Chapter 30
GIA
I hate the sound of this rain.
It’s a rhythmic, relentless tapping against the windowpanes that sounds too much like a countdown.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Every drop is a second I’m losing, a moment closer to whatever "motivation" my father is cooking up for me. The house is silent tonight, a heavy, velvet kind of quiet that usually makes my skin itch, but tonight, it’s just.. . still.
I’m sitting on the edge of Rafael’s side of the bed, the medical kit open between us. He’s propped up against a mountain of pillows, his jaw set stubbornly. The room is dim, lit only by the amber glow of the bedside lamp, casting long, dancing shadows across his chest.
"You're being too quiet, Gia," he grumbles. His voice is a low, sandpaper rasp that vibrates in the small space between us. "It’s making me twitchy."
"I’m concentrating," I murmur, my fingers steady as I peel back the surgical tape on his shoulder. "If I go too fast, I’ll take a layer of skin with it, and then you’ll growl at me for the next three hours."
"I don't growl."
"You do. You’re like a very large, very irritable bear who hasn't had his morning coffee." I dab a fresh piece of gauze with antiseptic. "Now, hold still. This is going to sting."
He doesn't flinch as the medicine hits the raw, pink edges of the wound. He just watches me. His green eyes are dark, focused on my face with an intensity that makes my pulse do a frantic little dance at the base of my throat. He's looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room. Like I’m not a spy. Like I’m just Gia.
"There's been something on my mind for a while now," he says suddenly, his voice dropping an octave.
I pause, the gauze hovering over his skin. "Just one thing? I figured your mind was a crowded place, Rafael."
He doesn't bite at the sass. He reaches out with his good hand, his fingers grazing my wrist, anchoring me in place. "The wedding. The one five years ago. I know about Arcuri."
The name hits me like a physical blow. I look down at his shoulder, focusing on the scar. My breath hitches, and for a second, the room feels ten degrees colder. I could lie. I’m good at it. I could tell him it was a long time ago and it doesn't matter.
But I’m tired of the lies. I’m tired of carrying a dead man’s ghost on my back while I'm trying to survive a living one.
"I was nineteen," I whisper. The words feel like glass in my throat.
Rafael goes perfectly still. He doesn't interrupt. He doesn't push. He just waits, his hand resting heavy and warm against my thigh.
"His name was Cosimo Arcuri," I say, and even naming him feels like letting poison into the room.
"He was twenty years older than me. Minimum.
Old money, old violence. My father didn't just sign a marriage certificate; he signed a bill of sale.
The contract had clauses about my 'conduct' and my 'movements' that read more like ownership documents than engagement terms."
I look up at Rafael, my vision blurring. "He started hitting me during our engagement. Just small things at first. Bruises where people wouldn't see."
Rafael’s grip on my leg tightens, his knuckles going white. The air in the room suddenly feels charged, heavy with his silent, simmering fury.
"The wedding happened," I continue, my voice gaining a jagged, hollow edge.
"We were at the celebration. The long table, the white flowers, the champagne. I was sitting right beside him, feeling the weight of his hand on my leg, knowing that in two hours, I’d be alone with him in a house I couldn't leave. "
I close my eyes, and I’m back there. The smell of his heavy cologne. The way my wedding dress felt like a shroud.
"Then the gunfire started. It was an ambush—some long-running territory dispute that had nothing to do with me. The world exploded into noise and glass. One second he was leaning in to whisper something cruel in my ear, and the next... he was dead. Right there at the table. Right next to me. Everyone scrambled. Guests threw themselves over balconies, guards dragged my father toward the exits, and the help vanished into the kitchens. In three seconds, that grand ballroom became a graveyard of overturned chairs and broken crystal.”
I take a ragged breath, the phantom scent of gunpowder filling my nose.
"I survived a firefight I had no part in creating, at a wedding I had not chosen.
I sat there in my white lace, covered in the blood of a man who had been hurting me.
And the worst part, Rafael? The part I can't say out loud?
I wasn't scared. I was relieved. The room was empty, Rafael.
Just me, the smoke, and his body. I sat there for what felt like ten minutes in that horrific, ringing silence before the first responders finally cleared the doors and all I felt was the weight of the world lifting off my chest because he couldn't touch me anymore. "
I look at him then, my lower lip trembling. "I never processed it. Not the relief, not the guilt. I just... shut down. For five years, I didn't want any man to touch me. I refused every proposal my father threw at me until I finally managed to disappear to Paris."
