39. Pietro
Pietro
Idon’t kiss her like a hero.
I kiss her like a man who knows he’s seconds from losing her again.
She’s fire beneath me—arch and curve and bite. Her robe slips, silk on skin, revealing the soft places I’ve touched.
Her lips part. Her legs wrap around my waist. She moans like she’s been waiting to exhale since Arcadia first breathed her name.
I slow down.
Just for a second.
Because I want her to know this isn’t just adrenaline. Not lust.
It’s us.
I lift her face to mine.
“I thought you were gone,” I whisper.
“I was,” she breathes. “But you found me.”
We fall again. Slower now. Deeper.
Her hands shake when she cups my jaw.
I don’t let her look away. Not this time. My thumb drags along her cheekbone, slow and reverent, as if I can memorize every plane of her face by touch alone. She shivers. Not composed, not sharp-edged, or untouchable. Here, in my arms, she’s soft. Breakable.
Her mouth parts to speak, but no words come. Only a quiet, trembling gasp as I press my forehead to hers. I can feel her heartbeat against my chest, wild and uneven, like she’s fighting something she doesn’t want to name.
“You don’t have to pretend anymore,” I murmur, voice low. My lips graze the corner of her mouth. “Not with me.”
Her fingers tighten in my hair, anchoring herself like she’s afraid she’ll vanish if she lets go. I kiss her then—slow, deep, lingering. The kind of kiss that tastes like everything we’ve lost and everything we’re terrified to want.
With my mouth on her eyelid, I ask the question that’s burned into my brain.
“Why’d you agree to this? I saw the live feed.”
We share one breath. Her eyes search mine like she’s weighing whether she can survive the truth.
“My only condition was to let you live.”
I exhale. Shake my head slowly.
Then she closes her eyes, gathering whatever fragile courage she has left.
“I lost myself—I needed to know the truth of who I really am.” Her voice trembles, but she doesn’t look away.
“What I learned about my past infected me—why was this life what my mother wanted for me? I thought I had no other choice—my feelings for you would fade. That I’d go back to being… untouched by you.”
“You wanted that?”
Her hands slide up my chest, fingers splaying over my heart.
“But every night, it was the same,” she goes on, her voice breaking. “I’d close my eyes and feel you here. Your eyes locked on mine. I wondered if you were real. Wondered if I’d imagined us. But you’d carved yourself into me and left something I couldn’t scrub out—didn’t want to.”
My chest tightens so hard it hurts.
“I told myself I had unfinished business—my mother’s business,” she whispers.
Her gaze lifts to mine, unflinching now.
“And when I saw you again, I knew,” she says, her voice steady even as her hands shake. “It’s always been real. Even when I tried to convince myself what happened with us was just circumstance—proximity. Emma’s the only thing that’s ever felt like…home—until you.”
Her words are choked with tears. Her confession lands like a fist to my sternum. My throat closes around everything I’ve never said.
I don’t have words for the storm that cracks open inside me. So, I kiss her instead—slow and reverent, like she’s the answer to the question I never dared ask myself.
She arches against me, silk sliding over heated skin. When I lift her, she wraps around me without hesitation, thighs clenching, breath hitching in my ear. I carry her a few steps to the wall and press her there, feeling the outline of every desperate need between us.
Her nails scrape along the nape of my neck as I trail kisses down her throat, tasting the salt of her skin. She tips her head back to give me more. Always giving, even when she doesn’t know how to receive.
“You make it so hard to hate you,” she whispers, voice cracking.
I pull back just enough to see her eyes, dark and unguarded in a way that wrecks me. “Then don’t.”
A choked sound catches in her throat. She swallows hard, blinking like she might shatter if I say one more honest thing. But I’m past caring about my own defenses. Past pretending this is only desire.
My hands slide down her sides, learning her again. She trembles when I brush my thumbs across the soft curve of her hips. When our mouths meet, it’s no longer careful. No longer restrained. She kisses me like I’m her only oxygen. Like she’s been starved for this—for me—and doesn’t know how to stop.
Her robe slips lower, pooling at her waist. I pull back just long enough to look at her, every inch of her flushed and beautiful.
“You’re here,” I say, voice raw. “You’re really here.”
“For as long as you’ll have me,” she breathes.
I kiss her again—harder this time, all teeth and longing. She gasps into my mouth. The contact snaps something inside me. A groan tears free of my throat, low and unsteady, as I press closer until there’s nothing left between us but heat and the fragile, impossible hope that this might last.
I press my mouth against her ear. “They’re watching.”
She rests her forehead against mine, breath ragged. “I don’t care.”
Neither one of us cares.
“I don’t want to be lost anymore,” she whispers.
“Then don’t be,” I promise. My voice is hoarse. “Stay with me. Let me keep you.”
I kiss her ear, “I have something to do.” I whisper my secrets into her ear. Softer than any mike can detect.
Before I slip away.
Their system is sloppy—not secured.
I boot up the control room’s computer.
I’m in luck.
An Internet connection.
I insert the flash drive--press send on the file Luca, Gavrix, and I built.
Every name. Every transaction. Every classified atrocity.
Broadcast to global intelligence.