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jarofstyles · 4 months

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Saccharine- Verboten 9

It's been a little bit! Here is part 9, please message us what you think!

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Verboten Masterlist

WC- 2.4k

Warnings- age gap, smut, richrry, best friend's dad, etc

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“Sweet Angel.”

His voice never got old. Fingers pried her thighs open, a soft whimper leaving her mouth as she felt his tongue swipe up her messy folds, sensitivity making her jerks before his hands gripped her hips to keep her still. “Uh-uh. None of that. Aren’t you going to let me clean up my mess?” The croon of his sexed out voice made her shiver, splaying her thighs open as she gripped the sheets that had come off the bed slightly. It didn’t matter anyways, they desperately needed a change.

Once she had opened herself back up, she was met with what she was assumed were praises falling from the older man’s mouth. “Bene, così bene per me. Ho incasinato la mia bellissima ragazza. Lascia che ti pulisca.” His hot tongue followed suit, her eyes rolling back as she resisted the urge to clench her thighs together.

This was one of Harry’s favorite parts. Getting to see the mess he made of his girl. 5 days into the trip and he had been a menace. He knew that. His attempts to take it easy had been in vain, as neither of them could keep their hands off of each other, but there had at least been an attempt on his end. It was just difficult when their feelings were finally out in the open and Y/N had let down the final wall he had been trying to tip over with his gentle pushing. She knew how much he liked her, and he was relishing in her unfiltered behavior.

Her shuddery inhale was the sweetest melody, tongue tenderly swiping up again to make sure she was clean of the remnants of their lazy morning sex. A new tradition that Harry hoped would extend back at home. His girl was soft and pliant for him in the dewy mornings. He’d woken up as the golden sun had leaked into their bedroom, the sheer white curtains that slightly hid the view of the city ocean and rock below them being lit a warm orange. A sunrise with the warm Italian breeze drifting through the cracked balcony door hitting his skin as he felt her soft breathing on his chest.

Y/N had not only spread her wings for him, but let him into her cocoon. A warm, snug area where she could be as giggly and as soft as she wanted. Limbs tangled like yarn a kitten has played with, a pure side to her that many didn’t get to even theorize about. He got to hear her little comments under her breath as they people watched out in public, let her babble about her dreams once she woke, took diligent mental notes about things she had never mentioned before- such as always wishing to go trail riding one day, her love of the particular moss colored green tile in the kitchen that she had fawned over for a bit too long, the skincare routine he had watched a million times before but looking at the brands so he knew what else to indulge in for holidays.

Harry was a man in love, love so deep that it sort of startled him when he thought about it. While the actual sentiment hadn’t been actively exchanged, he knew it was mutual. It wasn’t any sort of arrogance, but the way in which her feather soft touches caressed his face and arms. How gentle she was with him, her worries of his thoughts and feels. How she kissed him. Languid and syrupy, her soft mewls against his mouth and desire to be as close as possible even when he was buried to the hilt.

This trip was spoiling him and he was going to take every single moment and marinated in it. When they got back home, they’d have some bumps to go through.

“H-Harry…” Her sleepy voice moaned, a glance up showing her smile. “This isn’t just cleaning me up.”

Correct. The older man had been greedy for her pleasure since the first day they’d connected in an intimate way. Y/N’s orgasms, her affection, the taste of her, they were all his willing addictions. A greedy, greedy man he was, constantly taking if she allowed it. She always did.

“M’Sorry, my love.” He pulled back, pressing a kiss to her swollen clit. “Did a number on you last night… Know you must be sensitive, but you don’t understand how incredible you taste to me.” his fingers kept her spread while his other arm was hooked over her stomach, her hand holding on to his forearm to ground herself.

Y/N’s eyes glazed over as she remembered how he had taken her the night before. Murmuring things that she didn’t know the exact meaning of in Italian, lighting up her insides as he had taken her under the stars on the loungers on the patio. Lips against her ear as her hands had dragged down his back, the wet sound of their sex and distant music from a party 2 houses over filling the night. He had filled her up and fucked his seed back inside of her, whispering about how that was the only place he wanted his cum for the entire trip and how much he adored her.

“How do I taste to you?” The breathless question was asked despite her own knowledge of what would happen next. Harry was a man, a man dedicated to her pleasure and easy to trigger when it came to sex. Y/N had been bent over the kitchen counter with her dress bunched over her waist just from purring his nickname into his ear.

His tongue paused at the top, nose brushing her mound as he chuckled against her puffy cunt. What a question. She knew how she tasted, Harry’s tongue soaked in her having been dipped into her mouth plenty of times- but she wanted to know how it tasted to him. How did he describe the most addicting thing he had ever placed his tongue on?

“Honey.” He drawled, fingers spreading her open again as he took a look at her. “Sweet, sweet honey. My own brand of addiction. Syrupy and sweet, so sticky. Look how it sticks to my fingers, my love.” He pulled his fingers off momentarily and spread them apart, letting her see the strings of arousal webbed together. It was messy, sloppy, and the both of them seemed to have a like for that sort of debauchery. “The taste of you is my favorite. Do you ever wonder why I can’t drag myself away from between your thighs?” He questioned, pulling his fingers into his mouth with a moan that made her sensitive hole clench around nothing.

This man, the one who she had to taunt into being rough and dirty with her, had overtaken her in boldness and experimentation. He’d opened up and uncovered the man she had a feeling laid underneath the pristine shirts and kind eyes. The filth had been underlying and Y/N had caught on early on. Birds of a feather and all that.

“I can’t pull myself away. M’obsessed with how you taste, how you feel… You. You’ve overtaken my mind, my beautiful girl. La mia bella ragazza. Non riesco a toglierti dalla mente. Sono ossessionato.” His last words were muffled as he pulled her clit back into his mouth, Y/N’s eyes rolling back and fingers finding his hair yet again.

—-------

Y/N had been imagining what it would be like to be official with Harry. It had been something that haunted her brain since the day at the pool house. One taste of him and her single burst of confidence had melded into a whole relationship that was beyond her wildest dreams, but this had especially taken her off guard.

Harry had been attentive before they solidified any issues, but to her surprise it had only gotten better. Now it was clear that a barrier, despite it being clear, was hard acrylic. Giving her a glimpse into the nest of comfort and saccharine he could provide. With the barriers shattered on both ends, Y/N had a feeling she was going to develop cavities.

