Chapter 15
ISABELLA
He’s doing it again. The quiet thing. The pretending-nothing-happened thing.
Three days since he pushed his sleeve up and let me trace silver lines across his forearm.
Three days since until you landed between us like a grenade.
Three days since I found pencil birds in the margins of a field guide.
Watched a man who kills people for a living turn red over an osprey drawing.
And now he’s reading reports. In our office. Six inches from my elbow. Like the world didn’t rearrange itself.
I’m going to lose my mind.
“Tomás isn’t the mole.” I’m typing fast. Too fast. Missing keys.
“Your surveillance photos. The hotel. He’s meeting a woman, Lorenzo.
A civilian.” He leans over. His arm crosses my sight line.
“I pulled his phone records. The calls to the hotel room match a personal number. Not Benedetti. Not connected to anything.” I close the tab.
“He’s a widower. Two kids. Meeting someone he doesn’t want his family to know about yet. ”
“That’s not cleared.”
“It’s cleared enough. The financial records are clean. The hotel visits line up with a relationship, not a dead drop.” I pull up the next window. The list is shorter now. The names left on it are harder. “Which means our mole is still out there and we’re running out of places to look.”
He doesn’t respond to that. But his jaw shifts.
“I’m focusing on Marchetti.” I open the tabs I’ve been running all week. “The bookie you identified. His gambling operation feeds into the Benedetti network, but here’s the problem. Marchetti runs old-school. Cash settlements. In-person intermediaries. The digital footprint is thin.”
“How thin?”
“Thin enough that I can see the money going in but I can’t see what comes out. His books aren’t online. They’re physical. Ledgers. Paper.” My fingers curl against my palm. I straighten them. “I can crack any server on three continents but I can’t hack a notebook in a man’s desk drawer.”
He turns a page. With purpose.
“That’s very convincing,” I say. “You should do community theater.”
A sound comes out of him. Not a laugh. Adjacent to a laugh. Near enough to count. I flag it. Data point four.
We work. My keystrokes filling the room. Marchetti’s digital ghost frustrating me in a way the Benedetti encryption never did. At least firewalls fight back. Paper just sits there.
I stretch. My neck is a knot. The screen has been blurring for the last hour and my shoulders have migrated up to my ears. I twist in the chair, reach past him for the coffee Rosa left, and my elbow clips his forearm.
He doesn’t pull away.
A week ago he would have pulled away.
His hand lands on my shoulder. Not a grip. Just pressure. Thumb finding the knot at the base of my neck like he already mapped the tension and came back with coordinates.
I freeze.
“You’ve been hunched over that screen for six hours.”
“I’m working.”
“You’re grinding your own spine into dust.” His thumb presses. The knot releases and I hate the sound that comes out of me. “Sit back.”
“Are you giving me an order?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t work on me.”
“It works on everyone.”
“I’m not everyone.” I face him. Square. His face is right there. Closer than I calculated. “I’m the woman who knows you draw birds. Your intimidation leverage is permanently shot.”
His throat moves. A heat behind his eyes that isn’t anger. The tension that’s been building since the scars, the garden, the rosary.
“Eat,” he says. Low.
“Make me.”
Wrong words. Right words. Both.
The air in the room compresses. The oxygen siphoned into the inch between us.
“Isabella.” Low. Not a question. Not a command. A warning.
“What?” I’m not backing down. My blood is running hot from hours of dead-end data and the proximity and the fact that he showed me his scars and what his mother left him and birds drawn with careful hands and then spent three days pretending none of it happened.
“You going to keep acting like the kitchen didn’t happen?
Like the garden? You showed me the rosary, Lorenzo.
You let me touch the scars on your arm and said until you and then came in here the next morning and asked about the weather. “
“I don’t know how to do what you’re asking.”
“I’m not asking for anything.”
“You are.” He’s facing me now. Full. His body angled toward mine in the chair. “You’re asking me to be the person who talks about these things. Who processes. I don’t do that. I have never done that.”
