Chapter 9
CASSIA
The mattress shudders beneath me.
My eyes snap open to moonlight and shadow.
For a moment I don’t understand what pulled me from sleep.
Then I hear it.
A sound dragged from somewhere deep. Low. Guttural. Coming from the man beside me.
His breathing has turned ragged. Not the slow rhythm I’ve memorized over the nights. Hunted. Jagged. A man fighting something he can’t escape.
I turn my head on the pillow.
Every muscle in his body is locked tight. Tendons standing out along his forearms where his fists twist in the sheets. Jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumps. Shirt dark with sweat, clinging to his chest. Lids moving, trapping him in terrors I can’t see.
Trapped somewhere I can’t follow.
Another sound escapes him. Worse than the first. A name, ripped from somewhere so deep it sounds like it’s being torn out against his will.
The sound settles into my chest like a splinter.
I’ve heard him have nightmares before. Through walls, on late nights at the compound when I was working for my father.
The ragged screams that no one acknowledged come morning.
The staff moving quieter the next day, giving him space, pretending they hadn’t heard their Don breaking apart in the dark.
I never thought I’d be this close to it.
His body jerks against the mattress. Fighting phantoms. His fists claw at the sheets.
Eighteen inches of rumpled cotton separate us. And that invisible line we’ve both pretended was sacred.
My palm moves before I can stop it.
Across the space between us. Across the line.
I flatten it over his heart.
He’s burning. His heartbeat slams into my skin hard enough to bruise. Beneath my touch, every muscle is locked so tight he might as well be carved from marble.
“Dante.” His name tears out of me. Urgent and unguarded. Nothing like the measured tones I’ve practiced my whole life. Nothing like the cautious daughter I was. The practical one. “Come back.”
His eyes fly open.
Wild. Violent in the moonlight. Pupils blown wide, seeing a threat that isn’t me.
For a single terrible heartbeat, this is the man who kills. The Don. The monster under the bed in the flesh.
I don’t move.
His focus searches the darkness. Lost and feral. Then it finds my face. The violence drains from his shoulders degree by degree. His jaw unlocks. The hard line of his expression goes slack, and his brows draw together the way a child’s would.
He blinks once. Twice. His pupils contract.
And then he’s just looking at me with nothing between us. No composure. No walls. Just him.
He’s here. He’s back.
“Breathe.” The word leaves me soft. Instinctive.
His chest expands under my palm. Once. Twice. Following my instruction like it’s the only anchor he has.
“You were dreaming.” A whisper.
“I know.” Sand over gravel. Wrecked.
My palm is still on his chest. His heart slowing beneath it. I should pull back. Retreat to my side. Pretend the line still exists.
I don’t.
He doesn’t push me away.
The seconds stretch. His breathing evening out. His focus on mine, unblinking, stripped bare.
His hand moves. Slow, like he’s fighting himself every inch. Like reaching for me is the hardest thing he’s ever done. His fingers close over mine. Press my palm harder against his chest. Hold me there like I’m the only thing keeping him anchored to the world.
Neither of us speaks.
His thumb strokes across my knuckles. Once. A question without words.
“Cassia.” My name in his mouth. Rough. Broken.
“I’m here.”
His expression changes. Darker now. The fear draining away, replaced by something else. Something that makes my pulse stutter.
His free hand rises. Slow. Deliberate. His knuckles graze along my jaw, and I stop breathing.
“I should send you back to your side of the bed.” His voice is gravel and smoke.
“You should.”
“Tell me to stop.”
The command hangs between us. Not a request. A dare.
I don’t tell him to stop.
The air charges. The moment before lightning strikes.
His thumb traces my lower lip. Featherlight. Testing.
“Three weeks.” The words scrape out of him. “Three weeks of lying next to you. Not touching.”
Three years, I think. Three years of watching you and never being seen.
“I know,” I whisper.
His focus snaps to mine. Reading something in my face that makes his grip tighten on my jaw.
“You know?”
I shouldn’t say it. Shouldn’t admit anything. But his thumb is still on my lip and his heart is still pounding under my palm and I’m so tired of being invisible.
“I know exactly.”
His control snaps. I can see the exact moment it goes.
He moves.
His mouth finds mine.
Not tender. Not tentative. Hunger, raw and urgent, like every night of lying beside me built pressure he couldn’t contain. Like he’s been holding his breath for days and I’m the only air that matters.
The first press steals my breath. Warm, firm, tasting of coffee and a darkness underneath. A taste that is his alone.
