Page 56

I want to memorize this.

His hands find my face. Chain whispering against my shoulder where the slack drapes between his wrists and my body. His palms against my jaw. His fingers sliding into my hair behind my ears. And his hands are shaking — the tremor of a nineteen-year-old touching a woman's face with the intention of holding instead of reading.

I feel the tremor against my skin and something inside me I've kept locked for twenty years clicks open. Deliberately. The switch I always knew was there. Twenty years of not touching it because touching it meant admitting the control was a choice and the silence it enforced was a prison I built for myself.

I open it and the silence floods with him. His heartbeat under my palms where my hands have found his chest. The chain's whisper. The sound his throat makes — low, raw, the sound of a man whose mouth is on a woman's and the kissing has stopped being a decision and become something the body is doing because the body is done waiting.

The kiss deepens. His tongue finds mine and I make a sound I haven't made in twenty years — not performed, not strategic, not the calculated moan of a woman running an operation. This sound comes from somewhere below my ribs, below my training, from the woman who has been locked behind twenty years of walls and is clawing her way to the surface through the wreckage of every reason I had to keep her buried.

His shirt comes off over his head — my hands, my decision, the chain dragging across my forearms as his arms lift and the fabric clears and his chest is bare and the bruises I found days ago are fading from purple to green and I put my mouth on the worst one. My lips against the fracture I found with my fingers and now find with my mouth and the difference between those two contacts is the difference between twenty years of rooms and this one.

He says my name. The real one. The one Emiliano spoke through a phone line. The one Giovanni pulled from every record. The one no one has said to me like this — with want and reverence and the specific, devastating weight of a man who knows who I am beneath every identity I've worn and is calling her.

He says it and my knees nearly give.

Twenty years. Twenty years of men saying names that weren't mine while they touched a body that wasn't entirely present. Twenty years of performing desire while the woman behind the performance counted ceiling tiles and exits and the minutes until she could walk away and scrub her skin clean.

This boy says the name that died on paper in a harbor city and the name comes back to life in his mouth. And the woman it belongs to comes back to life with it.

Our foreheads touch.

His hands still on my face. My hands still on his chest. The chain draped across my shoulder — steel warm from his skin, the weight of it resting against the scars beneath my shirt like a reminder of what we're inside of and what we just chose despite it.

His heartbeat under my right palm. Fast. Mine matching. The rhythm I overrode in the first room because the matching terrified me. I don't override it now.

The matching is the point. Two people tuned to the same frequency, finally letting the resonance hold instead of shutting it down.

Then the phone.

My burner — the pocket I forgot existed for the duration of his mouth on my skin and his hands in my hair and the sound he made when I touched him and the sound I made when he said my name and the world contracted to the size of two bodies learning each other in a room that was never supposed to become this.

I answer.

"I got your message."

Romeo's voice hits my ear and I understand immediately why this family draws people in. The charm is stripped to its frame — raw, load-bearing. The voice of a brother who hasn't slept. Who has been tearing this city apart warehouse by warehouse.

Three seconds of silence. I hear him breathing. The penthouse behind the breathing — distant, domestic. A household that's been holding its breath for days.

"Bring him home."

I look at Dante. He's standing with his hands at his sides, the chain hanging from his wrists, his face open and unguarded and devastating. A nineteen-year-old who has been waiting for this call since the night he chose mercy and the dark swallowed him for it.

"Your brother says come home."

"Both of us."

Steady. The certainty of a man stating a condition he won't negotiate. Both of us means I walk through that door with him. Means the woman who chained him enters the house she was hired to dismantle. Means Romeo Rivas opens the door for the enemy.

I hold the phone between us. Romeo's breathing on the other end — the calculation audible in the silence. The man who leads through trust facing the most extreme test that trust has ever met.

"I will open the door."

Four words. I end the call.

The room is quiet. The chain whispers as Dante shifts. I reach for his wrist — not the steel. The skin beneath it. The line where the chain has been pressing for days. I touch it with two fingers and a thumb. His pulse steady. The certainty in his blood matching the certainty in his voice.

Both of us.