“Then what do you do?”
His hand is on my nape. His mouth is on mine.
Not gentle. Not tentative. Not the careful press of a man who planned this.
A collision. His mouth hard against mine, his grip on my neck pulling me forward.
His hand is shaking. The grip itself, at the base of my skull, fine tremors beating against my skin.
He’s shaking and kissing me like he’s been starving and I am the only thing in the room.
Coffee and heat and a decade of nothing.
I make a sound I don’t recognize. My hands grab the front of his shirt, fists in black fabric, dragging him out of his chair and toward me. His other hand finds my waist. Grips. Fingers digging into the curve above my hip hard enough to bruise tomorrow.
His mouth opens against mine. His tongue slides along my lower lip and I open for him and the kiss goes from collision to devouring and it’s in my spine, my stomach, the ache between my thighs that’s been building for weeks.
“So this is happening again.” Breathless against his lips. “Cool. Great. Very professional.”
He draws back an inch. Eyes dark. Pupils wide. The weight on my neck hasn’t moved.
“Shut up, Isabella.”
“You shut up. You started this.”
“You said make me.”
“I was talking about food.”
“No you weren’t.”
No. I wasn’t.
He kisses me again. Unhurried. Deeper. I stand from the chair and we’re body to body and he’s hard against my stomach.
He breaks the kiss. I make a noise of protest that would embarrass me if I had any dignity left.
He reaches for me. Not my wrist. Not my waist. He laces his fingers through mine and holds tight.
His hand. Scarred knuckles and warm skin and the weight of the same hand that traced birds in margins and held a rosary in silver light. I don’t finish the thought. I just follow.
He pulls. Along the corridor. Past the kitchen where Rosa’s humming. Up the stairs I’ve only seen him climb alone.
His bedroom.
He opens the door. I’ve never been in here. The room is spare. Clean. Glock on the nightstand. A single window. Everything squared away with military precision.
He brought me here.
I stop in the doorway and look at the room. At the stripped-down spareness of it. At the single pillow on a bed that’s never held anyone but him. Then at him. Standing in the center of it. Waiting.
“I’ve thought about this.” The words scrape out rough. Like they left him more exposed than the kiss did.
“This?”
“You. In my bed.”
The sentence lands and the air leaves the room.
He walks me backward. My calves hit the mattress. Not a desk. His bed. The sheets carry sandalwood and soap and the clean sweat of a man who runs hot.
He kisses me again and it’s different now. Measured. Deliberate. Like he’s memorizing. My shirt goes over my head. The calluses on his palms scraping across my ribs. The bra clasp. Precise. Trained for a different kind of undoing.
“You’re annoyingly good at that.”
Down my collarbone. My shoulder. The curve of my breast. He strips the bra away and his lips close over my nipple and I arch into him. The sound I make is not dignified. Not controlled. Not anything I can take back.
He eases me back onto the mattress. Shirt still on, unbuttoned to the sternum. Ink and scars and the edge of the rib wound I traced three days ago.
“Your turn.” I tug at the fabric.
He pulls the shirt off. Both arms. Something he hasn’t done by choice, and he does it here, in front of me, without being asked twice.
“That’s new.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not. I’m just—” Looking at him.
His belt. The sound of leather. I help with the zipper. The fabric drops.
My breath catches. My thighs press together on instinct. He watches me look. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t rush. Just lets me take him in with the patience of a man who already knows what’s next.
“Still nervous?” Low. The corner of his mouth barely lifting. I swallow.
“I wasn’t—“
“You were.”
Between my thighs. Over the denim first. Pressing. My hips roll into the pressure. He finds the button. The zipper. Drags the jeans down and I’m helping, kicking them off. He traces the elastic edge of my underwear.
“Say the word and I stop.”
“If you stop, I’ll kill you.”
