Page 83 of Wicked Mafia Beast
"Kon." His name falls from my lips in a voice I barely recognize. Raw. Open. No walls between us.
He groans against my neck, his hips grinding deep, hitting the spot that makes my thighs shake and my fingers claw at his back. I don't bite back the sounds. I don't hide them against his shoulder or swallow them down. I let him hear exactly what hedoes to me, every moan, every gasp, every breathless whisper of his name.
And the way his body shudders when I stop holding back tells me he's been waiting for this all along.
I fall asleep in his arms, my face pressed against the roses tattooed on his chest, the steady thrum of his heartbeat filling my ears. And for the first time since this started, I don't tell myself it means nothing.
Because it does. It means everything.
I wake in the deep hours of the night. The room is dark except for the thin slash of moonlight between the curtains. He's asleep beside me, face relaxed, the hard lines softened, the constant vigilance dissolved. He looks younger without the weight of the world pressing on his brow. Younger and almost gentle, the scar on his eyebrow just a pale line, the sharp jaw unclenched, his lips slightly parted on slow, even breaths.
I trace the line of his jaw with my fingertip. The scar on his eyebrow. The curve of his lips. My touch is feather-light, barely there, the secret exploration of a woman memorizing the landscape of the man she loves.
"I love you." The whisper barely makes it past my lips, the words dissolving into the darkness of the room, existing for one fragile moment between the moonlight and his sleeping breath. Testing. Tasting. Letting them live in the dark where they're safe, where they can't be examined or challenged or taken away.
He doesn't wake.
But I could swear he smiles.
I press my face against his chest, breathe in cedar and smoke and warmth, and close my eyes.
Tomorrow I'll have to figure out what this means. What it changes. How to carry this new, terrifying, precious thing inside my chest without dropping it.
But tonight, lying in the arms of a man who has survived so much only to give me the most precious gift. His heart.
And for the first time in years, I am not afraid.
I don’t realize just how much accepting his gift will cost us both.
Sixteen
Onyx
The Foundry smells like rosemary and garlic. The delicious combination offers a coziness and warmth that seeps into old brick.
I stand in the bedroom doorway, freshly showered, wearing a pair of dark jeans and one of Kon's henleys that hangs past my hips and smells so much like cedar and smoke that wearing it feels like being held by him.
My laptop sits open on the desk, the USB drive Kon gave me plugged into the side, files from Luca's intelligence sprawling across the screen in organized folders. The Malone exposé is taking shape. Real shape. Stomach-turning, award-winning, empire-burning journalism that will leave nothing standing when it hits print.
The Syndicate Research folder sits in the sidebar. Still there. Still not deleted.
Tomorrow. I'll delete it tomorrow. I've been telling myself that for over a week and the lie has become so familiar it barely registers anymore. But I mean it this time.
I move through my bedroom while I towel-dry my hair and catch myself smiling at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. The woman staring back at me has color in her cheeks and a softness in her eyes that I barely recognize. Three weeks ago, this face was all sharp edges and dark circles and the haunted look of a woman running for her life. Now I look like someone who sleeps well. Someone who eats. Someone who has a reason to smile in a bathroom mirror at six o'clock on a Thursday evening.
Kon did that. This place did that. And I'm done pretending it doesn't matter.
For the first time in my life, I have people to visit. A best friend healing in Lincoln Park who sends me texts full of cherry-lip emojis and threats to interrogate my boyfriend. A family of Syndicate wives who add me to group chats about teething schedules and bad action movies. A man downstairs who grows roses on a rooftop and cooks me breakfast and loves me even though I haven't said the words to his face yet.
Tonight. I'm going to tell him tonight.
The decision sits steady in my chest, warm and certain, planted there by three weeks of breakfasts and arguments and tender sex and a man who turned off his security cameras because he trusts me.
His footsteps reach me from the hallway, the measured stride I've learned to recognize the way I recognize my own heartbeat. He appears in the doorway and leans against the frame, arms crossed, dark hair loose around his jaw, those bottomless black eyes sweeping the room and landing on me with an expression that makes my pulse stutter every single time.
The hard lines of his face soften. Just for me. The scar through his eyebrow relaxes and the perpetual tension in his jaw eases and for a moment he's not the Bratva Beast or the Syndicate's enforcer. He's just Kon. My Kon.
"I want to go see Sloane tomorrow." I toss the towel onto the bed and cross to him, my bare feet quiet on the carpet. "Can you take me?"
