Between Loyalty and You

Chapter 4 (Sofia's POV)

Two full days.

Forty-eight hours of silence so complete it felt like punishment.

The first morning after he made me come on his fingers, I waited. I expected him to appear with coffee, or to check the bandages, or at least to stand in the doorway the way he had every other morning since the accident. Instead, the door stayed shut. A nurse I didn’t recognize brought breakfast on a tray—eggs, toast, fresh fruit, painkillers lined up in a neat row—and left without meeting my eyes. She returned for lunch. Again at dinner. Each time the same polite, distant efficiency. No Dante.

By the second morning, the absence had turned into something sharp under my skin.

I spent hours cataloging every sound in the penthouse. The distant elevator. The low murmur of men in the hallway—his soldiers, rotating shifts. The occasional click of a door far down the corridor that I knew led to his office. Never the one to my room. He didn’t come. He didn’t call. He didn’t even send a message through the staff.

The memory of his mouth on my breasts, the thick stretch of his fingers inside me, the way he had licked me off his own hand, played on a loop every time I closed my eyes. My body still ached from the accident, but a different ache had taken root between my legs—low, constant, unanswered. I pressed my thighs together under the sheets more times than I could count, chasing friction that never satisfied. Once, in the middle of the second night, I slipped my own hand between my legs and tried to recreate the way he had touched me. It felt hollow. Empty. I came with his name bitten into the pillow and hated how unfinished it left me.

By the afternoon of the second day, the anger had burned away the last of my patience.

I sat up carefully, biting back the sharp pull in my ribs. The bandages were still snug. The bruises along my side had darkened to an ugly purple-green. My head no longer swam when I moved, but every shift still reminded me I was nowhere near healed. I didn’t care.

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The marble floor was cold under my bare feet. I was still wearing one of his shirts—someone had left a fresh one folded on the chair, but I had refused it. I wanted the one that still carried the faint scent of his skin from the morning he had lost control. The hem hit mid-thigh. I didn’t bother with anything underneath. Let him see exactly what he had been avoiding.

Standing made the room tilt for a second. I locked my knees and waited it out, one hand braced on the nightstand until the dizziness passed. Then I started walking.

Each step sent a dull spike through my left side. I welcomed it. The pain kept me focused. The penthouse hallway stretched longer than I remembered—dark wood, soft lighting, the quiet luxury of a man who could afford to live above the rest of the city. Two of his men stood near the elevators. They straightened when they saw me.

“Miss Russo,” the taller one said carefully. “You should be resting.”

“Where is he?”

“In his office. But he gave orders—”

“I don’t give a f**k about his orders.”

I kept walking. They didn’t try to stop me. Smart men. They knew better than to put hands on the don’s best friend’s daughter, even when she was half-naked and clearly not supposed to be out of bed.

The double doors to his office were closed. I didn’t knock.

I pushed them open hard enough that they swung inward and hit the stops with a solid thud.

Dante sat behind the massive black desk, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a stack of papers in front of him and a glass of something amber at his elbow. Two of his capos stood on the other side of the desk, mid-conversation. All three heads turned.

The room went silent.

His eyes locked on mine. For a fraction of a second, something raw and startled flashed across his face before the mask slammed down. He dismissed the men with a single tilt of his chin. They left quickly, closing the doors behind them without a word.

We were alone.

I stood just inside the threshold, breathing harder than the short walk should have required. The shirt had slipped off one shoulder. The bottom edge rode high enough that if I shifted even slightly he would see I wore nothing underneath. His gaze dropped, lingered on the bare length of my legs, the faint tremor in my stance, the way my n*****s pressed against the thin fabric. Then it climbed back to my face.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” he said. Voice flat. Controlled.

“You shouldn’t have disappeared for two f*****g days.”

He leaned back in the chair, the leather creaking. “I had business.”

“Bullshit.” I took another step forward. The movement pulled at my ribs and I couldn’t hide the wince. His hands tightened on the arms of the chair, but he didn’t rise. “You had me. You had your mouth on me. Your fingers inside me. You made me come so hard I saw the stars, and then you vanished like I was some mistake you regretted touching.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“Or what?” I kept advancing until I stood on the opposite side of the desk. Up close, I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his throat worked when he swallowed. “You’ll ignore me for another two days? You’ll send the nurse again so you don’t have to look at what you did?”

He stood slowly. The height difference felt deliberate, a reminder of the power he wore like a second skin. “You’re hurt. You’re not thinking clearly.”

“I’ve never thought more clearly in my life.” My voice shook with the force of the anger I had been swallowing. “You don’t get to touch me like that—like you’ve been starving for it—and then pretend I don’t exist. You don’t get to make me come on your fingers and then lock yourself in this office while I lie in your bed aching for more.”

