Page 32 of Empire
“I don’t know how to protect you from this,” I admit into his skin.
He shudders once. “I’m not asking you to.”
We stay like that for a while, water pounding over both of us, the room gone white and hot around the glass. My breathing slows first. I can feel his heartbeat under my palm—fast and alive. Mine’s no better.
When he finally leans back enough to see my face, he cups it with both hands and looks at me with the kind of terrible calm I know means he’s already decided something.
“I love you,” he says.
The words are quiet, but everything in me stops.
For one suspended second, all I hear is the shower… then the world slams back in.
I stare at him, but he doesn’t look away. Of course, he doesn’t. He’s Salvatore fucking Vieri. Half his power is the way he standsin the blast radius of his own honesty and makes other people decide whether to run.
“I know I shouldn’t,” he says, voice unsteady now in a way I’ve almost never heard from him. “And maybe that makes me weak or stupid or exactly what my father thinks I am, I don’t know anymore. But I’m done pretending this is something smaller just because smaller would be easier to survive.”
Christ.
I close my eyes for half a beat and almost tell him not to do this. Almost tell him he has no idea what he’s asking. Almost tell him that saying those words to me is like striking a match in a room full of gas.
But he’s already lit it.
So I cover his hands with mine and answer his love with my own.
“I love you too,lyubimiy.”
There it is. No taking it back, no softening it, and no cleverness to hide behind.
The look on his face is going to ruin me long after tonight ends. Relief, yes, but not simple relief. There’s sadness in his brown eyes, as if hearing it gives him exactly what he wants and confirms at the same time that neither of us is getting out of this clean.
He kisses me with tears in his eyes that he’d deny under torture, and because I know him, because Ilovehim, because I’m exactly as weak for him as he is for me, I pretend not to notice and kiss him back like I can hold the whole fucking world outside the glass a little longer.
When we break apart, he rests his forehead against mine and whispers, “Say it again.”
“Greedy bastard.”
“Indulge me.”
I exhale shakily and close my eyes. “I love you.”
His fingers curl into the back of my neck. “Again.”
I laugh against his mouth this time, helpless and wrecked. “I love you, Salvatore.”
“Cuore mio,” he murmurs, and then he’s kissing me again, and I’m done for in every way that matters.
Maybe I always am.
When the water’s gone lukewarm, the steam has thinned, and the city beyond the curtains keeps moving toward whatever disaster waits for us next, I’ll remember this as one of the only honest nights of my life. Two sons standing in the wreckage of what their fathers made them and admitting they love each other anyway.
It doesn’t save us.
It makes everything worse.
But tonight I walked into my bathroom thinking I’ll scrub another woman off my skin, only to find the one person who’s ever made me forget I’m already owned, standing in my shower choosing me anyway.
So I let myself have this.