Some of her shock had been chalked up to a poor dating poor pre-Harry. She hadn’t experienced fresh flowers delivered daily, candlelit dinners on the balcony overlooking the italian coast that he cooked himself, gelato tinged kisses, body worship, least of all clear communication. Dating in college had been grim to say the least and that had been a bit of a hint that her hunches growing up would be correct. Despite the knowledge that older men were still just men, after all, she knew she craved a different sort of goal. Maturity. She wanted to be spoiled with affection.

Now that she was getting that, though, she didn’t realize how good it could be.

At first it had made her slightly uncomfortable. The lack of barriers had also introduced a clearer picture of his intentions. Harry wanted to keep her, he’d said so himself, and this relationship was supposed to be for building up their connection. Having his intense stare on her at all times, every single drop of his attention when she spoke, it had made her realize just how half assed her past attempts of dating had really been. He placed his phone face down at the table while they ate, he kept her eye contact, he remembered the tiny things she said. She hadn’t been a fan of clams and he’d made sure to request the dish they had without them, happy to pay extra for a new plate.

As sad as it could be seen as, how bare minimum people could claim, it was so new to her that it had taken a few days to get used to.

One thing she definitely hadn’t expected was Harry scheduling them a spa day. A real spa day, with massage and facials and a high class sauna. All of the bells and whistles that had her eyes wide, hand tangled with his and anxiously held to the front of her body as she looked around the expensive facility. They’d had to drive out of the village for it, Harry keeping it a surprise until they’d walked in.

She’d watched a video on her phone the night prior in bed, showing him a bit as she had said she’d need to get a facial when they got back home for her pores- which he had responded like a true boy about having the necessities for a facial right then- but she hadn’t thought much of it until walking in on marble floors as a boisterous woman greeting Harry in rapid italian.

Was this how it would always be?

“Questa è tua moglie?” The woman gestured to Y/N making her curious. What was she saying? She’d need to learn italian so she didn’t feel left out.

Harry’s fond eyes laid on her, squeezing the hand she was holding against her tummy before replying. “Non ancora. Un giorno, se mi avrà.”

“Oh, che meraviglia.” The woman clapped, looking at Y/N with bright eyes. It must be a good exchange. “Siamo onorati di averti qui. Lascia che ti controlli”

A bit more chatting was finished up before they were whisked over to locker rooms, Y/N being brought over to the women’s and H giving her a kiss on the lips before taking his towel and robe into the men’s.

“I apologize, Miss. I did not know you did not speak Italian.” The woman smiled. “We will ask that you rinse off just a bit. There is a selection of soap. Lavender, Oat, Rose, Eucalyptus and the white is unscented. When you are finished, you can leave out the side door and it will bring you to the massage room where Signore Harry will be waiting.”

Y/N thanked the woman, going into the locker room.

Wow.

It was spacious and beautifully designed with high-end finishes and luxurious amenities, with a sleek design with soothing lighting, plush seating arrangements, and an opulent ambiance.

White lockers lined the walls to accommodate guests, each of which seemed secured with a digital lock- she would need to use her birthday as a code. She was awful with them. . The lockers seemed large enough to hold double of what she had. Harry had handed her a bad with what she assumed held her clothes and whatever else he would think of as necessary. Considering how closely he had been paying attention to her, she trusted his judgment.

She placed the soft white robe and slippers, as well as a fluffy towel down once she found one that she liked, taking a look around the area again. There seemed be plenty of grooming necessities including hairbrushes and combs that you could obviously bring home- but the wooden handles showed they definitely weren’t cheap. This was not going to be a cheap activity, not by a long shot. On the wall near the showers were shelves of tiny bottles of shampoos, conditioners, and body washes. Underneath had white mini loofahs and disposable razors- and Y/N had to remind herself not to be a little rat and steal some to bring home. Temptation would be strong.

It again showed her how well off, wealthy, her now boyfriend? Lover? Was. He had a big house at home, yes, but he wasn’t one to show off besides with his cars and paying for meals. He never flaunted. It had her reminded yet again that she had been plunged into a world she had no idea how to navigate- but she couldn’t say she hated it. She deserved spoiling sometimes. Harry had been trying to tell her that the whole trip, especially after she made comments every time she put on one of the dresses he had bought her at the market.

This was a whole other way of living. Harry had obviously been one of the more down to earth rich folk, but it still made her a little shocked as she took in the qualities of each thing as she did as instructed. This was no cheap hotel body wash. Was- were the combs Versace?! Taking a look at the golden emblem, Y/N had to scream silently into her fluffy robe as she placed it down on the mirrored vanity, separated by walls to give her privacy. Fuck.

What had she gotten herself into? And how could it feel so guiltily good?

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copias-sewer-rat · 5 months

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IN HIS IMAGE [SECONDO x f!reader] - CHAPTER IV

Secondo's little mischief against you at the library leads to the perfect opportunity to try something new, a brand new window of lustful opportunities opening for both of you.

We are almost there everyone! I hope you enjoy reading this chapter just as much as I have enjoyed writting it. Special thanks to @baelzbu/@bupia for all her support on this adventure and to @yollur for his beautiful Secondo art which immensly fuels my thirst for the Mr. Worldwide impersonator. Tw/tags: smut, +18 warning, established relationship, m/f relationship, teasing, vouyerism, overstimulation, use of cuffs, use of sex toys (dildo, sucker and plunge), dom!reader, sub!Secondo, cum eating, panty sniffing, slapping, edging, orgasm denial. 3.9K words.

Read also on Ao3 | My Masterlist Previous chapter | Next chapter

The excitement you are feeling is too much to hold. Your steps carry you swiftly towards your room, the cogs in your brain turning, already anticipating your plan. You have been thinking about this for a while. The idea of being a dom to Secondo has always been hiding at the back of your mind, always present. Talking to Secondo about it had never led to anything, not that he was against it or that he had declined the proposal, far from it, but there was never a good excuse for you to be dominating with him, never a feasible chance for you to assert some type of power. You knew you needed it, you were not as serious as him, as terrifying as him. Except now you had a clear and honest reason for it to happen: revenge.

Secondo had made a mess of you in the library, for sure he was having the time of his life in your rooms, laughing at your predicament. It had taken a while for you to be able to exit the area, the aftershock and the bliss had made you unable to think straight, far less walk straight. So, you had sat there, collecting and listing all the ideas that you had had over the years about how to make Secondo beg, cry and moan for you. It must be a kink of some sort, you think, but the idea of having Secondo under you, moaning, salivating at the pleasure you are giving him… such a manly man, reduced to a begging orgasmic puddle of bliss and cum and moans and cries and Italian obscenities… It drives you insane. It is not a want, it is a need and oh, by Olde One, you are going to get that man to scream your name in need and pleasure like the little whore you know he can be.

