Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Camilla did the last thing I expected. She leaned forward just enough to press her forehead against my wrist for a second, before she pulled back and curled into the pillow.
She didn’t speak. She just stayed there for seven full seconds, forehead warm against the inside of my wrist, before she pulled back and curled into the bed like the contact had cost her something she wasn’t sure she could afford yet.
Shock was written clean across her face. Not fear. Not anger. Pure, raw shock that the man who had bought her and killed in front of her could also do this.
I held her gaze for a moment, then looked back down at Camilla’s sleeping form.Morena smoothed the blanket with hands that shook. I adjusted the pillow. Neither of us spoke.
Camilla’s breathing evened out within a minute. Asleep. In a bed that belonged to me, under a roof I controlled, with her sister close enough to touch.
I straightened. Morena was watching me. The cut on her cheek had stopped bleeding. My jacket hung off her shoulders, far too big.
The silence between us was heavier than anything I had carried all night. I nodded once toward the hallway.
“Come with me, please,” I said quietly. “She’ll sleep for a while. We need to talk.”
She looked at her sister one more time, pushed herself out of bed, then followed me out of the room. I left the door open a few inches behind us.
For the first time, both of them were inside my walls.
And one of them had just trusted me enough to fall asleep.Morena stood in the middle of the hallway like she was deciding whether to run.
My jacket hung off her shoulders. Blood was still drying on her cheek.
She looked like she had crawled through hell and somehow managed to drag her sister out the other side.
I wanted to put my hands on her so badly my fingers ached.
“You left the jacket on purpose,” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded.
“You knew I’d find it.” I took a step closer. She did not back up. “You could have called me. You could have let my men take you in.”
Her eyes flashed. “I was afraid.”
“You walked into a gunfight with a four-year-old in your arms, Rena.”
“And you couldn’t stay out of it, could you?” she hissed. The words landed clean and hard.
“I know what I did,” I said.
“Do you?” She laughed once, sharp and tired. “Because from where I’m standing you bought me, collared me, fucked me on a schedule. And somehow I’m the one who has to explain why I didn’t wait politely for you to finish working rather than focusing on saving my sister. Which is all I asked for.”
I closed the last of the distance between us. She had to tip her head back to hold my stare.
“You were starving yourself in an alley,” I said, voice low. “You left me a breadcrumb like a challenge. You crawled through a window and pulled that child out while a man held a gun on both of you. Do not stand here and pretend you were only running from me.”
Her breath hitched. “I was running toward her.”
I lifted one hand and set it against the side of her neck. Her skin was hot. She shivered under the touch but did not pull away.
“You walked out with a knife to your own throat,” I said. “You put yourself between that child and a bullet. Tell me, Morena. When I put my hands on you right now, are you going to stop me?”
Her eyes were dark and furious and hungry all at once. “I should.”
“But you won’t.”
I kissed her to test my own theory.
It was not gentle. I took her mouth the way I had wanted to since the moment she threw the ring at my chest. She made a broken sound against my lips and then she was kissing me back just as hard, fingers fisting in the front of my shirt.
I crowded her against the wall, one hand on her throat, the other dragging down her side until I could grip her hip and pull her against me.
She gasped when she felt how hard I was.
I squeezed her hip, then slid my hand lower, over the curve of her ass, possessive and open.
She arched into it even as she made an angry sound into my mouth.
I groped her openly, roughly, like I had every right, and her body answered before her pride could catch up.
“Matteo!”
“I know,” I growled against her lips. “We shouldn’t. Not yet. Not like this.”
I couldn’t and didn’t stop.
I kissed her deeper, hand moving on her, thumb stroking her collarbone like I needed the reminder that she was mine. She trembled. Her fingers were tight in my shirt. She was kissing me like she hated how much she wanted it. I forced myself to pull back just far enough to speak.
“Camilla’s asleep twenty feet away,” I said, voice rough. “You’re hurt. You’re exhausted. And if I take you right now I’m not going to be careful.”
“Then don’t be careful,” she whispered.
I closed my eyes for half a second and rested my forehead against hers.
