The weakness

Luciano:

She was close.

Too close.

Close enough for her scent to crawl down my throat—something expensive and sharp, layered over red wine and fear she was trying so hard to choke down. I could feel the heat coming off her skin, the tension in her limbs as her fists curled into the front of my shirt like she didn’t even realize she was touching me.

Her breath hitched.

Mine didn’t.

Not outwardly.

Inside, I burned.

I didn’t move. I didn’t touch her. Not yet. I let her press against me, let her feel the war she was stepping into. Because that’s what this was now—a war. And she was the most dangerous weapon in it. She just didn’t know whose side she was really fighting on yet.

“I can do this,” she said, her voice a whisper on the edge of a confession. “I will do this.”

There it was.

Conviction.

Determination.

Madness.

I looked into her eyes and saw all three reflected back at me. But underneath them… a flicker of something else. Something she hadn’t given a name to yet.

She was unraveling.

And I wanted to be the one to pull the last thread.

“You believe that?” I asked quietly.

“I do.”

Liar.

Not because she didn’t mean it. She did. But belief wasn’t enough. Belief was soft. Belief could break.

What she needed—what I wanted—was obsession. Devotion. Blind, feral need.

And I was going to give it to her.

Piece by fucking piece.

I watched her now, every flicker of muscle in her jaw, every twitch in the fingers still gripping my shirt. She didn’t know how tightly she was holding on. Like she needed to steady herself, like touching me helped her remember who she was.

It should have terrified her.

It didn’t.

That’s how I knew I had her.

I’d seen this kind of spiral before—in enemies, in traitors, in men who thought they could control the game and found themselves on their knees. But never like this. Never in someone like her.

Ava Rivera wasn’t cracking.

She was changing.

And I would be the one to break her open fully.

Not with cruelty.

Not with threats.

But with truth.

She thought she’d found a loophole. A crack in the armor. She didn’t realize she was the crack. The weakness. The variable no one saw coming.

I’d known it the moment I saw her walk into that courtroom.

And now?

Now I was sure.

She was the key.

To my freedom.

To the end of this empire.

To everything.

I let my hand twitch—just enough that the back of it brushed her hip. She sucked in a breath, her eyes flicking to my mouth before she caught herself. Too late.

That hesitation was mine now.

That doubt.

That hunger.

It fed something in me. Something ancient and cold and violent.

Let the rest of the world burn. Let the blood run in the streets.

As long as she stayed right here, pressed against me, whispering lies about justice while her body told me the truth.

She didn’t come here to win the case.

She came here to lose herself.

And I’d let her.

But not all at once.

No. That would be too easy.

I’d chip away at her, night after night. Every late call. Every off-the-record meeting. Every fucking heartbeat she gave to this case. Until she didn’t know where I ended and she began.

Obsession wasn’t new to me.

But this—this was something else.

She wasn’t just the prize.

She was the fucking game.

And I was going to play it until she was mine.