CRAVED BY THE DON

Part 2: Safe House, Unsafe Heart

The door burst inward.

Camille did not see what Dante did. She only heard it: two flat cracks, a grunt, the wet thud of a body hitting carpet. Then his hand was around hers and they were running.

"Don't look down," he ordered, dragging her past the elevators. "Don't look back. Look at me."

She looked at him. It was the only thing that kept her legs moving.

Fourteen floors of emergency stairwell. Her heels came off somewhere around the ninth, and he did not slow down, did not ask, simply hooked an arm around her waist and carried her the last three flights like she weighed nothing. Her face pressed into his neck. He smelled of cedar and gunpowder and heat, and she hated that her body noticed.

A black car idled in the loading bay with its engine already running. A man with a scarred jaw held the door.

"Boss."

"Marco. The Volkovs got inside my building." Dante pushed Camille into the back seat and slid in beside her. "Someone gave them a key card. Find out who before sunrise."

"And the girl?"

"Her name is Camille." The ice in his voice made Marco flinch. "And she's mine to protect. Drive."

Mine. The word landed somewhere low in her stomach, and she folded her arms over it as if that would help.

The safe house stood alone at the end of a gravel road, glass and dark timber over black water. Camille stepped out barefoot, shaking, her blouse torn at the shoulder from the stairwell rail.

Dante locked every door himself. Checked every window. She watched him from the middle of the living room, hugging her own arms, and slowly understood that the man she had come to destroy had just killed for her, and that she had felt nothing but relief.

That should have frightened her more than the gunfire.

"You're bleeding," he said.

She looked down. A thin red line ran along her forearm. She had not even felt it.

He came to her without a word, sat her on the arm of the sofa, and knelt on the floor to clean it. His hands were gentle. That was the cruelty of it. Hands that had been steady around a gun now trembled, just slightly, as they held her wrist.

"You're shaking," she said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He looked up, grey eyes dark and unguarded, and for the first time he did not look like a king. He looked like a man who had almost lost something.

"Because for four minutes in that stairwell," he said quietly, "I thought they'd put a bullet in you, and I would have burned this entire city to ash."

The room went very still.

Camille pulled her hand free, stood, and put the sofa between them. "Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"Saying things that make me forget who you are." Her voice cracked. "You launder money for people who do this. Whatever was in those containers, it got people killed. I am not going to forget that because you're good with a bandage."

"I'm not asking you to forget."

"Then what do you want?"

He rose slowly. "You want the truth? I wanted your file deleted. I wanted you gone. Then I saw you at that gala, and I couldn't breathe, and I haven't slept properly since." A humourless laugh. "I've ruined men for less than what you've done to my concentration."

"That's not romantic. That's unhinged."

"Both," Dante said. "I'm a man of range."

A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. Wild, shaky, ridiculous, and it broke something open. Suddenly her eyes stung, her chest heaved, and the adrenaline that had held her upright for an hour drained out all at once.

He was across the room before the first tear fell.

He did not touch her at first. He stood close enough that she could feel his warmth, his hands open at his sides, giving her every chance to step away.

"Camille." Her name, low, a question. "Tell me to leave you alone and I will sleep in the car."

She should have. Every sensible cell in her body knew it.

"I hate you," she whispered.

"I know."

"I really hate you."

"I know." His eyes dropped to her mouth. "Hate me closer."

She grabbed his shirt in both fists and kissed him.

There was nothing gentle in it. It was three weeks of stolen glances and nine days of denial, and it crashed into him like a wave. Dante made a rough sound against her lips, a groan almost of relief, and his hands finally came up, one sliding into her hair, the other spreading hot across her back, hauling her against him.

She tasted smoke and need. She felt his heart slamming against hers, that same wild rhythm she had felt in the dark.

He was not in control. Neither was she.

"Stop me," Dante growled between kisses, forehead pressed to hers, breathing hard. "Say stop and I stop. I swear on everything I own."

Camille looked up at him, flushed, furious, wanting, and smiled a slow, dangerous smile she had never once worn in a boardroom.

"I'm not the one who needs stopping, Mr. Ravello."

His eyes went black.

She pushed him backward until his legs hit the sofa and he sat, and then she was over him, knees either side of his hips, her hands braced on his shoulders. He stared up at her like she was something he had prayed for and not expected to receive.

"You're in charge," he said hoarsely. "Whatever you want."

