"I'm going to come," I said. A warning. A confession. My hand tightening in her hair, my body tensing, the pressure building from the base of my spine in a wave that had been building since last night, since the hallway, since the sound of her through the door.
She didn't pull away.
She took me deeper. Her mouth sealing, her throat working, her eyes still on mine—watching me come apart, watching the moment the wave hit, and I came with a sound I'd never made before. Low, guttural, torn from somewhere deep. My hand fisted in her hair and my hips shuddered and I poured into her mouth and she took it. All of it. Her throat moving, swallowing, her lips tight around the shaft, her eyes never leaving mine.
The orgasm lasted longer than it should have. Longer than any I could remember. It moved through me in waves, each one pulling something out—tension, isolation, the years of performing threat instead of feeling anything—pulling it all out and leaving me empty and full at the same time, hollow and completed, wrecked and more myself than I had ever been.
She swallowed the last of it. Pulled back slowly—her lips dragging along the shaft with a tenderness that made my breath catch—and released me with a soft, wet sound that I would hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
She looked up. Her mouth was swollen. Her eyes were bright. And the expression on her face—
Pride. Quiet, earned, incandescent pride.
I pulled her up.
Both hands under her arms, lifting her the way I'd lifted her yesterday—except yesterday I was setting her on her feet and today I was pulling her into my lap, into my chest, into the spacebetween my arms where she fit like something designed for it. She curled against me. Her face found my neck. Her breath was warm against my skin and her body was warm against mine and her weight was a thing I could hold and would hold and would not put down.
"Good girl," I said. Into her hair. The words coming easy now, the way they'd been easy during the aftercare, the way they'd always been easy even when nothing else was. "My good girl. You're perfect. You're everything."
Her arms went around me. Tight. The scarred knuckles pressing into my back, the grip of someone who had found something worth holding and was not letting go.
The morning light came through the window—grey, thin, November in Oak Brook. The room was quiet. The house was quiet. The whole world was quiet, or felt that way.
I pressed my lips to her hair. Breathed her in. Closed my eyes.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Chapter 10
Cora
Iwokeupwarm.
Not the warmth of blankets or the heating system cycling through the night. Something else. Something that lived inside the body rather than on the surface—a heat that had settled into my bones and was still there when I opened my eyes.
I lay still. Let the ceiling come into focus. I’d slept. Actually slept—the deep, weightless kind, the kind that meant the nervous system had finally decided to stand down.
Midge was curled against my hip. One paw over her nose, her stub of a tail tucked around her, her breathing the slow metronome of an animal entirely at peace. I put my hand on her, feeling the rise and fall of her small ribs, and she didn’t stir.
I was sore.
The ache in my glutes and the backs of my thighs was specific, localized, mine—the kind of soreness that came with a map. His hand. The exact shape of it. I could trace the heat even now, hours later, the warmth still blooming under my skin like asignature. Not a bruise. He’d been too controlled for a bruise. Something more deliberate than that, something that existed in the precise territory between discomfort and pleasure and stayed there, refusing to resolve into either.
He’d told me I’d feel it the next day.
He’d been right. I’d asked for that, had chosen it, had counted every one. Good girl. The words landed fresh in the memory, clean and exact, and something in my chest responded to the replay the same way it had responded to the real thing. Tightening. Opening. The two at once.
My body felt different. That was the simplest way to put it. Like it had been claimed. His. I held the thought, waiting for it to scare me.
It didn’t.
It should have. I knew it should have. I turned it over—his, her body is his—and all I found was something quiet and certain that had moved into the space where the fear was supposed to live and settled there with no intention of leaving.
Then Maria arrived.
She always arrived this way—not as a memory, not as a face, but as a weight. A pressure at the center of my chest, localized, specific, the gravity of twenty-three years of carrying something I couldn’t put down and couldn’t not feel. Maria was sixteen in 2003. She was standing outside a Valenti club on the South Side on a summer night when the crossfire found her. She hadn’t been part of any of it. She’d been a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time when two families decided the street was a battlefield.
I sat up.