Page 128 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
23
NICO
The silence in my house is a physical thing, thick and heavy.
She’s staring into the cold hearth, her profile a study in marble stillness.
And I break.
It’s not a decision.
It’s a tectonic shift.
One moment I’m across the room, the next I’m standing in front of her, my shadow falling over her.
She looks up, her eyes wide, not with fear, but with a shocking, deep-seated defiance.
That look—it’s the final straw.
“Enough,” I rasp, the word tearing from a raw place in my throat. “This silent treatment… it’s fucking killing me, Elisa.”
She says nothing, just holds my gaze, her chin tilted up.
The challenge in her eyes ignites a fuse.
“You want to know why?” I snarl, leaning down, my hands braced on the back of the sofa, caging her in. “You want the truth? It gutted me. Your silence gutted me. Because I have spent my entire goddamn life building walls. Keeping everyone and everything I could ever give a single fuck about at a safe, clean, arm’s length. It’s how you survive in my world. You don’t get attached. You don’t leave a door open for someone to walk in and wreck you.”
My voice is vicious.
I’m shaking with the force of the confession.
“And then there was you. You didn’t knock on the door. You didn’t even pick the lock. You just… appeared on the other side of it, like you’d always been there. You looked at me and you saw right through every brick, every layer of bullshit, straight down to the rotten foundation. And I let you.”
Her defiance wavers, her lips parting on a soft, indrawn breath.
“So when you shut down on me,” I continue, my voice dropping to a tortured whisper, “when you gave me that fucking silence… it was the one thing I didn’t know how to fight. It was you using my own weapon against me. And it worked. It broke me.”
I see it then, the moment her walls crumble.
A single tear escapes, tracing a path down her cheek.
It’s my undoing.
I close the final distance.
My mouth crashes down on hers.
It’s not a kiss.
It’s a conquest.
It’s a fucking wildfire.
All the pent-up fear, the rage, the desperate, clawing need of the last few days explodes between us.
She doesn’t fight it.
She meets me with a ferocity that steals the air from my lungs, her hands flying up to fist in my hair, pulling me closer, deeper.
