"I'm still angry," she says.
"You should be."
"Don't agree with me so easily. It's suspicious."
"I'm not trying to win the argument." I hold her gaze. "I'm telling you you're right."
Her throat moves. Something in her expression shifts — not softening, not yielding. Recalibrating. The specific look of a woman adjusting her understanding of a man she thought she'd already mapped.
She reaches up.
Her fingers find the collar of my shirt — deliberate, slow — and she pulls me down to kiss me. It's not gentle, not forgiveness, and not the end of it. It's the kiss of a woman who is still furious and has chosen to be so here, with me, rather than across the kitchen.
I'll take it.
I take all of it.
Her hands clench in my shirt, and I step back, moving us against the counter and lifting her onto it. She wraps her legs around me like she's been waiting for this release all night. Maybe she has. The anger still lives in her hands — gripping too tight, demanding — and I match it, meeting her exactly where she is.
"I'm not your enemy," I say against her mouth.
"I know." Her hands find my hair. "I know that. It doesn't make any of this easier."
"No." I pull back far enough to look at her. Her eyes are dark, furious, and wanting. I feel all three in my blood. "Nothing about you is easy."
"Good." She pulls me back down.
I get her out of her shirt. She gets me out of mine.
The tattoos she said she wanted to learn — I feel her hands tracing them in the dark, following the lines across my chest and arms with a deliberateness that makes my jaw lock. She's learning me. Filing it away.
Then her mouth finds my chest, and she bites down — sharp, deliberate, the kind of bite with intent — and I hiss through my teeth.
She pulls back and looks at the mark. A thin bead of blood wells at the surface.
She holds my gaze, lowers her mouth to it, and licks it clean, slow and unhurried, like she has all the time in the world to ruin me.
"First scar from me," she says against my skin. Her eyes come up to mine — dark, furious, burning. "Now we're even."
I have been shot. I’ve been stabbed once on the left side, four inches from anything critical. I’ve taken hits that would hospitalize most men and walked away without a word.
Not one person in my entire life has bitten me and then named it.
I stare at her.
She stares back. Completely unrepentant. Waiting to see what I do with this.
I flip us before she can react, pressing her back against the counter, and feel her sharp inhale against my throat.
"We are very far from even," I say.
She throws me a dangerous smile. "Then I suggest you keep up, Moretti."
I work my way down her body with ruthless focus — not because I'm in a hurry, but because I need her to feel this. Need her to understand that what I did came from a place I can’t yet name, and that this is the only way I know how to say it.
My mouth finds her breast. She arches. I feel her pulse hammering under my lips.
Then I keep going.