“Not tonight,” I said, and it cost me. “Tonight you eat. You let someone look at that cut. You sleep in a bed that isn’t a car or an alley. Tomorrow we talk. Tomorrow we figure out what the fuck we are now that she’s safe.”
I kissed her one more time, slower, deeper, my hand gripping her ass because I couldn’t make myself let go. Then I forced my hands off her body and stepped back.
She stayed against the wall, breathing hard, staring at me like she couldn’t decide whether to hit me or pull me back in.
I nodded toward the kitchen. “Come on. Food. Then sleep. I’m not touching you again until you can stand without shaking.”
She pushed off the wall.
“You’re an asshole,” she said, voice rough. “I wanted you.”
I turned and walked toward the kitchen before I could change my mind and take her against the wall.
Behind me I heard her follow. I turned on the lights.
The sudden brightness made the cut on her cheek look worse.
My jacket hung off her shoulders. I opened the fridge and started pulling things out just so I had something to do with my hands that wasn’t putting them on her.
I set a cutting board down harder than necessary. “Sit.”
She stayed standing. I turned. Slowly.
“No more good girl?” I smirked.
“Fuck you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Such a brat.”
“You put me through too much,” she said.
“I kept you soft and aching and focused on my cock so you wouldn’t do exactly what you just did, run straight into a bullet for a kid I was already hunting,” I reminded her.
“How noble.” Her laugh was sharp enough to cut. “The great Matteo Ventura, protecting his breeding stock by keeping her too full of cock to notice her sister was kidnapped.”
The words landed exactly where she wanted them to. I crossed the kitchen in three strides and crowded her back against the island. She didn’t retreat. She tilted her chin up and glared at me like she was daring me to prove her right.
“Say that again,” I said quietly.
“You used me,” she muttered, sounding less sure.
“I used your body because every time I was inside you, you stopped looking like you were already halfway gone,” I hissed. “Because when you came on my cock you forgot, for thirty fucking seconds, that the world had spent eighteen years trying to break you.”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t you dare make this romantic.”
“It’s not romantic. It’s obsessive and ugly and the only way I know how to keep the people I refuse to lose. That’s why you were a prisoner.”
I braced both hands on the marble on either side of her hips, caging her in.
“You want the truth without the pretty version? Fine. I bought you. I collared you. I fucked you on a schedule designed to put a baby in you as fast as possible. And I would do every single one of those things again if it meant you and that little girl ended up exactly where you are right now, alive, in my home.”
Her breath caught. I leaned closer until my mouth almost touched hers.
“You left me a breadcrumb in an alley like a challenge. You crawled through a window with a gun at your back. So stop rewriting the story into one where you’re only here because you had no choice. You had every choice. You chose the version that brought you back to me,” I said.
“I chose Camilla.”
“And then you chose this.” I rolled my hips once against her so she could feel how hard I already was. “This is what you wanted when you were sitting on the ground in that alley missing the weight of my hand on your neck. Admit it.”
Her hands fisted in the front of my shirt.
I brushed my mouth over the corner of her lips, not quite a kiss.
“I hate that I get hard every time you look at me like you want to kill me. I hate that the only time my chest stops hurting is when you’re under me, taking every inch, calling my name while you come. So we’re even.”
She shoved at my chest. I didn’t move. “You’re still hard.”
“Yes.”
“And if I told you to stop right now…”
“I would stop.” I pulled back just enough to meet her eyes. “But you won’t. Because you’re just as fucked up as I am, and the only thing either of us has wanted since the second you walked back into this penthouse is for me to put you on this counter and remind us both who you belong to.”
Her pulse was visible in her throat. I waited.She said, voice rough and furious and hungry all at once, “Then stop talking and do it.”
I kissed her like I was trying to crawl inside her lungs.
My mouth crashed over hers, hard and open and starving.
She made a sound against my lips and I swallowed it, tongue sliding deep, claiming every inch of her mouth the same way I had claimed her pussy in front of the entire syndicate.
One hand fisted in her hair, yanking her head back so I could take her deeper.
The other gripped her jaw, holding her exactly where I wanted her while I licked into her like I was trying to taste the last three weeks of her running from me.
She bit my lower lip. Hard.