I choked on his name, a broken, desperate sound that seemed way too loud in the dead silence of the room. I tried to pull away, to hide, but he wasn’t having it. His hands stayed locked on my hips, his fingers digging in so hard I knew there would be marks by morning. He forced me to stay right there, pinned against him, making me feel every single second of the internal earthquake until I was shaking and completely wrecked.
I couldn’t even catch my breath before he was over me. He moved with a heavy, predatory grace, his body a searing weight that pinned me to the mattress as he settled between my thighs. There was just the silent, electric demand in his eyes. He waited, hovering just inches away, until my own hands betrayed me, reaching down to guide his thick, pulsing heat toward the ache he’d created.
Then he pushed.
He entered me in one slow, punishing surge that felt like it was splitting me open. The fullness was a blunt, stretching pressure that reached all the way to my bones. He stopped there, buried deep, his forehead crashing against mine. We both stayed frozen for a heartbeat, the only sound the ragged, desperate hitch of our breathing as he fought the urge to lose control completely.
“Sofia,” he choked out, his voice breaking.
“Don’t talk,” I whispered, wrapping my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. “Just stay.”
He began to move—a steady, rhythmic depth that felt like he was trying to fuse our lives together through the sheer force of friction. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t cruel; it was an honest, jagged collision of two people who had spent too long pretending they didn’t need this. The tension built, a heavy, pulsing heat that radiated from my chest outward, until we hit the cliff together. He came with a shattered groan, his body locking against mine as he anchored us both to the bed.
The silence of the penthouse returned, but the air was still charged. Gregory didn’t pull away; he shifted, his hands strong as he flipped me onto my stomach, pinning my wrists into the pillows.
“I told you once,” he growled into my ear, his chest a wall of fire against my back. “That once I had you in this bed, I wasn’t letting you go.”
He entered me again from behind—a blunt, deep reclamation that felt sharper, more visceral. He began a heavy, frantic drive, his pace increasing until the bed frame groaned against the wall.
As he moved, his hand reached down between my thighs. I felt the sudden, electric shock of his thumb pressing against the sensitive, puckered skin of my asshole. He didn’t just touch; he pulsed his finger against the rhythm of his thrusts—a sharp, insistent pressure that sent a completely different kind of fire through my nervous system.
The combination was a total sensory hijack. The deep, stretching fullness of him inside me and the rhythmic, insistent pressure against that forbidden edge created a circuit of heat that bypassed my brain entirely. I let out a broken, high-pitched cry, my fingers digging into the silk until it tore.
“Gregory—” I sobbed, my body clenching around him in a frantic, desperate rhythm.
He let out a final, guttural roar, his body shuddering as he spilled into me, the weight of him crushing me into the mattress as the city lights continued their silent dance outside.
The room was still. The amber light of the city had shifted across the floor, illuminating the discarded white silk of my dress. I lay in the dark, the unfamiliar weight of his arm draped across my waist, his thumb idly stroking the skin above my hip.
“Gregory,” I said, to the ceiling.
“Mm.” Low, half-drowsy, the sound of a man who had not yet decided whether to stay awake.
I turned the question over in my head—the one I’d been carrying since the basement, since Nico’s voice telling me things I hadn’t been able to fully dismiss. I wanted to ask it cleanly, without making it into a confrontation, and I couldn’t find that version of the question either. It existed somewhere between anger and need, and I didn’t have the vocabulary for the middle.
“Did any of it start real?” I said finally. “In the beginning.”
He was quiet for long enough that I felt the quality of the silence change—not avoidance, but the particular stillness of a man choosing his words with the full weight of what they needed to carry. His thumb moved once against my hip, slow, like punctuation.
“I told myself it wasn’t,” he said. “I was wrong.”
The city hummed below us, indifferent and vast, and somewhere out there, Nico Calderon was still alive and still calculating, and the war Gregory and his people had spent months choreographing was not finished, and morning would arrive with all of its complications still intact. None of that had changed. I was still angry. The wound was still there, layered and unresolved, and one night didn’t suture it.
But he had fallen asleep with his arm around me like it was somewhere he’d decided to stay, and the anger and the wound and the complicated truth of all of it existed simultaneously with that, and I was, in the most exhaustive way, done pretending they didn’t.
I closed my eyes.
Outside, Chicago went on.
Chapter 22 – Gregory
She woke up before I did.
That was new. I’d spent years conditioning myself to light sleep, but what pulled me out of it this morning was humming. Soft, unconscious, the kind of sound a person made when they forgot they weren’t alone, drifting out from the kitchen with the smell of coffee, and I lay still for a full minute and let it settle in my chest before I understood what the sensation was.
I didn’t have a word for it. I’d words for most states of being—threat, hunger, exhaustion—but this particular weight just sat there, like something that had moved into a room and rearranged the furniture.
She was standing at the counter in bare feet when I walked into the kitchen, wearing the oversized shirt she’d apparently claimed from my wardrobe without asking, her hair pulled into something loose and impractical at the back of her neck. She was reading something on her phone with the attention she brought to everything, her coffee mug raised and forgotten halfway to her mouth, and she was humming.