Chapter 4

The first thing he noticed was light.

Pale morning light seeped through the heavy curtains, softening the edges of the room, laying everything in muted gold. The second thing he noticed—what surprised him most—was her. Still there.

Sasha lay on her side, dark waves spilling across the pillow, her cheek pillowed on her hand. The sheet had slipped to her waist, leaving one bare shoulder exposed. Her breathing was steady, lips parted slightly in sleep, her lashes fanning shadows against her skin.

Nico had half-expected to wake alone. Women sometimes left. Sometimes they wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, to keep the memory contained in shadows instead of facing it in daylight. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Their night had been reckless, impulsive—fire lit in the middle of a powder keg neither of them fully named.

But Sasha hadn’t run. She was still here. And something about that shifted something inside him, something he didn’t have a name for.

He lay back on his elbow, watching her. Noticing details. The faint curl of her hair damp from last night’s shower. The way her full lips curved naturally, as if she was always a breath away from smiling. The curve of her frame under the sheet—short, thick, gorgeously real. No performance. No artifice.

She stirred, sensing his gaze, and her brown eyes fluttered open. For a moment she blinked against the light, then focused on him.

And she smiled.

It wasn’t the polite smile she’d given men at the gala. It wasn’t something rehearsed. It was warm, soft, touched with surprise—like she hadn’t expected to wake and see him watching her.

Nico felt his chest tighten. He’d seen beautiful women his entire life, but this was different. This wasn’t makeup or gowns or practiced glances across a ballroom. This was raw beauty, unfiltered, eyes meeting his as if no one else in the world existed. And it pulled something awake in him—something fierce and tender all at once.

He smiled back, slow and genuine. “Morning.”

“Morning,” she murmured, her voice husky from sleep. She stretched, pulling the sheet higher over her chest with a playful glance before slipping from the bed.

Nico propped himself against the headboard, watching as she started across the carpet. The borrowed shirt she’d worn last night was gone; she moved in only a towel now, wrapped snug around her curves. She disappeared into the bathroom, and he heard the shower start a moment later, the faint hiss of water filling the silence.

He closed his eyes briefly, dragging a hand over his face. He hadn’t planned for this. Hadn’t expected to want more after one night. But when he opened his eyes again, he realized—he wanted her back in his bed. Not later. Not eventually. Now.

The bathroom door opened. Steam curled into the suite, carrying the warm scent of soap and her skin. Sasha stepped out, her hair damp, towel tucked tight beneath her arms. She caught his gaze immediately, laughing softly.

“What?” she asked.

Nico didn’t answer. He moved. Swiftly, smoothly, crossing the space between them in a few strides. Her laugh broke into a startled sound as he scooped her into his arms.

“Nic!” she protested, but her hands gripped his shoulders instinctively.

He carried her back to the bed, lowering her gently onto the sheets. He leaned over her, storm-grey eyes locked on hers. For a long moment, he just looked—studying, searching, letting her see his intent.

“Can I?” His voice was low, asking the question he wouldn’t move forward without. His fingers brushed the edge of her towel.

Sasha’s breath caught. Then she nodded, her eyes steady on his. “Yes.”

His mouth curved in a smile, but it was softer this time, reverent. He tugged at the towel, loosening the fold until it slipped free, leaving her bare beneath him. Her skin glowed against the sheets, damp from the shower, warmth rising to her cheeks as his gaze swept her body.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured, and she believed he meant it.

Then he slid his hands to her waist, pulling her gently toward the edge of the bed. His eyes never left hers. She let him guide her, heart hammering, anticipation curling in her stomach.

When his lips pressed a slow kiss to her hip, she shivered. When he glanced up at her face, still holding her gaze, her pulse quickened with the intensity of it. This wasn’t just lust. It was attention—focused, consuming.

His mouth moved, unhurried, down her thigh, to the hollow of her knee, to the soft skin at the inside curve. Slow, deliberate—almost reverent. Like he worshiped the body he meant to ruin.

She felt ridiculous for trembling, but there was nothing to be done for it; her will, usually unyielding, surrendered with humiliating ease. She wanted to tell him she didn’t need kindness from the man who would doom her. But then he skimmed his mouth lower, stubble scratching lightly against her skin, the ticklish abrasion intensifying every inch he traveled. Her thighs tensed, volunteering their own unsteady tremor. The air in the bedroom tasted like rain, sharp and clean from the storm that had passed while they slept.

She willed herself not to flinch when his teeth grazed her, but the tremor that went through her wasn’t something she could argue down. He noticed, of course. He was always cataloguing her responses, collecting them like ammunition. His hands, unhurried, circled her knees and pressed them apart, and all the bravado she’d summoned earlier felt laughably thin.