The second kiss erases every number in my head.
He tilts my chin, and I part for him without thought. His tongue strokes against mine and my whole body clenches, a pulse that radiates from the contact to my spine to the ache between my thighs.
He kisses like he does everything else. With focus so complete the rest of the world ceases to exist. One palm cups my face. Rough calluses against my cheekbone. The other slides into my hair, cradling the back of my head like I’m something precious and something dangerous all at once.
“Cazzo.” The Italian escapes against me. Involuntary. Wrecked.
I pull back just far enough to breathe. “That bad?”
A rough sound. A laugh. “I’m fucked.”
“Is that a complaint?”
His gaze blazes. “It’s a warning.”
Then he’s on me again, harder now, and my body gives against his. My fingers dig into his arms just to stay upright. A moan escapes me, low and unfamiliar, and he swallows it whole.
He pulls back. Looks at me.
“That sound.” His voice is raw. “Make it again.”
Heat floods my face. “I don’t. I don’t usually do that.”
“With me, you do.”
His grip tangles in my hair. Tilts my head back. Takes us deeper.
I’m still on my side, facing him, but my body strains closer. My fingers find the hem of his shirt. Damp cotton, then bare skin beneath. Hot. Smooth.
He goes rigid when my nails scrape down his spine.
“Careful.” The word comes out strangled.
“Why?”
“Because I’m holding on by a fucking thread.”
I do it again. Harder.
He groans, a sound that shoots straight to my core, and then he’s moving.
One moment we’re side by side. The next, he’s above me.
Hips settling between mine, his arms braced on either side of my head.
The weight of him presses me into the mattress until I’m pinned, held, surrounded.
Cedar and smoke fill my lungs with every breath.
The world tilts.
I pull him closer. Kiss him with everything I’ve hidden.
He returns to my neck. The heat of him against my throat. Then he presses into the hollow below my ear, the spot no one has ever found, and my back arches off the mattress.
“Right there.” I barely recognize my own voice. “Please.”
“Here?” He presses again. Deliberate. “You like that.”
“God, Dante.”
“There she is.” Low. Satisfied.
He opens against my throat. Tasting. Learning the places that make me shake. My head falls back, offering him the column of my neck.
“Everything.” The word escapes me. “I’m giving you everything.”
“I know.” His voice vibrates against my skin. “I know you are.”
His touch traces where fabric meets skin. The strap of my nightgown slides down my shoulder. Cool air meets my skin the same moment warmth covers the exposed curve. Stubble rasping. The contrast makes me shiver.
“Bella.” The word lands against my collarbone. Rough. Reverent.
I thread my fingers through his hair. Tug until he groans. The sound shoots straight to my core. I do it again just to hear that noise. To know I have that power over him.
Me.
The invisible girl who counts everything. Making the most dangerous man in New Orleans groan.
His grip finds my waist. Fingers spread wide, pulling me into him. The hard ridge of him against me makes my breath stutter.
“Feel what you do to me.” A growl against my ear. “Every night, Cassia. Every goddamn night.”
He claims my mouth again. More demanding. My nipples ache against thin cotton, and when he shifts against me, the friction tears a gasp from my chest.
His thigh presses between mine. The pressure sends a shockwave radiating outward. My hips rise to meet him.
“More.” The word slips out before I can catch it.
“Greedy.” But the way he says it sounds like praise.
“Cassia.” Raw. Like saying it costs him something. “Look at me.”
I open my eyes. Find his inches away. Dark and burning and undone.
“Tell me to stop.” He says it like a prayer. Like he’s begging me to save him from himself.
“No.”
His control snaps.
His touch slides up my thigh. Beneath the hem of my nightgown. Calluses catching on smooth skin. My whole body coils tight, waiting, wanting.
He traces circles on bare skin. Spiraling higher with each pass.
“You’re shaking.” His voice drops low. Awed.
“Don’t stop.”
He skims the edge of lace.
“Tell me you want this.”
“I want this.” The words come out broken. “I want you.”
His grip tightens on my hip. His breathing fractures.
He returns to my neck. My spine lifts off the bed. I drag him closer, nails catching flesh, and a sound climbs out of my throat that I don’t recognize.
“That’s it.” His voice is wrecked. “Let me hear you.”
My fingers twist into the sheets, into his skin, into anything I can hold.
“Dante.” His name is the only word left in my vocabulary.
“I’m here.” Rough against my throat. “I’ve got you.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the girl who counts everything tries to surface. Tries to measure what I’m losing.
I stop counting.