Chapter 12 #3
"Come on, little one." His voice was soft. Close. The words brushed against my hair like something physical. "Bath time."
I made a sound. Not a word—something smaller, a protest that hadn't fully formed before it escaped. My fingers curled into the sheet. Held on.
"I know." His mouth pressed against my temple. Warm. Patient. "But you need this. I need to take care of you. Up we go."
He lifted me from the bed the way he'd lifted me in the foyer—one arm under my knees, one around my shoulders, my body gathering against his chest like something folded carefully for safekeeping.
I tucked my face into the hollow of his neck and breathed him in.
Salt and skin and the fading ghost of cologne. The scent of us.
The bathroom was cool at first, then warm.
He'd left the heated floor on—I felt it against his bare feet as he carried me, though I couldn't feel my own.
The soaking tub sat in the far corner beneath a window that looked out on nothing—frosted glass, private, the kind of design that said you are unseen here, you are safe.
He set me on the edge of the tub. Held me steady with one hand while the other turned the taps.
Water rushed into the basin, loud enough to fill the room with white noise, and the sound was soothing in a way I couldn't have explained.
Like rain. Like the ocean. Like the steady shushing of a parent calming a child who'd cried too hard.
He added something to the water. Lavender and vanilla—I recognized the scent as it bloomed through the steam, familiar and sweet, and some part of my floating brain registered that he'd bought this.
Had chosen these specific scents, had placed them in this specific bathroom, had planned for this exact moment.
He lifted me again. Lowered me into the water.
The warmth closed over me. I sank into it—let it swallow my shoulders, my chest, everything but my head, which he cradled with one hand until I was settled against the curved back of the tub.
Then he knelt beside me.
Not on a bath mat. Not on a cushion. On the hard tile floor, his knees against the cold stone, this man who ran a criminal empire kneeling on bathroom tile to wash his wife.
His hands found the bar of soap. Worked it between his palms until a lather formed, then set the bar aside and began.
My shoulders first. Long, slow strokes, his soapy hands gliding over the curve of muscle, the ridge of bone.
My arms—wrist to elbow, elbow to shoulder, each one lifted from the water and attended to with the same methodical care he brought to everything.
My collarbone. The flat plane of my chest. The swell of each breast, handled gently, his thumbs circling but not lingering, cleaning rather than arousing. Taking care.
His hands moved beneath the water. My stomach. My hips. The tops of my thighs, where the muscles were still trembling faintly from what we'd done.
Then he lifted my foot.
I hadn't expected it. The motion pulled me slightly from the haze—the strange sensation of my foot emerging from the warm water into the cooler air, his large hands wrapping around it, his thumb pressing into the arch.
He scrubbed between my toes.
A sound escaped me. Bright and sudden and completely undignified—a giggle.
An actual giggle, the kind that belonged to a child, the kind I hadn't made in so many years I'd forgotten my body was capable of producing it.
It bubbled up from somewhere beneath the floating and the warmth and burst out of me like a bird from a cage.
"Ticklish," I mumbled. My voice sounded strange. Young. Softer than I recognized.
"Of course you are." He was smiling. I could hear it before I saw it, and when I tipped my head to look at him—really look—there it was.
The smile. Not the controlled curve he offered associates and allies.
Not the measured acknowledgment that passed for warmth in boardrooms and sit-downs.
The real one. The one that transformed his face from something carved and intimidating into something beautiful.
I loved his smile. I'd been collecting them for weeks, hoarding each one like a miser counting coins. This one was the best yet. Warm and unguarded and directed entirely at me, at my giggle, at the small ridiculousness of a grown woman squirming because her husband washed between her toes.
He set the first foot down. Lifted the second. I braced for the ticklish scrub—tensed, grinning—and he was gentler this time. The corners of his mouth still curved.
"Lean forward, sweetheart. Let me get your back."
I obeyed. Drew my knees up and rested my cheek against them, arms wrapped loosely around my shins, my spine curved toward him in an offering of trust. The water lapped at my sides. Steam rose in lazy curls.
His hands found my shoulders again. This time there was no soap—just his palms, warm and wet, pressing slow circles into the muscle along my spine.
He worked his way down. Shoulders to shoulder blades.
Shoulder blades to the middle of my back.
The middle of my back to the small of it, where he pressed both thumbs in and held, and I heard myself make a sound that was almost a purr.
The tension I hadn't known I was carrying—hadn't known I was always carrying, the background hum of vigilance that had been running since I was twelve years old—began to dissolve.
Not disappear. Dissolve. Like sugar in warm water.
Like something that had been solid and heavy becoming part of the liquid around me, carried away by the current of his hands.