His thumb hooks the elastic. Pulls. Down. Off. His touch between my legs and I’m wet and this urgent need wins over everything else.
“Fuck.” His voice rough. “You’re so fucking wet.”
No comeback. His touch inside me. His thumb circling. Focused. Learning what makes me gasp. Harder when my breath catches. Easing off when I’m close.
“Look at me.”
My eyes open. He’s right there. Dark. Total focus.
He catches my wrists. Both. One grip. Pins them above my head against the mattress.
“Not yet.”
The words jolt through me. Not yet. Like there’s an order to this. Like he has a plan and I jumped ahead.
I writhe against the pin. His weight holds me. The restraint sends a surge through me I didn’t expect. Being held. Not being able to deflect or run or think.
“Stay here.” A command. “Don’t go into your head.”
“That’s it.” Quiet. Rough. “Right there.”
The tension coiling. My wrists flexing against the pin. He pulls back. I make a sound. Need.
“Don’t stop.”
Condom. The wrapper too loud in the quiet of the room. He pulls me to the center. Settles between my legs.
“I’ve never had anyone in this bed.” His voice scraping. “No one.”
He pushes his cock into me. Slow. The stretch.
My fingers dig into his shoulders and a moan breaks out of me that I couldn’t stop if I tried.
His arms are shaking. The veins in his neck standing out, his breath held between clenched teeth.
Holding himself still while I adjust. The cost of that stillness written in every line of his body.
“Breathe.”
I breathe. He sinks deeper. Fills me until there’s nothing left but him. My thighs lock around his hips. Face to face. In his bed. Where no one’s been.
“Isabella.” Barely a sound. Like it hurts to say.
He moves. Deep. Slow. My back arches off the mattress.
“Mine.” Against my collarbone. Not a question. A fact he’s just discovering.
“Right there.” The words fall out of me. “Don’t change anything.”
I pull him closer and the angle shifts and he swears under his breath. Raw. His control slips. His hips snap forward hard. I gasp. He does it again. The rhythm shifting from studied to desperate.
“Do you have any idea—” The words scraped raw. “How long—”
He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to.
“I know.” I pull him down. Forehead to forehead. “Me too.”
The pressure coils tight. My vision narrows to his eyes and the place where our bodies meet.
“I’m going to—” I don’t finish.
“Lorenzo.”
The orgasm hits like a wall. My pussy squeezing his cock so hard he groans, my back lifting off the mattress. I cry out. Loud. His name wrecked in my throat.
And then he reaches for me. Not my wrist. Not the mattress. He reaches and our grip locks together. Tight.
That’s when he breaks. A groan he tries to swallow and can’t. His body going rigid above me, his face pressed into my neck. Like I’m the only thing keeping him in his body.
He doesn’t let go.
Silence. His room. The hum of the compound settling. A mockingbird outside the window.
We stay. His forehead on my shoulder. Still locked.
He releases. His thumb traces the inside of my wrist where the skin is red. Looking at the marks. His nostrils flare. His touch goes to my hair. Tucking a strand behind my ear. Smoothing it where it tangled. Eyes elsewhere while he does it. Autopilot. Care he didn’t plan.
If I say anything, he’ll stop.
He pulls out. Deals with the condom. Finds his shirt on the floor. Pulls it on and buttons it all the way up, which tells me everything about how exposed he’s feeling. But he doesn’t leave. He stands at the foot. Watching me lie in the sheets with my hair ruined and my legs still unsteady.
“You should eat.”
“You should stop telling me what to do.” I pull the sheet up. His sheet. “Bring me whatever Rosa made. Please.”
That flicker in his face again. The fourth time I’ve caught it.
He goes.
I press my lips together. Swollen. Stubble burn on my chin. The ache in my wrists. The ghost of being held in the one moment he couldn’t pretend.
He brought me here. Where he never let anyone.
And when he came, he reached for me.
I can’t think straight. That’s scarier than everything else happening combined.