9. Mine to Protect #3
My back hits the wall.
His mouth finds mine.
The kiss is not gentle. It is not careful.
It is not the slow, deliberate lean from the garden bench — the almost, the hesitation, the giving-you-every-chance-to-pull-away.
This is the opposite of that. This is what happens when two people have been pulling away for weeks, and the rope finally snaps.
His hands frame my face — both hands, his palms against my jaw, his fingers tangled in my hair, holding me like I'm something fragile. And then he pulls me closer, and the hold changes — not fragile anymore. Vital. Necessary. The grip of a man holding onto something he's terrified of losing.
I fist his shirt. Both hands balled in the fabric at his chest, pulling him into me because the wall is behind me, and he is in front of me; the space between those two surfaces is exactly the width of his body, and I want it gone.
I want all of it gone — the contract, the guards, the war, the distance, the five days of silence, the careful avoidance, the lies he tells himself about business and perimeters and the man in the garden being a liability.
He kisses me like he's been starving. Like the almost in the garden took something from him that he's been trying to get back ever since and this — my mouth, my hands, my back against his hallway wall — is the only place he can find it.
I kiss him back with everything I've been swallowing for weeks — the anger, the confusion, the longing I refused to name.
The way his hand felt on my knee in the car.
The way he wiped the smoke from my face in the kitchen.
The way he said she sounds like someone worth saving and meant it.
All of it pours out of me and into him and the kiss becomes something that isn't a kiss anymore — it's a conversation we've been having since the alley, conducted in a language that doesn't require words.
His thumb traces the line of my jaw. My fingers find the back of his neck. He makes a sound against my mouth — low, involuntary, a sound I don't think he's ever made in front of another person in his entire life — and it undoes something in my chest that I will never be able to put back together.
A dam is breaking. That's what this is. A dam that held for weeks — through galas, garden benches, midnight kitchens, blood-covered knuckles, and the word business used as a shield — finally, irreversibly, breaking.
We drift apart.
Not far. Not willingly. Our foreheads touch.
His breath comes fast against my lips — ragged, uneven, completely shattered.
My hands are still tangled in his shirt.
His hands are still on my face. We are held together by the points of contact we haven't released, neither of us willing to be the first to let go.
"So much for business," I whisper.
His thumb traces my lower lip. Slow. Deliberate. The pad of his thumb follows the shape of my mouth the way you'd trace a line on a map — memorizing the route, committing it to something deeper than memory.
"It was always complicated," he says.
His voice is wrecked. Completely, thoroughly wrecked — a voice I've never heard from him before, stripped of every layer of control, polish, and De Santis discipline until what's left is just a man breathing hard against a woman's mouth in a dark hallway, telling her the truth.
We stay like that. Forehead to forehead. Breath to breath. His thumb on my lip. My hands in his shirt. The hallway dark and quiet around us, the house asleep, the world outside irrelevant.
Then he steps back.
Not far. Just enough. He releases my face — slowly, his fingers trailing along my jaw before they drop, like he's letting go of something one nerve ending at a time.
His eyes hold mine. Dark. Open. Full of something that looks like surrender and feels like the beginning of something that will either save us or destroy us.
"Goodnight, Sofia," he says. His voice is still wrecked.
"Goodnight, Matteo."
I let him go. He walks down the hallway toward his study. I watch him until he turns the corner — the line of his shoulders, the set of his back, the way his hand rises to his mouth as he walks away.
He presses his fingers to his lips.
He thinks I can't see it. But I can. And that gesture — that small, private, and unguarded gesture of a man touching his own mouth like he's trying to hold the kiss there — tells me more than every word he's ever spoken.
Something has shifted between us. A line crossed that can't be uncrossed. The contract, the rules, the careful architecture of business and perimeter and on paper — all of it feels like a language we've outgrown. Whatever comes next is written in something else.
I go to the guest suite. I close the door. I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark.
I touch my lips. They're swollen. Warm. They taste like him — something I couldn't have described an hour ago and will never be able to forget.
I close my eyes.
Neither of us sleeps. Again.
But for the first time, insomnia doesn’t feel lonely.