2. Elio #2
Her hands move under my shirt and her nails rake down my back, her legs locking tightly around my waist as she meets me thrust for thrust, riding my cock like she owns it.
“This pussy was fucking made for me,” I growl. “Only me. No one else will ever have you like this. Say it.”
“Oh, fuck,” she gasps, her honey-gold eyes glassy with pleasure. “Only yours, Elio…”
I drive into her deeper, the wet sound of our bodies slapping together filling the room along with her broken moans.
When she comes again, her walls pulse and flutter around my cock like a vise.
I follow her over the edge with a savage groan and bury myself as deep as I can go and spill inside her, pulse after pulse, filling her with everything I have.
I roll before I collapse on top of her, sweat-slicked and breathing hard, and drag her close again.
For a few long moments, we lie there in the quiet. Beyond the windows, the city breathes in restless pulses. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails and fades.
She is draped over me like she’s done this a thousand times.
The thought should unsettle me, should raise every instinct that has kept me hard and untouchable all these years. Instead, it sinks into me with a dangerous kind of ease.
One arm is curled loosely around her waist, my hand stroking down the length of her back in slow, possessive passes I do not even bother trying to disguise.
The gesture is mindless now, nearly instinctive.
As if some part of me has already decided she is mine to soothe, mine to keep close, mine to touch until the tension finally drains from her body.
Even now after I have had her, the possessiveness does not ease. If anything, it has simply deepened its claws in me. I should be sated by now, restored to whatever version of control I walked into that banquet hall wearing before she unmade it.
Instead, I feel stripped raw, every nerve inside me still lit up and humming.
Her fingers move across my chest with far more care than a man like me has any right to receive, tracing the scars littered across my skin—old ones first, a thick, pale line near my ribs from a knife slashed across me during a bar brawl when I was seventeen and stupid enough to think rage made me invincible.
The smaller notch below my collarbone is next, a stab wound that should have killed me if the man holding the blade had steadier hands.
Then the newer ones, the harsher, meaner marks left by bullets, are the ones her fingers pause over.
The marks are evidence that violence does not come from those proving themselves in alleyways after a night out drinking and a few impulsive exchanges, but from grown men waging war under family names with the desire for power grabs.
Her touch over them is feather-light, almost reverent. That softness does something unbearable to my heart.
I stare up into the dark at my ceiling, trying to understand how I have ended up here flat on my back in my private apartment with a woman curled up against me, letting her fingers drift across every piece of my brutal personal history that has been carved into my skin over and over as if she has all the time in the world to learn it.
What is it about Isabella that has always unraveled me so easily?
It has only been a year and a half since she came into my orbit. Eighteen months, to be exact.
A blink by the standards of men like me who measure life in wars, shifting alliances, and funerals.
And yet it feels longer than that by miles… as though she has been lodged beneath my skin for years, irritating and intoxicating in equal measure and impossible to remove.
I remember the exact second I saw her and she stopped being a background figure and became an actual fucking problem.
She had been standing near one of the back terraces at a dinner between our families, shrouded in shadow and listening to a conversation she was clearly not meant to be included in.
Most girls her age would have looked bored or intimidated by the things being discussed. Isabella, instead, looked thoughtful, picking apart every little detail.
Approaching her had been a mistake, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me. Amos Russo’s only daughter had only ever been another pretty girl draped in expensive fabric and jewels, trailing behind the powerful men in her family, in my mind.
I had absolutely no idea what I’d be getting myself into when she first turned those honey-gold eyes on me.
No woman should have that kind of power over me.
And yet… she does.
The irrationality of it makes me feel weak in ways bullets never could. I know how to handle threats and men who come at me with blades and bravado. I know how to solve problems in permanent, efficient ways.
But this? This gnawing pull toward a woman I should have kept far from myself the second I understood what she was becoming to me? There is no clear solution for it.
Distance has only made it worse. Restraint turned it obsessive.
Every attempt to starve myself has somehow only deepened the hunger.
I exhale slowly.
“You make me want things I shouldn’t,” I admit into the darkness, the words slipping out before I can cage them.
The second the words are out, I almost regret them. Not because they are untrue but because they are the most honest thing I have said in a very long time.
She lifts her head up to rest her chin on my chest, eyes searching mine. “Like what?”
My jaw tightens.
I am rapidly realizing this is not just sex.
Maybe it never was with her.
She makes me want what I was raised to believe would get me killed, a life outside of my family’s syndicate where mornings belong to no one but us.
Where locks on doors are not for strategy, but for privacy between us. She makes me want to keep her, protect her, to choose tenderness when violence has always come more naturally to me.
She makes me want… peace, and I do not know what to do with that.
“I don’t know,” is what I find myself saying.
Men like me only know how to hunger for power. For the cold satisfaction of watching rivals choke on their own arrogance. Those wants are simple, clean in their brutality. They fit the world I was born into.
Peace simply does not.
It is softer, stranger, even. It asks a man to imagine surviving without the armor that made him.
To picture a life built around waking up and not immediately reaching for the part of himself shaped to kill at a moment’s notice.
She watches me for a long while. Her fingers move up to my chest, her palm splaying over my heart.