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Enzo gestures for me to sit next to him. “Come here. I’ve got some more info I could use a fresh pair of eyes on.”

He doesn’t need to tell me twice. I hop up from my chair and am soon seated next to him.

Outside, through the window, Matthew shrieks with laughter as Marta chases him across the grass. Inside, the three of us bend over the papers together, and for the first time since I walked back through that gate, I’m not a secret being managed, or a woman being protected, or a complication being worked around.

I’m at the table.

My hands are on it.

It’s a good feeling.

I decide not to examine how frightened I am that it won’t last.

Ten days after the lawyer’s office, the house is asleep when I go to him.

I check on Matthew first. He’s sprawled sideways across his bed with the rabbit under one arm, breathing slow and deep. I pull the blanket back over him. Then I walk down the hall in my bare feet and push open the door to Enzo’s room without knocking.

He’s awake. Of course he is. He’s sitting in the chair by the window in an undershirt and slacks, a glass of something untouched on the table beside him, the city light cutting across his face. He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t say a word. He just watches me, the way I now know he watched me for eight months from somewhere I couldn’t see.

I close the door behind me.

Then I reach back and turn the lock.

The click is very loud in the quiet room. Something moves behind his eyes, hot and dangerous and starving.

“Every lock in this house is mine now,” I say. “This is the first one I’ve turned to keep myself in.”

“Stevie.” My name comes out rough.

“Eight months.” I cross the room slowly. “Eight months, you watched me. Every night, you went home and thought about me.”

“Every night.”

“Tell me what you thought about.”

He doesn’t tell me. He shows me.

He’s out of the chair before I reach it, one hand at my jaw and the other at my waist, and he kisses me like a man who has been holding something behind his teeth for a very long time. I fist my hands in his undershirt and drag it over his head. He gets my sleep shirt off in one pull, and then I’m bare in the city light, and he stops to look, the way he always does, like he wants to memorize every inch of me before he ruins it.

“I thought about this,” he says against my throat. “You. In my room. Choosing it.”

He walks me back to the bed and lays me down. When he catches my wrists and pins them above my head with one big hand, he pauses, his eyes on mine.

“Yes,” I tell him, before he can ask.

He holds them there and takes his time. His mouth on my breasts. His teeth at my hip. His tongue between my thighs, slow and merciless, until I’m arching off the bed and pulling against his grip just to feel him not let go. Every time I get close, he eases off and looks up at me, dark eyes glittering, and waits.

“Please,” I finally gasp.

“Again.”

“Please, Enzo.”

“That’s my girl.”

He lets me come then, his mouth sealed over me, and I shake apart so hard I see stars.

He’s inside me before the aftershocks fade. One long, deep stroke, and he holds there, buried as deep as he can go, my wrists still caught in his hand, his forehead against mine.