He lingered over every part of her as if there were a ledger in his mind.

He stood up for a moment, staring down at her, eyes dragging along the length of her body, and then he moved. He hovered over her and wedged himself between her legs.

He kissed the hollow of her stomach, the damp seam beside her hip, the place where her thigh began. He kissed her as if he could memorize the map of her, as if with every inch he touched, he erased the world and replaced it with her skin. Leaning up, he rested his weight on one elbow, using his free hand to trace lazy patterns along her ribs. Sasha’s breath hitched under his palm, but she didn’t look away.

It would have been so easy to shut this down. He could have gone through the motions—made it hot, impersonal, ended it with polite distance. That’s how it usually was. But with her, he wanted to linger, to test every nerve, to see how slowly he could draw out pleasure before she trembled apart in his hands.

He lowered his mouth to her breast, teeth grazing her nipple until she arched against him. He didn’t stop; he went slower. She reached for him, winding her arms around his neck. Damp hair, slick against his cheek as she pulled him closer. He kissed her, and it was different from last night’s wildfire. This was slow, intentional, a possession claimed in the hush of bright morning. She tasted faintly of mint, her mouth softening beneath his as if she’d been waiting for this.

Her hands traced the muscles of his back, fingers splaying across his skin. She made a low sound in her throat when his palm pressed flat above her heart, steadying her as he pushed inside—careful at first, as if the morning itself required some gentleness. But as her body opened for him, as she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him deeper, patience gave way to hunger.

The tension built between them, not just sexual but something heavier, fuller. A pulse under the skin that carried the memory of last night’s dance floor, the confession of names. Her nails dug into his shoulders. He pressed his face to her collarbone and whispered something, not a word but a rough, involuntary sound.

He devoured her neck, teeth grazing the tender skin before claiming her nipples with a hunger that made her cry out. His descent was deliberate torture—each inch of her body conquered, marked, possessed. He made his way further down her body.

When his mouth finally crashed against her core, her world fractured. Her back bowed violently off the bed, a strangled sound tearing from her throat. He growled against her flesh, eyes locked on hers as he pinned her writhing hips with bruising force, his grip tight, anchoring her to his hold.

He stood again, guiding her futher up the bed toward the mound of pillows and slid her legs open with her knees.

"Is this okay, Sasha?" he asked permission.

"Yes," she barely said aloud with a nod.

His breath caught as he positioned himself between her thighs, the heat of her skin against his making his heart race. When his hardness found her entrance, slick with desire, he paused—reverent, as if approaching a sacred threshold.

He thrusted upward with fierce desperation, his fingers digging crescents into her hips as she matched his rhythm perfectly—their bodies finding that primal synchronicity that made her breath catch and her mind whisper dangerous fake promises about fate and belonging.

When release came, it was not a storm. It was a collapse, a slide into the ache that had haunted them both, unspooling the knots in his chest. He caught himself shaking, not with cold, but a trembling that had more to do with hunger than weakness. Every inch of his body wanted to stay inside her—prolong, repeat, never let go.

She looked at him, eyes half-lidded, unfocused and still too wise. He wondered, briefly, what she saw. If she saw a man, or if she saw just another fuck boy. He smoothed the hair from her forehead and kissed her again, slow, imprinting the taste of her on his tongue.

They lay tangled together.

He could hear the city through the window—delivery trucks, car horns,shouts, a distant siren. Her hand wandered, palm splayed over his chest as if she could pin down his heartbeat, force it to slow. For a few minutes he let her, allowed himself this rest, weirdly peaceful, then the old calculation returned. Somehow it always would.

He drew a shaky breath and slid out of her, the ache of loss immediate and barbed. She rolled to her side, curled into herself as if preserving the last heat between them. Her hair was a snarl across the pillow; he reached over and tried to comb it smooth with his fingers.

She thought about how gentle and kind he had been, always asking first.

What mattered most in that moment was the way Nic centered her, the way he asked not with words but with eyes, and the way she answered with the arch of her body, with her voice, with the grip of her hands on him.

The morning light poured over them, and Sasha realized with dizzying clarity—this wasn’t just another mistake, another night. This was something that had cracked open inside her. And Nic, for all his storm and shadow, was the one who had woken it.

*

The corridor outside the suite was quiet enough that Sasha could hear the soft thud of her own pulse in her ears. Plush carpet swallowed the sound of her heels; sconces cast slim rivers of honeyed light down the walls. She paused a heartbeat with her hand still on the door handle, as if it might pull her back. It didn’t. The latch settled, and the door whispered shut behind her.

