Chapter 5 Vasso
VASSO
Ishouldn’t have touched her.
Not the cheap, offensive cotton she now wraps her body in that I wanted to tear off and replace with silk.
Or that delicate wrist. Or fuck, that smooth place beside her ear where her breath still hitches the way it did when I used to kiss her there.
I shouldn’t even have stayed in the same room long enough to remember the exact heat of her skin beneath my hand—but I did, and of fucking course, the moment I did, every line I’ve drawn for a decade blurs like chalk in rain.
I stand on the master balcony now with a raging erection that won’t quit, a glass of bourbon that tastes like varnished oak and old decisions as the Atlantic wind climbs the cliff face to lay cold fingers against the back of my neck as if the night itself wants to cool what it can’t contain.
Across the endless lawn the lighthouse turns its patient eye, the beam grazing the sweep of beach below and the black bite of the rocks to the north, and for a second—all of one second—I let myself imagine the island as it was when I was a boy who wasn’t allowed up these steps, never mind the inner sanctum of its suites.
A boy who tracked sand into service corridors and learned to make himself narrow in doorways so he wouldn’t be seen.
This fucking house used to spit me out every single time.
Now it wears my name.
You’d think the satisfaction that sings through my veins on that knowledge alone would be enough. That owning the keys to a place that locked you out, holding the deed to every acre where you were told to keep your head down and your voice lower, would roar its own triumph.
But bricks don’t apologize and glass doesn’t grovel, and standing in the rooms where my mother once scrubbed salt from the windows while men in Savile Row suits either leered or ignored her, I feel something tighter than triumph coil in my chest.
Hell, I should tear the entire thing down, starting with that fucking driveway where I came within a whisker of begging the daughter of the man who had already broken my family to choose me anyway, to run, to say no to a future that didn’t have my name in it.
I should replace the gravel with fire and leave nothing for memory to cling to.
Her light is still on.
Of course it is.
I told her goodnight because I know the choreography of restraint, but I didn’t mean it, not when walking away cost me skin; if I’d stayed one second longer in that room I would have undone the knot at her waist and swallowed every reason why this needs to play out as I swore and decreed.
She still wants me.
She can dress it in hate and rancor, but her body doesn’t speak that language; it speaks pulse and breath and the way dilated pupils widen when old heat flares.
Naomi’s body remembers me as clearly as mine remembers her, with whispers of lighthouse nights and greenhouse shadows and that precise, impossible summer when forever felt like a thing two people could actually promise and keep.
I drink and let old man Theodore’s vintage bourbon—the one I stopped the estate from selling to pay off their debts—burn a path down my throat in smug, orderly fire.
I remind myself what this is: a game, a controlled burn, a marriage of convenience, public lies, and private test of wills, my hand at her back on cue and eyes that say the right story when the cameras blink.
I try to remind myself I built this plan on logic and leverage, not on the kind of hunger that makes a man ruin his own strategy.
Except now I’m remembering everything I swore I wouldn’t let myself touch.
The way she used to look at me like I was the only fixed point on a tilting map.
The way my name sounded in her mouth when it was soft.
The way that last week’s betrayal swallowed me whole.
I clawed my way out of that hellhole, turned my family’s shattered reputation into currency and then into a continent of assets; I bought back this island acre by acre with blood and grit and signatures that no one dared forge, and I told myself that the house where I once wasn’t permitted to cross the threshold would feel different once it belonged to me.
It doesn’t.
Or rather, it does, but not in the ways a sane man would hope.
Not yet. Not when every room has a ghost shaped like her.
The gallery windows hold the afterimage of a girl laughing at the gulls; the service corridor has the echo of a boy too proud to look up; the drive is a scar that throbs when I breathe wrong.
I’m thirty-two, and I hate that she can still make me feel eighteen and invincible and desperate in the same heartbeat.
So I force myself to think about the path that brought me back—the years of making myself untouchable, of learning the men who write out the checks and the men who actually sign them, of discovering that revenge requires patience and an appetite for detail.
The deal calendar in my head clicks forward: the conservation lease vote that will put the island’s stewardship in hands I control; the fund that wants a domesticated narrative to go with its capital; the hospitality roadshow that prefers a reformed sinner to an unapologetic one.
And now the story comes with a bonus I didn’t plan for but wholly embrace.
Naomi Kane—no, Naomi Dillinger—still burns for me.
The princess still craves the former pauper.
The girl the world said was out of my league reaches for me with her eyes, her fuckable mouth, her beautiful tits and her yoga-supple hips, even as she glares, and it makes something feral in me bare its teeth.
There’s a satisfaction in that I won’t pretend not to taste, a dark little sweetness at the back of the tongue; revenge is a cold knife, but it can also be honey, and the combination is heady.
I tell myself, out loud, because sometimes you need to hear the words to believe them. I didn’t come back for love. I came back for balance sheets and signatures and the click of a lock when the key turns and barred doors finally open in welcome.
I came back to make sure certain names never sit above mine again. I came back because there’s an old debt carved into the bones of this place, and every day I’m here I intend to collect.
It will be sweeter now.
Because she wants me and I know it.
Because when I put my hand at the small of her back and guide her through a room full of people who once wouldn’t let me through the front door, she’ll lean helpless and willing, and they’ll see, and every eye that ever slid past me will have to watch.
The wind shifts and brings me salt and night-blooming jasmine and the faintest trace of her perfume riding the currents through an open window, and for a reckless second I picture going back down the hall, knocking once and not waiting, telling her the truth with my hands and mouth and my cock instead of in diamonds and embossed paper.
Then I remember the driveway and the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes that night ten years ago, and whatever softness the perfume suggested hardens into the thing that kept me alive when softness was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
She’s a liability, I tell myself.
A weakness.
A fire I can’t feed without burning the scaffolding I’ve built to hold everything else.
And yet I know how this goes: I’ll feed it in controlled portions, I’ll let it lick at my knuckles but not take the hand, I’ll give the performance the world wants and take what I’m owed in quiet moments where the cameras can’t follow. I’ll exact every single pound of flesh until—
I stop, because endings have weight, and the one that wants to finish that sentence is not the one I should allow.
Her light goes out. The bourbon is gone. The house settles and the island breathes.
I toss the glass over the balcony and watch it crash onto the marble below, someone else’s job to clean up this time, not my beloved mother.
Then I spin around, watch my reflection—a man who finally made it inside and still suspects that the lock was the simplest problem to solve.
It’s a good thing then that I’m used to harder challenges.
Like how to sleep when all I see is the way her lips parted when I got too close.
And much how harder it would feel the next time.