away. The blood. The ghosts. The betrayal. All that remains is the slap of skin, the heat coiling low, the way I sob when he grips my hips and fucks me harder.
‘I’ve got you,’ he pants. ‘You don’t have to be strong now. Not with me.’
I break.
He flips us, pulls me on top of him, one hand fisting in my hair, the other gripping my ass as he thrusts up from below. I ride him like I was made for it, sweat-slicked and shaking, nails raking his chest.
When I shatter, it’s with a scream I can’t swallow. He comes seconds later with a brutal groan, arms wrapped tight around me, like letting go isn’t an option.
We lie there for a long time after. Tangled, spent, silent.
His hand strokes my spine, lazy. But there’s a line between his brows, one I’ve come to recognise. Thought. Strategy. Worry.
The war isn’t over.
‘It’s not over,’ I whisper. ‘He won’t stop.’
‘I know, duci,’ he says, voice flat. ‘But neither will we.’
I rest my cheek on his chest, hear the solid drum of his heart. The man I used to want dead has become the only place I feel safe.
Irony of ironies. Turning out to be the night for them.
Which irony will involve the heart that’s beginning to beat only for Rafaelle Salvatore?