She took a breath—then another—and smoothed a palm over her dress.

It looked as if the night had never touched it. The silk lay pristine over her hips, no trace of the whiskey bloom that had ruined it hours ago. Room service had whisked it away and returned it with military efficiency while she slept. Nic had arranged it without making a production of it, the way he did everything that mattered: quietly, decisively, like the world would conform to whatever he asked.

A tremor of recklessness ran down her spine, as bright and fizzy as champagne on an empty stomach. Reckless. The word should have scolded her; instead, it warmed her from the inside out. She lifted her hand and pressed two fingers to the smile tugging at her mouth, as if she could make it behave.

God. She had actually done it.

Not just snuck away from a gala. Not just disobeyed a dozen unspoken rules. She had gone upstairs with a stranger and said yes to the night like it belonged to her. She’d had—she bit her lip—she’d had the most mind-bending, breath-stealing, smile-into-the-pillow sex of her life. The kind that knocked something loose and replaced it with a steadier version of herself. The kind that made the corridor look different, like walls had moved out an inch just for her.

She walked.

The elevator was empty, mercifully, its mirrored walls multiplying her in soft, forgiving angles. She avoided her eyes anyway. Not because she was ashamed, but because she knew if she met her reflection right this second she’d grin like a maniac. The kind of smile that said, you did it, you unmanageable creature, you climbed out of the gilded cage and you flew.

At the lobby floor, the doors opened on a wash of music and morning clatter. The ballroom would be a ruin of last night’s glory now—flower petals bruised on tabletops, stray programs curled at the corners like sleeping moths, a crew in black aprons erasing evidence that rich people had been themselves. But the hotel’s grand lobby was already awake, the kind of awake that smelled like coffee and waxed stone, like money that never sleeps.

A high ceiling rose above her, frescoes peering down with indifferent saints. The concierge desk cornered one side of the space, polished wood gleaming; a pair of bellhops steered luggage carts like ships. Business men in shirtsleeves checked watches. A cluster of tourists whispered under a chandelier. The soft, endless piano from the hotel’s soundtrack measured out a genteel heartbeat.

Sasha’s phone buzzed in her clutch like a moth. She ignored it in favor of the practical first: a text to her father. She should have done it before. She knew that. She also knew that if she had done it before, she might have answered to the familiar tug of obligation instead of the new pull in her chest toward herself.

She slid the phone out, thumb hovering over the screen. The cursor blinked in the message field to Lenny DeLuca, a dot pulsing like an impatient foot. What do you even say? Hi, Papa, remember how I’m your property? I exercised my right to be human. She rested the base of the phone against her lips and laughed under her breath, small and breathy and private.

Keep it simple. True without being specific enough to light a fuse.

She typed: I’m okay. Left the gala early. Stayed with a friend overnight. Heading home now. She stared at the word friend until the letters blurred, then added: Phone was on silent. I’ll call in a bit.

Her thumb hovered over send. A memory of Lenny’s voice flicked through her: Business is supposed to be stuffy. Another voice overlapped it, low and steady in her ear: You decide what it holds. She hit send and tucked the phone away.

It felt like dropping a pebble into a deep well. She didn’t know how long it would take to hear the splash.

She adjusted the strap of her clutch, lifted her chin, and took a step toward the revolving doors—and stopped. An odd hush fell in a tiny radius around her, not silence exactly, but that quality crowds get when a new thread of conversation tightens. It came from off to her right, near the concierge counter where a woman in tweed and a man in a too-tight polo pretended not to be staring at the mezzanine balcony that circled the lobby like an old opera house.

“Look,” the man hissed to the woman, as if he were gifting her a magic trick. “There’s Nico Maretti. The new Maretti family heir.”

The names tumbled over her like a glass that hadn’t been righted in time.

Sasha’s feet moved before her mind did. She pivoted, following the line of the man’s pointing finger up—past crystal banisters and veins of gold leaf—to the open corridor above, the one she had just come from. The mezzanine framed the hallway like a picture.

A figure paused at the railing.

Black suit, loosened white shirt. Broad-shouldered. Dark hair already a little unruly at the edges as if fingers had been there. His tie was in his hand instead of at his throat, rolled absently like he couldn’t be bothered to pretend at stiffness for anyone. When he turned slightly, the light skated across the angle of his jaw. A shadow of ink climbed just to the edge of his collar.

He glanced down into the lobby.

Storm-grey eyes swept the space the way a man takes stock of a room he might have to own.

Sasha knew those eyes in her bones already.

