Xiomara - 50830

41021-50830 Xiomara

The ledger in my hands blurred, the neat columns of numbers dissolving into nothing. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen lust cross the threshold of La Luna Azzurra — the restaurant was soaked in it, from candlelit dinners to kisses stolen in corners. But Luca and Marti… they carved a different kind of silence in the air.

I should have looked away. I should have buried myself in invoices and supplier costs. But the way his hand pressed against the small of her back, guiding her like he owned not just her body but the very air she breathed—God, it pinned me in place.

And Marti. That girl carried her desire like it was both a weapon and a wound. I saw the tremor in her step, the way she dared herself to keep walking toward the danger she craved. I knew that kind of hunger. The reckless surrender that tasted like freedom but cut like a knife.

I hated how my body reacted. The flicker low in my belly, the sudden heat in my chest. I had built my life on control—outmaneuvering men with power, holding my secrets so tightly even sleep couldn’t pry them loose. But lust doesn’t care about control. It slithers in through the cracks, uninvited, leaving me aching in ways I don’t let myself admit.

And knowing Luca would kneel for her — the promise already alive in his gaze — was like watching devotion incarnate. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, this worship of him. But the truth? I envied her. Envied the way she let herself be adored. My own body pulsed with the ghost of that memory — a man once tracing the hollow of my collarbone, whispering that it was his favorite part of me. I’d almost believed him. Almost.

But men like that always took more than they gave. They left you hollow, clutching at shadows. Luca wasn’t hollow. He was heat and worship and ruin wrapped in skin. And Marti, foolish or brave, was walking straight into it with open arms.

My fingers curled tighter around the ledger until the edge cut into my palm. I told myself it was only curiosity, only business — my restaurant, my staff, my cousin. But deep down, in those back alleys of my mind, I don’t dare light too brightly; I knew the truth.

I wanted it. Not him, not her. The surrender. The wonder. The shamelessness of it all.

I wanted to know what it felt like to let someone kneel before me and not feel like a transaction, not feel like a debt waiting to be called in. To be touched like a prayer instead of a bargain. To be undone, not outmaneuvered.

I closed the ledger. Numbers could wait. But the ache they had left in me—that would linger long after Luca’s door upstairs clicked shut.

Xio’s hunger is real, but Marti is living it in: Her Knees His Promise