SIENA DIDN’T START in fear when someone crawled into bed with her before the sun had even properly come up in the sky. She didn’t have to be scared when she knew who it was without even opening her eyes. His presence was like a tangible aura to her. Something that sunk deep into her senses, and made itself at home there.
She felt him.
Smelled him.
Loved him.
“Go back to sleep,” she heard John murmur.
Siena reached for him the second John was close enough to grab, but he seemed to have other plans. His arms tangled around her—like strong, steel bars keeping her close to him, protected, and hidden from the world. He dragged her closer in the bed, tucked her head under his chin, and refused to let go.
Siena could have fallen back to sleep like that. It would have been easy given how comfortable and tired she was. Instead, she dared to tip her head back on the pillow, and look up at him. Dark hazel stared back—familiar eyes that hid so much from the world, but showcased nothing more than a beautiful soul to her.
She was happy to see he looked better than the last time they were together. Less darkness in his eyes, and fewer lines of worry and anxiety on his face. His voice hadn’t held that same low, unsure quality as it had before, telling her that his mind was likely in a far better space than before.
It helped her anxiety that hadn’t left since she took off from his place to know that he was doing better. She didn’t need to know the reasons why, or what pushed him back in the other direction. Just knowing he was there was more than enough for her.
Ten days ago.
Yeah, Siena was keeping count, now. It was yet another way she had found to get through her days without John, and the time in between seeing him again. Marking off days in her mind was like a challenge of sorts—could they see each other sooner this time around than the last time?
Silly, sure.
It kept her going.
“When did you get here?” she asked.
Siena had the slightest feeling he had been there for longer than it took him to wake her up, and crawl into her bed.
“Long enough to make a coffee, and take my meds,” he said. “It’s four in the morning—go back to sleep, amore.”
“Did you pick the lock again?”
Because he hadn’t changed it like he said he would. This was the first time he had actually gotten back to her apartment since that first time after he got out of the facility. Things were always getting in the damn way.
So was their life.
“Yes,” he said, “and I came in the back way with the extra building key you gave me. Now, stop talking, and go to sleep.”
“But when I wake up, you’re going to have to go.”
“Sleep,” he said again. “I’ll be here.”
Surrounded by John, his warmth, darkness, and soft sheets, Siena really didn’t need to be told again. John’s fingers stroked a gentle path up and down her naked spine, which was enough to make her close her eyes. The sensation sent her off to dreamland in seconds.
John’s voice followed right behind. “I’ll be here.”
The next time Siena woke up, sunlight had filtered through the bedroom through the break in the curtains. Warm rays streaked lines over her naked back, and dust particles danced in the stream of light; her gaze followed the amusing sight.
“I need to dust,” she said.
The form she was resting on started to chuckle. The sound rocked them both on the bed, and made her smile even wider.
“Did you pull me onto you, or did I climb on?” Siena asked.
“A little bit of both,” John replied in a murmur.
“Huh.”
“And you do need to dust.”
Siena laughed, and tipped her head back to stare at John. He had sat higher on her bed to rest his back against the headboard. He looked entirely relaxed sitting there watching her—like this was the one place he was meant to be, and the only place he wanted to be.
Siena supposed it was.
Or she hoped it was.
And maybe, had the circumstances been different in their lives, they could have already been well into the start of their own life.
Together.
She pushed those sad thoughts away. It wasn’t the time for them, and it wouldn’t do her any good. Besides, she had John with her right now, and that was all that mattered to her. It was all she needed to make her whole day brighter.
“I’ve been busy,” she admitted, “and for the record, I didn’t even live here for months. Nobody lived here. I only got to come here once in a while if I needed to grab something specific, and I wasn’t allowed to stay. Kev and Darren didn’t want me getting any ideas about coming back to my apartment, you know.”
John’s gaze hardened momentarily—it always did that whenever she brought up how controlled her life was—but he still managed to offer her a smile. It didn’t reach his eyes, but he tried. “I guess you can be excused, then.”
