I freeze mid-thrust.
Her eyes are wet, red, unflinching. She’s still trembling around me, but there’s no fear in it.
“I love you,” she repeats, steadier. “And I hate you for making me say it like this. But it’s true. I love you, Raffaele D’Amico.”
The hollow pit in my chest cracks wide open.
I kiss her—brutal, claiming—and start fucking her again, deep and punishing. She moans into my mouth, and I feel her body answering for me.
“I’m going to kill him,” I growl against her temple. “Nico. And every fucking traitor who stood with him. I’m going to burn his whole operation to the ground. I’m going to take everything Vincenzo built and put my name on it and then put his head on his father’s chair.”
“I know.”
She’s rocking back into every thrust, gasping but listening.
“And after?” she breathes.
I pull back enough to meet her eyes.
“I become the Conti don.” I slam into her again. “And you become my fucking wife.”
It’s not a question. It’s a statement. A done deal.
“Okay.”
I still for half a second.
“Okay?”
“But I’m not hiding in some fucking bunker.”
“Bea.”
“No. If we’re doing this—all of it—I’m not rotting in some marble cage while you’re out there. I’m done waiting. I’m done losing my mind alone.”
I stare deep into her glistening eyes. She means it. The woman under me isn’t asking anymore.
I feel a dark, unexpected relief.
“All right. Then we lose our minds together.”
She reaches past me, hand shaking, and pulls open the bottom drawer of the desk. She clearly already went through it at some point. We’ll talk about that later.
She slaps a brochure against my chest. The one I’ve been staring at for years.
Sea Bright. The mansion on the north end of the strip, the long one with the garden that runs down to the dunes. I’ve been looking at that property for three years. I haven’t let myself think about why.
“These have a purpose, right?” Her voice is very small for a woman who just told me she loved me. “You kept them for a reason.”
I take the brochure.
Sure. I’ve been collecting these for ten years, off and on, but I haven’t, in a decade, allowed myself to imagine living in any of them. I have a discipline about that.
Men in my line of work who imagine other lives tend to die faster.
But none of those men have ever met anyone like her.
“There’s a house,” I say slowly. “Sea Bright. The mansion at the north end.”