Her body answered first—pulse spiking, stomach flipping, mouth going very dry. In the same breath, every taught lesson she’d swallowed since she was old enough to understand the weight of her last name jolted awake like a squad called to attention. DeLuca. Maretti.

Nic. Nico.

Her breath stalled halfway to her lungs, then dropped, heavy as a stone. Oh, God.

She had slept with her father’s rival. Not just slept with, but thoroughly fucked her father's rival.

Not just a rival. The rival. The name she’d heard recited like a curse and a prayer in the same breath. The family punched into every story of we did what we had to at the DeLuca dinner table. The men Lenny insisted were animals. The men her cousins spat on in the street with their eyes and got away with it because they knew where the cameras weren’t.

Nico Maretti. The new heir.

Nic.

Sasha found a laugh in herself—thin, disbelieving, the kind that would splinter into something else if she gave it permission. It lodged in her throat like a cough she couldn’t clear. She pressed a hand to her sternum and discovered her palm damp. Steady. Breathe. Breathe.

The woman in tweed whispered again, enthralled. “You think he’s meeting someone?”

“Not here,” the man said. “Not public. He’s cautious. They all are. Especially now.”

The word now tolled like a bell, and with it, the memory from the balcony above the gala—whispers sliding down like ash: The oldest Maretti boy—gone… Leaves the young one holding the leash now… Nico… a storm in a tailored suit. She had shrugged then. Weather. Men and their crowns. She tried to shrug now and couldn’t get her shoulders to play along.

Nico had not seen her yet. He let his gaze move over the lobby—a sweep, not a search—and turned his head to say something to a man in a charcoal suit trailing him at a respectful distance. Even from here, the energy around him hummed different. People made a mistake about power, assuming it was just volume. Nico didn’t look loud. He looked like a line you step over and regret the rest of your life.

She had crossed that line last night with both feet.

Heat and cold took turns with her. She could feel each place his mouth had mapped on her as if her skin had memory separate from her mind. She could hear his voice saying her name the way he said it in the dark. She could also hear Lenny: Maretti blood is poison, you hear me? Two truths layered like interference. A laugh almost escaped again and rebounded into a curse.

“Shit,” she whispered, because breath needs something to be when it can’t be air. “Shit.”

For one cowardly, survival-brained second, her body suggested running. The revolving doors were ten strides away. There was a car stand out front and a hundred cabs that didn’t care whose daughter she was. She could be in the back of one before he decided whether to come downstairs. He didn’t even know her last name. She could press the night between them like a pressed flower and pretend it belonged to no one.

Then her phone buzzed.

She flinched as if it had barked.

She fumbled for it, thumbed the screen open. A message from her father stacked on a call that she’d missed while she’d been staring at the mezzanine. The text was short enough to wound.

Where are you.

No question mark. Her father never wasted punctuation.

She swallowed. Her tongue felt too large for her mouth. She typed with careful fingers.

I’ll be home soon.

She hit send. The read receipt popped below her words almost instantly. A dot appeared and disappeared. She waited for the explosion. It didn’t come—yet.

Above, Nico stepped back from the rail. And then his eyes met hers, and she realized that her mouth was still open in surprise.

The world seemed to stop for a moment and her breath hitched.

For a second he looked like he might turn toward the elevators. Her heartbeat slammed against her ribs so hard she felt it in her throat. He said something to the man at his shoulder, then pivoted the other direction, heading down the corridor she knew by feel now—the one that led back to his suite.

She exhaled so sharply she wobbled on her heels.

A bellhop pushed a cart past her, oblivious. Somewhere near the doors, a toddler squealed at a flock of pigeons outside the glass. The concierge laughed politely at something a guest said. The world continued its reliable nonsense while the map in Sasha’s head redrew itself with alarming speed.

She had slept with the enemy.

She had liked it.

She had liked him.

She pressed her lips together until they softened, then let them go. The lobby suddenly smelled too strongly of lilies—yesterday’s arrangements parked on a cart waiting to be taken away. The sweetness turned her stomach. She needed air. She needed her car. She needed five minutes alone to decide whether she would throw her phone in the river or call Nico or pretend she had never learned how to spell his name.

Nico. Nic. He had offered her safety without demanding anything, and somehow it had felt like danger anyway. He had watched her like she was a decision he wanted to get right. He had asked with his eyes and his mouth and his hands and waited for her to say yes. He had been careful when careful mattered, and demanding when she demanded it of him. He had been a stranger, and her body had known him like a language it somehow spoke.

Her head knew something else: this would not be a secret forever. Secrets in their world had half-lives measured in whispers. If she told no one, the air would tell it anyway.

