Chapter Seventeen
Morena
At night, I stared at the ceiling and tried not to see the politician’s throat opening again. The memory would not stay buried.
The side corridor of the afterparty. The suppressed sound that was almost polite.
The way Matteo’s face never changed while he pulled the trigger the first time.
The wet useless sounds the man made while he clutched at the hole in his throat.
The second shot through the heart. The calm way Matteo had wiped his hands, adjusted his cuffs, and walked me back through a room full of people who knew better than to meet his eyes.
He had killed a man for touching my arm. He had done it in front of me and then brought me home and stripped the lingerie from my body and filled me while the image was fresh behind both our eyes.
I should have been only horrified.
Part of me was.
The larger, more dangerous part kept circling the same thought I could not make stop.
For the first time since I was ten years old and sitting under a white tablecloth while a man in clean gloves ended my world, someone had looked at the people who hurt me and decided they did not get to keep breathing.
The realization sat in my chest like a live coal. I hated how safe it made me feel. I hated that my body had clenched around him harder because of it. I hated that the cream and the denial and the murder had tangled together into something I could not separate cleanly no matter how hard I tried.
Camilla’s photograph was up on his wall now, but time was passing. The numbers felt suddenly unreliable. Matteo’s voice from the car played on a loop in my head. No sign of them yet.
The door opened. Matteo walked in carrying a tray.
He looked at me for a long moment, dark eyes moving over the way I sat with my bare feet tucked under me on his dark sheets.
Something unreadable passed behind his expression.
Then he set the tray down on the mattress and sat on the edge of the bed close enough that his thigh brushed my knee.
“You have earned the run of the penthouse,” he said. His voice was quiet. Absolute. The same tone he used when giving orders that ended lives. “You will not try to leave. You will not make me regret this. Clear?”
“Yes,” I nodded quickly. Before he changed his mind.
He studied my face for another long second as if looking for any crack in the answer.
I held still. I did not look at the tray. I did not look at the door. I looked at him the way he had taught me to: enough to prove I was listening, not enough to pretend I was brave.
“Eat something,” he said.
Coffee steamed in a heavy white cup. He did not feed me. He did not comment when my hands shook lifting the plate. He just sat there with his thigh against my knee and watched me swallow.When I set the cup down he reached for my wrist.
“You stay inside these walls,” he said, his tone carrying a warning. “You stay where I can find you. ”
“I understand.”
He nodded once, as if the matter were closed. Then his gaze dropped to my chest.
The cream was still there. I had felt it the whole time he spoke, a slow, relentless heat under the thin sheet, turning every breath into a reminder. My nipples were tight and oversensitive against the fabric. He knew. He had put it there after the event last night.
“Why don’t you lie on your back for me?”
I did.
He drew the black sheet down to my waist with the same unhurried precision he used for everything that belonged to him.
Cool air hit my skin. The cream made it worse.
My nipples tightened further, shiny and flushed, and the empty ache between my legs sharpened in answer even though he had not touched me there.
He looked at them the way he looked at a problem he had already decided how to solve. “Put your hands above your head. Keep them there.”
I lifted them. The position pulled my chest up.
“You came last night with my cock in you again,” he said, voice low. His thumb hovered over one nipple without touching. “I think I’ve been spoiling you. You’re making me too soft. So today, I have to deny you. Sorry, baby”
Heat flooded my face. I hated how fast my body understood him.
I hated that I was already wet from the threat of not getting what I craved.
The first wet heat of his mouth on my nipple dragged a cry from me that I could not swallow.
The cream and his tongue and the careful scrape of his teeth combined into something sharp and overwhelming.
He sucked slowly, deliberately, while his fingers worked the other nipple with the same focused pressure, rolling and pinching until the dual sensation built faster than I was ready for.
Heat coiled tight under my skin. My clit throbbed in time with every pull of his mouth. I was so empty between my legs that the need felt like a separate heartbeat, mean and insistent and completely unanswered.