"Whatever I want?" She traced one finger down the open collar of his shirt, over his pulse, watching his throat work. "Then you don't get to rush me."

A low, helpless laugh. "Cruel woman."

"Forensic accountant," she corrected. "I go line by line."

She undid the first button. Then the second. Then the third, slowly, her eyes never leaving his.

His breath grew ragged. His hands clenched into the cushions as if holding himself back by sheer will, and the sight of it, this dangerous, untouchable man coming undone beneath her fingertips, sent a slow, molten heat rolling through her.

"Camille," he said, a warning and a plea at once.

"Quiet." She slid the shirt from his shoulders and let her palms drift down the hard planes of his chest, feeling the muscle jump under her touch. "You've spent three weeks looking at me like I was something you couldn't have. Let me look back."

She took her time. She learned the heat of his skin, the old white scar beneath his ribs, the way his breath stuttered when her mouth followed the path her fingers had made. He tipped his head back against the sofa, eyes shut, jaw tight, a low sound caught in his throat that she felt more than heard.

"You are going to kill me," Dante said roughly.

"Not yet."

Then his control snapped.

He caught her wrist, not hard, only enough, and she found herself turned and drawn beneath him on the soft rug before the glass wall, the black water glittering beyond it. His weight settled over her, warm and deliberate, and he braced himself above her, close enough that every breath they shared was a kind of touch.

"Now," he murmured, his voice dark as smoke, "it's my turn to go line by line."

She shivered.

He kissed her slowly, as though he had all night and meant to use it. Her mouth, then her jaw, then the pulse fluttering at her throat. His fingers found the torn edge of her blouse and paused, and his eyes lifted to hers, asking. She answered by arching into his hand. A rough sound left him, half laugh, half groan, and the silk gave way beneath his fingers.

The cool night air touched her skin first. Then his mouth. Heat followed heat, unhurried and devastating, until her fingers were in his hair and her breath was breaking on his name, and the careful, guarded woman who balanced other people's ledgers had forgotten every number she had ever known.

"Dante." It came out unsteady. "Please."

"Say it again."

"Dante."

He lifted her as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around his waist and let him carry her through the dark house, his lips against her shoulder, her throat, the sensitive place beneath her ear, until the bedroom door swung shut behind them and the moonlight spilled silver across the sheets.

He laid her down like something precious. Then he looked at her for a long, quiet moment, with a reverence that undid her more than any touch.

"Whatever happens tomorrow," he said, low and rough, "I need you to know I have never wanted anything the way I want you."

She pulled him down to her by the collar of his open shirt. "Then stop talking."

What followed belonged to no one else.

There was the sound of her laughing breathlessly into his shoulder. There was his voice in the dark, murmuring her name like it was the only word he had ever needed. There were hands that learned and mouths that lingered, and a slow, spiralling hunger that built and built, until the world narrowed to heat and breath and the wild, helpless rhythm of two hearts that had finally stopped fighting.

There were no federal files then, no family names, no war. Just a woman who had come to destroy a man, and the man who let her undo him piece by piece.

And when it finally broke over them both, she cried out against his mouth, and he held her through it as though he never meant to let go.

Afterward, tangled in the sheets with her head on his chest, she listened to his heartbeat slow beneath her ear. His fingers drew idle circles along her spine.

"I should still hate you," Camille whispered.

He pressed a kiss into her hair. "Hate me again in the morning."

She forgot the citrus. She forgot the war. For one long, burning night, she forgot to hate him.

Camille woke before dawn.

Grey light slid through the glass. Dante slept beside her, one arm heavy across her waist, his face softened and younger in sleep. She lay still and let herself look, and the look frightened her far more than the gunfire had.

Because she did not want to leave.

She slipped out from under his arm, found his discarded shirt, and padded barefoot toward the study at the end of the hall. She told herself she only wanted water. She told herself a great many things.

The study door stood ajar. On the desk, beneath a lamp he had forgotten to switch off, lay an open folder.

Her own face looked back at her.

Not from the gala. From a university lecture hall, four years ago. Photograph after photograph, clipped and dated: Camille in the library. Camille at her graduation. Camille at her sister's funeral.

Her breath stopped.

On the top page, in Dante's handwriting, a single line had been underlined twice:

She doesn't know it was my father who ordered the audit that ruined hers.

Behind her, very softly, a floorboard creaked.

"Camille," said Dante. "Let me explain."