“Geeze, thanks.”
His hands squeezed her ass firmly. The action made Siena laugh.
She pushed up higher on her knees, and crawled up John’s body where she stopped just a breath away from his lips. His gaze zoned in on her mouth, and his pupils dilated as he watched her lips curve into a grin. His tongue peeked out to wet the seam of his lips.
Then, the corner of his mouth quirked up in a half-assed smirk that instantly made her wet between her thighs. She found herself wondering what she might have to do to get him to put that tongue of his to work on her pussy.
Yeah, she went to that dirty place fast. All because of him, too. He didn’t have to even try. He barely did a thing!
Goddamn.
This man was terribly sexy.
More than he could possibly know.
“Are you going to kiss me good morning, or what?” John asked.
Siena’s gaze drifted to the clock on the nightstand. A time flashed back at her, and made her frown. Like she thought when he first woke her up, they wouldn’t have very much time together. Life would come along to separate them all too soon.
“As long as that’s all we do.”
John’s fingers dug into her backside even harder than before, and he grinded her lower half against his. He didn’t even try to stifle the groan of her name. “That’s unfair, and you give me more credit for my control than I actually have.”
Siena laughed, and then pressed a fast kiss to John’s lips. Her innocent gesture soon turned into something much hotter. Heated coals coaxed into a raging flame with every graze of their lips, and tease of his tongue. She loved the way he urged her to kiss him deeper with flicks of his tongue against hers, and then the way he bit her bottom lip just hard enough to take her breath away.
She found herself rolled over on the bed in a single breath, and John hovered above her. The hard lines of his body were like a canvas of art for her—unblemished and mostly unmarked. She could stare at him all day, and never be bored.
His fingers tangled with hers, and pressed them into the pillow above her head. He fit perfectly between her widened thighs, and she could feel his erection growing harder against her naked thigh with every shift of their bodies.
John dropped a kiss to her nose.
One to each eyelid.
A path across her jaw.
Dotted kisses to her cheeks.
It was so sweet, that all she could do was smile when he finally came back to her lips. For the moment, the two could pretend like a war wasn’t raging outside their small bubble. That nothing was wrong in their life.
They could be normal.
“I missed you,” he said quietly.
His words grazed her lips like his kiss had. A soft-spoken promise that only brushed along her surface, but somehow managed to reach deep into her heart, and grab tight. An assurance that would never let her go.
She couldn’t let it go.
“I missed you, too,” she said.
John grinned. “I figured I had the chance to come over, so I might as well take it.”
“Not complaining.”
“Didn’t think you would.”
All over again, she was struck by how at ease John seemed compared to the last time. “You look a lot better—headspace-wise, I mean.”
“Do I?”
“Mmhmm.”
John’s lips curved a bit at the edges. “Choosing stability means being honest when I’m having trouble. Not to everyone, mind you. It’s not about them—this is all about me, and my mental health.”
“Absolutely.”
“Leonard—the new therapist—dropped the mood stabilizer for a bit and changed it to an antidepressant until I level out again. Might take a couple weeks. Might be a month. All depends.”
But …
John had gone and done that.
Asked for something different.
Acknowledged something was offset.
Knew he needed a change.
It was huge.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said at the sight of her growing grin.
“You know it kind of is, John.”
“It’s a good thing, yes.”
“That, too.” Siena looked over at the clock again. “I’ve got a little while before Jason will be knocking on my door again.”
John’s happiness was soon gone with those words. “Mmm.”
“Kev’s funeral,” she explained.
“Ah. Shame.”
“It is. I would rather stay in bed than go and put on yet another farce for him, even if the bastard is dead.”
John stilled and quieted as his gaze traveled over Siena. She could hear his silent questions without actually needing him to ask them. She could feel the unspoken words burning between the two of them.
They hadn’t talked about what she did.
Not really.
