When we’ve gone around the driveway so many times she’s gotten it down to a science, I tell her to park by the front door. She’s breathless, eyes bright as stars, a smile wider than an ocean. I don’t tell her she’s not ready to back into the garage without putting the car into the kitchen.
We’re barely in the house, and I have to press her against the wall, feeling her breaths move her chest against mine.
“I have to have you.” I grind my erection against her.
“Can’t you control yourself?” She hitches up her leg to wrap around my waist.
“I cannot control how I feel about you.”
“I mean long enough to get upstairs.”
I kiss her with unrestrained affection, demanding nothing else, leading her inside. We are languid together, undressing up the stairs. Without urgency down the hall. It doesn’t take any control to be here, in this bed, tasting her, feeling her moan into my mouth. I demand nothing from it, and she only offers a moment that we stretch into minutes.
“You’re a master of control,” she says.
“I’ve proven that a dozen times already.”
“You have.” She touches the edge of my mouth, gazing up at me with her rich brown eyes. “But I have nothing to prove.”
I trace my thumb along her neck.
Tomorrow, I may live in a world where I am separated from this collarbone. This throat. This chin.
If only happiness stuck to a soul for as long as anger does.
Instead of saying that, I kiss her, opening my mouth to get the sting of doubt off my tongue.
I worship her body with my lips, prizing the difference between where she’s soft and where she’s rough. Her fingers run through my hair, gripping it when I suck on her nipple.
She pushes me away and, with a wanton grin, runs her hands and lips over my body. I let her taste the drop that’s formed at the tip of my dick.
I pull her up before I let loose in her mouth. She’s above me, hair falling over her face, knees on either side of my hips. I push her back so she’s up on her knees as I finger her cunt.
“Oh, Dario.”
“What is it?” My view of her writhing body is perfect from below.
“That’s so good.”
“I want you to fuck me now.” I hook two fingers in her pussy and draw her forward. "Sit on my cock, sweet prima.”
Up on her knees, she hovers above my cock. I point it upward with one hand and push her down with the other, watching my body disappear into hers.
We twist together, in no rush to start or finish. I angle myself to stimulate her nub, and she takes the cue, moving with me.
“You love to fuck,” I say, getting off on this sweet thing doing the fucking. “Don’t you?”
My big hands squeeze her tits, run over her face, defacing the beauty they touch.
“I love to fuck,” she says, and I stick two fingers in her mouth. She sucks them, still beautiful, even when I destroy her.
“Keep fucking.”
She mms against my fingers, her movements losing control and stability.
“You want to come?”
She nods. I take my fingers from her mouth and put my hands on her throat.
“Please. Please let me.”
“Stay still. I have it.”
Holding her in one spot, I fuck her deep and hard until she stiffens, pulsing around my cock. When I explode inside her, it’s like coming home… together.
“What’s the first thing you want to do on St. Easy?” I ask. Her head rests on my chest and my legs are twined around hers.
“Is there surfing?”
I’m feeling the pressure of all the preparation I need to do, but I can’t leave her just yet.
I am preparing to kill her father, after all.
“The waves are too small.” I run my thumbnail over her arm, and I draw the pad of my thumb in the opposite direction. Feeling a field of goose bumps, I reach behind her and pull the throw blanket over us. “I can teach you to snorkel.”
“Are there sharks?”
“Yes.”
“I saw a thing on television. A woman went under the ocean in a cage to take pictures of them.”
“Sharks?”
“She had on a suit and a mask and a tank of air,” she says.
“You don’t have to wear all that. And you don’t have to go into the ocean if you don’t want. I’ll make them teach you to snorkel in the pool.”
“Can you get me one of those cages though? And the whole outfit with the tank on the back?”
“You want to swim with sharks?”
“I want to see them. She was so close she could see stuff—like meat—stuck between its teeth. She patted its nose just like this.” She taps and strokes my forehead, then yawns, putting her head back on my chest. “It didn’t attack her.”
“It was full from the last guy who went down in a cage.”
“I want to do it.” Her voice has a soft, breathy wetness against me, and the rise and fall of her body is getting shallow and even.
“Pet a shark?”
“Mm-hm.”
Of course, I’m not going to let her near a fucking shark, but I might be too dead to keep her from getting in that cage. And if I live, she’ll see me as the man who locked her in a house and left her behind. She’ll walk away from me if she has any sense, then I’ll have to watch helplessly as she swims with sharks.
