She didn't lower her gaze. On the contrary, she slowly raised her hand, bringing her fingers directly to his neck. Right over the carotid.
She didn't press. She just brushed the pulsating skin.
Like a doctor checking vital signs. Or a lover evaluating where to sink her teeth.
"An unalterable rhythm..." Elena murmured, feeling Vittorio's pulse hammering under her fingertips. "And yet, I feel an acceleration. Imperceptible. Perhaps your body is more honest than your philosophy."
She moved closer still, erasing any distance. The heat of their bodies mixed, creating a suffocating magnetic field.
Her eyes remained untouchable ice.
She tilted her head, brushing the corner of his jaw with her lips. An electric contact.
"Sometimes the contract is rescinded before signing," she whispered against his skin. "Just to avoid surrendering to the party who believes they are entitled to it."
Pause. She pressed lightly on the carotid.
"Are you willing to risk the deal falling through... while you bask in your patience?"
Vittorio closed his eyes for a split second.
"Honesty, Elena," he murmured, his voice broken, deep, "is a complex structure. Not a solitary pillar."
His fingers slid onto her waist, tightening.
"My body responds to your art. Not to a weakness. It is an architecture that you yourself are designing. Line after line."
His free hand settled over hers, interlacing their fingers. A ring of flesh sealing them.
"And the contract," he continued, his burgundy eyes shining with a dark light, "the one you fear might fall through... has been binding since the first glance."
He leaned down, his lips brushing her ear.
"My patience is not passive waiting. It is strategy. The true art is not taking by force, but orchestrating the inevitable moment of complete cession."
Pause. Lower voice.
"When every resistance dissolves. And in that moment, Elena, there will be no will left to deny possession... because the object will belong, by nature, to the owner."
She didn't back away.
Instead, she slipped out of his grasp with a fluid, liquid movement. Forcing him to remember the failure of the night before.
She broke free not to flee. To reaffirm her autonomy.
Her hand, the one on his neck, rose slowly. It traced the line of his jaw until it stopped on Vittorio's lower lip.
She pressed just barely with her thumb.
As if to seal his mouth. Or open it.
"You are so used to being the judge," she whispered, her eyes nailed into his with icy ferocity, "that you don't realize when you have become the defendant of your own hunger."
That was where the crystal broke.
It wasn't her challenging him with innuendos anymore. It wasn't him responding with that increasingly heavy mask anymore.
She was accusing him openly.
And he was taking it.
Elena brought her body close to his until every curve matched. A suffocating proximity that left no room for air.
"You talk about cession as if you were the one dictating the timing," she said, voice raspy. "But look at yourself. You are here, with bated breath, waiting for me to make a move."
She ran her hand down his chest, stopping over his heart. She felt its powerful beat. Her nails imperceptibly scratched the fabric.
"Who owns who, Lawyer?"
Cruel smile.
"You think you are acquiring me. But the truth is you are chained to my whim. Your dominion is an illusion. You are just a man dying of thirst in front of a lock he doesn't know how to open."
Pause. Voice lower.
"And what if I decided you will never enter?"
"Ah, Elena."
Vittorio interrupted her. His voice was black velvet. His burgundy eyes fixed on hers, a dangerous glint.
"Isn't the most exquisite prey the one who, in the illusion of her power, convinces herself she is the hunter?"
His hand grabbed her waist, pulling her even closer. Annihilating any distance.
She felt the heat of his body. An unequivocal physical response.
"You see the judge," he murmured against her neck. "But you forget the law. Gravity. The natural order."
Pause. Closer.
"Your beauty is not an isolated caprice, Elena. It is part of a larger design."
She hated him for that sentence. So definitive. So inevitable.
But she couldn't yield command.
Breathe.
"This thirst," he said, his lips brushing her temple, "is not a weakness, but a selection. A hunger so refined that it doesn't settle for just any source, but seeks the absolute. And my patience," he added, holding her tight against him, "is not a sentence. It is the guarantee that that possession, in the end, will be indisputable."
Elena's thumb was still pressing on his lip, an exquisite provocation that burned him. Vittorio leaned forward.
"Silence," he whispered, his voice a muffled thunder, "is a language for the few, Elena. And its sentence... is the most definitive of all."
His lips landed on hers.
It wasn't a sweet kiss. It was a slow, deep kiss that left no room for theories or words. A kiss that was an answer, a promise, a possession. His hand on the back of her neck tightened, pulling her even closer, while the other caressed her bare back exposed by the sweater.
Elena's brain shut down.
The only thing she heard was the sharp, continuous noise hospital machines make when the heart stops beating.
Click. Darkness.
Click. Fire.
She didn't melt into that embrace. On the contrary, her body responded with the vibrating tension of a violin string plucked with force.
She welcomed his mouth with lucid ferocity. Her lips parted not to suffer the invasion, but to trap it.
Elena's fingers, which had caressed the back of his neck, suddenly tightened in Vittorio's hair. A firm, almost violent grip, forcing him to maintain that contact, preventing him from dictating the rhythm.
She responded to the kiss with exasperating slowness, savoring the taste of him: wine, spices, and that dark, metallic promise of danger.
She was memorizing every nuance for a subsequent autopsy.
Then, just when the intensity seemed to reach the breaking point, she was the one to break the contact.
Click. Light.
She pulled back a few millimeters, letting their lips remain moist and touching, in that tortuous limbo where the kiss is over but the breath is still shared. Her eyes, now dark, devoid of the cerulean reflection that filled them with life, stared at him from that nonexistent distance. Her thumb resumed lazily tracing the outline of his mouth.
"Mmm..." she murmured against his lips, a low sound that vibrated in her throat. "A complex flavor, Lawyer. Notes of dominance... with a surprisingly sweet aftertaste of desperation."
She slid her hand from his hair down to the knot of his tie. She tightened it just barely. A silk leash.
"You broke the silence, Vittorio," she whispered, nipping his lower lip just barely, provocative, before pulling back a little more to look at him better. "Now that you've tasted... Are you sure you can stop? Or should I fear that your famous discipline has just crumbled in my hands?"
"Desperation," Vittorio replied, his voice raspy, as he felt her fingers tighten the knot at his throat. He knew that interrupted kiss hadn't been the end, but the beginning. "Is a rare incentive. And like any intense force, it must be managed with cognition. But your... your sweetness is a delicious surprise, not a weakness."
His burgundy eyes burned with a fire that hid nothing anymore, mirroring the liquid darkness of hers. There was no haste in his grip on her hips, only patient determination. A predatory quiet.
"Discipline, Elena," he continued, his lips brushing hers again as he spoke, "is not the absence of hunger. It is the art of satiating it with maximum efficiency. And my ambition... my ambition never settles for a single victory."