"Dante," I whisper, and his name in my mouth sounds like a prayer I did not mean to speak aloud.
We don't make it past the wardrobe.
Dante lifts me and my back hits the wooden doors hard enough to rattle the frame, and the sound is permission—the starting gun for everything we have held back since the study, since the dream, since the night I left with one bag and no note.
My legs lock around him. His mouth is on my collarbone, my jaw, the hollow of my throat.
"Forgive me." The words vibrate against my pulse. "For what I said about the killing. I had no right to use your guilt as punishment for my own."
"You had no right to a lot of things." I grip his hair and pull his head back, forcing him to look at me. "But you did them anyway."
"I did." No excuses, no justifications. Just the raw admission of a man who knows exactly what he is. "And if you let me, I will spend whatever time you give me proving I can be better than that."
I pull his shirt open and buttons scatter, and the sound of them hitting the tile floor is absurdly delicate against the violence of everything else.
His hands aren't careful. My hands aren't careful. Two years of restraint and composure and carefully maintained distance are burning down around us, and neither of us is interested in salvaging the wreckage.
The wardrobe doors groan under our combined weight. My thoughts strip to their most basic elements: his skin, his mouth, the devastating familiarity of a body I memorized before I learned to forget it.
"Do you have any idea what it did to me?" His voice is wrecked, barely recognizable. "Knowing you were out there, knowing someone else was waking up next to you, touching you like this—"
"Show me," I gasp against his mouth. "Shut up and show me."
We migrate—not deliberately, not with any spatial awareness, but through the momentum of two bodies that can't stop moving into each other. He sets me on the desk and everything on its surface goes—a lamp, books, something glass that shatters on the floor.
I don't flinch at the sound. Neither does he.
His forehead presses against mine and his breathing is ragged, and for one suspended second we are still—eyes open, inches apart, the full weight of what we're doing settling over us like a held breath.
I see him in a way the darkness of Nico's room never permitted: every line of his face, every fracture in the composure he wears for the rest of the world. He is undone.
The man who controls empires with silence is coming apart under my hands, and the power of that—the raw, intoxicating knowledge that I do this to him, that two years and a marriage and an empire couldn't cure him of me—is more devastating than any touch.
"I missed you." Three words I swore I would never speak aloud, and they fall from my mouth like stones I have been carrying for two years. Every single day, Dante. I missed you like a limb, like air, like the part of myself I amputated to survive leaving."
His answer is not words. His answer is his hands tightening on my hips, his mouth claiming mine with a hunger that says he heard me, he understands, he has been drowning in the same absence. The desk scrapes across the floor as he drives into me.
Dante carries me to the window. My back meets the cool glass and the contrast—the heat of him against the cold behind me—draws a sound from me that I feel rather than hear. The windowsill catches the back of my thighs and something on the ledge topples—a potted plant, a decorative frame—and falls to the floor behind us.
We are dismantling the room as we move through it, leaving a trail of broken and displaced objects like evidence of a natural disaster.
This is not the negotiated intensity of Nico's bed. This is not Luca's gentle reverence. This is the thing I left because it was too consuming, too complete, too much like drowning to be compatible with survival.
And I am drowning now. Willingly. With my eyes open and my arms pulling him deeper.
I push against his chest, and for one terrible moment his eyes flash with the fear that I am stopping this, that I am coming to my senses.
"The bed," I breathe against his mouth, and I am the one moving us now, my hands on his chest, guiding him backward until his knees hit the mattress. I climb over him and watch the realization settle across his features—that I am choosing this, choosing him, not being swept away but steering us both into the current.
Dante's hands frame my face and he looks at me, and the looking is its own act of intimacy, more exposing than anything our bodies are doing.
He is memorizing me. I can feel it—the way his gaze moves across my features with the desperate attention of a man who doesn't trust this to last, who knows I've left before and will leave again and is determined to take enough of me with him this time to survive the absence.
I rise over him, knees bracketing his hips, and lower myself slowly until we are fully joined. The tenderness of watching his face from above—every flicker of need, every crack in his composure visible in the low light—undoes me more thoroughly than the violence.
We move together with the fluency of two bodies that learned each other's language years ago and never forgot the grammar. My hands find his chest for balance as I ride him, and his eyes never leave mine, not once, not even when his jaw clenches with the effort of restraint.
When we finish, it is together—synchronized, the way our breathing used to synchronize in his study, the cadence that made me feel like my heartbeat belonged to someone else.