Chapter 9 #2
“Yes.” One word. It lands like a slap.
I stare at him across the table. But he’s still saying no.
“Renzo.” Gia, soft. “Maybe she could help.”
“No.” He doesn’t look away from me. “She stays here. End of discussion.”
“You don’t own me.”
“No.” He swallows hard. “But I’m trying to keep you alive. If that requires you hating me, fine. Hate me. But you’re not going.”
No one moves. Rosa has stilled over her serving spoon. Cassia is staring at her plate. My fingers curl around the edge of the table until my knuckles ache.
I push back from the chair. “Excuse me.” Steady. Cold. Every door inside me slamming shut. “I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Isabella.” Gia starts to rise.
“It’s fine. Rosa, thank you.”
I walk out. My heels echo on the marble.
He wants me. I saw it all through dinner. Every time Nico complimented me, every time Rosa called me beautiful, his whole body tightened, every muscle pulling taut like he was holding something back by force.
But wanting isn’t choosing.
I make it to my room before the tears come.
I sink onto the bed, the dress pooling around me like a bruise.
The sounds of the family drift up from below.
Rosa’s voice. Nico’s laugh. The scrape of chairs.
Ordinary. Warm. Everything I’ve been surviving without for three years.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth and wait for it to pass.
It doesn’t pass.
The house goes quiet by degrees. The voices fade. Footsteps on the stairs, then nothing. Then just the hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of the city outside the window.
I’m still sitting there when the door opens.
His footsteps are unmistakable by now. Light for a man his size. Deliberate.
“Don’t.” My voice is wet. Scraped raw. “Not now.”
He doesn’t leave. The door closes. The click of the lock.
“What are you doing?”
Silence. Then, rough. “I don’t know.”
Honest. Raw. The first honest thing he’s said since what happened in the office.
I turn. He’s standing just inside the room, arms at his sides. He takes in the blue fabric, and his Adam’s apple bobs.
“You wore that for me. To make me look.”
Not a question.
“Did it work?”
A sound leaves him. Hollow and broken. “You walked in and I stopped breathing.”
“Then tell me. Because from where I’m standing, you’ve spent two days pretending I don’t exist. And now you’re telling me I can’t be there when you find my sister. So forgive me if I don’t understand.”
He moves. Three steps, closing the distance, stopping just short of touching me. Sandalwood and something darker filling the space between us. The heat of his body seeping through the silk.
“You want to know what it did to me?” His voice is rough. “Watching you walk in wearing that. My brothers’ heads turning. Nico flirting and Marco staring and knowing every single one of them was thinking about what’s under that silk.”
My throat tightens.
“Sitting across from you for an hour, not allowed to touch, not allowed to take you, not allowed to do anything but sit there while you looked at me like I’d betrayed you.” He reaches toward my face, doesn’t quite make contact. “That hurt. This hurts. You hurt.”
“Then why did you walk away?”
A long pause. His hand drops. Comes back up. Drops again.
“Because I destroy everything.” The words are barely there. He grabs the doorframe behind him, holding it until the wood creaks. “The last person I loved.” He stops. Swallows. Tries again. “She called my name at the end. And I was across town.”
His voice cracks on the last word. He turns away. His chest heaving. “If I let myself have you. Really have you.” He drags his fist across his jaw. “I’ll break you. And I can’t.”
The rest doesn’t come. He just stands there, breathing like he’s been sprinting, fists opening and closing at his sides, turned toward the wall because he can’t look at me while he’s being this vulnerable.
But he’s still standing in front of me.
I reach up. I cup his jaw. He jerks back. Then stills.
“Let me be there tomorrow. I’m not asking to fight. I’m asking to help. On comms. In the van. Something.”
He leans into my hand. A fraction of an inch. Just enough.
“No.”
“Lorenzo.”
“No.” He covers my hand, holds my palm against his face. “I can’t focus if you’re there. I can’t think about anything but keeping you safe, and what you’re asking for is how people get killed.” His voice drops, raw and scraped. “My people. Your sister. I need to be able to do my job.”
My lungs lock.
“Then promise me something.” He opens his eyes. Dark. Burning. “Bring her back. Bring yourself back.” My thumb brushes his cheekbone. “I’ll be here. But you have to come back.”
He turns his head, presses his lips to my palm.
Then he pulls my hand away from his face. Gentle. But firm.
“The dress.” His voice is rough. “Don’t wear it again.”
“Why?”
“Because the next time I see you in it, I won’t be able to walk away.” He holds my stare. “And I’m barely holding on as it is.”
He releases my wrist. Steps back. Turns toward the door.
“Lorenzo.”
He stops. Doesn’t turn around.
“Tomorrow night. You find her.”
A pause. “I’ll find her.”
He reaches for the handle.
“Wait.”
He freezes.
“The zipper.” I turn my back to him. “I can’t reach it.”
Silence. His chest rises and falls.
“Isabella.”
“It’s a zipper, Lorenzo. I’m not asking you to defuse a bomb.”
More silence. Then footsteps. Close. His heat against my back. He finds the tab. The metal is small, and his scarred knuckles aren’t built for this delicate work. He fumbles once. The pad of his thumb brushes the bare skin above the fabric.
He doesn’t pull it down.
“You’re stalling.”
“I’m not.”
He is. His knuckle drags down my spine as the zipper follows. Slow. Pieces of silk and cool air hit my skin inch by inch. Shoulder blades. The band of my strapless bra. The small of my back.