In a few minutes you reach your rooms, stopping in front of the door. You are nervous, you can tell, but you need to look serious for this, angry even. It is time for the show and the curtains are rising.

When you enter, Secondo is completely naked and spread on your bed, peaceful and next to the pillow full of his cum. That almost gets you, but you hold your non-serious reaction and instead offer him a deafening silence.

“Tesoro! I was certain you would be able to come back on your own two feet! Buon lavoro!” The look you give Secondo is one of annoyance, it is crucial for your plan to work. He needs to feel like he has hurt you. You walk slowly, ignoring his comment, barely passing next to him but close enough to notice him raising a brow. Placing the book you had gotten from the library on your nightstand table, you turn away, not looking at him anymore. “Cara?” He asks, a bit hesitant.

You head towards the bathroom, hoping for Secondo to follow you. Turning the faucet on, you start cleaning yourself on the sink, mostly your makeup and the sweat that had accumulated from your spicy public adventure. Suddenly, the sound of bare feet against the bathroom tiles alerts you that Secondo is right behind you, and as you raise your head from the sink, his gigantic figure looms above you with an apologetic look.

“Tesoro, please, talk to me. Are you mad at me?” He asks, his voice sounding a bit dry.

As much as it pains you, you need to hold on a bit longer. He has to feel guilty enough to get him just where you want him. Secondo in the meantime is trying to get you to speak by enveloping your waist with his big arms and torso while nuzzling his face on the crook of your neck and inhaling your scent. Of course, he knows that if you truly didn’t want him around you would say something.

“Cara, my love, tesoro, empress of my heart… per favore, tell me what bothers you. Was I too rough? Did you not like it?” You exhale, trying to sound exasperated and walk towards the door, standing just outside the bathroom. You wait there, Secondo coming right behind and with that, you turn. He is, as you imagined, leaning towards you, both hands grabbing the exercise bar that stands at the top of the door frame. His beautiful figure is launched forward, glistening with sweat and his cock lazily twitches between his legs.

“Gosh, I love it when you ignore me, you are so fucking hot, but also, you are so mean to me, love… parlare, per favore.” That’s it, you have him just where you wanted him.

Closing the gap between your bodies you reach to kiss him gently, you don’t want him to get too desperate, just unfocused enough to act. Your tongue brushes his painted lips, savouring the greasy taste, asking for permission, which he gives, and you kiss him deeply but slowly. Secondo hums in your mouth, of course, he was desperate for contact, for your kisses.

*click*

Slowly you part from the kiss, and Secondo’s eyes are open, looking up at where his hands are, where his cuffed hand is, tugging at it with a surprised look. Moments before, you had extended your hands, taking advantage of Secondo’s posture to cuff one of them to the exercise bar. Secondo could have known a lot about your whereabouts at the library, but what he couldn’t have guessed is that you had stopped by Terzo’s quarters to ask for a pair of handcuffs. Terzo had hilariously accepted with a: “I don’t really want to know, but make him suffer.”

“What is this, tesoro mio?” Secondo asks, still looking at his now imprisoned hand.

“I told you that I was going to get my revenge, one way or the other…” You peck his lips playfully.

“And this is your idea of revenge? Cuffing me up to the bar?” Secondo scoffs and you laugh as if that was the most hilarious joke you had heard in your life. That makes him stop his mockery completely.

“Caro, you truly don’t know me if you think I would leave it to just that, oh no. I have a whole… session prepared just for you.” You tease, heading towards your wardrobe, looking for something very specific. After a few seconds you see it, the Secondo-shaped dildo and the vibrator that you bought along with it. Slipping the dildo into the silicone toy provides a pop sound that makes Secondo jolt. He is unable to see what you are doing from his angle, you could be sharpening some knives to cut off his dick and he wouldn’t know. But no, your revenge is going to make him beg.

Very slowly you walk towards the bed, your steps deliberately sensual and with a low vow that gives a perfect angle of your ass, you place the dildo on the mattress. Without moving, you glance back to see Secondo swallowing hard, his soft dick twitching slightly, already ready for another round.

“Tesoro, what-?”

“I don’t want you talking” you interrupt “I just want to hear you beg and moan as I take what I need from you, understand?” He nods. “You are going to be taking only what I give you, and I don’t want you to cum, if you do, there will be no prize afterwards, capisce?” Secondo blushes, his naked form heating from the teasing and the threats, and subsequently, his cock starts to get larger and rise from its place on his thigh. “And to ensure you don’t do it… I brought something to help you, aren’t I nice?” You laugh, leaving the keys to the cuffs right beside the book, a reminder of his ‘crime’ against you. Then, you stand up, reaching for the wardrobe once more to get all the tools you need for your punishment. On your way there you take off your shirt, discarding it on the floor, your lacy black bra the only thing between the cold air and your tits and you can feel Secondo’s gaze burns into you as if taking away the items of clothing that linger on your body. You blush slightly, but you do need to keep your composure, you are in charge for once, and you don’t want that role to falter right at the start of it all.

At the wardrobe once again you retrieve two things: a clitoral sucker and a penis plunge. The sucker you leave at the bed, next to the dildo, but the plunge you take with you directly to Secondo. During your whole stroll towards him, he is looking into your eyes, hard and punishing and primal, but there is nothing you can do to avoid how wobbly your legs feel when his darkened orbs burn into your soul. Once there, positioned almost skin to skin, you touch his cheek, his eyes still looking at yours, but he smiles candidly and then it turns into a toothy grin filled with desire. You kiss him, this time passionately, taking the hand on his cheek directly to his half-hard cock. Secondo doesn’t know what you are planning, you have surprised him this time, not that you don’t every single day as he discovers new things to love you for, but this? Oh, he is going to love seeing this side of you. You taking the lead surely wasn’t on his mind but now he cannot think of anything else. Palming his erection makes him hiss, your cold hand on his hot member creating this chill of need that makes Secondo’s blood rush to the place he needs it the most. With a few pumps his tip comes out of hiding accompanied by a soft groan. Secondo tilts his head backwards as you move your hand up and down, trying to get him as hard as possible.

“Love… without lubricant, this is starting to hurt a bit.” He comments and you chuckle bitterly.

“Who allowed you to speak? I surely did not.” You spat at him, Secondo looking back at you with a dumbfounded stare. Who are you and what have you done with his tesoro? He is not complaining however, this is turning him on so fucking much. “We are going to try this…” You say, showing Secondo the plunger. “If you don’t like it let me know and I will take it out entirely. This is supposed to help you not to cum, but I am sure you can take it, huh?” The explanation seems to have fallen on deaf ears because he looks like he wants to let you do whatever you want to him. “Do you understand?!” You shout, hitting the door frame with your hand, in return getting Secondo out of his trance. He nods fervently, seemingly scared of your sudden anger “Bene.”

