Between Loyalty and You

Chapter 5 (Sofia's POV)

It was the day before my father came home, and the penthouse felt like a pressure cooker that had been left on too long.

Dante had kept his word from the night I stormed into his office. He checked on me every day—morning and evening—without fail. He would appear in the doorway, sleeves rolled, expression carefully blank, and ask the same clipped questions. How was the pain? Had I taken the pills? Did I need anything? Then he would check the bandages himself, fingers clinical and brief, never lingering the way they had the morning he made me come. When I tried to catch his wrist, or shift, so the shirt rode higher, or say something that would force him to look at me like a woman instead of a responsibility, he simply finished what he was doing and left.

Seven days of that careful distance. Seven days of watching the hunger in his eyes grow sharper even as he refused to feed it.

My body was healing. The worst of the rib pain had faded to a dull complaint that only flared if I twisted wrongly or drew too deep a breath. The cut at my temple was a thin pink line. The bruises along my side had yellowed at the edges. I could walk to the bathroom without help now. I could sit up without biting back a sound. But Dante still treated me like I might shatter if he let me out of the bed for longer than necessary. I knew it wasn’t only about the injuries. Keeping me horizontal and contained was the only way he could keep himself from touching me again.

I had tested every boundary. Soft invitations. Bare skin. Quiet confessions of how often I touched myself thinking about his fingers. Nothing cracked the wall he had rebuilt.

Until today.

He came in just after six, the sky outside already turning the deep blue of early evening. I was sitting up against the headboard, his shirt deliberately unbuttoned halfway down my chest, bare legs stretched out on top of the covers. No underwear. I had stopped wearing any three days ago, and he had noticed—I saw it in the way his jaw flexed every time the hem shifted.

“Dinner will be up in twenty minutes,” he said, stopping at the foot of the bed like he always did. Safe distance. “How’s the side?”

“Fine.” I let the shirt slip further off one shoulder. “You can stop asking. I’m not dying.”

“You’re still healing.”

“I’m well enough to do a lot of things, but you keep pretending I can’t.”

He ignored the bait and reached for the water glass on the nightstand, refilling it from the carafe like the conversation was already over. The ordinary domesticity of it scraped something raw inside me.

“My father lands at noon tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll hand me back like a package you were forced to look after and that will be the end of it. You’ll go back to being the man who looks through me at family dinners. I’ll go back to being the girl who was never supposed to want you.”

His hand stilled on the glass.

“Sofia—”

“I’m tired of the careful version of you.” I pushed the covers the rest of the way off and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The movement pulled at my ribs, a sharp reminder, but I stood anyway. “I’m tired of you checking my bandages like a doctor and then walked out before the air between us could catch fire. You felt how wet I was for you. You heard the way I came on your hand. And you’ve spent every day since then acting like it was a fever you have already recovered from.”

He set the glass down harder than necessary. “You need to stop.”

“Make me.”

I stepped into his space. Close enough that the front of my body almost brushed his. The shirt hung open, the soft inner curves of my breasts visible, the bare skin of my stomach and the dark thatch between my legs only a shift of fabric away from full exposure. His eyes dropped before he could stop them. I watched his pupils blow wide.

“You think I don’t see it?” I pushed, voice low. “Every time you walk in here you’re hard before you even open the door. You look at my mouth like you want to ruin it. You look at my legs like you’re two seconds from spreading them. And still you leave. Still, you tell yourself loyalty is enough to keep you from taking what you want.”

Something in his face changed. The careful control cracked, and what came through was pure, sharp anger.

“You don’t know when to quit,” he said, his voice suddenly rough. “You push and push, like this is a game you can win by being reckless enough. You have no idea what it costs me to walk out of this room every night with the taste of you still in my head.”

“Then stop walking out.”

“You’re my best friend’s daughter.” The words came out like they hurt. “I held you when you were twelve and scraped your knee at the lake house. I taught you how to shoot when you were fifteen because your father asked me to. And now you stand here half-naked in my shirt trying to get me to f**k you like the last six years of knowing exactly who you are doesn’t matter.”

“They don’t. Not to me.”

His hand shot out and gripped my upper arm—not hard enough to bruise, but firm enough to keep me from moving closer. “You are playing with something you can’t control.”

“I’m not playing.” I leaned into the hold, letting him feel the give of my body. “I’m asking you to stop pretending you don’t want to drop to your knees and find out if I still taste as good as you remember from your fingers.”

The last thread snapped.

He spun me around and walked me backward until the backs of my thighs hit the edge of the mattress. The movement forced a small sound of pain from my ribs, but he didn’t ease up. His eyes were dark, furious, hungry.

“You want me to lose control?” he said, voice low and dangerous. “You want to see what happens when I stop being careful with you?”

“Yes.”

He shoved the shirt the rest of the way off my shoulders. It pooled at my elbows, trapping my arms loosely at my sides. Then he pushed me down onto the bed—careful of the ribs even in anger—and dropped to his knees between my legs like the words had been a command he could no longer refuse.

There was no slow build this time.

He hooked my knees over his shoulders, yanked me to the edge of the mattress, and put his mouth on me in one hot, open claim. I cried out at the sudden wet heat. His tongue dragged through my folds, broad and filthy, before he sealed his lips around my c**t and sucked hard. The sensation was so intense my back arched despite the protest at my side. One of his hands splayed across my lower stomach to keep me still; the other gripped my thigh hard enough that I knew I would carry the shape of his fingers later.

He ate me like he was starving and angry about it.

There was nothing gentle in the way his tongue thrust inside me, f*****g me in short, deep strokes before returning to my c**t to suck and flick in relentless rhythm. He groaned against me when I got wetter, the sound vibrating through every sensitive nerve. I tried to roll my hips, and he pinned me harder, forcing me to take exactly the pace he set. My hands finally worked free of the shirt and buried themselves in his hair, holding on as the pleasure coiled tight and mean low in my belly.

“Dante—f**k—”

He didn’t ease off. If anything, he went harder, adding two fingers alongside his tongue, curling them against the same spot he had found days ago. The dual sensation wrecked me. My thighs shook on either side of his head. I came with a broken cry, pulsing hard around his fingers, flooding his tongue. He didn’t stop. He licked me through it, slower now but still thorough, dragging every last tremor out of me until I was limp and gasping against the sheets.

Only then did he lift his head.

His mouth was wet with me. His eyes were still dark with the same anger that had snapped him open, but underneath it was something rawer—regret, hunger, the knowledge that he had crossed another line he couldn’t take back.

He stood slowly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The front of his trousers was strained tight. He didn’t touch himself. He didn’t touch me again.

“Your father is coming home tomorrow,” he said, his voice rough and final. “I’m glad. You’ll go back to his house, and I won’t have to walk into this room every day and look at the one thing I’m not allowed to want. You’ll stop torturing me with something I should never have tasted.”

I pushed up onto my elbows, still trembling, still open and glistening from his mouth. The words landed like a blade between my ribs—sharper than any physical pain I had felt since the accident.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I mean every word.” He stepped back, putting distance between us again. “Get some rest, Sofia. Tomorrow this ends.”

He left without another glance.

I lay there in the darkening room, the taste of his anger and his hunger still thick in the air, and stared at the ceiling while the city lights began to glitter beyond the glass.

One more night.

And he thought returning me to my father would be enough to kill what lived between us.

He was wrong.