That nearly finished me before I had even begun.
I moved slowly at first, because I wanted every inch of it, wanted to feel the way she yielded and welcomed and held me all at once, wanted to watch her face when pleasure started to replace the last of the tension she had carried into the room. The rhythm deepened on its own after that, not frantic, not rough, just fuller and more honest.
She laughed once, softly, half against my lips, and I looked down at her with so much love in me it felt like another kind of pain.
“I’ve got you,” I whispered.
When she let herself believe me, I felt it.
Later, when I could tell she was close again, I turned all of my attention to that, because there were few things in life that made more sense to me than the instinct to devote myself to her pleasure. It was not enough to have her under me, warm and willing and real. I wanted the full surrender of her body, the soft wreckage after, the satisfaction of knowing I had put that look in her eyes and that softness in her limbs.
By the time she finally flew apart in my arms, I was gone enough myself that following her felt less like a decision than an inevitability.
Afterward I gathered her close and kept her there, one hand moving slowly over her back, my mouth finding her hair, her temple, whatever skin I could reach without having to let her go. She fell asleep warm and satisfied against my chest, trusting enough to surrender to it fully, and I lay awake a while longer just looking at her in the dim light and trying to understand how I had come so close to losing this.
In the end, maybe there was nothing to understand.
I ended the year pleasuring the woman I loved, and as she slept in my arms with her breath warm against my skin, my only wish was that I might be lucky enough to spend the next fifty years doing exactly the same.
CHAPTER 29
EMILY
Iwas nervous.
It felt faintly ridiculous, considering I was not the one about to swear allegiance and formally step into one of the highest roles in the Chicago mafia, and yet as I sat between Lily and Elena with my hands folded in my lap, I felt the dampness of my own palms and the restless beat of my heart. I had already wiped my hands once against the fabric of my dress when I thought no one was looking. Lily, of course, had noticed immediately and sent me a smile that was equal parts sympathy and amusement.
I made the right decision.
I knew that now. Not in the dramatic, headlong way I had once thrown myself into love, but in the quieter, steadier way truth settled after being tested. The month since I had come back to Chicago with Pietro had not been perfect, and that was precisely why I trusted it. There was a night, three weeks in, when he told me about a threat that had come through the previous day—not because he had to, not because I asked, but because he promised to stop deciding alone what I could bear. I was angry for an hour and frightened for two, and he had stayed in the kitchen with me while I worked through both withoutonce trying to manage the outcome. There was the afternoon I pushed back on a decision he had already made about a house—where we would live, how the security would work—and he pulled out the plans and started again from the beginning, because he had genuinely not thought to include me the first time and was sorry. There was the week I fell behind on my thesis and he said nothing at all, just made coffee and sat at the other end of the table until I found my way back to it. Small things. Ordinary things. The kind that didn't make good stories but added up to something you could stand on.
Trust had returned not like lightning, but like brickwork.
Living in his parents’ house had been awkward for roughly two days, after which it became mostly absurd. The place was so large, and Lily had folded me into her orbit with such sincerity that resistance would have required far more energy than I possessed. Elena came and went often enough that I had more than once found her barefoot in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. Violet arrived in whirlwinds of children and beautifully tailored chaos. Matteo drifted in and out like a dangerous weather system wearing cashmere. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped feeling like an anxious guest and started feeling like someone whose place, while perhaps not yet official on paper, had already been accepted by the house itself.
Sophie, for her part, had gone from offended absence to impatience with remarkable speed. She was coming this summer for a visit. I could not keep her away any longer without risking a full-scale emotional uprising and, knowing my sister, at least three weaponized guilt texts a day. We had all agreed, silently and then explicitly, that there were things she did not need to know. The mafia part of Pietro’s life, the deeper mechanics and bloodier truths of it, belonged to him and me and the people already born into that burden. This particular darkness was ours to carry, not hers.
Even so, sitting there now, watching the room fill with men whose names carried weight in places I had once never imagined existing beyond television, I still had moments where the surreal tenor of my own life nudged at me from the inside. These were not vaguely dangerous men in expensive suits. These were men high enough in the Chicago outfit that even I, still new enough to all of this to notice every shift in tone and posture, could feel the hierarchy in the air. They spoke to Lily and Elena with deference so strong it was almost ceremonial, and to my discomfort and secret fascination, they had slowly begun extending the same to me.
One of them, an older man with silver at his temples and a scar I tried not to stare at, bent slightly as he passed our row and said, in a tone so respectful it startled me, “Miss Hart, if you need anything, you only have to ask.”
I looked at him longer than was probably socially elegant. “That’s very kind. Thank you.”
He inclined his head as if I had said something far more important than basic politeness and moved on.
Elena, who had absolutely seen the whole thing, leaned in. “You look surprised every time.”
“Because I am,” I whispered back.
Lily patted my knee lightly. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I’m not sure I should.”
“That’s probably why it suits you,” Elena remarked, and there was something warm and shrewd in the way she looked at me that made me suspect she enjoyed me more than was prudent.
Before I could answer, movement at the front of the room pulled all attention toward it, and suddenly the air changed. Pietro stood there in black, every line of him composed, his cane a familiar part of him, and in this context, transformed into something more obviously tied to the kind of authority hehad once tried so hard to keep compartmentalized from me. He looked impossibly handsome and utterly calm, which I knew better than to trust completely. Only someone who loved him very much and had spent the last months learning him would have seen the tension under the surface.
As the vows began and the room hushed around them, I found myself looking not only at Pietro but at the men surrounding him. Alessandro, standing with the kind of restrained power that seemed to alter the shape of the room by existing in it. Hoka, with that impossible stillness of his. Matteo, looking bored in the specific way of men who are in fact paying attention to every possible angle. Power was everywhere here, old and inherited and honed by violence and legacy, and yet the thing that caught me most forcefully was not the power itself but the fact that Pietro, in the middle of it, still looked for me.