With care you grab Secondo’s erection, pumping it again a couple of times and getting the plunge ready to enter his dick. Slowly you tease his tip with the device, situating it on its urethra and with a teasingly slow motion you push the plunge inside. Secondo hisses, his spine arching so you stop until he signals that you can continue, and you do until it is all the way in.

As a reward for his good behaviour, you kiss him fervently. “You did so good my love, I am so proud of you!” You coo, and Secondo smiles, noticing that his cock is twitching slightly, probably stimulated by the plunge. “Unclasp my bra for me, will you?” Secondo obeys, getting his free hand behind you which makes you close the gap between you two, your covered breasts touching his naked chest. Once he manages to unclasp your bra, it falls right to the floor and now your bare breasts are touching his burning surface. They feel so soft against his skin, like the softest pillows he has ever felt. How bad he wishes he could do to them what he did to the cum-filled pillow lying on the bed. No, he thinks, right now he must behave, he has to be a good boy so he can get the reward you have promised. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop him from being a little teasing brat and raising his hand and trying to touch them. You catch him in the act, slapping his hand downwards. “Ah ah ah!” you shake your head “No touching, not you, not me… just watch and take what I give you, remember?” He nods once again, amazed by how well the dominant role suits you. “I might need to punish you for that…”

You push Secondo aside, entering the bathroom once more and placing yourself looking at his broad, muscled and very seductive back. You prepare yourself as best as you can and without a word you slap Secondo right on his left butt cheek, making him hiss and leaving a reddening mark on the white surface of his very tender ass. “That’s for the scene at the library!” You announce and then go again, this time on his right cheek, making a dry and echo-y noise that reverberates all along the dark bathroom behind you along with another grunt from Secondo. “That’s for fucking a pillow instead of me!” and then you go again, this time slapping his whole ass with one motion. “And that’s for trying to touch my tits when you were not allowed to!” With that Secondo moans sweetly, the pleasure from the pain leaving him breathless and oh, the sight before you is glorious. Secondo’s perfect ass, so perfectly sculptured is red and steamy and full of the marks of your small hand, compared to his that is.

Leaving him alone you return to the bed and just before you do anything else you strip completely before him. Of course, you do it slowly, you tease him. You sit on the bed, looking directly at him. The shoes come first and you take a moment to massage your ankles and your feet, both sore from the pressure you did at the library, which makes you moan, but of course, you exaggerate it and in return you see Secondo pushing his lips together, trying to hold something in. Rising to your feet once more, you grab the waistband of your pants, stretching them slightly and sliding them to your feet. The only item of clothing left on you are your matching black laced panties, like the last bow on a pristine-looking present that you are going to tear apart in a few seconds, but you are going to savour this.

You sit once more on the bed, pushing yourself backwards until you are in the middle of it, the undone sheets around you nestling your body perfectly and the dirty pillow… right next to your head. Laying down there, you open your legs and bend your knees until Secondo has a perfect view of your glistening panties, stained with the previous release. The drama has to continue, this is going to be the best acting anyone has ever seen, so you throw your hands backwards, one of them falling on top of the pillow.

“I just got so frustrated, reaching an orgasm so strong all alone, trying to be quiet, it was so…” you exhale again “…unfair.” With a quick motion you sit on the bed, your boobs bouncing against your chest. “And here you were…” you say, grabbing the pillow “moaning and grunting as you pleased, fucking a pillow instead of my tight cunt that is always needy for your cock?” Two fingers search the inside of the pillow, the cum there is cold but still liquid, you take out some and inspect it, rubbing your fingers together, feeling the sticky texture. “I honestly feel insulted…” and with that you open your mouth and push the two fingers to your tongue, sliding them down and leaving the trace of Secondo’s release glistening there for him to see what he is missing.

On the bathroom door, you observe a very tense Secondo, the shadows of the room hardening his features, his white eye shining against the dark, and right now, he is flexing his free hand, probably trying not to touch himself to the very nice show you are offering.

Discarding the pillow to the floor makes a wet sound, a given with how much Secondo cums inside of you regularly. Nonetheless, it never ceases to amaze you just how much jizz he can produce. Once you let him do so after all of this teasing, you hope for it to be the best release of his life.

There is a small moment of realization on Secondo’s face when you go and reach for the dildo. The vein on his cuffed hand gets more visible, he is grabbing the bar with too much force. ‘But the real spectacle hasn’t even started yet!’ you think, looking at Secondo in the eyes. The air stays still, and no sound in the room can be heard, none at all that is until you turn the vibrator on and Secondo lets out a low-pitched moan, music to your ears.

You turn it off after a couple of seconds. Secondo’s head falls forward, thankful for the moment of calm, but then you turn it again and press it against your clothed entrance. Secondo jumps, his knees go forward and he screams in pleasure.

“AAAAAAHHHHHHH, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckkkkkkkkkk……….”

From your position you see Secondo’s dick vibrating, the entirety of it, the same rhythm as the toy, just as you had suspected.

The tingly feeling feels amazing but you need more contact, so turning off the dildo once again you take off your panties. Secondo huffs, grateful once more. It seems like the mix of the vibrations and the plunge are making him edge over and over again, but he also seems to be enjoying the punishment. You make the panties into a tight ball in your fist and throw them towards Secondo who, in the last second, looks forward and grabs them with some difficulty.

“Just a little reward, so you can feel me closer.” You explain, blowing him a kiss.

The feeling of the toy next to your core right now is not that of silicone but of Secondo’s hot and pulsating flesh, the bluish light that surrounds it confirming it.

“Here we go again dear… remember, don’t cum…” and with that the dildo vibrates again. Instantly, Secondo brings your dirty panties to his face, muffling his moans and groans, inhaling your scent. His dick vibrates once more and you can feel it so clearly teasing your wet and dripping entrance. But you need more.

As best as you can, and without stopping the dildo this time, you reach for the sucker, turning it on and pressing it against your clit. The mixture of both the sucking and the vibrations make you lay entirely on your bed, your knees folding, your legs opening, each pushing hard against the bed.

“FUCK, Satan, oh fuck… that’s amazing!” Your hips buckle forward and your eyes shut from the pleasure.

“MMMMMMMM, GHHHHHH!!!” You hear from the bathroom door and your eyes open to look at Secondo, you have never seen him as beautiful as he is right now.

