Page 133 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
For a long time, the only sound is the drumming of the water and our ragged, synced breaths.
The steam slowly clears from the mirror, revealing us—spent, wrecked, and utterly fused.
I slowly, carefully, lower her until her feet touch the floor, my arms still wrapped around her, holding her steady as her legs tremble violently.
I turn her in my arms.
Her face is pale, streaked with water and tears, her eyes hollowed out with exhaustion and a kind of stunned awe.
She looks utterly ravaged.
Beautiful.
Mine.
I reach up and gently wipe a tear from her cheek with my thumb.
She leans into the touch, her eyes closing.
The world outside, with all its dangers and demands, is still there, waiting.
But in this steam-shrouded sanctuary, surrounded by the ghosts of saints and the scent of our sex, we are, for this one stolen moment, untouchable.
The silence between us now is not a weapon, but a pact.
And It's finally, perfectly, broken.
The hot water is beginning to run cold.
I don't move, just hold her there against the wall, my body a cage and a cradle, feeling the fine, aftershock tremors that still wrack her frame.
Her skin is flushed, marked by my hands and my mouth, a living map of the storm we just weathered.
She feels fragile in my arms, all the fierce defiance from earlier washed away, leaving something raw and terrifyingly exposed.
Her voice, when it comes, is a cracked whisper, muffled against my chest.
"I'm sorry."
I go still. "For what?"
"For not telling you sooner."
She pulls back just enough to look up at me, her eyes swimming with a fresh wave of tears. "About the baby. I was... scared. I thought... I thought it would be a chain. For you. For me. I thought if I kept it to myself, I could control it. I could protect it."
The confession hangs in the steam-filled air.
The baby.
The secret that started this whole silent war between us.
It doesn't feel like a bomb anymore.
It feels like a key, finally turning in a lock I didn't know was there.
I lift a hand, cupping her jaw, my thumb stroking over the apple of her cheek.
"Look at me." Her wet lashes flutter as she meets my gaze. "You think I don't know what it's like to be scared? To want to control the one thing in your life that feels like it's spinning into chaos?" I let out a slow breath, the truth of my own bloodline, the curse and the power of it, settling between us like a third presence. "It doesn't matter. None of it. The hiding, the running. It ends now."
