After Interrogation (Wedding Night)

Mine

Seraphina & Declan — Wedding Night

✦

✦ explicit content — 18+ ✦

We get back to the suite at half past midnight and I am still running the names in my head.

Three of them. I've had them since the moment Caruso said the Ghost — the word landed and three faces surfaced immediately, unbidden, the way the right answer always surfaces when you've been building toward it for long enough. I've been sitting with all three for the last two hours in the car, at the safe house, across the table from a man with a broken finger and everything he knew laid out between us. Running the architecture. Testing each name against the network map. Eliminating.

Two of them I can eliminate with another forty-eight hours of work.

The third one I cannot eliminate. And it is the one that sits wrong in my chest.

Declan closes the suite door behind us. He's watching me — he does this, I've learned, when he knows I'm working through something and is deciding whether to wait or push. He usually waits. It's one of the things about him that continues to surprise me. Patience in a man who moves like he does, who takes what he wants with both hands — the patience is real and it is specific and it is, I have decided, more dangerous than the rest of him combined.

"Tell me the three names," he says.

I look at him. He's shed the jacket again. Rolled his sleeves. Still has dried blood on his right hand from Caruso's face meeting the worktable and he hasn't bothered to clean it yet, which is its own kind of statement about his priorities. His green eyes are on me with complete attention and I feel it the way I always feel it — like being the only thing in a room full of things worth looking at.

"Rinaldi," I say. "Marco's logistics coordinator. Access to shipment schedules, port contacts, route information going back five years."

"Possible."

"Byrne," I say. "Your uncle's former second. Retired two years ago — or appeared to."

Something shifts in his face. Brief. Controlled. "Also possible." A pause. "And the third."

I set the laptop on the table. Sit down on the edge of the bed and look at my hands for a moment — at the emerald on my finger, green as his eyes, catching the low light of the suite. At the latex glove lines still faintly visible at my wrists.

"Matteo DiMaggio," I say.

Silence.

"DiMaggio," Declan repeats. Carefully. The way he repeats things he's filing.

"We grew up together. Our families were close when I was young — his father did business with mine for fifteen years. Matteo and I were in the same circles from the time I was eight." I keep my voice even. "He had access. He's always had access — to both sides, because his family sits at the intersection of Italian and Irish interests in this city going back thirty years. He knows our operations. He knows the routes. He knows the people."

"And?" Declan says. He hears the and. He always hears what I don't say.

I look up. "He was in love with me. He's been in love with me since we were teenagers." I say it the way I say difficult facts — directly, without decoration. "He made it known to my father when I was twenty-two that he believed I should be promised to him. That a DiMaggio-Conti alliance made more sense than anything my father would arrange otherwise." A pause. "My father declined."

The room is very quiet.

"DiMaggio's response to being declined," Declan says. His voice has gone to that specific register — level, controlled, the one that is several degrees colder than his normal and carries significantly more danger.

"He pulled back. Publicly cordial, privately — absent. I thought it was wounded pride." I hold Declan's gaze. "I'm now considering whether it was the beginning of something else. Whether being told no was the catalyst for all of this."

"A man who thought you should belong to him," Declan says. Slowly. "Who was told no. Who then spent eighteen months building an operation designed to take down both families." His jaw sets. "So that he could — what. Come in after the collapse. Pick up the pieces. Including you."

"That's the theory I haven't been able to eliminate," I say. "I can't confirm it yet. I need forty-eight more hours with the network—"

"Seraphina." He crosses the room. Stops in front of me where I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and looks down at me with an expression I have not seen on him before — something that is past controlled, past the careful management he keeps on himself, something raw and specific and directed entirely at a name I just put in the air. "A man who decided you were his," he says. "Who has been trying to destroy everything around you so he could take you."

"That's the hypothesis. Not confirmed—"

"He's not going to get the chance to confirm it himself," Declan says. "I want to be clear about that."

I look at him. At the green of his eyes this close, darker now than I've seen them, something burning in them that is not anger exactly — anger is too simple for what's on his face right now. It's possessive and it's absolute and it is, I am realizing, entirely directed at the idea that someone else looked at me and decided I belonged to them.

"You're being irrational," I tell him.

"I'm being precise," he says. "There's a difference." He reaches down and takes my face in both hands — careful, the way he's always careful with me, even when the rest of him is anything but — and looks at me with those burning green eyes. "You are mine," he says. Quiet. Absolute. Like stating a law of physics. "You have been mine since a park bench in May and you will be mine after whatever comes next and no one — no one — who thought otherwise is going to be a problem for very much longer."

I should have a response to that. Something measured. Something that addresses the irrationality of territorial possession as a response to a geopolitical threat assessment.

I don't say any of that.

"Okay," I say instead. For the third time in our acquaintance that word does more work than anything I could have built.