He looks so lost in the agony and the pleasure you are providing. His gigantic form looks weak and needy, his paints are messed and mixed together with patches of grey spreading across his neck and cuffed arm. His knees are trembling, barely holding him in place. His dick is throbbing and vibrating with ecstasy, the plunge almost unable to stop his release. Your panties are in his mouth, muffling his cries. His eyes are filled with tears and his free hand is digging into the flesh of his leg, making it bleed.

His image, so fucking sinful, so fucking perfect. You are sure he is thinking the same about you, how perfect you look with his dick between your legs, how insanely tempting you are lost in your pleasure. You regret not having him close right now because you just want to kiss him, so deeply, so fucking much it is making you dizzy. The sucker takes your clit deliciously, sending shock waves of pure lust through the nerves of your head, your chest and ending on your toes, which twitch and contort with involuntary delight. Your hips launch forward once more, the toy vibrating in your entrance, getting coated with your juices.

“mmmmm! MMMM! HMFFF!” Secondo ‘says’, it was a good idea to give him your panties. You make a mental note about him looking delicious and gagged for future indulgences.

“You are taking it so well, agh, you feel so good, vibrating for m-me, mmmm, teasing my entrance, the place where you belong, between my legs, my dearest sinful serpent…” With a flick of a switch, the vibrations from the dildo go faster and you start to rub it along your folds. “Oh my dear… agh, aaaaaa, so fucking good, so good for me, so so good…” You moan. At this point, you cannot see Secondo, the tightening in your abdomen making you close your eyes in pleasure. However, if you did open your eyes you could have seen Secondo almost falling to the ground in pleasure, both of his hands now grabbing the exercise bar, his knuckles white, his eyes fixated on your form, twisting from the pleasure and he can’t do a fucking thing. It almost makes him feel like a dirty peeping Tom, seeing you so horny, taking all that you need and him wanting to fuck you so badly but just hide in the shadows.

Despite all of that, you don’t need to see him, even if you feel his eyes on you, his sweet noises are enough to fuel your imagination. That added to all the stimuli between your legs sends you over the precipice.

“Secondo, fuck, I’m coming, I’m coming, fuck, fuck, fuck, look at me, agh- SECONDO!” You cry, your release so strong that you even squirt over Secondo’s length.

With that, your saliva-filled panties fall from Secondo’s mouth. “AUGHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHH” You hear his scream and look at him with a worried look. He seems to be fine, he is looking at his enormous erection with pride and he hasn’t come, he has made it through.

With uneven breaths you stand up, get the keys for the cuffs and go to help your love.

“I-I did it…” He breaths, raggedly, he has made a lot of effort but he does look proud so all your worries dissipate.

“You did! I am so proud of you! Did you like it?”

“It was fucking perfect… so hot, fuck, you were so selfish tesoro, fuck me... We have to do this more often…” Secondo says, a truthful smile on his lips. Instead of saying anything you grab his neck and peck his lips, something brief and sweet.

“Tesoro, are you going to leave me like this?” He remarks, nodding his head towards his throbbing erection.

Unlocking the cuffs you offer him a devilish grin “What do you mean? I am not finished with you... because your wish is my command."

----

Italian translations:

Buon lavoro: good job

Cara/o: dear

Tesoro (mio): my teasure

Bene: good

parlare: speak

per favore: please

capisce?: understood?

----

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#gonst #the band ghost #ghost #ghost bc #ghost band #papa secondo #papa emeritus II #papa secondo x f!reader #papa secondo x reader #the band ghost fanfics #papa secondo smut

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topguncortez · 1 year

Text

Bad Medicine | Chapter 4

Previous Part | Masterlist | Next Part

synopsis: A wealthy Italian mobster sets up his daughter to marry the head of one of the last remaining mafias in California. The union was supposed to create and heal the damage between two families, but all it does is cause more harm than good.

word count: 5.4k

warnings: drugs, guns, stripping, violence, abuse, fighting, prostitution, blood, alcohol usage, mentions of sexual assault, torture, death, cops, stalking. mentions of suicide, mentions of past physical abuse, scars, burns, violence, waterboarding, abuse, mentions of death, language.

She was hoping it was a dream when she woke up. That the last 48 hours were some sick twisted torture method her own brain came up with. But when Y/N woke up in that dark bedroom with the large painting of Jake “Hangman” Seresin staring back at her, she wished she was dead. She sobbed when she saw herself in the mirror. She had a small, dark bruise on her chin from where Jake grabbed her, another on her cheek from getting slapped and a very faint scar forming from the knife against her throat. Her eyes scanned over the scars that already littered her body. The puffy, pink burn mark on her ribs stood out the most. That was the one she was most ashamed of. Every once in a while, she could feel the phantom pain of the white hot branding iron against her skin.

Y/N bit her lip as she gripped the sides of the sink, and bowed her head letting the tears fall onto the tile floor. She had told herself after Francisco she would never let another man lay a hand on her, and now here she was, letting some Mafia wannabe smack her around. This time, she had no control over it. She didn’t do it to herself, she didn’t go find Jake or the other men at the club and invite them into her home. No, her father did this. Her father was the cause of her pain, once again.

Y/N heard the door to the bedroom open and the soft clack of shoes. She looked around the bathroom, looking for something to protect herself with, her eyes landing on a pair of hair cutting scissors. She grabbed them in her hand and hid behind the linen closet door. She held her hand over her mouth to silence her shaky breathing as the footsteps grew closer. She was like a feral animal, ready to attack anything and everything who would hurt her without repercussions. Looking down she noticed that the shoes were black leather snakeskin boots, and knew who they belonged to.

“Y/N?” Bob called out as he entered the bedroom. She listened as he cautiously walked closer, crossing the threshold into the bathroom. She held her breath and could see from the crack in the door as Bob looked around the bathroom. He paused, his head cocked a bit to the side as he listened. He knew she was in here. Y/N closed her eyes, and released a slow, quiet breath to calm her heart rate. When she opened her eyes, Bob was gone.

Very carefully, she pushed the linen closet door open more, and stepped out to look around to see if the coast was clear. She felt a bit braver and took a complete step out of the closet, seeing no sign of the man who was just here. Y/N let out a shaky breath and lowered the scissors, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Quickly, Y/N jumped and raised the scissors to attack.

“Y/N! It’s me!” Bob exclaimed, raising his hands in defense, but that didn’t stop her from charging at him, ready to stab him in the neck, “What the fuck!” Bob yelled, taking control of Y/N, grabbing her wrists to keep her from penetrating the scissors into his skin.

Rooster had been right behind Bob, and stepped in quickly as Bob wrestled to get Y/N to the ground. Rooster took the black scissors out of her hand, as Bob tackled her to the floor, straddling her hips and holding her wrists down, “Quit fucking moving!”

