Chapter 8
Marcello
The gym is underground—one level below the villa's main floor, carved into the hillside itself, the stone walls keeping it cool even in the heat.
I've been down here since midnight. The heavy bag hangs from its chain. I’ve been introducing it to my fists for the better part of two hours with a focus that has nothing to do with training and everything to do with the fact that if I stay still my mind goes to her.
I work combinations. Left hook, right cross, body shot, repeat. The chain rattles. My knuckles split on the fourth set. I don't wrap them, and I don't stop. The sting is useful—it gives the energy somewhere to go.
She laughed today.
One genuine laugh, in the library, brief and surprised and entirely unguarded, and it hit me like a fist to the sternum.
I’ve been managing the wanting since London—the tight professional lid I keep on it, the cold logic of wait and she's not ready and this is not the time. The laugh blew the lid clean off, and I’ve been down here beating myself back to equilibrium ever since.
I want her.
That’s simple.
What’s not simple is the specific quality of the wanting. It doesn’t feel like the appetites I’m accustomed to managing. The clean physical need that women have always been willing to meet and that I have always been able to walk away from.
This wants the laugh as much as the body.
Wants the filing gaze and the lifted chin and the way she traces words with her finger and the sound of her Russian accent thickening when she’s about to tell the truth.
Wants the whole architecture of her, which is dangerous, which is precisely why I’m down here at midnight hitting something instead of going to her room.
Gala is healing. She needs time. She has been through things that require time, and you do not take from a woman who has had too much taken already.
This I know. I also know she’s been awake for the last hour. Her footsteps in the hall are recognizable. I know the particular quality of the light under her door. I know she’s been standing outside the gym door for approximately four minutes.
I stop. Let my hands fall. The bag swings on its chain and goes still.
The door opens.
She stands in an oversized T-shirt that belongs to Gemma and a pair of shorts, hair loose down her back, bare feet on the stone floor.
The gym light is the low amber of the wall sconces, and it turns the ash blonde of her hair to something warmer and catches the dove gray of her eyes when they find mine across the room.
She isn’t pretending she wandered down here by accident. That chin is level. That gaze is direct.
I’m shirtless and bleeding slightly at the knuckles. My chest is heaving. I have approximately no composure left, which is inconvenient.
“You couldn't sleep,” she says. Not a question.
“No.”
Her eyes move down to my hands—the split knuckles, the blood. Something crosses her face. Not alarm. Something more complicated than alarm.
“What were you thinking about?” she asks.
You. Every version of you I've catalogued since London. Your laugh. The way you ate that first meal like someone rationing. Your hands on the wall of the garden. The sound you made when I told you Katya was alive.
Aloud, I say, “Nothing useful.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she crosses the room.
She stops in front of me—close enough that I can smell her. The warm, clean scent that’s purely her underneath everything else. She lifts one hand and places it flat against my chest.
Over my heart. Her palm is cool against the heat of my skin. She can feel it hammering.
Gala.
I cover her hand with mine—not to move it, simply to tell her I feel it too. I keep my eyes on hers.
“Tell me to stop,” I say. “And I stop.”
She looks at me for one more second. Then she steps closer, closes the remaining distance, and presses her mouth to mine.
Gala
He tastes of effort and something dark and clean. The first touch of his mouth is so careful—so deliberately, precisely careful, the way he does everything—that something in me clenched since London simply opens.
Oh.
I kissed Marcello Lucchese first. I want to be clear about that, even inside my head—this was not taken from me. I gave it. I chose it.
I stood in the doorway for four minutes, considering reasons to go back to bed.
Every one of them was sound, and none of them was strong enough.
Because the sound of the chain rattling and the knowledge that he was down here at midnight hitting something, and the look on his face when I made him laugh today added up to one conclusion that no amount of survival math could argue against.
I want him.
His hands come up to my face—both of them, slow, cradling my jaw with a gentleness somehow more devastating than force would be.
He angles my head and deepens the kiss and makes a sound low in his throat that I feel everywhere.
The part of my brain that has been running threat assessments since the van goes quiet for the first time in months.
Quiet. Just—quiet. No calculations. No exits. Just this.
He breaks the kiss and looks at me. The careful neutrality is gone, the professional composure stripped off, and what’s underneath is something vast and direct and aimed entirely at me.
“I’m going to take my time,” he says. His voice has dropped to something low and rough that moves through me like a current. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
He will ask. Every time. I already know this about him—the asking isn't performance, it's architecture. It's how he's built.
“Don't stop,” I say.
Marcello
I take my time.
The T-shirt goes first—I lift it over her head and she lets me, arms raised, and then she’s standing in the amber gym light in just the shorts. I take her in the way I take in any situation that demands full attention, completely, without rushing to the next thing.