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he says, low: "Come here." And pulls me up off the bed and into him, and his mouth comes down on mine and it is nothing like the careful kisses from before — this one has the possessiveness in it, raw and undisguised, this is what it feels like when Declan Callahan stops managing himself entirely and I find I have wanted to know what this felt like for a long time.

✦ ✦ ✦

She says okay and something in me that has been running on restraint for hours lets go.

A man decided she was his. A man built an eighteen-month operation around the idea that she was something to be acquired and I am aware that this is information I need to process strategically and I will, I will process it strategically, but right now what I am is not strategic. Right now I am the man she married today and she is standing in front of me in a suite thirty stories above Manhattan and someone else thought they had a claim on her and I need — with a clarity that overrides everything else — to make that untrue in every possible way.

I walk her back toward the bed. She goes — not because I'm pushing her, because she's choosing it, and that distinction matters to me more than anything, her choosing it matters more than anything — and when the backs of her knees hit the mattress she looks up at me with those dark eyes and there's no performance in them. No management. Just her, here, present.

"Declan—"

"I know," I say. "I've got you." I ease her down. Come over her. My hands bracket her head and I look at her face — take the time to look at it, to read it, to make sure what I see there is what I think I see there. It is. "Tell me if anything—"

"Don't give me the speech," she says. "I know the speech."

"Then you know I mean it."

"I know you mean it." She holds my gaze. "Now stop talking."

I almost smile. My wife. God.

I start at her mouth because that's where I always start with her — her mouth that says precise and difficult things and occasionally says okay in a way that contains everything. I kiss her slowly and then not slowly, my hands moving into her hair, tilting her head back, taking the angle I want and feeling her exhale against me in a way that tells me her composure is already going and we've barely started.

"You taste like the whiskey," she says against my mouth.

"You say that like it's a complaint."

"It's an observation." A breath. "I don't have complaints yet."

"Yet," I repeat. "High bar."

"It's always a high bar. Keep up."

The dress is already gone from earlier — we never made it back to the suite before the call about Caruso came in — and she's in far less than she was before and I take my time with what remains, my hands moving over her with the same attention I give everything I've decided matters to me. Every inch of her. Learning what I started learning before and continuing it now, filling in the gaps. The soft inside of her elbow that makes her breath catch. The line of her collarbone. The curve of her waist where my hands span it and she makes a sound that she doesn't suppress this time.

I move lower. My mouth follows the line of her sternum, her stomach, the soft skin below her navel and I feel her go completely still beneath me the way she goes still when something is happening that she doesn't have a category for yet.

"Declan." Her voice has gone low and rough already. "What are you—"

"Being thorough," I say against her skin.

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true." I look up the length of her to find her eyes. "Put your hands in my hair and don't let go."

A pause. "That's very specific instruction."

"I'm a specific person."

Her hands come into my hair. The grip is tentative for about four seconds and then it isn't — her fingers curl in my hair as I slide my tongue through her wet folds. One stroke of my tongue and her back arches off the bed. I use my forearm to hold her in place. I continue to slide my tongue through her folds, gently suck on her clit. The moan that escape her beautiful mouth will play on repeat in my mind forever. I place a singe finger in inside her as I continue to suck her clit. She is incredibly tight. I I have to make sure she comes so she is ready for me. I place another finger inside her as she screams for me to not stop. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, her moans and her hands in my hair is my undoing. She is so wet I know she is getting close. I murmur against her cunt how well she’s doing. Her taste is so captivating.

I take my time. Long, thorough, deliberate strokes of my tongue, learning her the way I learn everything, with complete focus and no intention of rushing. Her breathing comes apart in pieces, the careful architecture of her composure disassembling itself one breath at a time, and her hands in my hair go from holding to gripping and the sounds she makes are real and unmanaged and mine and I feel each one like a struck match.

"Oh God," she says. Low, broken. Not a prayer. A statement of fact from a woman who deals only in facts. "Declan, I—"

"Stay with me," I say against her. "Don't think. Just feel it."

"I'm not—" A breath that comes out fractured. "I'm always thinking, I can't just—"

"You can," I say. "Let me show you."

I don't stop. I continue to fuck her with my tongue as my thumb puts pressure on her clit. I don't give her time to rebuild the walls or find the categories or do any of the things she does when she needs to feel in control of something. I just stay, and pay attention, and learn her completely, and at some point she stops trying to think and she just — falls. Her spine arches off the mattress. Her grip in my hair goes tight enough that I'll feel it tomorrow. My name in her mouth the way it sounded the first time tonight — broken and real and nothing held back — and I feel the shudder that moves through her entire body and I stay with her through every second of it.

The room is quiet. Her breathing slowly returns from somewhere far away.