“You’re a dangerous woman, you know that?”
I wait for her to answer, but she doesn’t wake up enough to admit it.
When I’m sure she’s deeply asleep, I slip out of bed to continue the work of surviving long enough to join her in paradise.
I make a call while I get in the car. Connor finally picks up.
“Boss?” The music behind him says he’s at a party or club. Lucky guy, but I’m luckier.
“I need to get a signal to Massimo. Do we have an open channel?”
“Yeah. Live one though. Face to face. It’s dangerous.”
“Remo’s got cheeks like a baby. They won’t hurt him.”
“What message do you want him to deliver?”
“Peace.” I start the car and head down the drive.
“Peace?”
“I’m thinking about peace. Meet me in an hour and I’ll tell you about the war that we’ll fight before it.”
Since the Hell’s Kitchen headquarters is permanently soiled, we’ve moved operations to a vacant restaurant in Washington Heights. Our equipment is less corporate now. There are no conference tables or filing cabinets. My team has lined the stainless steel surfaces of the kitchen with guns, and the shelves are stacked with ammunition.
They’re all watching me intently, waiting for the details.
“I put out an offer for peace negotiations.” Someone sucks in a breath. Someone else clears his throat. “It went to Massimo. Asked him to keep it quiet. Kid’s a soft touch. No?”
They all nod. Good.
“He’ll meet me. He won’t keep it quiet, and he won’t be alone. But while half his guys are watching us—”
“And trying to kill you,” Oliver says.
I nod to his concerns but continue. “Connor’s team is going to slip into Precious Blood and get us the keys to the kingdom. The interior access points. Possibly Peter Colonia’s apartment.”
There are some nods, but enough bafflement that I know someone’s seen the hole in the plan.
“The building parking lot under Precious Blood has biometric authentication,” one of the older guys says. “Ever since the wedding, it’s locked up. Unless we want to blow off the doors?”
Good man.
“There’s a soft spot on the roof and a clear line to custodial. What I’m looking for is the keys to Peter Colonia’s life. His bathroom. His car. Anything. Once we have them, we’ll know how to finish him.”
Remo, the youngest of the DiLustro loaners, runs in, panting.
“He said… he said…” He leans on the table to keep from collapsing after his lungs burst.
“Take it easy, kid,” Connor says.
“Massimo,” Remo says after he gets a slap on the back. “He said yes. He’ll meet you on the north platform of St. Nicholas. Three hours.”
I laugh. That’s three in the morning.
“If he wants to meet that far past his bedtime, I’ll be there.”
On any New York City sidewalk, a person may walk over thick, silver-dollar-sized glass disks embedded in the concrete. Under those disks are passages where deliveries flow from business to business, keeping trucks from blocking the main roads.
Behind papered windows and padlocked doors, down creaky wooden steps and past an open, walk-in refrigerator, Connor points a flashlight down one of those tunnels.
“St. Nicholas Station is three lefts and two rights. Not in that order,” Connor jokes. I know the way. “We’ll have it cleared from the north platform. Just don’t let him follow you back.”
I trust it’ll be cleared, but I walk it with him anyway.
“You okay to get the keys?” I ask.
“Just keep the little prince occupied.”
“Then Monday. That’s the big job.”
“Been chomping at the bit to get this started for a long time now.”
“Things can go really fucking sideways.”
“That’s what they say.”
We turn a corner and step through a broken wall. The graffiti on the walls of this tiny room is twenty years old. The smell of humanity is long gone.
“Listen.” I take Connor’s arm to stop him. “After this, no matter how it goes, I’m out.”
“Out?”
“I’m leaving with Sarah. Going to the island.”
“You can’t.” He’s two heartbeats from pissed off. “Not until every last one of them is dead.”
“I have to. I can’t protect Sarah here, and I can’t leave her. She’s the priority and—” He starts to cut me off, but I hold my hand up to buy another few words. “And you need to take over. Do it any way you want.”
“Come on, mate. There’s no way.”
“I’ll leave you everything you need. The property’s yours to use. The money’s in the bank. Everyone will fall into line behind you.”
He looks away, into his own mind and his own potential.
“I don’t like it,” he says. “You’re putting the mozz on this whole thing.”
“Do I have to ask what that means?”
“No.” He opens a steel door that leads to another dark tunnel. “Just don’t cark it when you meet with Massimo.”
I know what cark it means, and I have no intention of dying before Sarah and I fly the fuck out of here.