My eyes closed. The floating deepened. I existed as nothing but sensation—warm water, warm hands, the smell of lavender and vanilla, the quiet sound of Dante breathing beside me.
Safe. Held. Tended.
For the first time in my life, I wasn't performing anything. I was just being.
He lifted me from the water like I weighed nothing.
The towel was warm. The cotton was soft and warm and he wrapped it around me like swaddling, tucking the edges under my arms, pressing the fabric against my skin with his palms until the water was absorbed and all that remained was clean warmth.
He dried my legs. Each one lifted, held steady, the towel run down from thigh to ankle with the same unhurried attention he'd given the washing.
He dried my feet. Gently this time—no scrubbing, no toes, just the soft press of cotton against my soles while I stood barefoot on the heated tile and swayed slightly, drowsy as a child kept up past bedtime.
Then the brush.
He found it on the bathroom counter—my brush, the wide-toothed one I used for wet hair, and he knew it was mine because he knew everything. He'd memorized the layout of my things the way he memorized everything else. With precision. With care.
"Turn around, sweetheart."
I turned. Felt his hand gather my hair at the nape of my neck—the weight of it, heavy and wet, darker when it was soaked. He started at the ends. Long, slow strokes, working through the tangles with a patience that made my throat ache.
No one had brushed my hair since my mother died.
The thought arrived without warning, rising up through the floating like a stone breaking the surface of a still pond. So many years since anyone had stood behind me and drawn a brush through my hair with this kind of tenderness.
The brush moved higher. Through the mid-lengths, working from ends to roots the way someone who'd studied this would do it—not yanking from the top, not forcing through knots.
Learning the grain of my hair and moving with it.
Each stroke pulled the tension from my scalp and replaced it with a tingling warmth that traveled down my spine and settled somewhere in my chest.
He set the brush down. His fingers combed through the result—smooth, damp, untangled. Then he lifted something from the counter.
His t-shirt. Soft gray cotton, worn thin from a hundred washes.
He pulled it over my head. I lifted my arms automatically—the obedient gesture of a child being dressed—and the fabric slid down, engulfing me.
The hem fell to my mid-thigh. The shoulders hung past mine.
I was drowning in it, disappearing into the shape of him, and the feeling was so good it made my eyes sting.
I loved sleeping in his shirts. Loved the way they surrounded me with his scent, the way the softness of the worn cotton felt like being held even when he wasn't there. It was the closest thing to carrying him with me. A portable version of safety.
He guided me to the bed. Our bed, I thought, and the word bloomed in my chest like something planted months ago finally breaking through the soil.
Not mine. Not his. Ours. The sheets were cool and crisp and he pulled them back, settled me against the pillows, drew the covers up to my chin with the same careful precision he brought to everything.
Then he climbed in beside me. Propped himself against the headboard, one arm along the pillow behind my head, his body warm and solid and right there.
"Story?" I asked.
My voice sounded small. Young. Softer than the voice I used in the world—the competent voice, the composed voice, the voice that had destroyed Victoria Marchetti at a charity gala with words sharp enough to draw blood.
This was something else. This was the voice of the girl I'd stopped being at twelve, the one who'd loved bedtime stories and believed the world was a place where someone would always come to tuck her in.
The little I was learning to let myself be.
"Story," he confirmed.
He reached for his nightstand. A book was there—a worn copy of The Little Prince, the spine creased, the cover soft with age.
I curled against his side. My head found its place on his chest—the hollow beneath his collarbone, the spot that felt like it had been carved specifically for me. His heartbeat was steady beneath my ear. Slow. Strong. The metronome I was learning to set my life to.
He opened the book. Found their place—they'd been reading it in pieces, a few pages each night, though we'd only started last week. He cleared his throat softly.
"'If you please—draw me a sheep.'"
His voice was low. Warm. The words came out with a care that surprised me every time—Dante, who spoke in short, blunt sentences, who used language like a scalpel, reading a children's story with the tenderness of a prayer.
The French names rolled off his tongue—le petit prince, le renard, la rose—and I didn't know if his pronunciation was perfect, but it sounded perfect to me.
I didn't need to follow the words. I'd read this book a dozen times. I knew the prince and his rose and the fox who taught him about taming. What mattered most is invisible to the eye.
The sound was enough. The safety was enough.
This man. This terrifying, tender, impossible man—reading me a bedtime story in lamplight while the city slept around us.
Because I'd asked. Because I was his to care for.
Because to him, I was the rose. Not a weakness to be hidden or a transaction to be leveraged or an alliance wrapped in white silk and delivered to an altar.
Just precious. Just worth tending. Just his.