Joy sat frozen, her mind struggling to process the scene unfolding before her.
This wasn't the Carmela she knew.
The Carmela she had come to understand over these past days was stoic, reserved, someone who kept her emotions locked away behind an impenetrable wall.
She was like Joy herself in so many ways—two women cut from the same cloth, which was probably why they had grown close so quickly.
They understood each other without words, recognized the same guardedness, the same wariness of vulnerability.
But the woman Joy was watching now?
That was someone else entirely.
Carmela had wrapped herself around Cassius like a cat seeking warmth. Her arms were locked around his neck, her body pressed intimately against his, rubbing against him as if asking for affection.
And the way she was drinking from his neck—sucking, licking, swallowing with soft, needy sounds—it was nothing like the simple exchange of blood Joy had imagined.
It was intimate.
Deeply, unmistakably intimate.