Seemed that silence was over.
“You don’t regret it at all, do you?” John asked.
Siena didn’t flinch. “Not when it’s for you—for us.”
“He was still your—”
“Nothing. He meant nothing.”
John cleared his throat. “Jesus, woman, don’t be so cold. I don’t like you cold.”
Siena smiled, unable to stop herself. “Never cold to you, John.”
“Better not be.”
He let go of her hands, and Siena used that freedom to cup his jaw, and pull him in for another lingering, burning kiss. That flame he created was now a devastating inferno, ravaging her insides in the best way.
“Do you ever think about the future?” she asked.
John—so close she could see the flakes of gold in his hazel eyes—smiled. “I do when I feel like punishing myself. Nothing is ever really guaranteed, you know.”
She did know.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Siena told him. “I still think about it. I need to. It helps.”
“What do you think about, then?”
“Us.”
John’s smile deepened. “Be specific.”
“Everything. A wedding. I’d go for ivory, likely. In a church, maybe, but I wouldn’t be offended if it wasn’t, too. I wouldn’t want to walk alone, though.”
“No?”
“You could walk with me. Be different.”
John laughed. “I would absolutely walk with you, donna. You never have to be alone.”
“And I think about what comes after all of that, too. Life, kids—”
Siena’s words trailed off when she felt John stiffen above her. She met his gaze, but could plainly see the way he tried to hide his discomfort.
“What?” she asked.
“Kids is kind of touchy topic for me,” he said, shrugging.
John dropped to the bed beside her. He used a hand to rest his head on as he stared at her, waiting for a reply. Siena didn’t really know how to reply.
“Why?”
“It isn’t obvious?” he asked.
“No.”
John waved a hand toward his own body. “This, Siena.”
“I’m lost.”
“I didn’t wake up one day with bipolar—I didn’t catch it like a sickness, babe. I’ve had it in my genetics from the day I was born, and puberty was the switch turning it on for me. There’s no cure for it, either. You learn to manage it, and to stay at relatively stable levels that still fluctuate no matter what you do. There’s a genetic component. Something in my DNA that was there from someone else in my family. Passed on, you know?”
“John—”
“Having kids means continuing this on—or possibly. You don’t know for sure, right? My parents had four kids, and I was the one that found the barrel of the gun in the game of genetic roulette, so to speak. I’m not sure I want to do this to one of my kids. I know what it felt like to be confused for more than half my life, and to constantly feel like I was drowning.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with you.”
John gave her a look.
Siena only gave it right back.
“Siena,” he said, a little too patronizing for her liking. “I didn’t say something was wrong. There is something different, though.”
“You don’t want kids at all?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re not saying differently, either.”
John frowned, and scrubbed a hand down his jaw. Rolling to his back, he stared at the ceiling. “I never gave it a lot of thought—settled myself on the idea it just wasn’t going to be something I moved forward with.”
“See, that kind of sounds like a strong no.”
He looked over at her. The intensity of his gaze made her still in place.
Siena still managed to speak. “This is a hard line for me, John. I want children. I have always wanted children.”
He nodded. “I never did.”
Ouch.
“Until this, and you,” he added in a murmur.
Relief so sweet it was almost poisonous swept through Siena’s insides. “Oh?”
“Mmm.” John sighed, and went back to staring at the ceiling. “Like everything in my life, I can’t go into something like that without planning for it. It’s a huge change, and—”
“I get it.”
Quickly, Siena crossed the space between them, and crawled back on top of him. She straddled his waist, tangled their fingers together, and looked down at him.
“But there isn’t, by the way,” she said.
John cocked a brow. “What?”
“Something wrong with you. There isn’t.”
“It took me a long time to figure that out, though, Siena. I’m thirty-one now. I still wake up some mornings and think, why can’t my brain work like everybody else’s? I wonder why I have to struggle with emotions, and processing them, not to mention everything else that comes along with being bipolar. It took a long time to figure out nothing was wrong. It was hell.”
