Chapter 10 #2
I push her hand away. Not gently. I grip her hips.
My thumbs dig into her hip bones. I drag her all the way to the edge of the table until her ass hangs off the polished wood.
I step into her space. Aligning the blunt head of my aching cock with her slick, swollen opening.
She is ready. Dripping for me. Waiting for the claim.
I push forward.
One brutal, uninterrupted thrust. I bury myself to the hilt.
She gasps loudly, her head throwing back against the table, exposing the long, elegant line of her throat.
I fill her. Stretching her tight walls past their limit.
The scalding heat of her pussy clamps down on my length.
A vise of wet muscle and slick heat. Groaning, I rest my forehead against her chest. Her soft tits heave against my chest. The fit is perfection.
Two fractured puzzle pieces forged in violence and chaos, locking together in the dark.
I pull back. The friction is pure, agonizing madness. I thrust back in. Deep. Hard. Hitting her cervix.
She moans, a beautiful, helpless, broken sound.
I set a punishing pace. Hips snapping forward.
Flesh slapping flesh. The sharp, rhythmic sound of our bodies colliding fills the war room, echoing over the low hum of the servers.
I grip the backs of her knees, lifting her legs and wrapping them high around my waist. Her ankles lock tightly behind my back.
The diamond ring flashes in my peripheral vision.
The ring my father put on my mother's hand.
The ring that survived the massacre. Now it lives permanently on my woman's finger. The final seal of the Costa family.
"You are mine," I bite the words against the sensitive skin of her neck. Thrusting hard. Pounding into her on the tactical table where I planned to burn this city down. "You hear me? No more contracts. No more fake covers. No more logic."
Thrust.
"Mine."
Thrust.
"Every breath."
Thrust.
"Every inch."
She scratches my back. Her blunt nails find the jagged cuts she just bandaged upstairs in the bathroom.
The wounds tear open. Fresh blood wells up, stinging my skin.
Pain flares sharp and bright. It is a grounding wire.
It fuels the beast. I drive deeper, angling my hips upward to grind against her swollen, aching clit with every downward stroke.
The pressure builds in my balls. A deep, inevitable explosion gathering force. I cannot stop it. I do not want to stop it. I want to ruin her for anything else. I want to claim her so thoroughly she forgets how to breathe without me surrounding her.
She is clenching around my cock. Milking the length with every spasm of her tight walls. The friction is unbearable. The heat is melting my sanity.
"Enzo!" she sobs, her head thrashing side to side. "Please. Please."
"Take it," I command, my voice low and ragged in the vault. "Take every piece of me. The monster. The fixer. The man. All of it. Yours."
Her inner walls spasm violently. She is cumming again. The tight, rapid clenching pushes me straight over the precipice. I fist her hair with one bloodstained hand. Her gaze locks onto mine. My calculating, calm gaze is totally fractured, shattered by the force of my obsession.
"Natalia!" I roar.
I bury myself to the hilt. My hips lock against hers. I explode.
Pumping my hot seed deep inside her slick heat.
Filling her with my cum. Hot, thick bursts of possession firing against her cervix.
Breeding my woman on the war room table.
Claiming her biology, her future, her soul.
Tying her to my violent, chaotic world forever.
There is no escape now. There is no going back to her clean, corporate life. She is a Costa. She is mine.
I collapse on top of her. My weight crushing her soft breasts.
Panting hard. My lungs burning for oxygen.
Sweat drips from my brow, splashing onto her flushed cheek.
We are tangled together in a mess of limbs, sweat, and bodily fluids.
The musky smell of sex and my whiskey scent fills the cold air of the vault.
I refuse to pull out. My cock stays buried deep inside her slick heat, still twitching with powerful aftershocks. The wetness seals us together.
She strokes the hair at the nape of my neck. Her small, warm fingers carding through the waves. Her touch is a soothing balm. The only calm in the center of my storm. Her heart thuds rapidly against my ribs. A frantic, beautiful rhythm.
Minutes pass in the fortified silence of the basement. The beast is fully sated, fat on possession and triumph. But the lethal protector is awake.
I turn my head slowly, resting my cheek against the soft curve of her breast. The surveillance monitors on the wall are still glowing blue. The destroyed laptops litter the floor, but the retrofitted servers in the corner are fully operational.
