Chapter 16 #2
Elia’s hands had slid up into his hair without her realizing it.
Her fingers tightened there, holding him close even after the kiss broke.
The heat of his skin burned against her palms. The bandage on his arm brushed her shoulder, a reminder of the violence that had brought them here and the man standing in front of her who had faced it without hesitation.
Magnus stared down at her, chest rising and falling. His voice came out dark and visceral. “Tell me to stop.”
He meant it. Even now. Even like this. He would stop if she asked.
That undid her more thoroughly than anything else tonight. She held his gaze. “No.”
Something fierce and unmistakably male broke open in his expression.
Magnus lifted her up in his arms and started for the stairs. The room tilted beneath the sudden motion. One arm hooked around his shoulders automatically. Her dress spilled over his forearm. The hall ahead stretched in warm pools of shadow and light.
Behind them the discarded shirt, the scattered studs, and the dark drops of blood remained where the night had left them.
Ahead of them lay his bedroom.
Magnus didn’t slow once.
Elia looked up at his face, at the hard lines of his face and the terrible purpose in his eyes, and knew with a certainty that shook her to the core that whatever happened next would change everything.
The knowledge should have terrified her. Instead she tightened her arms around his neck and let him carry her upstairs.
The stairs passed beneath her without her registering them.
She was aware of him instead. The heat of his bare chest against her side.
The strength of his arms. The way he carried her without effort, as though her weight was something he had already accounted for and dismissed as irrelevant.
His eyes were fixed forward. The bandage on his forearm brushed her shoulder with every step, and every time it did, something tightened in her chest that had nothing to do with fear.
He had bled for her.
The thought kept returning in a loop she couldn’t break.
Not metaphorically. Not abstractly. He had put his body in front of a blade meant for her throat, and now he was carrying her upstairs in his own house with blood still drying on his skin, and he hadn’t once looked at her as though she owed him for it.
That undid her more thoroughly than the kiss had.
He nudged open the bedroom door with his shoulder.
The room beyond was warm and dim, lit by low lamps.
The bed was still made, the covers pulled tight and meticulous the way the staff kept everything in this house.
She had sat on the edge of that bed before.
Had thought about him from it. Had lay awake staring at the ceiling and told herself the wanting was just gratitude, just proximity, just the predictable confusion of a woman who had never been given anything without a price.
She had stopped believing that somewhere around the pool.
Magnus set her down at the foot of the bed.
He didn’t step back. He stood directly in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her head to keep his eyes, and for a moment he simply looked at her.
The same way he had looked at her on the balcony at the gala.
The same way he had looked at her across every distance he had ever knowingly maintained between them.
Like she was something he had been patient about for a very long time.
“Still shaking,” he said.
“I know.”
“Adrenaline.”
“Probably.” She reached up and pressed her palm against his sternum. His skin was hot. His heartbeat moved beneath her hand, steadier than hers. She flattened her fingers and felt the breath expand in his chest. “Or maybe this.”
His gaze dropped to her hand. Something moved through his expression—a fracture in the tough surface he maintained the way other men maintained fortresses.
“Elia.”
Her name in his mouth still did something to her she couldn’t catalog properly.
Not the way the Donati sons had spoken it, snapping it out to summon her from the edge of a room.
Not the way Bianca had used it, clipped and diminishing.
Magnus said her name like it meant something.
Like it was a word he had been given privately and intended to keep.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
“I know.”
“I need you to know that I’m not doing this because I’m grateful.” Her voice was steadier than she expected. “Or because I think I owe you. Or because I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
His eyes sharpened. “Why are you doing it?”
“Because I want to.” The words came out certain and nothing like the version of herself that had stood in the Donati drawing room with her eyes cast down and her hands folded and her wants packed away in a place where they couldn’t inconvenience anyone.
“Because you’re the first person who made me understand that wanting is allowed. ”
Magnus was still for one suspended moment.
Then his hands came up, framing her face with a care that was almost reverent, and he kissed her the way he had kissed her on the balcony—consuming, unrelenting, certain.
But slower this time. Intentional in a way the first hadn’t been, the hunger still there but shaped now into something purposeful.
She kissed him back.
The gown’s zipper was at her back. His fingers found it without searching, as if he had been calculating the location since he first saw her on the stairs before the gala.
The silk pooled at her feet.
She should have felt exposed. She didn’t.
Instead, she was seen in the way he had promised the first morning in the east wing, when he had told her she was being misclassified, when he had looked at her in the bronze silk and said visible like it was the beginning of something rather than the end of something else.
His gaze moved over her. She let it. She had never let anyone look at her before, not really. She’d spent her life making herself smaller and dimmer and less, and standing here while Magnus looking at her with that dark attention was nothing like diminishment.
It was like being given something back that she hadn’t known was taken.
“Come here,” he said.
She stepped forward.
His hands found her waist and drew her in, but he stopped just short of the bed.
His mouth returned to hers, slower now, deeper, while his fingers moved over her body with delicious purpose.
The last barriers between them disappeared in a tangle of impatient hands and sliding fabric, each of them finishing what the other had started until nothing remained but warm skin and rising heat.
Only then did Magnus guide her down, lowering them both to the bed with a discipline that belied everything burning in his eyes.
His body covered hers and she made a sound she didn’t recognize—low and involuntary, something that had been waiting in her for years without ever having a context to exist in.
He caught it against his mouth and answered it.
She arched into him.
His mouth moved to her throat, and she tipped her head back without thinking, offering him more, and the gruff sound he made against her skin sent a shockwave straight through her center. She hadn’t known a sound could do that. She hadn’t known anything could do that.
