15. Bella #2
I take him the way he has taken me. I push him back against the pillows and climb over him and reach between us to guide him in myself, slow, sinking down until he is buried to the hilt and I have to stop and breathe around the thick stretch of him, the white grid of the lights sliding across both our bodies.
Then I move. I set the pace and I keep it cruel, rising until he nearly slips free and sinking back down slow enough to feel every inch, watching his jaw go tight, watching the control he wears like a second suit come apart at the seams. I brace my hands flat on his chest and I make him wait.
I make him feel me take my own pleasure first, grinding down against him, chasing the angle that lights me up from the inside, until I am slick and clenching around him and his hands come up to grip my hips.
“No,” I tell him. “Hands down.” And the most dangerous man in Chicago fists them back into the sheets and leaves them there because I told him to, and the obedience of it—the wracked restraint in him, the cords standing in his forearms, his cock jerking inside me every time I clench—undoes me faster than his hands ever could.
I make him say my name first for once. I drag it out of him rough and wrecked, the way he has dragged it out of me a dozen times, and when it finally breaks loose it is not a command or a claim but a plea.
Only then do I let us both go. I ride him through it, his release pulsing hot inside me, my own breaking over it in waves that leave me shaking, and I come down over him with my forehead against his and his hands still fisted in the sheets where I left them—the most powerful man in Chicago coming apart underneath his wife because she ordered him to and he wanted, more than control, to obey.
We lie together under the moving lights, my head on his chest, his heart going hard, his hand making slow circles on my back. And neither of us says the thing we’re both, by now, thinking and not saying. We are getting very good at not saying it. It is starting to be louder than saying it would be.
“Nico changed the board tonight,” Dante says into my hair, after a while, because we can never stay out of the war for long and have stopped pretending we want to.
“You understand what he did. He moved the Moretti rank and file off Luca and onto you, in public, in front of witnesses Luca can’t lean on later.
Luca can’t undo a toast. He can only outrun it. ”
“Which means he moves now,” I say. “We sped him up at the Commission. Nico sped him up tonight. He came into these eight weeks thinking he had a season to work in, quiet, and we’ve taken the quiet away from him one room at a time.
A patient man with no time left stops being patient.
That’s when he makes the mistake we need. ”
“That’s when he reaches for you,” Dante says, and his hand goes still on my back.
The whole tenderness of the night doesn’t leave his voice, but something colder lies down underneath it.
“The trap only works if the bait’s real, Isabella.
He has to believe he can get to you, which means I have to leave a gap that looks like the gap a man in love leaves by accident, which means for a few days you are going to be genuinely, not theatrically, exposed.
I have run it forty ways. There’s no version where I keep you completely safe and still catch him.
I need you to know that before you say yes again, in the light, sober, not in the middle of a fight. ”
Propping myself up on his chest, I make sure he can see my face, so he can watch the evidence the way I told him to.
“My father kept everyone he loved behind a wall,” I say, “and it didn’t save him, it just meant he died without anyone close enough to catch the knife.
I’m not going to win the way he lost. Set the gap.
Make it good. Make Luca believe he found the crack in the great Dante Salvatore all by himself.
And when he reaches through it for me—” I take his face in my hands the way he takes mine, claiming it, “—you be the gun, husband, and I’ll be the thing in the dark he didn’t know was waiting, and we will end this the way my father couldn’t, together, with both of us still standing at the end of it.
That’s the only version I want. Build me that one. ”
He looks at me for a long time in the moving Christmas light, and whatever he sees decides him.
“All right,” he says. “We set it after the holidays. Let him sit through one more Christmas thinking he’s winning. Then we take everything he has, starting with the thing he thinks is his weakness in me, which is you, and which is actually the last thing he’ll ever misjudge.”
Outside the window the snow has started again, soft over the absurd little lights, burying the city for the second time this month.
Somewhere across it, Luca Rossi is lying awake adding me up and not liking the total, and he still believes the number is me alone, a grieving girl he can frighten or take.
He has not yet understood that he is no longer subtracting one Moretti from his problem.
He is up against two of us now, in one bed, under one set of ridiculous lights, and we have stopped, somewhere in these eight weeks, being two people he can take apart one at a time.
I fall asleep claiming the warm weight of my husband like territory, and for the first time since the alley on Taylor Street, I am not afraid of what’s coming. I am looking forward to it.