I lift my weight off her. She makes a small, protesting sound when I withdraw from her body, and the sound writes itself somewhere permanent in me. The wetness of us streaks the polished mahogany. My seed pools on her inner thigh. I have never seen anything more obscene or more correct.
She is shaking. Not from cold. From the aftershocks. Her dark eyes are glassy. Her lips are parted. The cynical lawyer is gone for the second time in her life, and I am the one who took her down both times.
I scan the room. Rules return in a steady column. Rule one: hydration. Rule two: warmth. Rule three: containment. The fixer's entire architecture, redirected to a single Costa wife.
I retrieve my black button-down from the floor and wrap it around her shoulders.
I pull the front closed and button the bottom three buttons myself.
I crouch and lift her off the table, cradling her against my bare chest. Her bare toes brush my hip.
I carry her to the wet bar built into the west wall of the war room, set her on the granite, and pour a glass of cold water from the carafe.
I press the rim to her lower lip. She drinks.
The platinum ring catches the blue monitor light and throws a starburst across her throat.
"All of it," I tell her. My voice has not come back yet. It is still the gravel of a man who screamed her name into the vault ten minutes ago.
She drains the glass. I refill it. She drinks again.
I watch her swallow. Her throat moves with each swallow—the small, stubborn sign of life I have been unable to stop watching since she walked into Il Corvo, fourteen minutes late, soaked through with rain.
The beat that broke the matrix. The beat I will spend the rest of my life protecting.
I retrieve a clean cloth from the drawer beneath the bar—military-grade kit, stocked for triage.
I wet it under the warm tap. I clean her thighs slowly, methodically, the way I once cleaned a service pistol.
The reverence is the same. The math is not.
There is no math here. There is only her, and the small, contented sigh she makes when I run the cloth between her legs.
She watches me work. The corner of her mouth lifts. "Aftercare from the fixer."
"Aftercare from your husband."
The word lands between us. I have not earned it yet. The ring is on her finger and the contract is dead, but the legal paperwork has not caught up. I do not care. The word is accurate. The rest is logistics.
I fold the cloth and set it on the granite.
I run the back of my knuckles down the column of her spine—slow, slow, the hand that held the ring out to her at Il Corvo tracing every vertebra now.
She arches into the touch. A low, hungry hum rises from her chest. I file it.
I file every sound she makes. The fixer has never built a database he intends to use this much.
I help her down from the granite. Her bare feet meet the cold concrete of the war room floor—the most heavily fortified room in the compound, and she stands in the middle of it in nothing but my black button-down and my mother’s ring.
She takes up exactly as much space as she wants.
Do not lose the objective, Enzo. The objective has changed. The objective is her.
I drop my hand to the small of her back.
I keep it there. The pressure is light. It is not a leash.
It is a tether. It is the shape my palm makes when I am telling my body she is here, and she is staying, and we are going upstairs to my bed where I will spend the rest of the night learning the shape of her sleeping next to me.
We are three steps from the door when the server in the corner emits a single, sharp chime.
My hand on her back tightens. Old reflex. New stakes.
Suddenly, a silent alarm flashes red across the primary monitor.
A priority-one encrypted ping drops into the secure network.
The transit hub data I destroyed in the tunnels with Rourke was just the tip of the spear.
The Bellantis are making a move. The retaliatory strike is already forming in the shadows of the South Side.
But the encrypted alert isn't coming from Matteo or Dante upstairs.
It carries Santi's field signature—a Costa cipher only the three of us know.
My older cousin Santi—Igor's son, the shadow on the periphery of every Costa room, the sniper who watches from rooftops nobody else has clearance to occupy—is currently relaying field intel he physically recovered from deep within enemy territory.
Vincenzo is decrypting the file from his end.
Santi found something in the wreckage of the money-laundering network.
The war did not end in the tunnels today.
It is only escalating to a catastrophic new level.
I tighten my grip on Natalia's hips. I pull her closer, wrapping my scarred body around hers, acting as a human shield against the coming violence.
The calculation begins again in my mind.
The wheels start turning, spinning faster and deadlier than ever before.
But this time, I am not calculating revenge for an old ghost. I am redrawing the entire Chicago board, rewriting every variable in this city until the only safe square left is the one she stands on.