His teeth sank into the place where my pulse lived and my entire brain whited out.
I didn't push him away. My hand twisted tighter in his shirt and my back arched off the bench and a sound came out of my mouth that I was going to have to move countries to recover from. His mouth was hot against my skin, the pressure sharp enough to sting and slow enough to make every nerve ending in my throat light up in sequence. His hand tightened in my hair, tilting my head further, and I let him because my body had staged a full protest against my common sense.
For five seconds, maybe six, I was just gone. Everything I'd been angry about, the lease, the apartment, the way he made decisions for me like I was a line item on his schedule, all of it dissolved under the heat of his mouth and the scrape of his teeth and his heartbeat slamming against my knuckles through his shirt.
Holy shit. Was this actually happening? Was I getting my first love bite from an angry mafia prince on a college bench in broad daylight? Was this my life now?
Apparently, yes. Yes, it was.
I went still. He felt it. His mouth slowed against my neck, then lifted. When he pulled back, his eyes were darker than I'd ever seen them, pupils blown wide, and his breathing wasn't steady. Neither was mine.
He didn't apologize. He didn't look like he wanted to. His jaw was set and his gaze stayed on the mark he'd left on my throat, and the expression on his face wasn't guilt or regret. It was satisfaction. The kind of deep, quiet satisfaction that belonged to a man who had just done exactly what he'd been holding himself back from doing, and would do it again in a heartbeat.
I touched the spot on my neck where his teeth had been. Definitely going to bruise. Definitely going to be visible above every neckline I owned.
Great. Wonderful. I'll just wear turtlenecks for the rest of the semester. In April.
"That's going to be hard to explain to Elena," I said.
His eyes tracked my fingers on my neck and something shifted in his expression. Darker. Hungrier. Like watching me touch the mark he'd made was doing something to him that he had zero interest in hiding.
"Tell her your husband did it," he said, and the way he said husband, low and certain, turned the word into something that pressed against my ribs.
***
He walked me back toward Nik's SUV with his hand on my lower back, his thumb tracing a slow circle through my hoodie like he couldn't stop touching me now that he'd started. My neck was still tingling. My thoughts were a mess. Half of me wanted to sprint back to the courtyard and demand he do that again. The other half wanted to file a restraining order against my own hormones.
"If I'm staying at the apartment," I said, because I needed to feel like I had some control over something, anything, "and I'm saying if, then I have conditions."
He glanced down at me with one eyebrow slightly raised, the corner of his mouth tugging in a way that told me he found the word conditions entertaining, which was annoying, because I was being serious. "Let's hear them."
"I keep going to class. I keep my café shifts. And I get my own room with a door that locks."
He was quiet for a few steps, his thumb still moving on my back, considering. "The classes, we can figure out. The café, with someone nearby. Those are reasonable."
I waited. I knew the third one was coming.
His hand slid from my lower back to my hip and settled there. "The separate room, though. That's not happening."
I opened my mouth to argue and he stopped walking. I stopped because his hand on my hip didn't give me much choice. He turned me toward him, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, and the afternoon light caught the green in them and made them look almost translucent.
"Why," he said, his voice dropping, "would a husband and wife sleep in separate rooms?"
Damn him.
He was playing me with my own game. I had grabbed this man's hand on a sidewalk and called him darling in front of witnesses. I had let him upgrade boyfriend to husband in front of Lana and Elena without flinching. I had built this entire performance, and now he was living in it with his feet up while I scrambled to remember which parts were supposed to be fake.
"That's," I started, and his thumb pressed into my hip bone, which was distracting and he absolutely knew it, "that's a technicality."
He leaned down. His lips brushed the mark on my neck, feather-light, soothing the sting he'd left, and my breath did something humiliating.
"There are no technicalities in a marriage, Ava," he murmured against my skin. "You're either my wife or you're not. And you told every person in your life that you are."
