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Claudia stopped caring about right and wrong sooner than Ezio did.
It’s the sleepless nights waiting for him to return that damn them. It’s Claudia trying to fill her head with anything but the thought of her brother out there, dead and alive at the same time as long as he was out of her sight. It’s that Uncle Mario is a good man but he can’t be their father, and Mother has become another responsibility Claudia must take care of, and who else is there? Even before the tragedy, friendship was something Claudia had understood—even if their parents had never explicitly told any of them—was to be kept shallow and easy to break. A family of secrets couldn’t permit outsiders among them. It had saved no one in the end, and Claudia was still lonely.
The only person Claudia has left in the world is her brother, and he won’t stay put.
She opens her eyes to the dim light of her bedroom in the morning. She sleeps lightly now, always. She had been resting when the brutes had broken into the palazzo and destroyed her life, and she remembers too well the disorienting scramble to hide, the way she’d waited to wake up from what she was sure was a nightmare. Claudia won’t be caught off-guard again.
She only needs one breath to read her surroundings. The noise that had woken her. The weight dipping her bed behind her. The body leaning over hers. Claudia twists and lashes out.
He catches her wrists and pins them to the bed, light enough for Claudia to break free but firm enough that she’s figured out who is in her room by the time she does.
"Ezio," she breathes.
"Sorellina," he says. Sometimes, she wonders if he insists on reminding himself that as a punishment.
She will never know if Ezio wants her for the sake of wanting or because he knows he could lose her. It shouldn’t matter; the end is the same. She still wishes she could ask him.
"You stink like a horse," she says, even as she tries to pull him down closer. It’s unpleasant, and Claudia takes a deep inhale of it anyway. She’s the first living thing Ezio has come to since he got off his steed.
"Well, you-" Ezio presses a kiss to her forehead. It isn’t what she wants his mouth to be doing, but she can be patient. Desire is Ezio’s weakness. She has a woman’s advantages now.
(She hadn’t needed them the first time. It hasn’t been that long, but that Claudia feels like a dream, young and terrified. Ezio had seemed so much older, so invincible in his defiance of what had taken everyone else away from her.
They’re both adults now, and Claudia knows that Ezio was never either those things. He was good at fooling them both into thinking he was. He still is at believing it himself.
She misses how safe she felt the first time she was in his arms.)
Ezio breathes in. "You smell like blood," he whispers. Claudia’s thighs part a little further.
"It began yesterday." Ezio has his rules. A man who fucks his own sister has to draw the line somewhere. He says he doesn’t want to burden her with a child.
If that was the only reason, he wouldn’t indulge at all, Claudia thinks.
The rags between her legs are heavily stained. The scent of blood filling the air makes Ezio’s cock stir against her side. Is that the assassin, or is that her brother? He slips his fingers down past her sensitive pearl and dips them into her body. Just one at first. It’s been months, and she doesn’t touch herself like he fucks her. She hums her pleasure, whether that’s a testament to Ezio’s skill or the easy slickness of her blood.
She tugs on his hair. Ezio lets himself be coaxed down into a real kiss. His mouth is hot, and she shifts like she always does after the first press of their lips to let hers trace his scar. Her tongue darts out. His stubble rasps against it.
She hates him for leaving. She loves him for coming back alive. She wants more than his fingers before she loses her mind.
Ezio hits the mattress with a thump when she flips him over. He’s stunned for a moment. Does he think she spends all day sitting at her desk? Someone will have to continue what he started if he falls too soon.
Claudia hasn’t killed anyone except in her dreams, where she’s not a little girl hiding with her eyes covered but a woman strong enough to take a blade and plunge it down again, again, again, until she wakes up shaking with rage. She caresses the side of Ezio’s face. She could kill for his sake. She could carve a wound in the world in his name and call it justice.
Ezio isn’t touching her. She knows the solution for that. She lifts her shift over her head and throws it aside. Immediately, his hands are on her chest, and he only remembers a moment too late that one is covered in her blood. Hot rivulets of it are running down her thighs to stain his breeches, but Ezio still acts like his handprint wrapped around her breast is the greater crime. She can’t stand it. She grabs his hand and squeezes it around her breast until it hurts. After that, he stops hesitating.
He pushes himself up to lick the blood away himself while it’s still wet. Still making a mess as he gropes her breast, he follows his touch with his tongue. Claudia rocks her hips in his lap each time he forgets himself and sucks in earnest to leave stinging little bruises across her chest.
Claudia doesn’t let him out from under her to get his breeches all the way off. She can get to his cock without that much effort, and that’s the reunion she wants.
She was bleeding when Ezio took her maidenhood. Maybe that was the real reason: so he wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s his whether he wants it or not. Claudia has no great desire for a husband, not anymore. Ezio is the only man she wants in her life, and if he’ll fulfill all the duties one should, why would she marry someone else? For a home? But they already run Monteriggioni as a husband and wife would. For love? They’d have to match Ezio in that as well, and everyone else in the world would fall short.
She sinks him into her blood-rich heat, and Ezio’s fingers dig into her flesh. He groans, mouth open on her tit in an attempt to muffle himself.