“No!” Y/N yelled and spat at him. Bob groaned and backhanded her. Her head thrashed to the side from the force and she spit out light pink blood from her mouth. Bob took a shaky breath as he pushed himself off of her. He hated having to use violence against someone.

“I-I’m sorry,” Bob said and held his hand out to her, but she scurried away from him, running her back into the bathtub, “I promise, I’m not going to hurt you,” He spoke, holding his hands up to her. He approached her gently, like he would a scared dog. He knelt down to her level, still holding his hands up, “I wanted to see if you were okay. . . after last night.”

“No! I’m not fucking okay!” Y/N yelled, “I want to go home!”

“We can’t let you do that,” Rooster said, shoving his hands into his pockets. Y/N looked up at him, but he avoided looking into her eyes. Rooster might give off the impression of being a cold blooded killer, but that man was nothing but soft, “He wants you to come and eat. And no, we can’t just bring food to you, he actually wants to see you eat.”

Y/N looked between the two men, before nodding softly. Bob crept closer, trying to help her up, but she smacked his hands away. She pushed herself up from the floor, she looked at herself in the mirror and frowned at her appearance. She wore just a baggy t-shirt and some cotton shorts she had stolen from her brother. Her hair was all over the place and the bruises stood out against her reddened cheeks.

“Can I clean myself up?” She asked softly.

“Later,” Bob said, “He’s pissed you’re late.”

Y/N followed Bob out of the room, Rooster following behind her. She felt like a prisoner, all she was missing was the orange jumpsuit and shackles on her ankles and wrists. The maids and butlers didn’t dare to look at her or Rooster as they walked by, but they all greeted Bob. Y/N found that funny since Rooster was yet to hit her, and both Jake and Bob have. She looked over her shoulder at Rooster. There was more to him than just meets the eye. The scars on his face had a story to them, and she was determined to know.

“Keep fucking staring at me, and I’ll gouge your eyes out,” Rooster threatened and Y/N quickly looked away. She looked over the staircase and noticed how far the drop was. She made a mental note, it was a long way down, but the balcony outside her room would cause more damage.

Bob led them into the main dining room. Jake was already seated at the head of the table and looked up briefly as they walked in. The table was full of breakfast foods and Emile was still bringing more out. There was no way these boys could eat all that food, but then again Y/N has watched her brothers finish off a five course meal without leaving a crumb behind.

“Here,” Rooster said and pulled a chair out for Y/N. She nodded and sat down, and Rooster pushed the chair in. Emile smiled and placed a plate with a blueberry muffin and scrambled eggs on it in front of Y/N. She smiled shyly at the woman in thanks.

“I didn’t get to properly introduce myself last night,” Y/N looked up and jumped at the sight of the man from last night who held a gun to her head. In the daylight, he didn’t look nearly as terrifying. His skin looked soft and warm. His smile was one of friendliness, not like Jake’s, “I’m Javy or Coyote.” Y/N opened her mouth to introduce herself as well when Jake spoke.

“He already knows who you are.”

She gave Javy a tight lipped smile and nodded. Y/N picked up the muffin and started to peel the wrapper off. She subtly looked up at Jake, who was reading something on his iPad, and took in his features. There was a small scar above his eyebrow on the right side. Jake let out a groan and Y/N quickly averted her eyes back to her plate. No one at the table seemed to be concerned as Jake grunted again, and let out a shaky breath. Y/N looked at him with caution as he pushed his chair back and a young girl crawled out from under the table.

“Really? At the table?” Bob groaned, as Jake fixed himself.

“Good morning brothers,” Jake smiled and kissed the girl, “Get lost.”

“W-what?”

“Leave,” Jake demanded. The girl could only protest as a guard came and grabbed her, taking her out of the house, “She hasn’t offed herself yet?”

“Nope, just trying to kill us,” Rooster said, shoving his face full of a muffin, “I thought you took the scissors out of there.”

“Trying to see if she was as smart as she claims to be,” Jake shrugged and sat back down in his chair, “I got shit for you to do today,” He spoke to Y/N, who looked up from the muffin she had barely touched in her hand, “Eat.”

She shook her head, her appetite was now gone, “I-I’m n-not-”

“It wasn’t a fucking suggestion,” Jake rolled his eyes, “Eat. Or I’ll chain you up and have someone spoon feed you like you’re a child.”

Y/N nodded and picked up her fork, pushing around the food on her plate. Her appetite had disappeared the moment she watched Jake stab the poor guy in the basement last night. This was her defense mechanism, she would shut down to being barely alive and functional. She had seen her mother do it, eating less, sleeping more, drowning everything with alcohol. Hell, Y/N had done it for most of her relationship with Francisco.

She could feel Jake’s stare on her, and could feel the anger grow in his eyes as he stared at her. Bob looked over at the girl and then over at his boss. Jake looked up and caught his friend’s glare, and Bob shook his head. He knew what Jake was about to do. Jake was a creature of habit and short circuits. Jake slammed his iPad on the table and marched over to Y/N. She quickly grabbed the fork that was placed next to her and stood up from the chair. She placed her arm in front of her to block him and held the fork up.

Jake smirked and cocked his head to the side, “What are you going to do with that sweetheart.”

She didn’t hear Rooster move behind her, and wrapped his arms under her armpits, making her drop the fork. She struggled against his large frame and strong grip. Bob leaned over from his chair and picked up the fork and set it on the table.

“Let me fucking go!” Y/N yelled.

“Hold her still,” Jake said and grabbed the pitcher of water from the table. Rooster grunted as he tightened his hold on Y/N’s arms.

Jake grabbed her chin, digging his fingers into her jaw making her open her mouth, and poured the whole pitcher of water down her throat. Y/N gagged and tried to move her head but couldn’t against Rooster and Jake’s grip on her. Bob looked down at his plate trying his best to block out the choking sounds. She coughed loudly as she caught her breath when Jake set the empty pitcher down. Rooster felt her body sag in her arms and if it wasn’t for him holding her she would’ve crashed to the ground. Jake lifted her chin again, making her look him in the eye.

“You fucking listen. This shit will be really easy, if you just fucking listen,” Jake said and Y/N clenched her jaw. Jake looked from her eyes to her lips and chuckled, “Oh we’re gonna have a great time being married.”

“Yeah, if i don’t kill you first,” Y/N mumbled.

“Can’t wait to see you try, sweetheart,” Jake gave her a wink. He grabbed his iPad and walked back down to his office. Rooster let her go, and walked wordlessly down the same path Jake did. Bob was the only one who looked at Y/N, as she sat at the table, tears running down her face as she ate what was on her plate.