I could feel his mouth moving against the bruise when he spoke and my thoughts were scattering in every direction. This was unfair. He was negotiating with his lips on my neck and I was supposed to form coherent sentences.
"Fine," I said through my teeth, because I was losing this round and we both knew it. "Same bed. But you stay on your side."
"I don't have a side."
"You do now. I'll draw a line in marker if I have to."
He straightened, and his mouth curved. Something told me this man was not going to stay on his side. "Deal."
I added the last condition before I lost all remaining leverage. "I'll check in when I leave and when I arrive. That's it. No tracking apps, no tailing me between buildings."
He considered it, his thumb still resting on my hip. "If you don't, I'll come find you. That part isn't negotiable."
"Parole terms," I muttered. "Got it."
His hand slid back to the small of my back and we started walking again. My pulse was doing something embarrassing and I was pretty sure he could feel it because his thumb was resting right over the vein in my wrist.
***
Nik was leaning against the SUV, sunglasses on, scrolling his phone with a coffee cup balanced on the hood.
"Oh good," he said, pushing off the car. "You found her. I was so worried."
I took in the sunglasses, the coffee, the completely un-panicked body language. This man had not experienced a single moment of distress since I'd left the SUV.
"You weren't worried at all," I said.
Nik's grin spread slow and shameless.
I turned to Cillian. "He called you in a panic. You told me he couldn't find me."
Cillian's expression gave away nothing, which gave away everything.
"You fake-panicked so he'd come running," I said to Nik.
Nik took a sip of his coffee. "And it worked beautifully. You're welcome." He opened the rear door with a flourish. "You two were being ridiculous. Someone had to intervene."
I got in the car and slammed the door harder than necessary. Nik's laugh followed me through the glass.
***
That night, I put my three terrible mugs on the shelf he'd cleared for me.
When I opened the cabinet and saw the empty space already waiting there, already made, I stood with the World's Okayest Human mug in my hand for longer than made sense. He'd made room for me before I'd decided to stay.
I didn't know what to do with that, so I put the mug down and closed the cabinet and moved on.
He took the bathroom first. I changed with the door shut and climbed into bed so far on my side that one shoulder blade hung off the edge.
"You're going to fall off," he said.
"This is my side. Plenty of room."
The light went off. I lay in the dark listening to him breathe and tried very hard not to think about the warmth radiating across the mattress. His arm was resting somewhere near the invisible line I'd mentally drawn and I could feel the heat of it even though we weren't touching.
I waited until his breathing evened out. Then I eased out of bed, grabbed my laptop, and took it to the living room.
The article was still in my browser history. I'd skimmed it once before, half-asleep, the night I found it. Matteo's text had interrupted everything. Now I opened it and read it properly, curled up on the couch with the screen brightness turned low.
Volkov-Moran Family Tragedy: Aoife Moran Volkov, 44, Found Dead in Family Estate.
His mother. The woman in the emerald dress with his eyes and that protective hand on his arm. Dead at forty-four in the family home. The article was careful with its language. It mentioned an ongoing investigation. It mentioned a son, seventeen, who had been present in the house at the time.
Present in the house.
There was a follow-up piece, three months later and much shorter. The investigation had been closed and no charges were filed. The family released a statement calling it a tragic incident and requesting privacy.
No charges, in a house full of people who made their living in violence. A seventeen-year-old boy who lost his mother and was then raised by the same people who, according to every gap and silence in these articles, may have been responsible.
My chest ached.
I was still staring at the screen when the bedroom door opened.
Cillian stood in the doorway, hair wrecked from sleep, eyes adjusting to the glow from my laptop. His gaze found my face first. Then it dropped to the screen.
I watched him read the headline from across the room. Something behind his eyes shut, and the man standing in front of me was suddenly someone I hadn't met yet.
"Ava," he said. My name sounded different now. Quieter. "Close the laptop."
I didn't close it.
"Cillian," I said. "What happened to your mother?"