Chapter 85: My Husband Offered Me a Massage. I Should Have Known Better (18+)

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The next week and a half blurred together in a haze of sore muscles, bruised pride, and the kind of stubborn determination that probably should have worried me more than it did.

At first everything hurt and getting out of bed felt like a personal attack.

Walking down the stairs made me question every life choice that had led me to challenging a mafia don to a fight, and even sitting down came with a quiet, betrayed groan that I tried very hard to keep behind closed doors.

Nikolai, of course, had no sympathy whatsoever.

The little shit...

He would simply stand on the mat with his arms crossed and that same unimpressed expression, waiting for me to stop complaining and get into stance already.

I showed up every single day anyway, partly because I had a contract hanging over my head and partly because the idea of backing down now made me want to crawl out of my own skin and fucking die.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth day, something shifted.

I stopped trying to meet force with force and started listening when Nikolai told me to use my flexibility instead of my nonexistent upper body strength.

Suddenly the same movements that had felt clumsy and useless began to make sense.

I learned how to redirect instead of block head-on, how to slip under an arm instead of trying to shove it away, how to turn my hips and use an opponent’s momentum against them.

It wasn’t pretty, and it certainly wasn’t graceful, but it worked often enough that Nikolai’s corrections became a little less frequent and a little more precise.

Once, after I managed to make him actually adjust his footing, he gave me a short nod and said,

"Better." Coming from him, it felt like a standing ovation.

By the end of the second week I was still getting knocked down, still sweating through my shirts, and still muttering insults under my breath every time I hit the mat, but I was faster.

Harder to catch, fhe training had become the only part of the day where my brain shut up long enough for the rest of the noise... to fade into the background.

I would leave the gym aching and exhausted and strangely lighter than when I walked in.

I didn’t know much about what Lorenzo was doing during those same days, only that he was busier than usual and that the already heavy security around the estate seemed to tighten even further.

Once I caught the tail end of a conversation about a body being handled and something about fox masks, but the moment he noticed me in the hallway the discussion ended and he gave me one of those unreadable looks that dared me to ask.

I didn’t...some things I was better off not knowing yet.

But deep down I knew, that man who tried to end me had died.

Which brought me to tonight.

I had barely made it back to our room after the latest session before the full weight of the day’s work settled into my muscles.

Everything felt tight and overused, the kind of deep ache that promised I would regret existing tomorrow morning.

I was in the middle of trying to peel my damp shirt off without whimpering when the door opened and Lorenzo walked in, still in his dark shirt and trousers, looking unfairly put together for someone who had apparently been dealing with whatever fresh hell the family business had thrown at him.

He took one look at me... sweaty, angry at the damn world, mid-struggle with my own clothing and his eyebrows lifted slightly.

"Rough session?" he asked, already closing the door behind him.

"I am in the best shape of my life," I muttered, finally yanking the shirt over my head and tossing it aside. "Can’t you tell?"

His gaze moved over me in that slow, assessing way of his, lingering on the way I was favoring one side.

Without any further comment he walked over to the dresser, pulled out a small bottle of something that looked suspiciously like massage oil, and turned back to me as if the matter had already been decided.

"Lie down."

I stared at him. "Excuse me?"

"You’re moving like an old man," he said calmly, already rolling up his sleeves. "Lie down, I’ll take care of it."

"I...I don’t fucking need you to—"

"Alex." He said my name the way he always did when he had already made up his mind and was simply waiting for me to accept reality. "You’re sore and I can help. Stop arguing and get on the bed."

I wanted to keep protesting on principle. I really did.

But the dull throb in my shoulders and the way my lower back was already staging a full rebellion made the offer sound dangerously close to heaven.

With a long, put-upon sigh that I hoped adequately communicated how much I was suffering for this, I muttered something unflattering under my breath and moved toward the bed.

I came back from training feeling like someone had taken a hammer to every joint and then asked me nicely to keep moving.

My shoulders throbbed, my lower back felt like it had twisted the wrong way and gotten stuck, and my thighs burned with that deep soreness that made even sitting down feel like an exercise in careful negotiation.

Lorenzo was already in the room when I limped in.

He took one look at me, noticing how I was favoring my right side and trying to hide it, and that decision settled on his face, like it had been waiting there all along.

"Lie down," he said, sounding calm as ever. "On your stomach."

I opened my mouth to argue and I mean, pride is a stubborn little thing and hates admitting that maybe I needed help—but the promise of actual relief was too tempting to resist.

I grumbled while stripping down, heat creeping up my neck under the weight of his gaze.

The mattress sank slightly as I climbed on, and I buried my face in the pillow for a moment, breathing through the residual embarrassment of being so sore and so vulnerable at the same time.

Then I felt the bed shift again as he joined me.

The first touch of oil was cool on the tight knots in my shoulders.

He poured it slowly, letting it pool and trickle down my spine before his hands followed, big and warm and intentional.

He worked the oil in with long, firm strokes, thumbs digging into the tense muscles along my upper back until I let out a reluctant sigh, something in me loosening.

I hated how good it felt. I hated how my body started to melt under his touch, how every careful circle of his hands drew another small sound out of me that I couldn’t hold back.

"You’re tight here," he murmured, his voice low and almost gentle as his thumbs found a particularly nasty knot just under my left shoulder blade. "Stop tensing."

"I’m not tensing," I muttered into the pillow, which was a total lie.

Every time his hands moved, I had to fight the urge to flinch, arch, or do something equally humiliating.

Why do his hands even feel like that?

The oil made every glide of his palms sound louder, slicker, the soft sound of skin on skin filling the quiet room in a way that felt way too intimate.

He ignored my protest and kept going, working lower, kneading the muscles along my spine with a pressure that was patient and thorough, making it impossible to stay mad.

"That’s... enough...y–you can stop," I tried, my voice muffled and not as convincing as I wanted. "I said I’m fine."

He didn’t even slow down. Heat radiated under his hands. My breathing turned uneven.

I tried to concentrate on the bruises from training, the dull aches still in my thighs and hips, anything but the slow, spreading warmth that had nothing to do with sore muscles and everything to do with the fact that Lorenzo was touching me, and he wasn’t exactly being clinical about it.

"Don’t— just don’t press there, perv!"

Next, he moved to my lower back, pressing deep into the spots that had been complaining all week, and I let out a sound I immediately regretted.

It was soft and broken, way too close to a moan. My fingers dug into the sheets.

I could almost feel him smiling, even without seeing his face, that quiet, knowing grin that always meant trouble.

"Breathe," he said. "I’m not going to break you... not just from a massage."

I wanted to tell him to shut up. I wanted to explain that the problem wasn’t the massage, but how my body was reacting like it had been waiting for exactly this.

The oil was everywhere now, warm and fragrant, making every slide of his hands smoother and more dangerous.

He worked down the backs of my thighs with that same relaxed precision, thumbs pressing into the tight muscle bands, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to hold back another sound.

My cock was already half-hard against the sheets.

Oh...crap!

Not now, come on!