The words crack apart in my mouth. I already know the answer. I just need to hear the air hold it for a second — need it to be real and spoken and not just something I’m kneeling in front of on the floor.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
Because it’s all here. Written in scar tissue and ink. He walked into my family’s war. Faced the mafia, faced the Bratva, and he did it without asking me to say thank you. Without asking me for anything at all.
How did I not see it? How did I stand across from this man, year after year, and mistake devotion for danger? Read love as manipulation? He gave me every reason, and I catalogued every one of them as a reason to run.
The guilt moves through me like a current, sharp and consuming, tangled up with something that feels unbearably close to grief. For the time lost. For the version of me that was so buried under her own wounds that she couldn’t recognize when someone was bleeding for her.
My lips press against the largest scar. Softly. The way you touch something sacred.
“Nico.” His name comes out as barely a sound. “I love you. I love you so much.”
His hands find my face, cradling me like I’m something he almost lost too. He tilts me up toward him.
“I know, baby.”
Quiet.
Certain.
Like he always knew, even when I didn’t say it. Especially then.
I look up at him. This man who broods and commands and moves through the world like a thunderstorm. And I see it clearly for the first time without fear clouding my vision. All those years I spent keeping him at arm’s length, I thought I was protecting myself.
I was just making us both bleed slower.
My past had its hands around my throat for so long I forgot what it felt like to breathe free. And while I was suffocating in it, this man was quietly going to war.
For me.
For my name, carved into his skin above every scar.
Nico helps me to my feet. “All I want to do is have my dick buried inside my wife.” His deep voice bounces off the walls and hits my clit with hunger.
“I need that, Nico.”
Quickly, he removes the rest of his clothes. “I’ll probably come in less than five minutes the first time. But I promise to make it up to you.”
“I know you will.” Did something happen to his sex drive while he was in a coma?
I stare at his bobbing cock, then meet his cognac gaze. “I have no right asking, but did the other women say anything about your hairy chest and balls?”
My hands roam his hairy pecs, and his large hands gravitate to my round ass.
I remember asking that bitch Lucy. She said he was always shaved.
His tongue slicks across his lips as he peers down at me. “I kept my chest shaved. Lucinda never said anything about it. And I didn’t let a forest grow around my dick and balls,” he pauses. “No woman has seen my dick in five years.”
I chuckle. “What? Nico. You can be honest.”
“Serenity, I haven’t fucked another woman.”
I laugh again. “Stop playing, Nico.”
“I’m not. Once you and I had sex, I never fucked another woman.”
I step back. “Nico, are you really going back to the beginning?”