She’s extraordinarily beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with the stage they put her on—this is not performance, this is a woman in low light on a Sicilian hillside who has stopped being afraid of what she wants.
Mine. Not because I took her. Because she is standing here.
I bring her against me slowly, one hand at the small of her back, the other coming up to her hair—and she makes a soft sound when our skin meets, a sound of surprised pleasure, like she wasn’t expecting warmth.
My hand tightens in her hair, gently tilting her head back, and her throat is pale in the amber light.
I put my mouth there, and she exhales—long, slow, like something she’s been holding for a very long time.
I take her mouth again, deeper, one hand in her hair and the other traveling the length of her—the curve of her waist, the flare of her hip, the soft warmth of her skin.
She arches into my hand, her own hands gripping my arms, nails pressing in. Not to push me away. The opposite.
“Marcello—” she starts.
“I have you,” I tell her. Against her mouth. “I have you.”
I walk her back to the training mat and lower her down. I plank over her and eyes roam her face. Eyes look back at mine, no wariness in them right now, no calculation, no armor. Just her. Just this.
This is what she looks like when she isn't surviving. This is what she looks like when she's simply living.
I drop my head and put my mouth to the curve of her neck, her collarbone, the swell of her breast, and she gasps and arches as her fingers thread into my hair.
I take my time. Every inch of her is a thing I intend to learn properly, and I have all night.
She deserves to be worshipped by someone who understands the difference between taking and being given.
When my mouth reaches her stomach, she makes a sound that tightens everything in me. I trace lower, and her hips rise as her hands grip the mat.
“Look at me,” I command.
Those gray eyes find mine.
I hold them. And I take care of her.
Gala
I have never felt this way. Not with a man who asks with his hands before he asks with words, not with a man who watches your face like it contains all the information he needs and adjusts accordingly.
Our farm gave me nothing of this. The van gave me terror of it.
The auction stage gave me the threat of it.
This is none of those things.
His mouth on me is deliberate and certain and unhurried.
I come apart completely—the first time with a sound I barely recognize as mine, high and unguarded, my hands in his hair—and he does not stop, works me through it, watches my face with those dark intent eyes until I stop shaking.
Then he rises above me again, both hands framing my face.
His weight is warm and solid, real. I reach for him.
“Tell me,” he murmurs against my mouth.
“Yes,” I say. “Now. Please.”
He shifts, positioning himself.
I feel the cool, unexpected touch of metal—a piercing—and my breath catches.
His eyes sharpen immediately, watching my face.
“That—” I start.
“I know,” he says, low and rough. “Tell me if it's too much.”
It is not too much. The absolute opposite of too much.
“Oh. Oh, that is—”
He moves slowly, reading every breath I take, and when he is fully inside me, we both go still. The amber light and the stone walls and his forehead against mine. Both of us breathing, adjusting to the weight of the moment.
Full. Claimed. But the claiming goes both ways—I can feel it. He is not taking. We are taking each other.
“Gala,” he says. My name in his mouth, in the dark, in Italian-accented English with the weight of a man who does not say things carelessly.
“Move,” I tell him.
Marcello
She undoes every piece of discipline I own.
Every response honest, every sound real, her hands on me like she’s been waiting for somewhere to put all the strength she’s been holding in check.
She comes apart a second time when I reach between us and find the angle that makes her gasp my name and grip the mat, and I follow her over the edge with a groan I don't bother containing because there’s no one in this room to perform for.
It's just us. Just the amber light and the stone walls and this woman and me.
Afterward, we stay as we are, her head on my chest, my hand moving slowly through the fall of her hair. The gym is quiet. Somewhere above us the villa sleeps.
Her breathing slows. Her hand lies flat against my ribs, feeling my heartbeat come down.
Then she speaks.
“Even though you took me against my will, thank you for helping me. You’re not a monster like the men I’ve known.”
I’m still.
She’s giving her trust to me now—here, after this, in this room. The timing is not accidental. She’s decided I am the right person.
“You’re welcome.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Something moves in her eyes—the last calculation, the final piece of the assessment she has been running on me since London, arriving at its answer.
Whatever she finds satisfies something, because the eyes soften.
Not the softening of defeat. The softening of decision.
She's decided. I can feel it. Whatever the decision is—she's made it.
She lays her head back on my chest without speaking. Her hand presses flat against my heart.
We stay there in the amber light until the stone walls pale toward dawn. I do not sleep, and I do not want to, because I would rather be awake in this than asleep in anything else.
Ti amo.
I do not say it yet. Not because it isn't true—because she is not ready to receive it. But I know it now, here in this gym on this hillside, with this woman's hand over my heart in the dark.
I will dismantle a pig farm in Russia and a Bratva network across three countries and tear a hole in the world if I have to. And when it's done, I will say it out loud.
And she will say it back. I am as certain of this as I have ever been of anything.
The dawn comes in. I hold her tighter.