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"Come for me," I say against her hair. "Right now, on my cock, with my fingers in that smart mouth. Show me what I almost died for."

She breaks.

It rolls through her in a long shudder, her cunt gripping me in waves, her cry muffled around my fingers, her hands curling into fists against the plaster.

I hold her through it, hips still moving, dragging it out until her legs give and I’m the only thing keeping her upright. I take her weight against my chest. The stitches scream, I hold her anyway. I'd hold her with my back split open.

I slide my fingers from her mouth. She gasps like a swimmer surfacing.

"Oh my God," she manages.

"Wrong name."

"Don't you dare make me laugh while you're still inside me."

I pull out, and the loss of her heat is its own small grief. Then I turn her around by the shoulders. Her face is wrecked in the most beautiful way I've ever seen. Flushed, glassy-eyed, lipstick smeared soft at the corner of her mouth, her chest heaving against her bunched-up shirt. She reads my expression, and her eyes darken, because she always reads me first.

"Kneel," I command.

She goes down without a word, jeans still tangled at her thighs, and tips her face up like an offering. The sight of her takes the last of my control out at the foundation. Three rough strokes of my fist, and I come with a sound I grind down to almost nothing, painting her cheek, her parted lips, the line of her jaw, while she watches me through it with those eyes that have owned me since a black dress and a party I never let myself remember.

For a second, all I hear is our breathing.

She licks the corner of her mouth, slow, holding my gaze, and smiles like she knows exactly what she just did to me. "Welcome home.”

I crouch in front of her, ignoring the fire across my back, and wipe her cheek with my thumb, gentler than anything else I've done tonight. She leans into my hand. For a moment neither of us speaks, and the silence doesn’t press for anything. I didn’t know it could feel like that before her.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

A WEEK LATER

Amanda

The sheets smell like him, and I refuse to be embarrassed about burying my face in his pillow twice in the last hour like some kind of cologne-addicted golden retriever.

We got to Rome last night. Valentino promised me ten days of this city on foot, getting lost, eating things from questionable street carts, and so far we've seen exactly one room of it.

The one with the bed.

Well, the shower, briefly, which doesn't count because we ended up back in the bed.

He left an hour ago.

"I have a job," he said. "It's important. It's not dangerous."

That was the whole briefing.

He also left Fabio outside the door.

Fabio, for the record, is six-foot-something of Sicilian granite who has said maybe eleven words to me total, and I'm pretty sure three of them were I'll be here. He's in the hallway right now doing whatever silent mountain men do. Standing. Watching. Possibly photosynthesizing.

And lying here, scrolling my phone with my legs tangled in five-star sheets, I realize how quickly this started feeling normal.

Guards in hallways. A man who checks the locks twice and kisses my forehead like it's sacred. Someone, always, watching the door so I don't have to.

Six months ago, I would've called that a cage.

Now I know what the world looks like without it, and I'll take the granite man in the hallway.