She wonders what would happen if they got caught.
Mother would die, if she knew. Claudia feels cold and resentful, and then sick with guilt, and then she sets to riding Ezio’s cock so that she doesn’t have to feel anything at all.
It aches. She wasn’t prepared enough. She relishes it with every minute stab of pain his cock sends through her. "Harder," she breathes. "Ezio-"
"I’ll hurt you," he says, like he isn’t already.
"Harder," she demands. He doesn’t argue a second time. He grabs her hips to bring her rhythm under his control, and when he starts to meet her with his thrusts, it does hurt. The angle pushes him too deep. Claudia bites her lip not to yelp. If she does, he’ll stop, and she needs this. She isn’t like lovers or his courtesans. She isn’t something he might break if he doesn’t keep himself in check. Claudia’s eyes roll to the ceiling as he pounds into her.
If it had been Federico who lived, would he be in her bed? She can’t even imagine him older.
Maybe they did die in Firenze, she and Ezio and Mother all. The little girl crying over her broken heart might have had her neck snapped in the end. The boy Ezio was would never have looked at her the way he does now.
"Ezio," she begs, until his name is the only one she can remember how to say, "Ezio, Ezio, more."
Ezio chuckles and pants, "There is no more, sorellina. I can’t grow a larger cock to please you." She huffs. She has to do everything around here. She rubs herself as their bodies meet. She can feel Ezio inside her, shoving at her walls, graceless when she’s asked for power instead of skill. He has the stamina to give it to her.
Claudia smells her own blood like a fog surrounding them. Every thrust pushes a little more out of her to coat Ezio’s cock. Her bedsheets will be ruined. They can be replaced.
Her first orgasm shivers through her pleasantly. Her second is the one she yearns for, the one she earns by rubbing herself past her body pleading for a short break to recover and by withstanding Ezio’s attempts to impale her. She aches so deeply that it makes spots dance in her vision. She collapses forward. Ezio catches her. He paints a trail of her blood down the side of her cheek. This time, he doesn’t stop touching her.
He does try to slow for her sake. "Keep going," Claudia orders, and he obeys. It hurts in ecstasy.
Ezio is going to leave bruises on her hips. He’s holding on so tightly that she can feel the strength in his hands down to her bones. Good. She wants him to dress her in purples and blues to survive tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. She wants to be sore in secret places only he will ever touch. She wants part of Ezio to live under her skin so that she isn’t alone when he leaves her again.
He’s close. Claudia leans down to brush her lips on his.
"Fuck me, Ezio," she says. "I want my brother’s come to drip out of me." Ezio’s rhythm falters.
He arches his back. She shudders against the ache. She can’t feel his seed within her, but his dick throbs hard. Ezio’s face twists in a ridiculous fashion as he fills her. Short little jabs mark the end of his stamina, each one twinging in her belly.
She takes more kisses from him while he’s too exhausted to do anything about it but pant against her mouth.
There’s been a murder between their legs. Ezio’s cock glimmers with dark red fluid as it slides out of her. Claudia reaches down to stroke his softening cock. Her hand comes back crimson-wet. She thinks to wipe it on the sheets, but Ezio wraps his bloody hand around her wrist. He pulls it near.
He laps at her palm for a taste of the mixture: her come and his, unable to be separated from her blood. He takes it into his mouth in long strokes, from wrist to fingertip, and Claudia reaches down to touch herself again as she watches. Her clit protests, but sparks of pleasure come like those between blades caught on each other. Ezio swallows. Her blood clings to his lips. He’d only be more of a mess if he went for the source.
She takes a taste of it from his lips like she does the stories of his vengeance. She has to be satisfied with this.
"Stay with me." He won’t.
"I need to clean myself up before the rest of the house is awake," Ezio excuses himself, but he lingers in her bed, playing with her hair with his one clean hand. "Did you miss me?"
Claudia snorts. "You have to ask?"
Ezio frowns up at her. She forgets, amid all else, the most important fact about her brother: he is an idiot.
"Sì, come sempre," she reassures him and restores his smile. "Do you?"
"I know you are safe here." He doesn’t answer her question. No matter, Claudia’s the cleverer of the two. She’ll devise the truth from the ache in her core and the way he trusts her with the accounts and the whispers he brings her of another dead conspirator.
All of that can only mean he does. It has to. An uncomfortable disquiet roots inside her.
She’s jealous of the clean answer he’d pulled from her. She should have held her tongue. It wouldn’t make it untrue, but he might return more often if he thought she cared less.
She lets Ezio tip the scales until she’s on her back again. He covers her body with his. In the journey up his body, her fingers find the gnarl of a fresh scar. She can’t pull her hand from it. Death dances too closely with her brother, but maybe all the sacrifices he makes in his place appease it, or God, or whatever it is that brings him home safe.
The deaths please her, so it might be under her own power that Ezio returns. She wishes it were so.
Ezio kisses her forehead. She wonders if his lips are clean enough not to smudge her. "Ti voglio bene," he murmurs.
"Ti amo," Claudia responds. Ezio hovers above her.
"Sì," he agrees, "ti amo." With that, Claudia will be satisfied.