Chapter Sixteen
Matteo
The first reports came in twelve hours later.
I stood at the long table under the windows and three separate secure lines open.
The teams had the full packet. Dario’s known addresses.
The plants who had delivered the photographs.
The private airstrip used by mid-level operators who moved people when the price was right.
Clean extraction. No noise. The child unharmed. Those were the strict instructions.
I gave the orders in the same flat voice I used for everything that needed to end cleanly. Then I waited.
The first call came forty-seven minutes later.
Empty apartment.
No signs of a struggle.
The second safe house had been cleared out in the night. The third location was a burned shell. The airstrip cameras had been wiped. No flight plan.
No surviving witnesses who were willing to talk, and mostly dead now from the efforts to make them. Dario Rizzo and the little girl in the red shirt had vanished into thin air.
I ended the last call and stood in the quiet for a long time.
The wall of photographs watched me. Morena under stage lights.
Morena leaving the club with her arms wrapped around herself.
Camilla’s photo had been added, and it scared the shit out of me.
It wasn’t fear for myself. Fear of the look that would settle in those blue eyes of my wife’s when she realized the only pure thing left in her life was still gone.The failure sat in my chest like a second pulse.
Then I walked to the bedroom. She was awake.
Soft fabric twisted around her hips. Blue eyes lifted to mine the moment the door opened.
The residual ache from the night before lived in the way she shifted against the mattress.
I had left her denied. The cream had kept working for hours.
She looked soft and restless and half-lost in the need I had refused to satisfy.
“I think we both need a distraction,” I said.
She pulled her legs up against her chest. “You don’t have any new leads?”
“I have over fifty people working on it,” I muttered. “I’ll be kept updated. But we shouldn’t just sit here.”
“You’re right,” Morena nodded. “Maybe… if we’re seen somewhere, it will draw Dario out.”
My eyes snapped to hers. “Good point, Rena.”
I dressed her myself. Sheer white lingerie that barely covered anything.
Tiny matching bottoms that sat low on her hips.
Sheer stockings that clung to the soft skin of her thighs.
A long black coat that hid everything until I decided otherwise.
I replaced the heavy collar with a thinner, more elegant version that locked with a quiet click.
Simple white gold. The ring stayed on her finger.
I leaned in, mouth at her ear, and let the truth settle between us. “You’ll have to keep the coat on.”
She shivered. The feeling of it pleased me more than it should have after the morning’s failure.
The car ride was quiet except for the soft shifting of her body against the leather seat. She pressed her thighs together once. I put a hand on her knee and opened them again without a word. She whimpered. I kept my eyes on the road and felt the dark satisfaction settle deeper.
The problem sat further away with every soft broken sound my wife tried to swallow. She was distracting me.
The lingerie runway show we were going to was private. Invitation only. Dim lights. Soft music. Models in almost nothing walking a narrow runway while the city’s most powerful men watched from low couches and shadowed booths.
I kept Morena close, one hand low on her back. The coat stayed closed. She lasted less than ten minutes before the first quiet beg.
“Please,” she whispered against my shoulder when a model in nothing but straps and crystals walked past. “Matteo… it’s too much.”
I answered without looking at her. “What’s the problem? Already want to go home?”
“I feel…” She flushed. “I’m half-naked under this, and you know it.”
I could feel the heat of her through the coat when my hand rested at the small of her back. Every time she shifted, every time the lights caught the flush on her cheeks, every time her breath hitched, my pain quieted a little more.
The failure with Camilla sat further away. The only thing that mattered was the desperate, beautiful woman beside me who needed what only I could give.
She begged again when the lights dimmed for the final walk. “Please… I can’t… I need…”
I tipped her chin up with two fingers so she had to meet my eyes. The blue of them was glassy, wrecked, perfect. “You need what I decide you need. And right now you need to sit here and feel it. Feel how wet you are for me. And you’d better keep it quiet. People are watching, baby.”
The afterparty was held in a private lounge above the show floor. Low lights. Expensive liquor. The soft pulse of music that felt more like a heartbeat than a song.
I pulled her onto the floor the moment we entered and made her dance with me. Slow. Intimate. Bodies pressed together.
The simple press of my thigh between hers made her whimper against my neck.
I kept one hand splayed low on her back so any attempt to pull away registered immediately.
Flushed. The coat had come open just enough that the sheer white lingerie showed at the collar and the high slit of her thigh.
The scent of her arousal rose between us, sharp and sweet and unmistakable.
“Please,” she breathed against my throat. “Matteo, please… I can’t take it… it’s been hours…”
I turned her slowly under the lights and let my mouth brush her ear.
