Page 108 of Valentino

"Again."

"Yours, fuck, Valentino⁠—"

"Touch yourself," he orders.

My hand obeys before my pride can veto. Two fingers, his rhythm, and his voice in my ear telling me I'm beautiful, I'm his, that he's going to fill me up and keep me, crude and reverent in the same sentence.

"Valentino, I'm⁠—"

"I know." His grip tightens under my chin. "Give it to me. Scream."

I do. I come apart so hard my vision whites out at the edges, screaming something that's mostly his name and partly a prayer. He fucks me through it, snarling, and then his rhythm breaks. He takes his cock out with a groan that I feel in my bones, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, both of us shaking like we survived something.

We collapse sideways onto the wreckage of the sheets. His arm hooks me back against his chest, and for a long time there's nothing in the room except our lungs trying to remember their job.

"Luca definitely heard that," I say, when I can finally remember how to speak.

"Good." No remorse whatsoever. His lips press against the back of my neck, soft now, unhurried, and the contrast nearly undoes me all over again.

I lace my fingers through his where his hand rests over my heart. The contentment is so foreign it almost hurts.

Valentino

I shift, and she makes a low sound against my ribs.

"Amanda."

"Mm. No. Whatever it is, no. I'm busy." Her lips move against my skin when she talks, and the warmth of it goes straight through me. "I'm doing important work down here." She says while she drags her fingers all over my body.

"We need to talk."

She goes still. The fingers stop their mapping. Then she pushes herself up on one elbow, the sheet sliding off her shoulder, and looks down at me with her hair wrecked and her eyes already sharpening. I watch the softness leave her face. I hate myself.

"There it is," she says. She sighs, and the sigh is older than she is. "I knew you had something today. You've had it since breakfast. You get this fold right here—" she presses her thumb between my eyebrows, gentle, which is worse than if she'd slapped me, "—when you're carrying a thing you don't want to put down. So. Put it down."

I sit up against the headboard.

"You need to leave for Chicago."

She blinks. Once. Just the one slow blink, like her whole body is buffering, and then she says, very evenly, "What do you mean?"

"Enzo Basile knows it was me." The words come out flat because flat is the only way I can carry them. "There was security footage from the palazzo. He ran it. He has my face, and now he has my name. He's put money on me for anyone who finds me and brings me to him breathing. Every freelancer between Naples and Zurich is going to be hunting me by the weekend, and some of them are good at it."

Her face doesn't move.

"There's a passport ready for you," I say. "You fly out of Fiumicino tonight. Toronto, then O'Hare. Luca takes you to the airport, Dmitri's people meet you on the other end, and Vittoria is waiting in Chicago. It's already settled."

"Settled." She repeats the word like she's checking it for rot.

"Yes."

"By who?"

"By Bruno. By me. By everyone whose job is keeping you alive." I keep my voice level, the way I'd keep my hands level over a wound. "The bounty is on me, Amanda. Which means everyone near me becomes a way to reach me. You're the softest target I have, and Basile is the kind of old man who understands exactly how to use a woman to break a man. I've watched him do it to other people. I won't watch him do it to you."

The bells finish. The room holds the quiet badly.

"Okay," she says. "Walk me through the part where you come too."