“But you did. That’s what matters most today.”
John didn’t deny it.
Siena felt like that was a battle won for him.
• • •
Siena’s attention drifted between her brother saying one last goodbye to the closed casket keeping Kev’s body hidden from view, and the sunlight streaming in through the colorful stained glass windows. She should have been more present, or at least, made the effort to seem like she gave some kind of damn.
She couldn’t do it.
At least, she had managed to put on a proper black dress, sweep her hair into a simple chignon, and brush her face with a bit of makeup. It wasn’t the effort she would usually put into getting ready for church or a funeral, but it was the best she could do for today. Anything more, and it might seem like she cared.
She didn’t.
Darren nodded to one of his men when the guy came closer. It seemed like her brother had more of those—men to do his bidding—than she cared to count, now. Unlike Kev who only worked with a couple of people, and kept Darren the closest, her other brother was entirely different. He kept many men at his side, and handed out orders like a tyrant who was unwilling to be questioned or challenged.
The change had happened instantly.
Practically overnight.
Siena supposed she now understood what her father had meant when he once told her that while many bosses came into the position by chance, far more bosses in this life were simply made that way. Men born to be in a position of power because they had the temperament, control, and mindset to do the job.
Her brother was not the man born to do the job, but rather, one who had come into the seat by chance, and was making the best of what he had to work with. Sometimes, it was a fascinating show to watch, and other times, it was incredibly disconcerting to Siena.
Darren was a chameleon—able to change the exterior he offered to someone depending on the situation at hand. He might not be a boss on the inside, but he was fully capable of presenting the image of a boss on the outside when he needed to.
Unlike John.
A man who Siena thought would suit a position like a boss’s seat far better than Darren. John, who commanded attention without needing to change his image to suit the needs of others in order to make his position and demands clear.
John was who John was.
Darren, on the other hand, wasn’t quite sure who he was at the moment, but rather, only knew who he needed to be.
“Get up.”
Siena glanced over at her mother’s sharp order. “What?”
Coraline waved at the aisle. “Come on, we have to follow behind the casket. Stop acting like a daydreaming, foolish girl, Siena.”
Jesus.
She pushed out of the pew to quickly follow behind the casket carrying her brother. Darren was one of the pallbearers, along with a few other men he had chosen to do the job with him. She kept her head down as she walked toward the entrance of the church, entirely uninterested in meeting the gazes of those who had come to say goodbye to Kev. The scent of the priest’s incense clung heavily all around them.
Almost over.
She would soon be able to take off her mask again.
Be free again.
Siena’s mother slid in beside her as they continued their trek behind the casket and procession. Coraline’s mask of grief was all but gone in that moment, and instead, a cold, expressionless, and unfeeling one took its place.
For a second, it took Siena by surprise.
Her mother didn’t give her the time to question it before she started talking. And when she did talk, it scared Siena to death.
“You should have been more careful with your business,” her mother murmured. “And by business, I mean Johnathan Marcello.”
Siena swallowed hard, and looked forward. She kept her gaze locked on the back of the shined, gleaming black casket with its gold-plated bars and details. “I have no idea what you’re—”
“Don’t play stupid with me,” Coraline hissed low. All the while, her mother’s face remained impassive. Her voice stayed too low for someone else to overhear, and her expression gave nothing away as to their conversation. Siena could not say her face looked the same. “I will not allow you to ruin what your brother is working so hard for simply because you cannot control your stupid little heart.”
Her mother said the word with so much disgust, that Siena flinched.
“You think this little issue with the Marcello and Calabrese families is new?” Coraline scoffed low, and shook her head subtly. “No, Siena, it is far from new. Years—decades—in the making, really. It started with your grandfather, and then was passed onto your father. He passed it onto your brothers, and finally … Jesus, finally, we have the chance to finish this. To either take a controlling portion, or ruin the Marcello family for good. Except here you are, getting in the goddamn way with that man.”