She forced herself to move. One step. Another. The revolving door accepted her and curved her out into morning.

The day had the nerve to be beautiful. Blue sky burnished to silver along the river, gulls knifing the air, a breeze lifting the hair at her neck the way his fingers had. The city smelled like coffee and diesel and wet stone where the street had been hosed down. Normal. It should have helped. It didn’t.

Her phone buzzed again, insistent. She considered not looking. Then she did, because the worse thing about fear is the part where you pretend you’re not.

We will talk when you get here. Lenny. Not a request.

She slipped the phone back into her clutch with care, as if it were a bomb with a faulty trigger.

A valet in a red vest approached, polite smile already in place. “Miss? Car?”

“Yes,” she said, and surprised herself with how steady she sounded. “A taxi, please.”

He whistled two notes and a yellow shape swung toward the curb like a compliant beast. She thanked him and slid into the back seat, silk whispering against leather. The driver—a man with a face the city had shrugged at too many times to count—caught her eyes in the rearview and raised his eyebrows. “Where to?”

She gave the address of a coffee shop three neighborhoods away from home and added, “I’ll redirect you in a minute.” She wasn’t going to give Lenny a straight line on her location until she’d had something with caffeine and a bathroom sink to splash her face in.

The taxi lurched forward, shouldering into traffic with the indifferent grace of a thing that knows it always gets where it’s going. Sasha leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The slurry of last night reassembled itself behind her lids: the low lamp, the way the city fell away, the sound he made when she put her mouth to his throat, the quiet after, the way he said Only when I mean it as if the world would punish him for the difference.

Her stomach flipped again, and this time it wasn’t panic. It was a memory blooming like the vanished stain.

She laughed once, a short, incredulous sound that drew the driver’s eyes to her again in the mirror. She didn’t care. She covered her mouth with her fingers and let the laugh melt into a groan. “You,” she told herself, quiet, amused, halfway furious, “are in such deep shit.”

The city slid by, mercilessly pretty where sunlight loved it—brownstones with eye-lashed windows, bakeries lifting their metal gates with a rattle, a dog dragging a reluctant owner toward some smell that had to be addressed immediately. Her phone sat in her lap like a weight. She lifted it, set it back down. Lifted it again.

A thought arrived uninvited, clear and sharp as a shard of glass: He didn’t know who I was either.

She had not told him her last name. He had given her a nickname instead of a crown. Somewhere upstairs he was probably already back to being the man who moved in rooms with men who tried to move him. But last night, in the space carved out by heat and laughter and the morning’s quiet, they had been two people who had decided to forget the world for a while.

Her chest hurt with the unfairness of it. Not regret. Not yet. Just the ache that comes when the world snaps the leash back on a thing that wants to run.

She made herself lift the phone with both hands this time. If she didn’t choose something, someone else would choose for her.

I need coffee first, she texted Lenny, reckless in the smallest way that still counted. Then I’ll come by.

No apology. No explanation. She didn’t owe either for needing twenty minutes of ordinary before she put her head in the lion’s mouth.

The dots appeared, vanished. Reappeared. A minute later, the reply arrived, as abrupt as a door closing.

Fifteen.

She huffed. “Fifteen it is.”

She glanced out the window as the taxi paused at a light. The hotel rose like a story she had already told herself two endings for. On the mezzanine, there was no one at the rail now, just sun gilding brass. Somewhere up there, a man with storm-grey eyes was becoming again the thing the lobby whisperers had named.

She tapped the glass with one fingernail, a tiny percussion only she could hear. “Maretti,” she said, tasting the name like a new language.

It didn’t change the shape of her mouth at all. It changed everything else.

The light went green. The taxi flowed forward. She pressed her palms to her knees and counted her breaths—one to clear his smell from her head, one to let it return, one to promise herself that whatever came next would not erase what she had claimed.

She had woken next to a man who made her feel like she’d stepped inside a story that fit. She had learned his real name at a bad time in a worse place. She was going to walk into a house where her father would try to make a different story fit her instead.

Fine. Let there be two stories. She would hold both until one of them let go.

“Miss?” the driver said, eyes in the mirror again. “That coffee place still good?”

She exhaled, long and even. “Change of plan,” she said and then rattled of the address.

He nodded, flicked on his blinker, and cut across two lanes like a man who knew when to be brave.

As the hotel dropped out of the rear window, Sasha pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth and made herself smile. It felt like armor. It felt like truth. It felt, for a brief, stubborn moment, like she could steer.

“Deep shit,” she told her reflection in the ghost-window. “But yours.”

And the city, because it loved her or didn’t care, took her where she told it to.