"That," she says, after a long moment. "Was."

"Was?" I come back up the length of her. Find her eyes. Dark and open and slightly dazed — Seraphina Callahan, slightly dazed, which is something I intend to make happen as often as possible for the rest of my life.

"Shut up," she says. "You're smug."

"I'm thorough."

"Same thing." She pulls me down by the back of my neck and kisses me tasting herself on my tongue-deep and immediate and with a hunger she's been managing the lid on for months and has apparently decided tonight to stop managing. Her hands move over me with the precise deliberate attention she brings to everything — learning, cataloguing, finding the places that make my breath change and returning to them with something that is either scientific method or revenge, possibly both.

"Your turn," she says against my jaw.

I go very still. "Seraphina, you don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." She pulls back far enough to look at me. Dark eyes, completely steady. "I want to. There's a difference." The corner of her mouth moves — that almost-smile, the real one. "You keep saying that about differences. It's rubbing off."

✦ ✦ ✦

I have never done this before either. I need him to understand that I am approaching this the way I approach everything I don't have prior experience with — directly, attentively, and with the full intention of being good at it.

He watches me with those green eyes and there is something in them I haven't seen before — something that strips away every last layer of the composed, controlled, always-in-command man and leaves something that is just — wanting. Raw and specific and entirely directed at me.

That look does things to me. I file it somewhere I intend to come back to for a long time.

I take my time. I have watched him take his time and I understand now what it does — the deliberateness of it, the complete attention, the message it sends that says you are worth every second of this. I give that back to him. My hands first — learning the shape of him, the scar at his ribs that I already know, the places where he goes tense and the places where the tension releases — and I feel him watching me work with that hungry steady gaze that doesn't waver.

My mouth follows. Slow. Deliberate. As guide my tongue from shaft to tip.

"Fuck Sera." His voice has gone completely rough. His hand comes into my hair — not directing, just holding, like he needs the contact. "You don't have to be this—"

"Thorough?" I say against him.

I hear his breath leave him in a hard exhale that is almost a laugh and is mostly something else entirely. "Christ," he says. "You're—"

"I'm a fast learner," I say. "Pay attention."

His hand in my hair tightens. I take that as the compliment it is and continue.

I pull him into my mouth while running my tongue over the tip of his cock. I learn him the way he learned me — completely, patiently, reading every sound he makes and every shift in his breathing and using the information. He is not quiet. As I take him to the back of my throat and hold him there, until I can’t take it anymore. He tries to be and fails, which is the most honest thing I've seen from him yet — the sound he makes, low and rough and unmanaged, the way my name comes out of him when I do something right. I file all of it. I intend to be very well-informed on this subject.

"Enough." He pulls me up — gently but without negotiation, his hands at my waist hauling me back up the bed with a decisiveness that sends a hot shock straight through me. His eyes on mine, dark and burning. "Come here."

"I was busy," I tell him.

"The only place I am finishing tonight is with your tight cunt wrapped around my cock." He rolls me beneath him in one smooth motion and I let it happen — I choose it, which is the point, which has always been the point — and his body settles over mine and his mouth finds my ear and he says, low: "Tonight you're mine. All of you. Every part." A breath. "Say it."

I look up at the ceiling for a moment. At the city light moving through the glass. At the particular absurdity and rightness of lying in a hotel suite on my wedding night being told to say it by a man with dried blood on his hand and green eyes that have been taking me apart since May.

"Yours," I say. Low. True. Mine to give and I'm giving it. "Tonight and after. All of me."

Something moves through his face that I don't have a word for yet. Something large and certain and permanent.

"Good," he says. And then he's done talking.

✦ ✦ ✦

I take my time even though every part of me wants to abandon time entirely.

She said yours and meant it and I felt it land in the deepest part of me and now I need — with a specificity that has pushed out every other thought — to make her understand what that means. What I mean when I say mine. Not possession in the way DiMaggio understood the word. Not a claim on something external. Mine in the way that means I am going to spend the rest of my life learning every part of her and protecting every part of her and standing next to her while she dismantles the world and I am never, not once, going to make her smaller to make myself feel larger.

Mine in the way that means she chose me. And I intend to be worth that choice every single day.

But also — and I am not going to pretend this isn't true — mine in the way that means no one else. Not ever. Not the ghost of whatever DiMaggio thought he had a right to. Not any version of her history or her future that doesn't have me in it.

I kiss her until she stops trying to keep track of what's happening and starts just feeling it. My hands move over her with possession now — not the careful learning of earlier, this is something else, this is I know you now and I am not being tentative about it — and I feel her respond, feel her arch into the touch, feel the precise moment she stops managing her reactions and just has them.

"Declan." Breathless. Her hands at my shoulders, gripping.

"I've got you," I say. "I've always got you."