Coraline sneered, but quickly replaced it with a sad smile when she waved to someone who reached out to touch her arm as she passed. Out of the corner of her mouth, her mother said, “Darren has the Marcellos where he needs them to be—soft, and pliable. Backed into a corner, so to speak. I love you, Siena, and that is the only reason I was willing to turn my cheek about what I knew you were doing, but if you don’t stop, I won’t be able to pretend anymore.”
Siena’s throat tightened more.
Her mother nodded. “And you do know what your brother would do to Johnathan should he find out you have been entertaining the man behind his back, don’t you? I am sure you would hate for your crazy boyfriend—if you could even call him that—to die because of your stupidity.”
“Ma—”
“Shut up,” Coraline hissed.
The two walked out into the sunlight, and quieted for the moment. Siena took the second she had where her mother wasn’t talking to suck in a deep gulp of air. It felt like the breath had been ripped right out of her lungs, and her chest was crushed.
How did her mother know she was still with John?
How had she known anything?
Siena was careful—she had to be. She made sure not to leave anything lying around where someone could find it. She was back at her own place which meant she didn’t have to worry about someone listening through the walls, or just outside the door.
She didn’t take risks.
She didn’t dare.
Except …
She had.
Once, or twice.
Kev’s casket was pushed into the back of the hearse by the pallbearers. The men all slapped the back of the casket with their palm—a final goodbye.
Siena’s mother turned to her once more. “You are my daughter, Siena, and I do not want to see you become fodder to a man’s games or plans. Play this right with me, and you could have far more than you ever dreamed of. Johnathan—is he really your highest bar to reach? He is what you really want? Why? You could have much more, darling.”
She didn’t reply.
Her mother apparently wasn’t looking for one.
“The Marcellos have called a meeting with your brother. Darren expects it will either lead them into a peaceful resolution that puts the Calabrese higher, or it will dissolve into more violence that will lead them into a longer war. Either way, it will be happening soon. Should you do anything to cause your brother to call off that meeting—say, get caught with Johnathan—you will not like what I do.”
It was always men who planned.
Men who played games.
Men who manipulated.
Siena learned in that moment that men often forgot women were the flies on the wall. Women were the ones who needed to be watched because they held more information than anyone possibly knew.
Women were the dangerous ones.
Women like her mother.
“How did you know?” Siena asked.
“About you and the Marcello man?”
Siena only nodded.
Coraline turned to face Siena with a cold smile. “I was coming to visit you a while back, but you rushed out of your place like a bat out of hell. Your enforcer didn’t trail behind, so I thought I should. I saw where you went, and I saw you leave his place. I thought … maybe I should keep a closer eye on you. I am glad I did.”
Fuck.
Nothing was ever safe.
Not in their life.
“You see,” Coraline said, “your brothers are a lot like your father—or was, for Kev. They’re stupid in the way they believe that their word is law, and because they have said it, us women will automatically follow it. I know better. Do you think I stumbled upon my marriage with your father because I loved him, and wanted to marry him?”
“I don’t know why you married Daddy, no.”
“Because I was told to, but not because I wanted to. I have learned over the years to make sure the men in my life take everything I give them at face value and never feel the need to dig deeper. I loved Matteo, I did—it took years, but I loved him. And I will not see everything he worked for ruined because one of his children cannot manage to step in line with the rest.”
“I will stay in line, Ma.”
Only long enough to watch the Marcellos ruin this family.
After that, it was fair game.
“You better, but should you think to do something to force my hand,” her mother warned, “you will not like what I do. I will make my arranged marriage and carefully sheltered life look like a cake walk compared to your future after this, darling. I do not want to hurt you, but I absolutely will.”
What could she possibly say to that? Nothing.
So she didn’t.
Coraline moved down the stairs, calling over her shoulder, “Keep it in mind, Siena.”