CHAPTER 12
Santino
Iwoke up to an empty house. The silence gnawed at the noise in my head.
I didn’t know how I got through the night.
At dinner, all I could think about was her mouth around my finger. The rise and fall of her chest. The outline of her nipples through the thin fabric of her t-shirt when I licked her finger clean. The way her shorts hugged her ass when she moved.
Every time her lips closed around a piece of bread, my brain supplied a different image.
My cock. Her mouth.
And I hated how badly I wanted to watch her eyes water while she choked on it. The thought should’ve shamed me. It didn’t. It felt inevitable.
I could barely concentrate on my food. I walked away before the monster inside took over me.
If I stayed close to her long enough, my restraint would break.And worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop it.
It was already ten by the time I reached the manor site.I kept my distance. Far enough to give her space and pretend it was security. Close enough to remind myself she was near, but not mine to touch.
I fished out my phone and messaged her.
She glanced at her phone, frowned, then slipped it back into her jacket like she refused to engage.
She saw the message again. I saw her brows draw together as she turned her head, scanning for me.
She looked in my direction, like she knew exactly where I was hiding.
Watching. Waiting.
Like I had been doing for the past week.
Proximity to her was a problem. Being under the same roof, hearing her move from room to room, watching her pretend I didn’t exist—it fed something I’d locked down. And now, it was testing the strength of its restraints.
I had told myself I came back for a reason.
To protect her. To eliminate any threat aimed in her direction.
It was logic. But logic doesn’t react when she laughs in another room. Logic doesn’t go still when she walks past in those goddamn shorts. Logic doesn’t remember the exact shape of her mouth.
The monster does.
And it had been starving—for years.
I’d taught it to sit. To watch. To stay behind my teeth when she laughed with Marcello.
It wanted to take what it had been denied. To drag her into my ruin with me and keep her there until she stopped looking for a way out. To watch her touch the ugliest parts of me without flinching.
To make the monster hers.
To press her against something solid, fuck her senseless and remind her who I am when I stop pretending to be civilised.
I’d trained it to behave. That was control.
Marcello’s presence kept it caged. Forced it to behave. Forced me to behave. But he was gone now.
And the monster was making me forget the man I was.
The quiet between Roxanne and me wasn’t neutral anymore. It was charged. And every second near her reminded me how close she was, yet out of bounds.
She shook her head and locked her screen with more force than necessary.
God, she was beautiful when furious.
The same brown-haired golden boy from the club walked up like he belonged there, offering her coffee. She smiled when she took it.
Ouch!
I smiled despite myself. Roxanne always had teeth.With Marcello she softened, but with me she sharpened, somehow letting her good girl image slip. A side that only I knew existed.
By noon I’d circle the manor grounds twice.
I walked into the study—their makeshift office on site.
“Eat, or else you’ll get cranky,” I said, putting the bag of takeout on the table.
“I’m not hungry,” she replied.
She pushed the bag away and spoke with one of the contractors like I was just another inconvenience. Just then, golden boy came and offered her a sandwich.
“Here. Amelia made your favourite.”
“Gee. Thanks. And thank Amelia for me.”
She took the sandwich from him, eyes flicking to me like she wanted me to see. I picked up the take-out bag and dropped it in the bin. Heat surged through my veins like an inferno, and I walked away before I did something worse. Like smashing his face to a pulp.
One minute she was telling me she wasn’t hungry and another she was taking food from the pretty boy like it meant nothing.
Was I being petty and irrational? Maybe. But it burned anyway. My ego cracked louder than my knuckles.
I’d checked on him—Callum Finnegan.
Decent man, no criminal records, lived with his girlfriend Amelia, who worked in fashion and a cat called Ginger. He posed no threat to her.
But I couldn’t say the same for my self-control and fragile ego.
She laughed at something he said and lightly touched his arm. Her laugh cut through me sharper than any blade.
A vicious feeling clawed its way up my spine. The way she leaned in when she laughed—throat exposed, pulse visible, unaware of how easy it would be for the world to extinguish a light that bright.
I clenched my jaw so tight I heard my teeth grind. I shouldn’t care. But watching her laugh with another man, I felt a jagged edge tear open under my ribs.
It wasn’t jealousy.
Jealousy was human. Manageable. This felt older than that. Meaner. The kind of instinct that made men like me bury bodies in forests and call it protection.
And then he touched her like it was nothing. Like she was just another woman. Like he didn’t understand she could ruin a man just by existing in the same room as him.
And I stood there. Watching another man exist too close to what my bones still recognised as home.
Not mine.
Never mine.
He touched her.
But the monster refused to learn the difference. The thought repeated behind my ribs like a gunshot.
He. Touched. Her.
Before I could stop myself, my feet were already moving in her direction. His hand rested on her shoulder like she was something to lean on. Like he had the fucking right.
I’ll give him something to lean on for the rest of his life.
As a pulse throbbed in my temple, I kept telling myself this was protection. This was duty.
Liar.
The voice said again.
Her presence was the only addiction I’d ever known.
And the worst part, she didn’t even know it.
I’d survived bullets, wars, betrayal. I’d walked away from worse, unscathed. But two years ago, walking away from her felt like cutting off a limb and pretending I didn’t need it.