Y/N looked up at Bob, his ocean blue eyes were soft. He felt bad for her. She was a prisoner here as much as he was. Bob hated Jake’s rule. He wanted to go explore and be on his own. Bob had had a taste of freedom once, that was until Jake totally lost it. Bob had been on his way to starting a successful career in the Navy, he was days away from getting his promotion to captain when Jake had lost Natasha. Jake had pulled Bob out of the Navy and demanded that he stay in San Diego and help him track down who had exposed her. Bob had been in Y/N’s spot, crying at the table as he ate. He had locked himself in his room and contemplated swinging his legs over the balcony once or twice.

“You have an appointment to look at wedding dresses,” Bob said, “Your father set it up.”

“I don’t want to go,” Y/N said softly.

“Y/N-”

She shook her head. Y/N had dreamed of her wedding for as long as she could remember. Back then, she dreamed of getting married to Prince Harry at Westminster Abbey. She had everything planned out down to which guests would sit at what table. The whole while she planned, Sophie and her mother were right by her side. It wasn’t the Bobe without either one, but if she had to decide, she would want Sophie with her.

Y/N looked down at her hands and then slowly up at Bob. Jake had told her Bob was able to track people. A lightbulb went off in her head and her eyes grew wide as she stood up from the table and over to him.

“I need you to track someone for me,” Y/N said.

“W-who?” Bob asked, a nervous shiver ran down his spine.

“Sophie Dubois,” Y/N said softly, “She’s my best friend. She’s studying in Greece, but I haven’t been able to get a hold of her. Jake threw my phone away, I need you to get a hold of her, Bob, please.”

Bob looked into her eyes. The tear stains and bruises on her face were enough to make Bob’s heart want to break. But also knowing that Jake would not only beat him but more than likely Y/N up too, was enough to tell Bob to tell her no. Jake wasn’t usually one for violence against women, but he would shake them up enough to teach them a lesson. Bob had seen him rough up a few whores and drug dealers old ladies to know Jake wasn’t scared to get his hands bloody. Bob knew that Sophie was missing but trusted that the Santiago brothers were looking for her. But he also knew, he could probably find her faster than anyone else could. Bob took a deep breath and looked around the dark painted dining room and then over to the corner, where he knew Jake had placed a camera.

“I can’t help you,” Bob said and pointed to his left shoulder. Y/N looked at him confused and he took a deep breath pointing to his shoulder again. Y/N’s eyes slowly wandered up to the corner behind Bob’s head. She took a breath and nodded, “I’m sorry. But it’s for your own protection. Jake will hurt you and me if he knows I tried to help you.”

Y/N nodded and stepped around Bob, heading back up to her room. Bob waited a second, before grabbing a napkin and writing something down. He placed his body in a way to hide what he was writing from the cameras. He walked quickly, keeping his head down, taking the stairs two at a time. He looked down the hall before slipping the napkin under her door. Y/N was waiting with her back pressed against the door as the napkin slipped under the door.

‘Write down her name, age, birthdate, phone number, home address and last known address. Write everything in the bathtub, sit close to the wall and turn your body to the right to face the window. The cameras won’t pick up on it. Leave it under the loose floorboard in the right corner of the closet. I’ll do what I can. If you get caught. . . I had nothing to do with it.’

Y/N smiled down at the note written in messy scribbles. It was the one good thing to come in the past forty-eight hours. She pushed off the door and over to her backpack she was yet to unpack. She dug through it and pulled up a beat up college ruled notebook. She smiled at the zebra and turquoise duct taped cover. The pages were stiff and it was like looking through an old book. The handwriting had faded over the years and the pictures were starting to fall from the adhesive on them drying. She found a random page, the page with a picture of a twelve year-old Y/N and a picture of Prince Harry on it, and stuffed the napkin in it. She closed the notebook and stuffed it under her mattress.

— — — ♱♱♱ — — — ♱♱♱ — — —

How Javy and Rooster got stuck taking Y/N to go try on wedding dresses was beyond either of their knowledge. Jake had demanded that Rooster go as a guard for her and Javy to stop her from spending all their money. Jake needed Bob at the house to do more digging into Dante Soto and the Soto street gang. Javy wanted to stab his eyes out at all the white he was surrounded by. Rooster was actually a good help, pulling out dresses that caught his eye. Reuben had also tagged along, giving some sort of familiar comfort.

Y/N had a dress in mind that she wanted. She had drawn something up herself, the perfect combination of Princess Kate’s and Amal Clooney’s dresses. Her hands pulled at the delicate white dresses, scanning each of them up and down. She had pulled a couple out to try on, but she wasn’t dead set on one yet.

“What about this one?” Rooster asked, pulling out an off white dress that was covered in lace.

“Too. . . basic,” Y/N said, and her eyes fell on the perfect dress, “This one.”

Javy rolled his eyes hearing the words leave her mouth. She had said that about the last three she had added to her try-on pile. He looked over at Reuben, who was reading some book, not paying an ounce of attention to what was going on. Javy wished he could be that unbothered, a part of him secretly wanted to see what dress she would end up picking. Rooster sighed as he sat down next to them on the couch as Y/N went to go try on the dresses.

“Are we almost done?” Javy asked Rooster.

“Probably not,” Rooster sighed.

“How are you so good at this?”

“My mom owned a dress shop before she kicked it,” Rooster shrugged, “She’s calling for you.”

“Why me?” Javy asked, standing up from the couch.

“You haven’t tried to kill her.”

“I put a gun to her head.”

��She didn’t know your name then,” Rooster said, “Besides, you were shaking like a bitch holding the gun the whole time.”

Javy grumbled something under his breath as he got up and knocked softly on the dressing room she was in. Y/N opened the door slowly, and let Javy in. He walked into the room and crossed his arms over his chest as she was holding the dress on her body.

“Yes?” He asked her.

“I-I need you to tie it,” Y/N said softly.

Javy groaned, “Fine. Turn around.” Y/N turned around and he stepped behind her.

He looked in the mirror and his breath caught in his throat. She was stunning. The dress was fitted, and fit her body perfectly, showing off the curves she had. She had tied her hair back in a low messy bun, letting some stands fall down on her shoulders and frame her face. The dress was strapless with a heart shaped neckline, showing off her tanned neck and collarbones. Javy suddenly felt very jealous of his friend. Gorgeous women seemed to fall at his feet.

“Javy?”

“Oh, yeah sorry,” Javy said and looked at the back of the dress, “It’s a corset?”