“You can. You will. Look at how wet you are for me. Every man in this room would smell it if I opened that coat. They would see exactly what the cream has done to my wife. And they would know they will never touch it. You belong to me. Every inch. Every drop. Every broken little sound you make when I fuck you...”
Her hips moved against my thigh without permission. I let her have the friction for three full seconds before I stilled her with a firm hand on her waist.
“So desperate.”
“Please let me come. Please. I’ll do anything. Just… please. I need you inside me. I need it so badly it hurts.”
The words settled under my skin like heat. I was hard enough that the press of her body against me bordered on painful.
The Camilla problem, the empty airstrip, the wiped cameras, all of it faded under the evidence that she needed me this badly. This had not happened before.
I kept the same controlled rhythm and watched the flush climb higher on her cheeks. Every soft broken plea made the dark satisfaction in my chest expand. She was perfect like this. Soft. Open. Aching for the only man who had ever claimed her completely.
Eyes started lingering. A few underbosses from the outer families.
A couple of politicians who thought their money made them untouchable.
I felt the weight of their stares on the open collar of her coat, on the way she clung to me, on the obvious desperation in every line of my wife’s body.
My hand tightened on her waist. This time it was pure possession.
I was briefly distracted by a call about the ongoing search. One of the teams had a possible lead on a secondary airstrip further north. I stepped a few feet away to take the call.
That was when the billionaire politician approached my wife.
Mid-forties. Powerful. Used to taking whatever he wanted. He touched Morena’s arm. Leaned in too close. Said something crude about “the new Ventura bride” and how the wedding must have been “quite the show.” His fingers lingered on the coat fabric at her wrist.
Morena flinched hard. I ended the call without another word. There were no meaningful updates.
The room went quiet in stages as people noticed the shift in my face.
I walked back to my wife, took the man’s wrist, and broke it cleanly. The sound was small and wet. He stumbled back, shocked and loud, clutching the ruined joint. I followed him into a side corridor that the security detail knew to clear.
She had no choice but to watch.
I put a suppressed round through his throat first. He went down making wet useless sounds, hands clamped over the hole like he could hold the blood in. I waited until his eyes found mine. Then I put the second round through his heart.
Fast. Efficient. It was his fault for making it personal.
I wanted Morena to see exactly what happened to men who touched what belonged to me. I wanted the image burned behind her eyes, because I was longing to do it to Dario.
When it was done I wiped my hands on a clean handkerchief, adjusted my cuffs, and walked her straight back through the afterparty as if nothing had happened.
The body was being handled by the time we reached the exit.
No one met my eyes. No one spoke. The message had been delivered in the only language this world understood.
Morena asked about Camilla on the drive home. Her voice was small and raw. “Is there news?”
I looked at the road and gave her the clean truth. “No sign of them yet.”
The words tasted like ash. I did not let it show. The search would continue. Dario would not stay hidden forever. Camilla would come home.
Back at the penthouse I led my wife to the bedroom, and stripped the coat and the lingerie from her body myself. I opened the tube again and applied a fresh layer while she trembled and begged, the same thorough strokes over her clit and inside her until she was sobbing with need.
“Please,” she whispered, hips lifting against my hand. “Please, Matteo, I can’t… I need you…”
“You need what I give you,” I answered, voice low and absolute as I pulled the zipper of my slacks down.. “And right now I aam giving you this. So take it.”
I freed myself and pushed into her in one slow relentless thrust.
The tight heat of her body closed around me the same way it had on the stage, only this time there was no audience, no performance, only the clear purpose of filling her while the window was open and the image of the dead politician was fresh behind my eyes.
She came on the third stroke, walls locking down around me so hard it nearly pulled my own release forward.
I fucked her through it, relentless, using the aftershocks to keep her open and pulsing.
“Again,” I ordered against her mouth. “You begged all night. Now you take what I give you.”
I reached between us and found her clit with my thumb, slick with cream, and rubbed tight circles in time with my thrusts. I did not stop. I kept the same deep claiming rhythm, chasing her orgasm while she trembled and whimpered and begged from the oversensitivity.
The cream made it impossible for her to escape the pleasure. Every stroke forced another wave through her.
When the third orgasm tore through her I finally let myself follow.
I buried myself to the root and came with a low guttural groan, flooding her in thick endless pulses.
I stayed locked inside her, grinding deep.
My hand rested possessively over her lower belly, feeling the faint tremor of aftershocks moving through her.
“I couldn’t let another man do what Dario did,” I told her, voice low and absolute. “No one should look at you like that and keep breathing. You are mine now. I need to protect you. I will prove I can as many times as it takes.”