The silence that follows is absolute. The only sound is the rain and the steady, rhythmic beep of my own heart in my ears. I wait for the judgment. I wait for him to tell me I’m broken.
Instead, he reaches out. He cups my face with his good hand, his thumb catching a tear I didn't even know I’d shed.
"He’s dead, Gia," Rafael says. His voice is low, firm, like he’s anchoring me to the present. "He can't touch you. Your father can't give you to anyone else. You’re here. You’re with me."
"I'm with a man who took a bullet for me," I whisper, leaning into his palm. "And I don't know how to be... okay."
"You don't have to be okay," he murmurs. "You just have to be here."
He pulls me forward, his hand sliding into my hair, guiding my head to his chest—the side that isn't wounded. I can hear his heart. It’s a slow, powerful thrumming, a solid, living thing. I breathe in the scent of him mixed with the faint metallic tang of the antiseptic.
The weight I’ve been carrying, the silver veil of Cosimo’s blood, finally starts to lift.
I pull back just enough to look at him. His eyes are burning, a dark, predatory green that isn't about violence anymore. It’s about hunger. It’s about the fact that I just stripped my soul bare for him, and he’s ready to claim every inch of what’s left.
"Rafael, your shoulder," I murmur, my hand resting on his bicep. "You shouldn't... the doctor said—"
"Fuck the doctor," he growls.
He leans in, his mouth ghosting over mine, his breath hot. "I don't care if the stitches tear, Gia. I don't care if I bleed out on these sheets. I want you. Do you want me too?"
"You're a stubborn bastard," I whisper, my hands finding the buttons of his pajama bottoms.
"Yes, and you're a liar if you say you don't want this as much as I do."
He kisses me then, and it’s like the world catches fire. It isn't the desperate, panicked kiss of the basement or the clinical trade of the bedroom. It’s a revelation. He tastes like a promise I’m not sure I can keep, and I’m greedy for every second of it.
I climb over him, careful of his left side, my knees straddling his hips. My robe is a thin barrier, and I can feel how hard he is beneath me, pulsing with a need that matches the ache in my own core.
"Look at me," he commands, his hand coming up to grip my throat—not to hurt, but to possess.
I look. His eyes are blown wide, the pupils swallowing the green. He looks wrecked. He looks like a man who has finally found the thing he’s been hunting for.
"You’re alive, Gia," he rasps, his fingers sliding under my robe, finding the sensitive skin of my inner thigh. "You’re mine."
He pulls the robe off my shoulders, letting it pool around my waist. The cool air hits my skin, but I’m burning up. He leans forward, his mouth finding my breast, his tongue swirling over the nipple until I’m arching my back, a low, broken moan escaping me.
"Rafael… please…”
The word is a ragged plea, torn from my throat. The rain drums a frantic rhythm against the windowpanes of our room, a gray world blurring outside.
“Say my name again,” he mutters against my skin, his voice a low rasp that vibrates through my bones. His lips are hot on my collarbone. “Tell me you’re mine.”
“Rafael. I’m yours. Only yours.” Always you.
He moves me down, onto the mattress, his body solid over mine.
The hand that is not wrapped in white gauze slides between my legs.
My own thighs are slick, my skin feverish.
He finds the wet, needy heat of me. I’m so ready for him I’m practically weeping with it, my swollen vulva lips parted and drenched.
He slides two fingers inside, a slow, deep stretch that makes my vision flicker. The feeling is a blunt, wonderful invasion. My inner walls clutch around him, a slick, pulsing grip. “You’re so tight,” he whispers.
His thumb finds my clit, a swollen, aching bead of flesh. He circles it with a rhythmic, punishing pressure. “So wet. Did you think about this a lot?”
“Yes,” I gasp, my head falling back, my hair spilling over the pillows. “Every fucking second since we got married.” My breasts, bare and heavy, rise with my arching spine. They bounce slightly with the tremor that runs through me.
He pulls back just enough to discard his remaining clothes.
His movements are stiff, the bandages on his torso a stark white against his tan, scar-crossed skin.
He kicks his pants away. The sight of him—hard everywhere, his hard length thick and curving up toward his belly, the head a dark, flushed purple—is the most beautiful, terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
Veins rope the shaft. His balls are a heavy, hairy sac beneath.
