Chapter 165
LEVI
My throat tightened, but I nodded.
She smiled faintly—so faintly I almost thought I’d imagined it—then crossed the space between us. Her small hand slid into mine, and I felt its weight like a brand, a form on its own: the softness of her palm anchoring me, undoing me, binding me. Without words, she tugged—softly, yet with a grace that carried command.
Her fingers curled around mine, small but unyielding, pulling me toward the bathroom as though I had been hers from the first moment we met, born only to follow her guidance. And I did. God help me, I did.
I followed her the way a chained hound follows its master—not with resistance, but with a dark, helpless devotion. A servant who knew no law but her pull, no mercy but the quiet promise of her touch.
Even if she led me into the abyss itself—through Limbo, through fire, through the throat of some raging volcano—I would go. Willingly. Blindly. Because it was her hand guiding me, and that was enough to make even doom feel like salvation.
We stepped into the bathroom, and it unfolded before me like a dream, which was crazy since I had stitched it all together with my own restless hands, desiring only to please.
Candlelight trembled across the tiled walls, gold flames leaping and scattering in the wide mirrors, each flicker doubling, tripling, until the whole room seemed alive with fire. I had tried—God, I had tried—to make it romantic. To make sure that when she stepped inside she would feel it, know it: that she was loved, that she could let the weight slide from her shoulders, sink into ease, and forget what had happened tonight. To give her the absolute relaxation of mind, body, and soul, to know that she had someone waiting for her, wanting nothing more than to see her soften.
It was madness, really, to think of it this way. Madness because I had never been a man of small gestures. My whole life had been built on grand designs, sweeping strokes, luxuries that came easily with a phone call—the kind of things you pay others to perfect. But for her, I had wanted to do the little things myself.
So I lit the candles one by one. I scattered the leftover petals I had stolen from an old arrangement in my office, spraying them with water to coax the fragrance back to life, chasing after subtleties like a little boy trying to earn the heart of his first crush. I had never anticipated that I would be joining her—so I found myself enjoying the fruit of my madness, too.
The air was steeped in jasmine, threaded with vanilla, warm and sweet against my throat as I breathed in.
The faint red lamps I’d placed in the corners thickened the shadows, while the tall windows—closed but uncurtained—spilled silver moonlight across the room, weaving with the chandelier’s glow in a shifting play of light.
It was always me who used this place, my little fortress, a place I’d thought of as luxurious, functional, yet cold. But with her standing beside me, her fingers woven into mine, it felt different. Softer. Almost ethereal. As if the room had only ever been waiting for her to arrive and bring it to life.
A laugh almost broke from me—harsh, disbelieving. If someone had told me months ago that I would love this woman, that she would strip my grey world into something blazing white, rainbow even, I’d have called them a liar and driven them off with a sneer. Yet here I was, and she was real, and every breath of her turned my cynicism to dust.
My gaze slid toward the long mirror by the jacuzzi. I’d thought about it before—taking a woman there, pressing her against the cool glass, claiming her while watching every desperate flicker in her eyes. But I had never done it. Because none of them had ever been mine. Not really. Not wholly.
Isabella was.
She was.
The certainty coiled in my chest, hot and dangerous. She wasn’t someone I was borrowing, or cheating with, or keeping warm for a night; she wasn’t someone I feared would cheat on me or someone I did not trust. She was mine, entirely—even if we fought most of the time, even if I seemed not to know anything about her. My soul just believed she would not let any man but me touch her. I could feel it in the way her hand pulled me deeper into the room, in the quiet command of her movements. She was leading me, and I wanted it that way.
I wanted to fuck her in front of that mirror. I wanted to bend her against the vanity we had just passed, watch her lips part as the candles threw her beauty back at us in a thousand fragments. But more than that, I wanted to obey the pull of her, let her lead, and give her everything she asked for.
Because tonight, Isabella wasn’t just in my arms. Tonight, she was my whole damn reason.
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