His control breaks then. Just once — a sharp exhale against my throat, his forehead dropping to mine, his hands gripping me like I'm the only solid thing left.
"Dio mio— my God," he grunts. Low. Wrecked. Like he didn't mean to say it. Like he forgot, for one unguarded second, that he doesn't let people see him like this.
I file it away like something I intend to keep.
"Sei bellissima— you are so beautiful." Rough. Unplanned. Like the words came out before he could stop them.
Then he moves.
I stop thinking entirely — his hips finding a rhythm that is exactly, precisely, infuriatingly what I need. One hand gripping my hip hard enough to bruise. The other braced beside my head. His mouth on my jaw, my throat, my mouth. I wrap my legs around him, pull him deeper, and feel him groan against my skin — low and helpless, the sound of a man who has lost the same battle I have.
I come for the second time with his name on my lips and my nails on his shoulders.
Then he pulls back and flips me without warning. I gasp into the pillow as his hands grip my hips and drag me back into him.
"Ancora— again," he says against my spine.
He pushes inside me from behind — deeper, a different angle that pulls a sound out of me I didn't know I was capable of — his hand sliding around to the front while he moves, his mouth at the back of my neck, pressing words into my skin in Italian I'm too far gone to translate.
I come apart a third time with my face in his pillow and his body covering mine completely, like he's trying to eliminate every inch of space between us.
He follows moments later — my name rough and reverent, his forehead dropping to my spine, his hands flattening against my hips like he's holding on to something he refuses to let go.
We stay tangled together.
Neither of us speaks.
His heartbeat slows against my palm.
Outside, New York City does what New York City does — indifferent, relentless, alive.
In here, for exactly this moment, nothing exists but this.
Here'swhat I know about Luca Moretti in the early morning.
He is not in a hurry.
He knocked twice on the bathroom door when I had five minutes left.
"Bruni in five," he said, through the wood. Voice perfectly even. Like nothing happened.
Infuriating. Deeply, deeply attractive. Both.
Bruni delivers everything.
Six weeks of surveillance logs. Three burner numbers. A dead drop in a Midtown parking garage. A fixer whose name Niko is already running through seventeen databases.
I sit in the study and take it all in — my surgeon's face neutral, processing, filing. I don't let any of the cold fury show until I'm alone in the hallway afterward.
Six weeks.
They've been watching me for six weeks — before the drive, before Tessaro died on my table, before any of this started. Someone looked at Serafina Virelli and decided she was a variable worth monitoring. She went to work every day, unaware. Stood in her apartment, worked at her hospital, lived her life — while someone watched every minute of it.
I think about that.
I do the math.
By the time Luca comes to find me, I've already reached a conclusion, and that conclusion has a plan attached to it. The plan is either brilliant or insane, and at this point, I'm not entirely sure there's a difference.
