Between Loyalty and You

Chapter 7 (Sofia's POV)

The extra men arrived within the hour, just as Dante had promised.

I watched from the living-room windows as black SUVs pulled into the private underground entrance far below. Figures moved with quiet efficiency—more of his soldiers, harder-looking than the usual rotation. By the time the sun started to drop behind the skyline, the penthouse felt different. Heavier. The air itself seemed to carry the weight of locked doors and loaded weapons.

Dante spent the rest of the afternoon in his office with the door closed. I heard the low murmur of phone calls, the occasional sharp order. He didn’t come out to check on me. He didn’t send the nurse. The silence after my father’s departure felt deliberate, like he was already trying to rebuild the distance the phone call had destroyed.

I stayed in the bedroom for as long as I could stand it. The bag my father had brought still sat untouched near the closet. I hadn’t unpacked. Unpacking would make the extended stay feel real, and I wasn’t ready to admit how much I wanted it to be real.

By early evening, the quiet became unbearable.

I left the bedroom and walked the length of the hallway barefoot, still in the jeans and sweater I had put on that morning. The fabric felt wrong against my skin after so many days in his shirts. I found Dante in the kitchen, standing at the island with a glass of whiskey and a stack of papers spread in front of him. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, the tattoos on his forearms stark under the low lights. He didn’t look up when I entered.

“You’re supposed to be resting,” he said.

“I’ve rested for ten days. I’m not dying anymore.”

He turned a page without answering. The muscles in his jaw flexed once.

I moved closer, stopping on the opposite side of the island. “How bad is it at the estate?”

“Two men dead. One in the gatehouse, one inside the main hallway. They went in quietly, knew the camera blind spots. Professional.” His voice was flat, the same tone he used when discussing business that ended in bodies. “Your father’s people are still sweeping the property. Until they’re certain there’s no second team or leftover devices, you stay here.”

“And you’re angry about it.”

His eyes finally lifted to mine. The gray was colder than it had been that morning. “I’m angry that someone was bold enough to hit Marco’s home. I’m angry that two good men are in the ground. And yes, Sofia, I’m angry that the one place I was supposed to return you to is no longer safe.”

The honesty landed harder than any carefully worded dismissal.

I rested my hands on the edge of the island. “You could have said no.”

“No, I couldn’t.” He set the glass down. “Your father asked. That is the end of the discussion.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

He stared at me for a long moment, the same look he had given me in the hallway when he agreed to keep me—tight-jawed, resigned, and quietly furious at the position he had been placed in. Then he looked away, gathering the papers into a neat stack.

“There’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry. The new men have orders that you don’t leave this floor. If you need something, you tell me or the staff. No one else.”

He started to turn toward the office again. The dismissal was clear.

I moved around the island before he could leave. My hand caught his wrist. The contact was light, but he stopped as if I had grabbed him with both hands.

“You’re going to spend the next however many days treating me like a problem you can’t solve,” I said quietly. “You’ll check the locks, increase the patrols, and walk past my door like I’m not the same woman you had on your tongue less than twenty-four hours ago.”

His pulse jumped under my fingers.

“Let go.”

“No.”

He turned fully then, crowding me back against the island with the sheer size of him. One hand braced on the marble beside my hip. The other stayed at his side, clenched. Up close, I could smell the whiskey in his breath and the faint trace of gun oil that never seemed to leave his skin.

“You want to do this now?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous. “The same day your father’s house was breached and two of his men were executed? You want to stand in my kitchen and remind me that I put my mouth on you when I should have kept my hands clean?”

“I want you to stop looking at me like you already regret every second of it.”

“I do regret it.” The words came out rough. “I regret the first time I let myself look too long. I regret the morning I put my fingers inside you. I regret last night most of all, because now I know exactly how you taste when you come, and I have to live with that knowledge while I keep you under my roof for God knows how long.”

Heat flooded my face, my chest, lower. The memory of his mouth—hot, angry, relentless—rose so sharply I had to press my thighs together.

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because you pushed until the only thing left was either walk away or take.” His free hand rose, hovered near my face, then dropped again without touching. “And I am done taking things that don’t belong to me.”

“I belong to myself.”

“You belong to a life that doesn’t include my hands on you.” He leaned in another inch, close enough that I felt the heat of him through my sweater. “Your father trusts me with the only family he has left. I will not repay that by f*****g his daughter in the bed I put her in while she was healing.”

The crude word should have stung. Instead, it sent a low, dark pulse between my legs.

“You’re already halfway there,” I whispered. “You’ve had your fingers in me. You’ve had your mouth on me. You’re hard right now just from standing this close.”

His eyes flashed. For a second I thought he might prove me wrong by stepping back. Instead, his hand finally made contact—sliding under the hem of my sweater, palm settling against the bare skin of my waist just above the jeans. The touch was hot, possessive, and carefully controlled.

“You think this is a victory,” he said, thumb stroking once along the edge of my bandage. “You think if you keep standing in front of me like this I’ll eventually stop caring about the consequences.”

“I think you’re already past caring. You’re just still pretending you’re not.”

His hand flexed on my waist. The other came up and gripped the edge of the island hard enough that I heard the faint creak of pressure. He was so close now that the front of his trousers brushed my hip. The hard line of his c**k was unmistakable.

“Go back to the bedroom, Sofia.”

“Make me.”

The challenge hung between us, thin and dangerous.

For several long heartbeats, neither of us moved. I felt the exact second his control thinned again—the slight shift of his hips, the way his breath left him in a slow, measured exhale that sounded more like restraint than calm. His thumb traced the soft skin just below my ribs, higher than it needed to, brushing the underside of my breast through the thin barrier of the sweater.

Then he pulled his hand away as if the contact had burned him.

“There are men at every entrance of this building,” he said, his voice stripped of everything except finality. “There is a threat against your father’s house that may or may not still be active. I do not have the luxury of losing my head over you tonight.”

He stepped back, putting a full arm’s length between us. The absence of his heat felt immediate and cold.

“Eat something. Rest. If anything happens—anything at all—you come to me. Not the men. Me. Clear?”

I swallowed against the frustration rising in my throat. “Clear.”

He picked up the papers and the glass and walked out of the kitchen without another word. A moment later, I heard the office door close, followed by the low sound of his voice as he made another call.

I stood alone at the island, the place where his hand had rested still warm on my skin, and stared at the city lights beyond the glass.

The estate was compromised. Two men were dead. My father was out there handling bodies and blood. And I was still here—under Dante’s roof, under his protection, under the weight of everything we had already done and everything he was still trying not to do.

He could tell himself this changed nothing.

But the way his hand had lingered on my waist, the way his c**k had pressed against my hip, the way he had looked at me when he admitted he remembered exactly how I tasted—those things said otherwise.

I turned off the kitchen lights and walked back to the bedroom, the taste still too thick on my tongue.

Whatever came next, neither of us walked away clean.