Page 11 of The Savage

Shouldn’t be pressed against the cool marble of the communion rail, where a lifetime of prayers soaked into stone now witness something far more dangerous.

But she’s trembling, looking up at me with those wide, luminous eyes, and I swear the cherubs watching from the stained glass bow their heads – not in judgement, but surrender. And for one breathless moment, time forgets us as I turn a virgin into a sinner.

Her breath catches as I lower my forehead to hers, whispering things no good man should say in a place like this: that I’ve wanted her for a year, that I dream of her mouth saying my name, then wrapping tight around my grateful cock, that I’d burn the whole damn church down before I let anyone take her away from me before I’ve fucked her sweet virgin pussy to hell and heaven and back again.

‘Tell me you want this, bella angel.’

When she whispers, ‘Yes, Renzo… I want this,’ I feel something inside me fracture with need.

I guide her to the cot, gently, reverently, stripping off her dress, pocketing pink panties she’ll never get back. Then I let her cling to me while she learns how desire feels – how my desire feels.

Every sound Giada Mancinelli makes after she surrenders her virginity to me is a prayer turned inside-out.

Every soft plea against my throat is a vow she doesn’t realise she’s making. I murmur against her ear, voice rough, telling her she’s killing me, telling her she’s beautiful, telling her she has no idea what she fucking does to me.

Her hands clutch at my shoulders, trusting, terrified, burning.

And when the moment finally takes her… when she clings to me as if the world is tilting as she comes on my cock for the first time, my own control snaps.

And I shatter with a kind of breaking devotion I didn’t think I was capable of.

I hold her tight, whispering her name like contrition, like worship, like a curse meant only for her.

She buries her face against my neck, shaking, and I breathe her in like absolution.

When it’s over, her softness presses to me, and I revel in her breath warm on my skin, her fingers curled into my shirt as if letting go might undo the universe we just remade together.

I look down at her – flushed, trembling, forever changed – and I say it again, quieter this time, reverent and ruined: Mine.

Everything is different and yet the same in the aftermath.

The city still spins and the world still roars, but I can’t feel it the same way. It’s like I’ve been rewired from the inside out.

She changed the rhythm of my blood that night and every night after that.

Every gear I shift, every risk I take on the track, every reckless decision… it all leads back to that night. The night I touched something pure and ruined it with my hands. The night I decided I’d defy the world for her if I had to.

The night I became hers, even if she could never be mine.

The memory fractures.

A shriek of sound pulls me backwards to monitors beeping and voices exclaiming.

The golden light of the cathedral dissolves into the sterile white of the hospital.

Fuck. I’m dying for real now, aren’t I?

* * *

The Present

Cesare’s voice drifts through the fog first, steady and sharp as always. He’s pacing, probably barking orders even when I’m half-dead. Furia Racing can’t afford a scandal, not with the press circling.

‘The doctors say the concussion was quite severe,’ I hear him say to someone. ‘But they don’t know when he’ll wake again. Or if.’

If.

What a fucking word.