Page 71 of The Savage

The sun is melting into the sea, gilding his skin in light. He looks up when I approach, and for a heartbeat neither of us speaks. The silence hums with everything we can’t say.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I whisper.

He smiles faintly, gaze softening in a way that terrifies me. ‘Because I’m fucking dying to see you,’ he says. ‘All of you.’

My breath catches. ‘You already can.’

‘Not yet.’ His voice drops to a husky rumble. ‘Not until you take that off. Not until I see your hair. I’ve imagined it a thousand times, running my fingers through it, wrapping it around my wrist. Gripping it tight when I take your mouth or you take my cock. It’s driving me fucking insane.’

The bluntness of it steals my words. Heat rushes up my neck, my fingers trembling where they touch the hem of my sleeve.

‘You can’t say that to me.’

‘I can. They’re not offensive. They’re the truth. And you’re on shore leave from piousness, remember? You can do whatever you want. Including kissing and fucking. And for the sake of every man in the thousand-mile radius and be-fucking-yond, the only person you’ll be fucking and kissing is me. Because if someone else so much as dreams of you, I’ll hunt him through every church and alleyway in Sicily, slit his throat… and I’ll still come home to lift your skirt like the world didn’t just bleed for us. Because I’m the one who found you. I’m the one you melt for. And if some bastard even looks at you like he’s worthy, I’ll send him to meet your God myself.’

I feel my mouth gaping with every dirty, raw word. ‘You’re… crazy.’

‘I’ve been telling you that for days, baby.’

‘And I cannot… will not… do those things you speak so disgracefully about,’ I whisper.

He takes a step closer, slow and careful, the after-effects of his physio making him move with a kind of rough grace. ‘You will,’ he murmurs. ‘When you’re ready. Not before. But when you do, cara mia’ – his eyes flare gold in the dying light – ‘it’ll be beautifully dirty and holy. The kind they’ll sing about beneath the Sistine Chapel.’

He’s demented. I should turn away. I should pray.

Instead I stand there, the wind teasing the edge of my veil, thinking that maybe holiness and hunger aren’t opposites after all.

That night, I can’t sleep. I lie awake listening to the sea and the rhythm of his footsteps in the corridor outside my door.

I tell myself it’s wrong. That I am being tested. That the ache low in my belly is temptation, not truth.

But when I close my eyes, all I see is his hand lifting the edge of my wimple, his voice a sin I’ve already half-committed.

And for the first time since my life was turned upside down, I want to remember everything. Just so I know how to fight this hold Renzo Salvatore has on me.

10

GIADA

Afternoons in Ortigia feel like being held between two heartbeats. The sea hushes and the courtyard glows. Even the gulls seem to take their quarrels elsewhere.

I curl on the chaise with the linen throw to my chin and try not to watch the clock that tells me when Renzo will limp back from physio, wrung out, jaw locked, anger tamped down to something that makes the room feel charged.

He’s pushing too hard. I’ve told him so.

He only smirks and says, ‘I don’t do half-measures, bella,’ like that’s an answer and not a threat to his tendons.

Lately, it’s the silences that worry me more.

The way his eyes go distant when I prod at the shape of my past – my family, their lives, their desires. Even simple things like what they do for a living.

He sifts what he says like a jeweller grading stones, keeping the sharpest ones for later. I asked for the tablet he promised; he gave it to me with a smile and a kiss pressed to my knuckles that did not feel benign.

It holds a library’s worth of books, puzzles, language games. And as I suspected, it does not have the internet. No browser. No search. No easy answers. I told myself it was for my recovery. I told myself it was prudent. Today, it feels like another soft lock on a gilded door.

I read until the words blur and I doze.

The sleep is quick and hot, the kind that steals you without asking permission.