“Matteo!” The yelp left my lips before I could stop myself.
He switched sides. The cool air hit the nipple he had just left and the contrast made me shake.
He sucked harder this time, rolling the sensitive peak against the roof of his mouth while his fingers pinched and tugged the other with precise, relentless rhythm.
The cream turned every movement into a pure concentrated sensation that radiated from my breasts down through my belly and straight to the empty ache between my thighs.
I could feel the orgasm building in my chest and the tips of my breasts, strange and intense and completely outside my control. My hands stayed above my head only because he had told me to keep them there. My fingers dug into the sheets hard enough that my knuckles ached.
“Please,” I whispered. The word came out broken. “I can’t like this!”
“You can.” His voice was low against my skin, the vibration of it another form of the cream. “You will. Come for me like this. From nothing but my mouth on these pretty nipples. Show me how ready you are for this life. Show me how much you belong to me.”
The order pushed me over. cried out, back arching hard off the sheets as my head tipped back.
Matteo did not let up. He kept sucking and rolling and pinching through the entire climax until the sensitivity bordered on pain and a second, sharper orgasm tore through me right on the heels of the first. Tears slipped from the corners of my eyes and ran into my hair.
My clit pulsed emptily. The space between my legs felt soaked and neglected and so desperate that I sobbed once from the force of the need.
He finally lifted his head.
My nipples were wet, tight, and throbbing.
The cream made them glisten under the morning light.
I could barely stand the feeling of air on them.
He looked down at what he had done with open satisfaction, the same dark pleasure he had worn while he watched me lick his release from the marble floor two nights ago. “Good girl.”
The words settled under my skin the same way the cream had. Slow. Impossible to ignore.
He dressed me carefully, guiding my arms into the sleeves and drawing the fabric down over my breasts with deliberate slowness. The moment the soft (still always white) material brushed my oversensitive nipples.
I bit down on another sound. Every shift of the fabric felt like a deliberate reminder of what he had just forced from me.
He watched my face while he adjusted the top and made no effort to hide how much the reaction pleased him.
Then he helped me step into the white tennis skirt and drew it up my legs until the waistband sat soft against my skin.
“You will feel that all day,” he said. His voice was quiet and absolute. “Every time the fabric moves. Every time you breathe. You do not try to ease it. The next time you come it will be because I decide you have earned it. You got that, right?”
“Yes.”
He left me standing in the middle of the bedroom, nipples throbbing against the soft white fabric, the empty ache between my legs sharp and insistent.
I remember I could now freely walk the penthouse. I just could not leave, could not call anyone, and could not forget the way he had made me come twice from nothing but his mouth on my breasts…
I spent the next hour moving through the space like a guest in someone else’s life. The need between my legs did not fade.
The cream on my nipples kept every brush of fabric electric.
The cream between my legs kept me wet and restless and empty.
I pressed my thighs together in the kitchen while I drank a glass of water and immediately stopped when the pressure only made the ache worse.
I was throbbing when Matteo returned from the long table under the windows where he had been making quiet calls for the better part of an hour.
I asked the question carefully, eyes on the floor because looking at him while I said her name felt like handing him another piece of myself I could not afford to lose. “Has there been any real news?”
He looked at me for a moment too long. The pause was small. Almost nothing. But I had spent years reading the micro-expressions of men who held power over me. Something in his eyes flattened for half a second before the cold mask settled again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The words were smooth. Controlled. Practiced. “I don’t have anything new to tell you, but I swear I’m doing my best.”
I nodded. I was too afraid of what would happen if I pushed. He studied my face for another second as if checking whether the answer had landed cleanly. Then he turned and walked back toward the hallway, pulling his phone from his pocket.
I waited until his voice moved far enough down the corridor that the words became muffled. Then I followed.
My bare feet made no sound on the marble. The soft white fabric of the top brushed over my throbbing nipples with every careful step, sending fresh sparks of heat through my chest and down to the empty place between my legs.