Chapter Thirteen
Morena
Matteo had left before the sun fully cleared the skyline. Work again, until tomorrow night. The words had been flat, final, the same tone he used for the rules. The door had closed with that soft, expensive click that always sounded like a sentence.
I stood in the middle of the open space for a long time after he was gone. White clothes again. I hated how clean this color felt against skin that remembered every place his hands had been. He’d picked a knitted white dress before he left. It exposed my shoulders..
The diary waited on the low table near the couch, locked, the thin ribbon marker sticking out like a tongue. I sat on the cushion he had placed for me and opened it because the alternative was worse. The first entries were careful.
I wrote what he expected. Neat. Legible. Compliant. I made sure to fill a page with hate you’s.
Then my hand slowed.
I stared at the blank space under the last line and felt the words push up from somewhere deeper.
The wall of photographs was twenty feet away, covered by the heavy drapes he had pulled across it before he left.
I had seen the edges. I had seen enough to know what lived under that fabric.
Faces. Maps. Red string. My own face under stage lights, collar dark against my throat, eyes empty.
I closed the diary without writing the rest and stood.
The chain whispered across the floor as I crossed the room. My pulse was too fast. My fingers closed on the edge of the heavy drape. I pulled. The wall opened like a wound.
Photographs. Dozens of them. Printed stills from the club feeds.
Me on the secondary stage, black lace, thin club collar, eyes down.
Me leaving through the staff door at four in the morning, arms wrapped around myself, head lowered against the cold.
One grainy school photo from years earlier where I had a little softness left in my face.
Surveillance angles I had never known existed.
Close-ups of my hands. The curve of my waist under the lights.
The exact moment my eyes had found his across the dark club and held for one long second before I looked away.
Red string connected some of them to other photographs. Older men. Warehouses. Names I only half-recognized from the rare times Dario had spoken about the real power in the city.
Three faces were crossed out in thick black marker. The Vernizzi sons. I did not need the labels to understand. I recognized those names well. Were they really dead?I stood there until my legs started to shake.
Matteo had not simply bought a body when the Families demanded heirs. He had been watching. Cataloguing. Deciding. The cold precision I had felt on the stage, in the shower, when he applied the cream and ordered me to stay still, had roots that went back months. Maybe longer.
The man who had walked into that private room and taken Dario’s knife like it belonged to him had owned the idea of me before he ever put a ring on my finger.
Heat that had nothing to do with fear crawled up the back of my neck and settled low between my legs, thick and immediate.
I hated the reaction. I hated that the proof of how thoroughly he had claimed me before I even knew his name.
I hated that the photographs of my own hollow face made me wet enough that I could feel it starting to soak the soft white fabric between my thighs.
I sank to the floor in front of the largest still.
That trapped expression I had worn for weeks without knowing anyone was collecting it.
My fingers rose without permission and touched the edge of the paper.
The print was cool. Smooth. Real. I traced the line of my own jaw in the photograph.I did not know how long I stayed there.
Long enough for the light beyond the windows to shift.
Long enough for the ache between my legs to become something sharp and humiliating.
Long enough for the memory of his voice to play on a loop until I was pressing my thighs together against the marble, chasing friction that only made the need worse.
A soft sound at the front of the penthouse pulled me out of it. I scrambled up, heart slamming, chain clinking. The security tablet on the console near the door had lit up with a quiet chime. Delivery notification. Authorized. One of his people, probably. I approached carefully.
A thin white envelope sat on the floor just inside the door. No name. No return. Just my first initial in handwriting I knew too well.
Dario.
My hands shook so hard I almost dropped it. I carried it back to the wall of photographs because I could not stand to open it anywhere else. The paper tore under my fingers. Inside was a single photograph. No note.
Camilla.
She was sitting on a different carpet this time. Red shirt again, or one that looked like it. Hair longer. She was looking straight at the camera, not smiling, not crying. The timestamp in the corner said yesterday.
I sank back to the floor with the photo clutched against my chest. The wall of my own face stared down at me while the only pure thing left in my life looked up from a piece of paper that should not have been able to reach me inside this place.
I pressed the photograph to my mouth so I would not make a sound and rocked once, twice, the chain whispering against the marble with every movement.
I could tell Matteo about Camilla, finally.
The thought arrived fully formed and terrifying. I could walk to the diary, open it, and write the name.
Camilla. Four years old. Dario took her the night I refused the private rooms. That is the only reason I begged you to keep him alive. Take her. Put her somewhere he can never reach. I will give you every heir the Families demand.
The words sat on my tongue like blood.
I did not write them.
I slid the photograph under the edge of the mattress in the bedroom instead, deep enough that only someone looking for it would find it. Then I returned to the living room, to the wall, to the open space in front of my own photographed face, and tried to remember how to breathe.
Night came the way it always did in this place. Sudden. Complete. The city turning into a field of cold lights far below. I forced myself to eat what he had left in the fridge. I wrote the required diary entry in careful, empty sentences. No private thoughts. No resistance on the page.
Then I blacked one line out so thoroughly the paper nearly tore.
It was I hate you.I stared at the dark smear until the ink dried.
It was a confession. He would hold the page to the light.
He would know something lived under compliance.
I left the diary open on the low table and walked back to the wall because I could not stay away from it.
The photographs watched me the way he did. Patient. Absolute. Already decided.