The dress slips off my shoulders. Pools at my feet.
I’m standing in front of him in a strapless bra and underwear. The air conditioning raises every hair on my body. Behind me, Lorenzo has stopped breathing.
His grip closes on my nape. Not gentle. The grip of a man who’s stopped fighting. He walks me forward. My palms hit the vanity. Cool marble under my fingers, the mirror catching both of us. Me flushed and stripped down. Him behind me, face taut, still dressed.
“Watch.” One word. A command. His eyes meet mine in the glass.
He traces down my ribs. Over the curve of my waist. Along the waistband of my underwear, tugging it aside but not off.
“Tell me to stop.” Low. Steady. Giving me an out.
“Don’t you dare.”
His jaw unlocks for half a second. The mirror catches it. His pupils swallowing what’s left of the brown. His touch slides beneath the fabric. Between my legs.
Heat floods between my thighs. A full-body flush that starts at my scalp and rolls down.
“Oh.” Not a word. Just a sound I didn’t mean to make.
“Open your eyes.”
When did I close them? The mirror shows me someone I don’t recognize. Cheeks flushed. Rough knuckles between my thighs, his face buried in my hair, his weight pressing me into the marble.
He doesn’t speak at first. Just works me with the same precision he uses for every task in his life. Focused. Patient. Reading every twitch and shiver like he’s already mapped what makes me fall apart.
My hip shifts against the marble and I hiss. Cold. Too cold against flushed skin. He adjusts. Pulls me back against him, one degree, so my weight leans into his chest instead of the stone.
“That’s it.” Low. Against my hair. “Just like that.”
I grip the vanity edge until my knuckles go white. My reflection grips it too. Both of us unable to look away.
“You’re soaking my fingers.”
My knees buckle. He holds me up by the neck. His grip keeps me pinned while his thumb drags through the slick heat of me, circling where I need him most, then pulling away.
“Not yet.” Barely a murmur. “I want you wrecked first.”
“Watch.” Rougher now. “I want you to see what I see.”
I try. My eyes keep closing. Keep rolling back. His fingers curl inside me and my spine arches and a moan drags out of me, low and raw and loud enough to fill the room.
“Quiet.”
I press my lips together. Too late. The whimper is already hanging between us.
Faster. His skin burns against mine where the marble chills everything else.
He’s hard against my lower back and every shift of his hips grinds the proof into my skin.
But his rhythm doesn’t falter. His focus stays on me.
On the pace that’s unraveling me thread by thread. I bite my own lip and taste copper.
“Look at yourself.” Low. Stripped. “Look at what’s happening to you.”
The woman in the mirror is shaking. Skin flushed from chest to cheeks. Strapless bra askew. Underwear pulled to one side by a calloused grip. Her thighs spreading wider, desperate for more, and she is so close that the next stroke will break her.
Sandalwood and gun oil and underneath, just him. The scent soaked into the skin behind my ear where his breath lands but his mouth doesn’t.
His pace shifts. His grip on my neck tightens.
“Lorenzo.” Broken. Not a name. A plea.
“Come for me.”
My body obeys before my brain catches up.
The orgasm hits my core first, a clench so hard my vision whites.
Then it floods outward, thighs shaking, stomach clenching, heat rolling up my spine.
One breath rips out of me like a sob. My legs give.
He catches me. One arm banded across my waist, holding me upright while my pussy pulses around his fingers and my whole body locks and releases and locks again.
In the mirror, his face buried in my neck. Eyes shut. Every muscle in his face locked tight. He’s hard against the small of my back. Straining.
And he doesn’t take a single thing for himself.
He holds me through the aftershocks. Each one smaller than the last. Ragged but controlled. His hold loosening by degrees until it’s less restraint and more support.
Then he picks me up. Lifts me off my feet like I weigh nothing. Carries me to the bed. Sets me down on the mattress with a softness that contradicts every scar on his body.
He disappears into the bathroom. Water runs. He comes back with a warm cloth and crouches beside the bed. He wipes down my thighs. Gentle. Thorough. Not meeting my eyes. Focused on the task like it’s field maintenance, except his breathing has gone uneven and the cloth isn’t steady in his grip.
A throw blanket from the foot of the bed. He wraps it around my shoulders.
Then he crosses the room. Picks up the blue dress from the floor. Folds it once. Places it on the chair.
He straightens. Back to me.
“Lorenzo.”
He stops at the door.
“You made me watch. But you still won’t look at me.”
His head drops. One breath. Two.
The door opens. Closes. Gone.
I sit there. Wrapped in his blanket. The cloth cooling against my skin. My reflection stares back from the vanity across the room. Hair ruined. Glassy. Dark.
I came apart in his mirror while he held me up. Didn’t kiss me. Didn’t take anything for himself. Just gave and gave and then cleaned me up like I was worth caring for.
“I’m fine.” I say it to the empty room. “Very normal night.”
My voice cracks on the last word.
The bruises on my hips are already forming. His fingerprints. I press my thumb against one. Even rough, even gripping hard enough to mark, the pressure had shifted. For one second. Checking for damage. Calibrating.
The enforcer who calibrates his pressure.
Sofia. Tomorrow night. The warehouse.
I pull the blanket tighter. Curl up with sandalwood on my skin and his fingerprints on my hips and the memory of one word in his voice, the only word that mattered.
Tomorrow they find Sofia.
Tonight I lie awake pressing my thumb against his bruises and stop pretending this was just physical.
I’m not that good a liar.