ログインThe coffee made slightly too strong.The hand at her back in every doorway.The way he'd started leaving his office door open when she was home, so the sounds of the penthouse could reach him while he worked.The temple kiss.She added them up and said nothing and let them be what they were.The afternoon was quiet.Nonna commandeered the living room for what she called riposo....rest...and was asleep in the armchair within minutes, a small domestic miracle that made Eve smile every time she looked over. Dimitri was in his office, door open, the low murmur of Italian occasionally drifting into the living room where Eve had set up her own work, laptop open across her knees on the sofa.She got through three contracts and two emails and was halfway through a proposal when she became aware that the murmuring from the office had stopped.She looked up.Dimitri was leaning in the doorway, watching her.Not with the assessing heat of the man who had spent six weeks systematically dismantlin
POV: EVEShe woke before Dimitri for the first time.It was early....barely six, the city outside still grey and undecided about the day, she lay still for a moment just noticing it. The unfamiliar novelty of being the one awake first. Of watching him sleep instead of being watched.He slept differently than she would have expected. No iron control, no careful stillness. Just a man, deeply asleep, one arm thrown across the space where she'd been lying, his face unguarded in a way it almost never was during daylight hours. The scar along his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. His hair was disordered. He looked younger. Almost approachable.She studied him for longer than she meant to.Six weeks ago she had woken up in this bed in horror, clutching a contract she barely remembered signing, looking at this man like he was a cage. Now she woke up and looked at him like he was the most interesting thing she'd ever been given access to. The shift between those two points was so complete
"Which is why I want you there.""Yes." A beat. "Yes, I'll come today. Give me two hours." A pause, and then, softer: "Have you told her? About any of this?"He looked out at the city."Not yet.""Dimitri....""I'll tell her. When I know how much there is to tell."Nonna made a sound that conveyed, with remarkable economy, that she found this answer inadequate but was choosing her battles. "She deserves to be prepared.""I know.""The girl loves you. That means she'll walk into whatever is coming without hesitating. The least you can do is make sure she can see it coming.""I said I know, Nonna.""Then act like it." The warmth crept back into her voice, tempering the sharpness. "Two hours. Have someone make up the east guest room....I'm bringing my good pots, I refuse to cook with what you have in that kitchen."Despite everything, the corner of his mouth moved. "You've used that kitchen for three years.""Under protest. Two hours, caro."She hung up.Dimitri stood at the window for a
POV: DIMITRIThe call came at half past ten on a Tuesday morning.Dimitri was in his office, three floors of city noise below him and silence above, working through the Rotterdam problem with Marco when his personal phone lit up on the desk. Not the business phone. Not the secure line he used for operations.The personal one.The number that only seven people in the world had.He saw the name on the screen and went very still.Marco, who had spent fifteen years learning to read Dimitri Valentino the way sailors read weather, stopped mid-sentence and stood up without being asked."I'll wait outside," he said.The door closed.Dimitri looked at the phone for two more seconds....long enough to arrange his face into something that felt nothing, which was the only appropriate expression for this particular caller....and answered."Antonio.""Dimitri." His father's voice was exactly what it had always been. Smooth. Measured. The voice of a man who had never needed to raise it because the we
The word landed visibly. She watched it hit him....watched something in his expression crack open slightly, the way it had when she'd said I love you for the first time. Like he'd expected many possible answers and not that one.His hand came up and cupped her face, his thumb at her cheekbone, and he looked at her for a long moment with those storm-grey eyes that usually kept everything out.They weren't keeping anything out right now."We're leaving," he said, his voice rougher than usual."Okay.""Now.""Okay, Dimitri."He kissed her in the middle of the warehouse, in front of hundreds of dangerous people, without appearing to care even slightly. One hand in her hair, one at her jaw, unhurried and absolute and claiming in the way that everything he did was claiming.When he pulled back, the room around them had gone interestingly quiet.He didn't acknowledge it."Marco," he said, already turning. "Car."Eve followed him out with her heart in her throat and that word still sitting be
POV: EVEEve had learned, over the past five weeks, that when Dimitri said get dressed, we're going out with that particular flatness in his voice, asking questions was pointless.He'd tell her what she needed to know. Nothing more.So she'd put on the dress Marco had laid out....deep emerald, fitted, more conservative than she'd expected...and followed Dimitri to the elevator without asking where they were going. He was dressed differently tonight. No suit jacket. Dark trousers, a black shirt with the sleeves already rolled, shoes that were expensive but built for movement rather than boardrooms.She noticed his knuckles.He'd wrapped them. Both hands, clean white athletic tape wound with practiced efficiency from mid-palm to just below the first knuckle. She'd stared at them in the elevator and said nothing.The drive took forty minutes.She watched the city change outside the window...the clean geometry of the financial district giving way to older neighborhoods, wider streets, ind
POV: DIMITRI''You will soon be broken, Eve''Dimitri thought, watching Eve suck his cock with desperate, hungry enthusiasm.''And leaving will nearly make you run mad.''Because that was the plan. Had always been the plan.Make her so addicted to him that the thought of life without him would be u
POV: DIMITRIDimitri sat in his office, his door locked, his hand wrapped around his cock as he watched Eve fall apart.He'd been rock hard since the moment she'd positioned that camera. Since the moment he'd seen her face....flushed with arousal and humiliation and desperate need....as she'd touch
No." The devastation on her face was exquisite."But....you said...." "I said I had plans. I never said those plans included my cock inside you." He began unbuttoning his shirt, slowly, methodically, letting her watch."Tonight, I'm going to make you come until you're sobbing. Until you're begging.
Three days later Eve was sitting on the couch sipping her cup of coffee when Dimitri walked in."You're coming with me today."Eve looked up from her coffee, confused. It was Saturday morning. No work.She'd planned to spend the day recovering from a week of Dimitri's relentless control, a week of