He’s a man who has been through hell and came out the other side wanting to claim his fucking prize.
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t wait. He mounts me, his weight pressing me into the mattress. He guides his himself to my entrance, the broad head nudging against my plump, parted lips. Then he enters me with one slow, powerful thrust.
I cry out, a raw, unfiltered sound. My hands clutch his shoulders, my nails digging into the hard muscle there.
He’s deep, filling me completely, a solid anchor.
The stretch is immense. I open up for him, swallowing his length until I feel the firm press of his pubic bone against mine.
There’s no pain now, just a deep, throbbing ache that demands more, more.
“Stay with me, Gia,” he mutters, his teeth grazing my earlobe. A possessive nip. “Stay right fucking here.”
He starts to move. His pace is steady and relentless from the first pump. Every thrust is a declaration.
You are alive. You are here. You are mine.
I wrap my legs around his waist, my thighs squeezing his hips, pulling him deeper. My body moves in perfect, desperate sync with his. My breasts bounce in a wild, circular rhythm, the nipples hardening into points.
The pleasure is a rising tide, a heat that starts in my cunt and floods my belly, my chest, my brain.
It drowns out the sound of the rain, drowns out the memory of the church and the blood.
There is only the heat of him inside me, the sound of his ragged breathing, and the way his dark, demanding, owning eyes never leave mine.
“Look at me,” he growls, his voice thick. “Look at me while I fuck you.”
I do. I stare into those black depths. My own cunt is making a wet, sucking sound every time he pulls back and drives home. The feeling is exquisite. The stretch of my inner walls around his girth, the rub of him against my cervix, the friction of his shaft against my soaked, sensitive flesh.
“You feel that?” he asks, his thrusts becoming sharper, the angle more punishing. “You feel how deep I am? I’m in your fucking guts, Gia. This is where I belong.”
A warm, electric tension coils in my lower belly, a spring winding tighter and tighter. My breath comes in short, desperate gulps. I’m sobbing now, tears mingling with the sweat on my face. “Rafael! I… I’m going to—”
“Yes, you are. Do it, Gia. Come around me. Let me feel you milk it.”
The command breaks me.
I shatter.
It’s a violent, white-hot explosion that strips my mind bare.
My body convulses under him. My internal muscles pulse in a rhythmic, desperate sequence, clenching around his invading shaft like a hungry throat trying to swallow him whole.
A flood of my own fluids gushes out around him, hot and slick.
The sensation is so intense it borders on pain, a hypersensitivity that makes every subsequent thrust a glorious, overstimulating torture.
He follows me a heartbeat later. A guttural, raw sound escapes him as he drives in one last, brutal pump and holds there.
I feel the hot, sudden spill of him inside me, a thick, pulsing release that fills the space his hardness has carved.
His body shudders with the force of it, every muscle in his back and shoulders locking tight.
We stay like that for a long moment, tangled together in the wet, trembling aftermath. Him still inside me, softening slightly but still present. The mixed fluids of our bodies seep out onto the sheets, a warm, sticky pool beneath us.
He finally pulls out, a slow withdrawal that makes me gasp at the empty, sensitized feeling.
He collapses beside me, pulling me to his chest. His good arm—the unbandaged one—wraps around me, holding me tight against the sweat and salt of his skin.
I can feel the warmth of him, the steady rise and fall of his breathing. My own clit throbs.
He turns his face toward me. His eyes are still dark, but the edge of possession has softened into something else. Something warm. “That,” he says, his voice a rough whisper against my temple, “was just the beginning.”
"Your shoulder," I whisper, my hand resting on the white bandage. I pull back to look, and my heart sinks. A small, dark red bloom is starting to spread through the gauze. "Rafael, you’re bleeding. I told you—"
"It was worth it," he says, his voice sleepy but firm. He pulls me back down, his chin resting on the top of my head.
“You’re insufferable.” I say with a smile I can’t help.
I close my eyes, a sense of peace I haven't known since I was a child finally settling over me. I’m safe. I’m with a man who knows my scars and isn't afraid of them.
But as I drift toward sleep, the memory of the silver wolf charm and my father’s threat flashes in my mind.
I love this man, I realize, the thought as terrifying as any bullet.
And if my father finds out, Rafael won't just be bleeding. He’ll be dead.
I hold him tighter, praying that the morning never comes.