Page 129 of Falling for Mr. Ruthless

Tomorrow will bring plans and calls and arrangements made with characteristic efficiency. But tonight requires no strategy. No performance. No armor against vulnerability.

Just two people who've survived fire and emerged not just intact, but forged into something stronger. Something unbreakable.

I close my eyes, surrender to approaching sleep with the certainty of a woman who's finally stopped fighting what was always inevitable. In less than a week, I'll reclaim the name I never truly surrendered—Chanel Giannetti.

His.

As he is mine.

And God help anyone who tries to come between us again.

EPILOGUE: BEYOND WORDS

JAKOB

It’s midnight, and I can't sleep.

Not because of deals, deadlines or the weight of empires. Not because of threats, weaknesses or the ghosts that once haunted every decision.

I can't sleep because my wife is gone.

Her side of our bed remains untouched—the hollow where her body belongs empty and cold. The absence aches beneath my ribs, a hunger deeper than bone. I've grown addicted to her warmth, her weight, the sound of her breathing in darkness.

I check my watch.

Three hours since her message:Landing soon. Don't wait up.

But waiting is exactly what I'm doing, stretched across sheets that smell faintly of her perfume, pretending I'm not counting heartbeats until her key turns in the lock.

Four days apart shouldn't matter after everything we've survived.

Yet it burns.

The bedroom door opens with a soft click.

"You're supposed to be asleep," Chanel says—silhouette carved against hallway light.

"I don't sleep well without you."

Naked truth. No armor. No walls. Just the raw admission of what she does to me, even after all this time.

She drops her bag. Kicks off her heels. "That makes two of us."

The bed dips as she crawls across it, still in her travel clothes, hair pulled back in that severe knot that makes me ache to unravel it. She straddles me without hesitation, palms flat against my chest, eyes holding mine in the darkness.

"Did you conquer Tokyo?"

"Thoroughly." Her fingers work my shirt buttons open with an urgency that betrays her control. "They never saw me coming."

My hands find her waist, digging into the curves I've memorized like salvation. "You're devastating."

"You taught me well."

Her smile carries nothing of pretense—just the primal satisfaction of a woman who knows her power and wields it without apology. A queen returning to claim what's hers.

I pull the pin from her hair, watch it tumble around her shoulders. The transformation tears something open inside me—warrior to goddess in seconds flat.

"I missed you," I tell her, voice scraped raw with a need I once feared would destroy me. Would leave me bleeding. Would expose the hunger I'd spent years burying beneath silence and distance.