Chapter 15 #2
My hand found her throat first. Not squeezing. Holding. The weight of my palm against the column of her neck, my fingers resting along the side, the heel of my hand against the hollow where her pulse hammered. A reminder of who was in charge. Of who she’d given herself to.
She wrapped her legs around me.
I pushed in. Inch by inch. Slow enough to feel everything—the heat of her, the tightness, the way her body opened for me and then closed around me and held on. Her mouth fell open. A sound left her that had no consonants in it. Just breath and want.
I moved. Deep. Steady. The rhythm unhurried, each stroke deliberate, each withdrawal a kind of cruelty and each return a kind of grace.
“Good girl,” I said. Low. Against her ear. “That’s my good girl.”
Her nails dug into my back. The pain bright and specific and welcome.
“So tight,” I said. “So fucking tight. Like you were made for this. Made for me.”
She was close again. I could feel it—the tension climbing, her body tightening around me, her breathing going ragged. Her hips moved to meet mine and the rhythm we found together was the rhythm of something that had always existed and had been waiting for us to discover it.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Santo—“
I pulled out. She made a sound—animal, furious, the sound of a woman who had been denied twice and was running out of patience with the man responsible.
I flipped her. Onto her stomach. My hands on her hips, positioning her, the controlled handling of a body I knew by touch now, every angle and curve and sound committed to permanent memory.
I entered her from behind. One thrust. Full. Her face pressed into the pillow, the sound she made muffled by cotton and the rabbit’s ear—the cream-colored witness still half on the bed where it had been knocked.
My hand fisted in her hair. Not pulling—gathering. The dark strands wound around my fingers, the tension between us a living thing, a third presence in the bed. My other hand slid under her. Found her. The slick, swollen center of her where every nerve ending had been edged past reason.
“Ask me,” I said.
“Please Daddy.” No resistance this time. No fight. Just the words, given freely, given with everything she had. “Please.”
“Come for me.”
She did.
The orgasm hit her like a wave breaking—her whole body seizing, her back arching against my chest, the sound that tore out of her loud and raw and real.
I felt it around me—the rhythmic tightening, the pulse of her, the way her body claimed mine in the act of coming apart.
Her hands gripped the sheets. Her teeth found the pillow. She shook.
I followed. The release tore through me with a force that whited out my vision—everything narrowing to the single point of contact between us, her body around mine, the heat and the pressure and the specific, devastating fact of being inside the woman I loved while she came undone.
I stayed inside her.
My chest against her back. My mouth finding the nape of her neck—the vulnerable place where her hair parted, where the skin was softest, where I could feel her pulse decelerating by degrees.
“Cora,” I said. Against her skin. Into the warmth of her.
Her name in my mouth like a prayer. Like a promise. Like the only word I’d ever need to know.
We stayed like that until the light changed.
I held her. My arms around her, her back against my chest, the space between us eliminated.
Zero distance. The closest two people could get without actually merging, which was a thing I would’ve done if the physics had allowed it.
Just absorbed her. Taken her inside the ribcage and kept her there, warm and safe, where nothing could reach her that didn’t go through me first.
Midge had relocated to the pillow at some point during the proceedings. She was pretending to be asleep with the rigid conviction of a creature who had witnessed the entire thing and was electing to have no comment.
“Shower,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
I carried her. She didn’t argue. Her arms went around my neck. The rabbit dropped from the bed to the floor again. I’d get it later.
The shower was the ritual continued.
I’d run the water to the temperature I’d learned—the threshold between hot and too-hot, the precise degree where her shoulders dropped and her spine curved and the last of whatever she was carrying released.
Steam filled the small bathroom. The mirror vanished.
The world contracted to the tile and the water and the two of us inside it.
The rosemary shampoo filled my palm. I worked it through her hair — the long strokes, the circles at her scalp, the technique I’d been practicing since the first morning with the brush.
She leaned against me. Her back against my chest under the spray, the water running over both of us, her head tipped back against my shoulder.
Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was soft.
She looked like someone who had set down a heavy thing and was standing there marveling at how light her hands felt.
I rinsed her. Shielded her eyes. The gesture that arrived without thought every time—my palm across her forehead, fingers spread, the instinct so deep I didn’t even register it as a choice anymore. It was just the thing my hand did when water was near her face.
She turned. Looked up at me through the steam. Water on her lashes. Water on the scar through her eyebrow.
“Thank you,” she said.
Two words. Quiet. Carrying more than their weight.
I kissed her forehead. Turned off the water.
We were heading to Caruso’s. Dante and Marco needed to talk to me about our plan to gather the families. Cora, I hoped, would spend some time with Gemma. Have a chance to be small, maybe.
The drive was quiet. The good quiet. The kind we‘d built between us over days—silence that wasn’t absence but presence, the shared understanding that some moments didn‘t need words and were better without them. She held the rabbit in her lap. Midge’s head swiveled, tracking the city through the windshield.
Dante’s building. Brick. The converted warehouse with its expensive renovation that pretended to be simple. I parked. Came around.
The door opened before we reached it.
Gemma stood in the doorway in pajamas—soft-looking, patterned with something I couldn’t identify from the car, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her feet bare on the threshold.
She was holding two sippy cups. One in each hand.
The matching gesture so deliberate, so purposeful, that I felt the meaning of it land in my chest before my brain could translate.
One for her. One for Cora.
“I’m so excited for our play date!” Gemma said. Her face lit—the smile that transformed her, the one that made her look like someone who had finally been given permission to exist fully. “Let’s go. Caravaggio is waiting for us!”
Cora looked at me. The look was quick—a glance over her shoulder as she stepped toward the door, the bag in her hand, the rabbit and the crayons and the moon pajamas all going with her into the warmth of a place where someone was waiting in matching pajamas with a sippy cup ready.
She looked happy.
Gemma caught my eye over Cora’s head. The look said I’ve got her. The look said go. The look said, with the quiet authority of a woman who had found her own version of this and understood exactly what it cost and what it was worth: she’s safe here.
She waved me off.
I sat in the car for ten seconds after the door closed. The engine running. The November air coming through the crack in the window. My hands on the wheel. The split knuckles healing. The scabs tightening when I gripped.
Then I drove.
The city changed around me the way it always did—the residential blocks giving way to density, the buildings pressing closer, the streets narrowing.
Bridgeport came in through the windshield like something I could feel on my skin.
My neighborhood. My family’s neighborhood.
The place that had sheltered us for fifty years and that someone was trying to burn out from under us.
The green awning appeared. The faded gold script—CARUSO’S. The door that was heavier than it looked. I parked in the alley. Killed the engine.
I went in through the back.
Dante was behind the desk. Jacket off. Sleeves rolled to the forearm.
The bruise on his jaw had yellowed — the healing stage, the damage transitioning from fresh evidence to old news.
He didn‘t mention it. I didn’t mention it.
The conversation had been had with my fist and his silence and the single word okay that contained everything else.
Marco was in the corner chair. Phone down for once—face-down on the armrest, the screen dark. That alone told me this was serious. Marco without his phone was like Marco without his charm: a signal that the usual armor had been set aside because the situation demanded full attention.
The desk was covered.
Photographs. Documents. A timeline drawn on a sheet of paper in Dante’s precise handwriting—dates and names and arrows connecting them, the visual architecture of an operation laid bare.
I recognized some of it. The Bratva cell.
The grab attempt. Ferrara’s face in the photograph Dante had shown Cora at dinner.
But there was more now. Layers I hadn’t seen.
“Sit down,” Dante said.
I sat.
Dante walked me through it.
The Bratva cell first. Six men, contracted through a middleman named Pushkin — a Russian fixer who operated out of a social club in Ukrainian Village and who Marco had been tracking since October. Volkov had ties to three families. Only one of them was currently in conflict with us.