His hands were unhurried. That was what undid her first. She’d expected urgency—the men in the Donati house had always moved with urgency, with the impatience of people who took what they wanted before it could be reconsidered.
Magnus moved like he had already decided the outcome and saw no reason to rush toward it.
His palms traveled the length of her body with careful attention, learning her the way he learned contracts, the way he learned threats—completely, and without missing anything.
His mouth followed his hands.
When his lips found the curve of her breast she made a sound she didn’t recognize as her own. He answered it by taking more, his tongue moving in a gradual circle that drew her hips off the mattress before she understood she was moving at all. Her fingers found his hair. She held on.
“Magnus—”
“I know.” His voice was rough against her skin. Not soothing. Not distant. Present in a way that told her he was feeling this too, that the control he maintained cost him something, that he was choosing the pace deliberately and the choice was harder than he’d let her see. He shifted lower.
She didn’t understand his intention until his mouth found the inside of her thigh.
She couldn’t prevent the broken cry.
He didn’t hurry there either. He kissed the smooth skin of her inner thigh with the same attention he’d given everything else, and the warmth of his breath moved higher by degrees while her whole body tightened in anticipation of something she’d never experienced and couldn’t fully name. Her fingers curled harder in his hair.
When his mouth finally found the heart of her, she gasped.
The sound came out broken, stripped of the composure she’d spent years constructing, and she didn’t care.
She couldn’t care. She could barely hold a thought.
His tongue moved against her in knowing strokes, and her back arched completely off the mattress, her thighs trembling on either side of him, and she understood for the first time why the careful, quiet parts of herself had kept this locked away.
Not because it was dangerous, but because experiencing it would make the absence of it afterward unbearable.
She’d been right.
She would never recover from this.
His hands spread over her hips, holding her exactly where he wanted her while his mouth worked with patient, devastating thoroughness.
Every time she thought she’d found the peak of it, he shifted the angle or the pressure or the rhythm and sent her climbing again, higher, the tension inside her coiling until she was shaking, until she was saying his name in a voice she’d never heard come out of herself before.
Fractured and urgent and unguarded in a way she’d never allowed.
“Please,” she begged. “Magnus, please—”
He lifted his head.
She almost cried at the loss of contact.
She looked down at him and found him looking back up at her, his expression shorn of its usual restraint, his eyes intent and burning with something she finally understood wasn’t patience.
It had never been patience. It had been decision.
He had been choosing, every single day, not to do this until she chose it first.
He’d been waiting for her.
The understanding moved through her like the first drop of warmth in something that had been cold for years.
He kissed his way back up her body—her stomach, her ribs, the curve of her breast again, the hollow of her throat, the arch of her cheekbone. By the time his mouth reached hers she was trembling and desperate and she pulled him down against her with both hands.
“Now,” she said against his mouth. “Please.”
He braced himself above her. The blunt, insistent pressure of him notched against her. She felt the heat of him and all the contained power that had been coiled in him since the first night when he’d stood at her door and told her she was welcome in his bed whenever she chose.
She’d chosen.
He paused, holding himself still with what she now understood was tremendous effort. His forehead dropped to her temple, his breath warm and unsteady against her cheek. “Look at me,” he said.
She did.
“Tell me again,” he said.
“Yes.” No hesitation. No performance. Just the truest word she’d ever spoken. “Yes, Magnus.”
He pushed forward.
There was pain—sharp and sudden, and he stilled immediately, completely, his whole body arrested as though her gasp had thrown a circuit. He held himself motionless above her, the effort of stopping visible in every line of him.
“Elia.” Her name now carried an emphasis she didn’t have language for.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He moved again, careful now, giving her body time to adjust to the unfamiliar fullness of him, and the pain softened under each unhurried stroke until it dissolved into something else entirely.
Something that built with an inexorable pressure that made her dig her fingers into his shoulders and pull him closer instead of away.
Her hips rose to meet him.
He made a sound against her neck that stirred her blood.
After that, careful left the room.
He moved over her with a focused, driving intensity that consumed everything, her composure, her carefully maintained sense of herself as someone who didn’t need anything from anyone.
She needed this. She needed him. She needed the weight of him and the warmth of him and the specific, devastating way he said her name when she arched up beneath him.
She’d been trying to explain to herself why Magnus unsettled her in ways that had nothing to do with fear.
She understood it now with total, irreversible clarity.
He saw her. Not the servant. Not the debt.
Not the inconvenient blood tie or the overheard conversation or the leverage someone might someday manufacture from her existence.
Her.
And he’d refused to touch her until she’d stopped trying to offer herself as currency and started reaching for him instead.
The tension inside her built again, sharper now, overwhelming, and she buried her face in his neck and held on as it crested.
When she fell apart, it wasn’t soundless.
It wasn’t the careful, contained version of herself she’d constructed over years of surviving in someone else’s house.
It was loud and helpless and honest, and his name tore out of her on a broken exhale that he absorbed, that made him shudder in response.
His self-control finally, finally fractured as he followed her over the edge with a harsh, unguarded sound of his own that she would carry with her for the rest of her life.
He collapsed against her. Not heavily. Even now there was care in how he held himself. But close, his face pressed into her hair, his breathing as wrecked as hers.
They lay like that for a long time without speaking.
She didn’t have words. She wasn’t sure she had anything left that could be organized into language.
What she had instead was the steadying weight of him beside her, and the warmth of his hand finding hers in the dark, and the knowledge—absolute and irrevocable—that she’d just left behind the last version of herself that had ever believed she didn’t deserve this.