"I know," she says. "I know you do." And the way she says it — without argument, without the habitual resistance, just — accepting it — does something to me that I will not recover from. I do not want to recover from it.

I take her slowly. More slowly than the urgency in me wants, because this is her first time and that matters to me and she matters to me and I am going to be careful with this even with my jaw tight and every muscle in my body demanding I stop being careful. I watch her face through every moment of it — reading her, adjusting, giving her time to breathe through what's new and find what's good in it.

"Still with me?" I say against her temple.

"Stop asking me that."

"Answer the question."

"Yes." Her legs pull me closer. "Yes, I'm with you. Move."

The last of my restraint folds.

I move. And she moves with me — matching me, the way she matches me in everything, that infuriating and extraordinary refusal to be anything other than my equal even here, even in this — and the sound she makes is low and real and punches straight through me. My hand slides into her hair. Tilts her head back. My mouth at her throat, her jaw, the corner of her mouth.

"Say it again," I say against her skin.

"What—" A breath that breaks apart. "Say what—"

"My name." My hand tightens in her hair. "The way you said it before. I want to hear it."

She makes a sound. Then: "Declan." The way it sounds when nothing is managed. When she's given up every wall and every category and every carefully constructed distance and is just — here, with me, mine. "Declan."

"Again."

"Declan—" She breaks off because I shift the angle and she loses words entirely and I feel her nails at my back and I don't mind. I don't mind any of it. I want all of it.

I feel her build. Feel the change in her breathing, the tension in every muscle, the specific quality of her grip that tells me she's close — I have been paying attention, I have been doing nothing but paying attention — and I don't let up. I push her over the edge and I keep her there and I feel her come apart under me with my name in her mouth and her hands gripping and her whole body arching and I follow her because I was never going to last past that.

Her name on my lips. Nothing managed. Nothing performed. Just — her name. The way it's going to sound for the rest of my life.

✦ ✦ ✦

Afterward he doesn't move away. His arm pulls me in and his heartbeat is loud under my ear and the city does what it always does and I am — quiet. Completely quiet.

Not the managed quiet I perform. The real kind. The kind I only find in front of my monitors at three in the morning when I'm deep enough into a problem that everything else drops away. I didn't know I could find it anywhere else. I didn't know it was available in other locations.

His hand is in my hair. He still doesn't know he does that.

"DiMaggio," he says. Into the dark. After a while.

"Yes."

"I want the full file. Everything you have on him."

"Tomorrow," I say. "I'll pull it in the morning."

"Tonight."

"Declan." I tilt my head up to look at him. He's already looking at me. Those green eyes in the city light, dark and certain and still burning with something that hasn't gone anywhere. "It's our wedding night."

"I'm aware."

"The file will still exist in the morning."

"He thought you were his," Declan says. Quiet. Absolute. "He built an eighteen-month operation around the idea that you were something he could take. I need you to understand that I take that personally."

I look at him. At the jaw set with that particular tension. At the hand still in my hair that has tightened slightly without him realizing it. At this man who said mine and meant it in every possible way and who I am beginning to understand means it not as a diminishment but as a declaration — of his, yes, but also of what he intends to be to me.

"I know," I say. "I take it personally too." A pause. "In the morning I'll show you everything I have and we'll build the case together and we will deal with Matteo DiMaggio completely and permanently." I hold his gaze. "But right now it is our wedding night and you are going to stop thinking about him and so am I."

A long beat. Then the tension in his jaw releases by a fraction. "You're giving me an order."

"I'm making a reasonable request."

"It sounded like an order."

"Declan." I put my hand on his face. His jaw under my palm. "Stop thinking about him." I hold his eyes. "Think about me."

Something shifts in his face. The burning certainty of it — still there, never going anywhere — but the edge of it softening into something else. Something that is all mine.

"I've been thinking about nothing but you," he says, "since a restaurant in Little Italy in March."

I look at him for a long moment. At everything he is. At everything I didn't plan on and can't categorize and have stopped trying to file.

"Good," I say. "Keep it that way."

His mouth finds mine. Slower now. Warmer. The possessiveness still there, underneath, always underneath — but softer at the surface, something that feels less like claiming and more like keeping. Like he's decided I'm something he intends to keep and is starting to understand what that means in practice.

I let him. I choose it, which is the point.

Outside, Manhattan burns. Below us, somewhere in a Brooklyn safe house, a man with a broken finger sits in a room with everything he knew already gone. And somewhere in this city is a name I've been hunting for nine weeks that is going to break something open when I find it.

In the morning I will find it.

Tonight I close my eyes and I stay exactly where I am and I let the city burn without me for a few more hours.

I am Seraphina Callahan. I have been his since a park bench in May and I am — finally, completely, without reservation — all right with that.