"Horribly."
"Don't repeat it back at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're pleased about it."
"I'm not pleased about anything." He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips and he's close — not touching, that deliberate not-touching that feels louder than contact — and his eyes move over me once, slow and thorough, deciding something. "You smell like me."
"Your sheets started it."
"My sheets." The corner of his mouth twitches. "Dangerous objects."
"Apparently."
He reaches out. Two fingers. He tucks a strand of hair back from my face with a slowness that has no right to exist in a man who snaps arms for a living. His hand curves around the back of my neck, warm and certain, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw.
"We have thirty minutes." Low.
"Before Bruni."
"Before Bruni."
I look at his mouth. Look away. Look back.
"This keeps being a terrible idea."
"I know." He leans in. His mouth brushes the corner of mine — barely, just a suggestion — and I feel it in my spine. "Tell me to stop."
I don't tell him to stop.
We do not,strictly speaking, have time.
What we have is his weight pressing me into his mattress, his mouth on my throat, and his hands moving over me like he has a map and intends to ruin every inch of it. He gets my shirt off in one motion and looks at me like he's deciding where to start, and the answer is everywhere.
His mouth finds my breast — hot and deliberate, tongue circling my nipple until I arch into him with a sound I didn't plan to make. His hand slides between my thighs.
"Vai piano— go slow," he murmurs against my skin when I try to rush him.
I don't go slow. He makes me anyway — two fingers pressing inside me with maddening patience while his thumb works slow circles that have my hips lifting off the mattress. He watches my face while he does it. That's the part I can't handle — the watching, the completely focused attention, like I'm the only thing in the world worth looking at, and he intends to catalog every single response.
"Luca—"
"I've got you." He doesn't speed up. "Vai piano."
He takes his time, working me open — first his fingers, then his mouth. He moves down my body with ruthless intention, deliberate and slow, until his tongue finds me and stays there. His timing is obscene — pulling back when I get close, starting again, until I'm fisting the sheets with both hands and choking out words in broken sentences I will refuse to remember later.
When I finally come apart, it's loud and graceless, and I don't care. My whole body is shaking, his name in my throat, his hand flat against my lower back, holding me together as I fall to pieces.
"Brava," he breathes against my inner thigh. Barely a sound. Like a secret.
He kisses his way back up my body — unhurried, possessive, stopping at my hip, my ribs, the scar below my collarbone that he traces with his mouth like he's memorizing it — and by the time he settles between my thighs I'm already reaching for him, already desperate in a way that has nothing to do with pride.
He pushes inside me slowly.
Like he has all the time in the world. As the Bruni debriefs, the Enzo deadline, my father’s deadline, the entire collapsing architecture of two crime families simply does not exist.
He watches my face the whole time — dark eyes tracking every flicker, the moment my mouth falls open when he seats himself fully and stays there, not moving until I make a sound that is frankly humiliating and entirely involuntary.