My body was the traitor it had always been. My hand slid under the waistband of the trousers almost without my permission.
I was soaked. Shame burned through me hot and thick, but the ache was sharper, meaner.
I pressed two fingers against my clit the way I had on the mattress in the old apartment, slow circles at first, then harder, then harder until the wet sound of it filled the quiet room.
I kept my eyes on the photograph of my own face under the stage lights and let the memory of him flood in.
I pushed two fingers inside myself and fucked them in and out while my thumb worked my clit in tight, desperate circles. The stretch burned in the best and worst way. I was swollen from him. Still marked. The thought only made me wetter.
I came with a broken, high sound I could not stop, thighs clamped around my own hand, forehead pressed to the cool marble, the wall of evidence the only witnesses. The orgasm left me empty and filthier than our wedding night had.
Cum and cream and my own slick dripped down my knuckles. I stayed on the floor until the worst of the aftershocks faded, then forced myself upright on legs that felt disconnected.
I washed my hands in the kitchen sink like I could scrub the evidence away. The water was cold. It did nothing. I could feel the empty flutter of my pussy wanting more. Wanting… him.
I was standing there when the front door opened.
Matteo walked in like he had never left.
Black trousers. Fresh shirt with the sleeves rolled.
The same cold, focused face that had looked at me over Dario’s shoulder while he held a knife to the other man’s stomach.
He took in the open drapes, the wall, the open diary on the table, the state of my dress, the way I was standing in the middle of his living room.
The flush high on my cheeks. The faint shine of arousal visible on the soft white fabric between my thighs.
He did not speak at first. He simply closed the door, locked it, and crossed the space with the unhurried calm of a man who knew what he would find.
“Welcome home,” I squeaked.
“Thank you,” he said. “Did you miss me?”
I didn’t answer, and he just smirked.
Next, he picked up the diary. Read the visible entry. Then held the page with the blacked-out line up to the low light from the windows until the words showed through the ink.
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not surprise. Not anger. Something colder and more interested.
“Out of all the lines to cross out,” he said. His voice was quiet, almost conversational. “You crossed out that you hate me.”
I said nothing. My pulse hammered against the collar so hard I was sure he could see it.
He set the diary down and walked toward me. “Want to tell me why?”
“No,” I bit out.
“What a shame,” he said, clicking his tongue. “Now you’ve earned another punishment. On your knees for me, please.”
The marble was cold through the soft white fabric of my white dress. He stepped behind me so that I was facing the wall, the photographs, the proof of how long he had been collecting. I heard the soft sound of his belt, the slide of fabric, the quiet exhale that meant he was hard.
He did not make me wait.
He pushed the white dress above my ass, notched himself against me from behind, and pushed in with one slow, relentless thrust that forced a broken sound out of my throat.
The stretch was there. The residual sensitivity from the cream he now made me use myself, and from my own hand made every inch feel too much, too deep, too real.
He bottomed out and stayed there, buried to the root.
“I bet you touched yourself again too, didn’t you,” he smiled, voice low and controlled against the back of my neck. “So bad at following rules, baby. Now you come for me.”
He set a deep, claiming rhythm that rocked me forward with every stroke.
My hands braced against the marble. He fucked me like he was driving the truth of the wall into my body.
Every thrust was hard enough to force another broken sound out of me.
Wet. Obscene. The slap of skin on skin echoed off the glass.
“Still won’t tell me the truth” he said, never breaking the rhythm. “I can’t wait until you do and I can slit Dario’s throat.”
My walls locked down around him so hard he cursed under his breath. He kept moving, using the aftershocks to keep me open and pulsing, grinding deep so I felt every throb of him.
“Again,” he said. “And you are going to come looking at the proof that I chose you long before the Families ever demanded a wife.”
He did not stop. He angled deeper, hitting the place that made white sparks explode behind my eyes, and fucked me through the second orgasm while I shook and whimpered and tried to turn my face away from the wall.
He caught my jaw with his free hand and forced my eyes back to the photographs while he chased his own release.
When he came it was deep and endless, the same thick pulses that had marked me on the stage and on the bed. Hot. Claiming.
He stayed locked inside me for long seconds afterward, breathing hard against the side of my neck. I had no doubt I’d be pregnant soon if this carried on. Just like he wanted.
When he finally pulled out, the loss was sudden and filthy. Cum immediately leaked down the insides of my thighs in thick, slow trails. He did not let me move. He simply adjusted the white dress back into place with the same care he used for the cream, and turned me to face him.
His eyes were a darker gray than usual.
“You’ve been mostly good,” he said. “I’d like my wife to be a little sweeter to me. I treat you well, don’t I?”
I stared back, unable to answer, making him sigh..
Once we were in my bedroom, I looked down at the place where the Camilla photograph was hidden under the edge of the mattress. It was peeking out. My heart pounded. Before I could pounce and hide it, Matteo was next to me, and he saw it, too.
He did not reach for it.
He did not ask.
He only said, voice low enough that it would live under my skin for years, “Whatever is under there stays under there until you decide to put it in my hand. But understand this, wife. Every day you keep the secret is another day Dario remains useful. The moment he stops being useful, the moment I decide the risk outweighs the leverage, he disappears.”
He turned off the overhead light. The city glow through the windows painted cold bars across the bed. I closed my eyes.
“Wait… Please.”