The morning sun didn't rise; it attacked. It was a brutal, unforgiving glare that bounced off the pristine white snow outside, piercing through the heavy timber walls of the safehouse like a thousand needles. I woke up slowly, my consciousness surfacing from a sea of deep, dreamless exhaustion. My body felt heavy, ached in places I hadn’t known existed—a dull, thrumming heat still pulsing under my skin, a physical echo of the way Luciano had claimed me hours before.
For a few blissful seconds, I allowed myself to drift in the afterglow. I breathed in the scent of cedar, the metallic tang of the dying embers in the hearth, and the faint, musky trace of Luciano’s cologne that lingered on the silk pillowcase next to mine. I felt like a woman who had finally found a harbor in the middle of a