My vision tunnelled till I could only see his hand. Touching her. When Marcello touched her, it hurt. But I endured it, because she chose him. That mattered.
This—this was different. This was worse. This was another man forgetting his place. Forgetting she wasn’t something casual. And I didn’t know why it burned, only that it did.
I pushed his hand off so hard his arm snapped back.
“Take your hand off her,” I nearly growled.
“Hey, man. I didn’t mean—”
“I don’t care what you meant,” I spat.
“Are you insane?” she snapped back. “Can’t you behave like a normal human?”
“You can discuss without him touching you.” I looked at him with stern eyes. “Walk away.”
For a second, he stood there like it was déjà vu. Yes, motherfucker. It was me the other day too. He lifted his hands in a defensive manner and walked away.
She glared at me, eyes narrowed. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Fixing a problem.”
“You are the problem.”
I let out a breath and spoke low. “If I was the problem, you wouldn’t react this much.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again, then turned away with a frustrated breath. My fingers wrapped around her wrist and I spun her around so fast I thought she might fall. She yanked her hand off mine and yelled.
“Don’t touch me. Asshole.”
That did it. The pulse in my temple detonated. I didn’t think.My fist slammed into the plaster behind her head, cracking the wall. Dust rained down, and a hole appeared where my fist was.She flinched back—but her eyes never left mine.
I’d seen her angry. I’d seen her grieving. I’d seen her shattered. But I had never seen her look at me like I was a danger to survive. This was the first time I’d seen fear in her eyes. For me.Fear, not fire. And it gutted me.
Fuck.
I scared her. I dropped my hand and stepped away. If I stayed there any longer, I didn’t know what the monster that had just shown itself would do.
She was already shaking, and that felt like a stab through my chest worse than any blade could inflict.
I couldn’t stay here.
Not near her.
Not after that.
Without a word, I turned and left. I could hear her breathing heavily and Callum calling her name. But this time I didn’t turn around. I ignored the impulse to go to her, calm her down.
Apologise.
I kept walking until I reached the bike and left. I rode until the cold nearly cut the fever out of me. It didn’t work. Before I knew it, I was back at the cottage. Like muscle memory knew where to take me before my mind could argue.
The front door slammed hard enough to rattle the frame. Roxanne stormed into the house like a wildfire, footsteps echoing sharp and angry across the wooden floor. I was already sitting at the kitchen counter, elbows on my knees, head down, trying to calm the monster inside me.
The moment she walked in, the air changed. It was like the monster retreated slowly but reluctantly back into the shadows.Like her presence alone knew how to calm the ugliest parts of me.
Her scent hit me like a punch to the ribs, warm and furious.She dropped her bag on the couch.
“What the fuck was that?”
Her voice cracked, partly from anger, partly from the adrenaline of me almost punching a hole in the wall.
I looked up. Her cheeks were red, chest heaving, and her eyes spitting fire like she wanted to throw something at me.I deserved it.
But fuck me, she looked beautiful when furious.
“He. Touched. You.” I growled, enunciating each word.
“We are colleagues, dammit.” She let out a breath. “You scared him.”
“Good,” I said quietly. “That’ll keep him at a distance.”
“Learn to control your animal,” she snapped. “Or put a leash on it.”
My jaw flexed. “I barely touched you.”
“You punched a hole in the wall,” she fired back. “Next to my head!”
Her body shook from fury.
“I—” the words didn’t come.
She pointed to my knuckles. “Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” I muttered.
She pulled my hand toward her. I grunted—but not from pain, from the way she was touching me. She examined the scraped knuckles, the swelling, and all I could do was stare at her face.
The tip of her nose, slightly turned up. Her brown eyes, the perfect shade of coffee. Looking into them always felt like caffeine straight to the bloodstream—sharp, alive, dangerous.
Her plump, parted lips—the ones I wanted swollen beneath my mouth.
She turned my hand over once. Her touch was soft, maddening, grounding and inflaming, all at the same damn time. Every swipe of her fingers felt like slow torture.
I didn’t feel pain—not physical pain anyway.
But I felt everything else.
She tended to it with a sigh of frustration, muttering under her breath about “idiots,” and “testosterone,” and “stupid Sicilian men.”
When she finished, she pressed the bandage down harder than necessary. I hissed. She smirked, then dropped my hand like it burned her.
“You’re impossible,” she muttered, storming off toward her room.
The sound of her door slamming sent a full-body throb through me. And because I’m a fucking idiot, I imagined her stripping out of those work clothes, skin flushed, anger still rolling through her.
I imagined her slipping into those tiny shorts she slept in, nipples tight under that soft tee she always wore.
A low curse escaped me. I rubbed my hand against my face.
“Get it together, Santino.”
When she returned, she was in her fuzzy slippers, wearing exactly what I predicted—little shorts barely covering her ass, and that thin navy tee that clung every time she took a deep breath.
Fuck me sideways.
Dinner was silent. Tense. Every breath between us felt loaded. Like the air itself was charged.
She didn’t look at me. Not even once.
Her thigh brushed mine once under the table, and I forgot how to swallow. After dinner, she disappeared down the hall without looking at me.
And for the first time in years, I didn’t know whether to follow. So I did what I do best.
Stayed where I was.
And let the monster pace.