1. Cat #2
His mouth finds my breast and I have to brace my hands on the cool tile wall behind him to keep from collapsing onto his ribs.
He sucks like he’s been thinking about this exact thing for half a year in whatever cold rooms he’s been bleeding in, slow, devoted, a little desperate around the edges, teeth grazing just enough to make me gasp.
I rock against the hard line of him still trapped in his pants and he groans into my skin like the sound was punched out of him.
“Off,” I manage. “Yours. Carefully. I’m serious about the carefully.”
Between us we get his clothes gone without jostling the wound too badly, belt first, then pants shoved carefully down his legs.
His ruined shirt is already on the floor.
He’s fully hard when I free him, flushed dark, a bead of precome already slicking the tip.
I wrap my fist around him and stroke once, twice, watching his abs jump, watching him flinch when the movement tugs too close to the gauze.
“Easy,” I murmur. “Let me do the work. You just sit there and look tragic.”
“Cat-”
“Shh. Injured men don’t get to give orders. They get to receive them and say thank you.”
I rise onto my knees and guide him to my entrance.
I’m already wet, have been since he kissed me in the bathroom like apology and hunger were the same language spoken with different accents.
I sink down slowly, inch by careful inch, and the stretch punches a soft sound out of both of us that hangs in the dark.
When I’m fully seated, filled so deep I can feel him in my throat, I stay still, palms flat on his chest clear of the gauze, breathing through the fullness and the ache of months without being held afterward.
“Okay?” I ask him, reversing the usual script because tonight the power has to sit with whoever isn’t leaking.
His laugh is shaky, almost disbelieving. “You’re asking me?”
“You’re the one with the hole in his side. Seems relevant.”
“I’ve never been more okay in my life. Move. Please. Whenever you’re ready. Or never, if this is all I get, I’ll take never, as long as you’re here.”
“Dramatic.”
“Honest. There’s a difference, and I’ve been bad at it.”
I move. Slow rolls of my hips, grinding more than bouncing, keeping the motion shallow enough that his torso barely shifts, quiet as I can make it.
Every drag of him inside me lights nerves I’ve tried to ignore, wiring them back online one spark at a time.
His hands settle on my waist, not steering, just holding on, thumbs stroking the soft skin above my hipbones like he’s counting me present, like he’s afraid I’ll dissolve if he blinks.
“Missed this,” he rasps. “Missed the way you feel. Missed the sound you make when I-”
I clench around him on purpose and his sentence dies mid-confession. “That sound?”
“Christ. Yes. That one. Do it again.”
I lean forward, careful as surgery, and kiss him while I ride him in that aching, deliberate rhythm.
His tongue slides against mine, unhurried, tasting like the whiskey I poured him while the needle was still in my hand.
One hand leaves my waist and drops between us, fingers working my clit in tight fast circles that make my thighs tremble and my breath stutter against his teeth.
The coil in my belly draws tight too fast; I try to slow down, to make it last, and he shakes his head against my mouth.
“Don’t hold back for me,” he says. “I want to feel you fall apart on me. I’ve wanted it every night I wasn’t here. Every night I told myself staying away was protection.”
“Then don’t you dare disappear before morning. I mean it, Max. Cold sheets again and I will hunt you.”
“I swore. I meant it.” His fingers work me harder, surer, reading the twitch of my hips like a map he’s finally allowed to open. “Come on, Cat. Let go. I’ve got you. Even like this, I’ve got you.”
I do, quiet and shaking, forehead pressed to his, pulsing around him in waves that make my vision spot at the edges.
He watches the whole thing like it’s sacred, jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumps, hips barely lifting to meet me through it so he won’t tear what I just closed.
When I go boneless against him he strokes my back with the flat of his palm and waits, patient even with his cock still buried deep and twitching with unfinished need.
“Your turn,” I say softly once I can speak without sounding wrecked. “Tell me how you need it.”
“Just like this. Keep moving. I’ll, fuck, I’ll catch up. Don’t change a thing.”
I find the rhythm again, a little surer now, grinding down slow so he drags against that perfect spot inside me on every pass.
Aftershocks flutter through me; I chase them shamelessly.
