He doesn't break the kiss. I don't let him.
His mouth on mine and my hands in his hair and somehow we're moving — backward, sideways, I've lost all sense of direction because his hand has found the small of my back and pulled me flush against him and the full length of his body against mine has erased everything except the points where we connect.
My shoulder hits the doorframe. He doesn't stop. Shifts me. Pins me against it with his hips and his mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to the place below my ear where my pulse is hammering and he bites — gently, then not gently — and the sound that comes out of me is something I'll be embarrassed about later. Not now. Now I don't care.
"Upstairs," I manage.
"No." His voice against my throat. Low. Absolute. The voice that ends negotiations. His hands slide down my thighs and lift and I'm off the ground and my legs are around his waist and he carries me like I weigh nothing — three steps to the desk, papers scattering, something glass hitting the floor.
He sets me on the edge. Steps between my knees. His hands find the hem of my dress and push it up my thighs — slow, deliberate, his fingers dragging against my skin like he's claiming territory inch by inch. Possessive.
The way he does everything. The way he walks into rooms and sets glasses down and looks at men who owe him things. Except this isn't business. This is his hands on my skin and his eyes on mine and the hunger in them is so raw it makes my breath stutter.
I pull his shirt open. Buttons scatter. Underneath — his chest, a scar on his left shoulder I've never seen. Raised. Old. I press my mouth against it and he makes a sound that has no language — low, broken, the sound of a man being touched somewhere he forgot was tender. His hand fists in my hair. Not pulling. Holding. The grip of a man who is trying very hard to be gentle and losing the battle.
"Tell me to stop," he says against my collarbone. His teeth graze my skin.
I pull him closer by the ruined shirt. "Don't you dare."
Something snaps. I feel it — the restraint leaving his body like a wire cut. His mouth crashes back to mine and his hands aren't slow anymore.
They're everywhere. My waist, my hips, the back of my neck where his fingers tangle and tilt my head and he kisses me like he's angry at himself for waiting this long. Like every day of distance and control and filed-away wanting is pouring out of him through his hands and his mouth and the sound he makes against my skin when I arch into him.
"You're mine, Sera." He says it against my throat. Not a question. Not a negotiation. A fact delivered with the same certainty he used when he said let's go, wife over a dead man's body. "Every part of you. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." The word comes out wrecked. I don't recognize my own voice.
"Say it."
"I'm yours."
His grip tightens on my hips. He pulls me to the edge of the desk and I gasp and his forehead drops to mine and his breathing is ragged and his eyes are open and dark and close and for the first time there is nothing between us — no mask, no armor, no filing cabinet, no promise made at fourteen by a boy who didn't know this woman existed.
It's different from the wedding night. That was two strangers colliding in the dark. This is slower where it needs to be slow and not slow where it doesn't need to be and every sound I make he answers with his hands and every place he touches I feel for minutes afterward like a brand pressed into skin.
He watches my face the whole time — not looking away, not closing his eyes, cataloging every reaction with the intensity of a man who has spent his life reading rooms and is now reading me.
I say his name like something I'm reclaiming. He says mine like something he's keeping.
Afterward.
The study floor. His jacket spread under me — he pulled it from the chair before my back touched cold stone and the specificity of that gesture, the care buried inside the possession, is what makes my throat tight.
His arms are around me. My cheek against his chest. His heartbeat under my ear — still fast, slowing, the rhythm of a man whose body is ahead of his mind.
The room smells like cedar and his skin and scattered papers and us.
"This wasn't strategic," I whisper. My finger traces the shoulder scar. The one he didn't explain. The one I kissed without permission.
His mouth twitches against my hair. "No."
One word. The most honest sound I've heard from him since I know enough in the back of a dark car. I press closer. His arm tightens. His hand finds my hip — possessive even now, even on the floor, even with his shirt ruined and his papers everywhere and his carefully constructed control in pieces around us.
"Sera." Low. Against my hair.
"Mm."
"If anyone ever touches you again —" He stops. His arm tightens further. The sentence doesn't need finishing. The silence finishes it with a violence his mouth is too gentle to deliver right now.
I close my eyes. His heartbeat steadies under my ear. His hand is on my hip and his mouth is in my hair and his jacket is under my back and I am lying on the floor of a mafia boss's study covered in his scent and his fingerprints and the echoes of my own name in his voice and I should be terrified.
I'm not. I'm home.
That's the terrifying part.