“Maybe we should get you to bed. See if you can sleep it off.”
“I don’t think I could fall asleep,” she said, sounding close to crying again.
“I can think of one other kind of pain relief,” I offered, letting my hand drift low down her belly.
Her body reacted before she could even answer, her legs falling open for me.
I let my hand slide between, teasing up and down her center until her breath was coming in shorter, faster gasps. Only then did my finger drift up, teasing around her clit. Slow, almost lazy, not wanting her to jostle her body too much.
It was a gentle climb.
Then she came with a sweet little moan that made me have to focus to keep my own desire from building.
“How’s your head?” I asked afterward.
“Huh?” she asked, sleepy.
There was a smile on my lips as I climbed out, quickly dried off, then pulled her out and dried her off as well. I helped her into one of my tees, then took her to the bed.
I’d just managed to get myself dressed when Leo came into the apartment, a confused Goya looking around. He bounded to me when he caught sight of me. I unclipped his leash after a quick pet. Then he followed his nose down the hallway toward Claire.
“Hi, baby,” she cooed, still sleepy, as—I imagined—the dog leapt up on the bed.
“How is she?”
“Exhausted. Hoping she’ll knock out, so the headache has a chance to go away.”
Leo nodded, following me over to the coffee pot.
“Zeno’s fingers are gonna catch fire with how fast he is typing and scrolling,” Leo told me. “And everyone else is getting in touch with their crews, so we can increase the eyes on the street. They’re gonna surface eventually. Meantime, Lorenzo and Emilio have burned the documents now that they’ve read through it all to see if there was anything in it that the Family needed to know about.”
That checked out.
The documents had been ridiculously thorough. If anyone had been caught talking to the wrong crews or, God forbid, the cops, it would have been in those files.
“So that means the only copy we are aware of is on the laptop in Zeno’s apartment,” I said.
“Don’t worry. Cosimo and his crew are going to be protecting him until we can get everything we need off that thing before destroying it.”
Good.
One less thing to worry about.
“What a clusterfuck,” I said, passing him a cup of coffee. It was going to be a long night for all of us.
“The bright side is, we all can see how we need to improve now. I gotta stop going to the gym at the exact same fucking time every day,” he said.
That was true.
It was a horrible situation, all around, but it did show us the weak spots in our organization that others could use against us.
“Brio’s probably loving this.”
“What? Torturing Danny?”
“Well, we know he always loves that,” Leo said. “But no. I meant that with this, everyone who doesn’t already have one hasbeen asking him about getting them a dog for home protection. And for things like going to the parks with the kids.”
I wondered if things would have been different if Blair had Goya with her. He’d been a good watchdog. But even the best watchdogs didn’t always engage in an attack when someone broke in.