Sweat slicks the place where my palms press his chest. His breathing goes ragged, then broken.
I can feel him swelling thicker, getting closer, and I squeeze around him deliberately on the downstroke.
“Cat, I’m going to-”
“I know. Stop holding on and let go. I want to feel every last pulse of it.”
He breaks with a sound I’ve never heard from him, low, almost wounded, nothing like the controlled man who negotiates territories over espresso, his face buried in my throat like he’s starving.
His hips jerk once before he forces himself still so he won’t tear the stitches, and heat spills inside me in pulses that seem to last forever.
His hand fists in the towel on the rack beside us hard enough that I hear the loops strain.
For a long moment he just stares up at me like I’m something he dreamed during a fever and can’t quite believe survived until the gray hour before dawn.
I ease off him carefully, wincing at the wet slide.
He gets us to his feet and the few steps to the bed, easing down on his uninjured side, and I stretch out along the safe line of his ribs.
His arm gathers me in at once, possessive even in exhaustion.
Between us, the bandage is warm and intact, no fresh bloom of red, no evidence that wanting each other cost him more blood.
I press two fingers lightly to the edge of the gauze, just checking, and he covers my hand with his.
“Still attached,” I murmur.
“Thanks to you.”
“Don’t get sappy. It ruins your whole icy persona.”
“Let it ruin.” His lips brush my hairline. “I’m tired of ice.”
Outside, the city keeps making its predawn noises, sirens somewhere distant, a truck downshifting, the ordinary chaos of a world that doesn’t know or care that Massimo Moretti is in my bed instead of a ditch.
Inside, for once, he isn’t already reaching for his shoes.
His breathing slows against my temple. I match it on purpose, greedily, committing the weight of his arm to memory in case morning proves me a fool again.
I should ask about the men who did this.
About the six months. About whether “I’ll be here” means anything when daylight hits the windows.
Instead I fit my knee between his and let the questions wait.
His fingers card slowly through my hair.
The wetness cooling on my thighs feels like proof, temporary, maybe, but proof.
If morning steals him again, at least tonight I had this: his mouth on mine, his body careful under my hands, the stitches holding while everything else between us finally didn’t.
“Talk to me,” I say softly. “Not about the job. About anything else. I want your voice in the room.”
He’s quiet for a stretch. Then: “I kept one of your scarves. In the glove box. For six months. It stopped smelling like you after week two and I still couldn’t throw it out.”
“That’s either romantic or unhinged.”
“Both. I’ve been both.” His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist. “Tonight I don’t want to be the version of me that leaves. I want to be the version that learns how to stay.”
“Then start by not bleeding on my pillows again.”
“I’ll do my best.” A pause. “Cat. What we just did, if you regret it in the morning-”
“I won’t. I might be furious at you for a hundred other reasons. Not for this.”
Relief loosens something in his face. He tugs me closer until my cheek finds the unhurt plane of his chest again, and I listen to his heart argue with the night.
“Stop thinking so loud,” he murmurs, half-asleep.
“You can’t hear thinking.”
“I can hear yours. It sounds like courtroom prep.”
“Maybe I’m building a case.”
“Against me?”
“For keeping you.” I surprise myself by saying it. His arm tightens. “Don’t make me regret the closing argument.”
“I won’t. Not tonight.” A swallow I feel against my hair. “Ask me again in the morning. I’ll still be here to answer.”
When we finally still, tangled together in the dark, his whole body shudders.
“I missed you,” he whispers.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
We fall asleep holding each other, a real marriage, one night only.
I wake to cold sheets and gray light.
He’s gone. The warmth long faded. The only proof he was here is the bloodstain on the pillowcase and the ache behind my sternum.
Of course.
I strip the sheets and start my morning routine, because that’s what you do when hope fails you again.
I’m halfway through my makeup when I hear the car.
From the window, I watch a sleek black vehicle pull up the drive. The door opens, and out steps Marcella Greco, garment bag over one arm, phone pressed to her ear, laughing at something.
“Prep for tomorrow’s meeting,” the staff gossip said. A major alliance summit about the treaty.
Tomorrow. About me.
And the donna, whose seat at that table is written into the treaty itself, wasn’t invited.