Something dangerous flickered in his eyes. He came around the desk in three long strides, stopping only when he was close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze. The heat of him rolled over me. I could smell the faint trace of tobacco and the clean scent of his skin.

“You think this is easy for me?” he said, low and rough. “You think I haven’t spent the last forty-eight hours hard enough to hurt, because every time I close my eyes I still feel how tight you were around my fingers? That I haven’t had to stop myself from walking into that room and finishing what I started?”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because your father—”

“My father is in Palermo,” I snapped. “And I am here. Twenty-two years old, standing in your office still feeling the ghost of your hand between my legs, and you are still hiding behind loyalty like it’s the only thing that defines you.”

His hand shot out and gripped my jaw—not hard enough to bruise, but firm enough to tilt my face up. His thumb pressed against the corner of my mouth. The contact sent a fresh pulse of heat straight down my spine.

“You have no idea what you’re asking for,” he said. “The things I would do to you if I stopped holding back. You are not ready for that.”

“Then show me.”

For a long moment, the only sound was our breathing. His eyes dropped to my mouth. I felt the exact second his control frayed again—the slight flex of his fingers on my jaw, the way his body leaned in almost imperceptibly.

Then he released me and stepped back, putting the width of the desk between us once more.

“Go back to bed, Sofia.”

“No.”

“That wasn’t a request.”

I planted my bare feet more firmly on the floor even though the pain in my side had started to pulse in time with my heartbeat. “I’m not leaving until you stop treating me like a mistake you can lock away.”

He stared at me across the polished surface of the desk. The city stretched out behind him through the floor-to-ceiling windows, gray and indifferent. His hands were clenched at his sides. I could see the outline of his c**k already hardening against the front of his black trousers—proof that the two days of distance had done nothing to kill what lived between us.

“You’re bleeding,” he said suddenly.

I looked down. A thin line of red had seeped through the bandage at my side where the movement had pulled something open. The sight of it seemed to snap something in him.

He was around the desk again before I could speak, one arm sliding carefully around my back, the other under my knees. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, the motion smooth and controlled despite the tension radiating off him. I hissed at the shift in pressure against my ribs, but I didn’t fight him. My arms went around his neck, fingers sliding into the dark hair at his nape.

“Stubborn little thing,” he muttered against my temple as he carried me out of the office and down the hallway. “You’re going to tear yourself apart just to prove a point.”

“You left me alone for two days,” I whispered against his throat. “I already felt torn apart.”

He didn’t answer. His jaw was set, eyes fixed forward. But the arm under my thighs tightened, and the one around my back held me closer than strictly necessary.

When we reached the bedroom, he set me down on the edge of the mattress with deliberate care. He didn’t leave. He knelt in front of me, pushed the shirt up, and examined the bandage with a frown. Fresh blood had soaked a small patch near the lower edge.

“Stay still,” he ordered.

I watched the top of his head as he carefully peeled the gauze back, cleaned the shallow reopened cut, and rewrapped it with the supplies still on the nightstand. His hands were steady. Professional. But every so often his knuckles brushed the soft skin of my stomach or the underside of my breast, and I felt the slight hitch in his breathing.

When he finished, he remained on his knees between my spread thighs, looking up at me. The position put his face level with the hem of the shirt. If he leaned forward even an inch, he would be able to smell how wet I still was from the confrontation, from the two days of unanswered need.

“Don’t disappear on me again,” I said quietly.

His hands rested on my bare knees. Thumbs stroked once, slowly, over the sensitive inner skin.

“I can’t give you what you want,” he said, his voice rough. “Not clean. Not without destroying things that can’t be put back together.”

“Then destroy them.”

He closed his eyes for a second, as if the words physically hurt. When he opened them again, the hunger was there, raw and barely leashed, but so was the resolve.

“Rest,” he said. “I’ll have dinner sent up. And I’ll check on you myself tonight.”

It wasn’t everything. It wasn’t him staying. But it was more than the silence of the last two days.

I reached down and cupped the side of his face, feeling the faint scrape of stubble against my palm. He turned into the touch almost involuntarily, lips brushing the center of my hand.

“I’ll be waiting,” I whispered.

He stood, the movement stiff, and walked to the door. At the threshold he paused, one hand on the frame, back still to me.

“Next time you decide to storm through my home half-dressed and bleeding,” he said without turning, “I won’t be so gentle about putting you back where you belong.”

The door closed behind him.

I lay back against the pillows, side throbbing, my heart racing, the taste of almost still thick on my tongue.

He had stayed away for two days.

And all it had done was make the inevitable crash harder to stop.