“Yeah,” Y/N said softly, “Something traditional, ya know.”

Jay sucked in a breath as his fingers grabbed the white ribbon on the sides of the dress. He laced it through the eyelets and pulled, causing Y/N to suck in a breath. He had to control his own breathing, as he felt himself start to stir a bit in his pants. The little sighs she was letting out of her pink lips weren’t helping Javy’s situation either. He had to hold himself back from placing a soft kiss on her neck as he finished lacing up her dress.

“Done,” He whispered out, and Y/N looked over her shoulder at him, “It’s nice. Not my favorite, though.”

“Which one is?” Y/N asked him.

“Try them all on, and I’ll tell you, princess,” Javy said as he opened the door and walked back out to the couches where Rooster and Payback sat.

Y/N took a deep breath, looking at herself in the mirror. It felt odd trying on wedding dresses again. The last time she had been in this predicament, she was marrying the person she had thought she loved. Her mother and best friend were sitting outside the dressing room door, waiting for the breathtaking moment of when she found the dress. Instead it was two strangers and her bodyguard. She looked down at the mocking white dress. She felt like such a liar in it.

White is the color of innocence. And she was anything but innocent. She was damaged, a sinner. The things she had done had earned her a one way ticket straight to hell. No amount of time on her knees in front of the altar would fix what was already done, or save her soul, if she even had a soul. Y/N had learned to hate the color white. White was hard to clean blood stains out of.

“Okay,” Y/N said, and pulled back the curtain of the dressing room, “What do you think?” She asked them.

Rooster tapped his pointer finger against his chin, “I don’t like it.”

“Thanks, Rooster,” Y/N rolled her eyes, “Javy, already got your opinion. Reuben?”

“You look good,” Reuben shrugged. He looked at the girl. Her eyes were screaming that she didn’t want to be there anymore than they wanted to, “Why not your mother’s dress?”

“That old fucking thing,” Y/N scoffed, “I don’t even know where it-”

“Paulo threw it in one of your suitcases.”

“So we are just wasting our time here is what I am hearing,” Javy spoke up and Y/N shook her head.

“No, we’re not.” Y/N said and stepped back into the dressing room. She pulled the tie of the corset and let it unravel, until she could pull the dress off her body. She kicked it on the ground and stared up at the other handful of white dresses to try on.

Y/N had once loved her mother’s dress enough to consider wearing it for her own wedding. But the white material had too many harmful memories associated with it. Her mother had helped her craft the old wedding dress into her liking, and was set to wear it to her union with Francisco. Y/N had thought about throwing it in the grave with her mother, but instead, she tucked it away in a box.

Reuben looked around the small bridal shop, the rows and rows of white dresses blending into one. He squinted at a dress that stood out to him. The lace of it shimmering in the light. He looked back at the dressing room curtain, noticing that her feet hadn’t moved from the spot she planted them in. He knew her better than anyone else here, and knew she was fighting with herself, trying to find the dress that would make her father happy. That’s how everything had been since her mother’s death. Paulo had basically drilled it into her barely conscious body after they had found her: ‘don’t piss off the Don, he saved your life.’

“I’ll be right back,” Reuben said to the two boys, pushing himself up from the couch and walking over to the dress. He gently ran his fingers over the material of it. He grabbed it off the rack and walked back over towards the dressing room, “Can I come in?” He asked softly.

“Yeah,” Y/N answered back. He pushed the curtain back and smiled at her sadly, “I don’t want to wear my mother’s dress. I don’t care what the fucking Don says-”

“I think you’ll like this.” Reuben spoke, cutting her off. He handed her the dress that was draped over his arms, “I know you mentioned the whole princess Diana thing once.”

“Thank you,” Y/N said, her eyes softening. Reuben gave her a tight lipped smile, hanging up the dress. He unzipped it and pulled it off the hanger. He crouched down, to help her step in the dress, and pulled it up her body. Once she had it secure on her upper body, he stepped behind her to zip it up.

“I knew it,” He said softly.

Y/N was at a loss for words. The dress looked like something from a dream, and felt like it was made to be worn by only her. She stood staring in the mirror for a few minutes, eyes trailing over the intricate lace that covered the bodice, admiring the way the lace did not overtake the skirt, but spread delicately across the chiffon.

“Are you done in there?” Javy asked, interrupting her thoughts. She looked at Reuben in the mirror, who was already giving her a sweet smile. When she turned around, Reuben already had his arm poised for her to take, leading her out of the fitting room and back towards the others.

@cherrycola27 @seresinsbabe @violyn20 @materialgirl01 @bradleybeachbabe @a-reader-and-a-writer @lt-spork @topnerd03 @3in1shampooconditionerbodywash @bioodforbiood @topguncultleader @ma-fraise @abaker74 @double-j @cm27078 @thedroneranger @khaylin27 @mak-32 @unhinged-btch @wittywhispers @theliterarybeldam @bloosomjoon @chxcxlate-cxxkies @luckyladycreator2 @wellshit6 @harper1666 @phoenix1388 @footprintsinthesxnd @dempy @emma8895eb @bonitanightmxres @love2write2626 @bobbyonboard @some-lovely-day @thenewdaysalreadyhere @cassiemitchellslibrary @ilymoonie @morgensternsblog @hotch-meeeeeuppppp @rintheemolion @tallrock35 @adoringsebstan @xoxabs88xox

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shuichisweave · 2 years

Note

can you write something abt edward and his little bimbo that hes obsessed with???

JSKADJFAKFK YES OMG

crosswords

Edward Nashton x Bimbo reader (SFW)

You might be asking yourself how you and Edward even met? Well to be frank I would too.

One night after your friend had held an absolute rager of a party at the club you wanted to actually get some real food in your body instead of just cocktails, and sure enough there was a perfect little diner right across from the Iceberg Lounge.

As per usual, Edward was there working on a crossword puzzle that had a few remaining spots that he just couldn’t fill in.

This didn’t normally happen for him and he was starting to get pissed off because of it.

Edward normally hated when anyone sat next to him, especially pretty girls he didn’t know how to talk to. But when you plopped yourself and your ridiculously tiny purse down next to him, he hesitated telling you to move or moving himself. Your cherry lip gloss lined lips smiled at him, seemingly aching to talk to him. To be fair, he thought you were quite cute. With your warm cheeks coated in makeup and glitter, and manicured acrylic fingernails that were rapping against the tiled countertop, you were the image of beauty in many people’s eyes.

He usually hated mainstream beauty, but you were a spectacle. Carrying yourself with beauty and opulence. He couldn’t expect there to be a single thought going through that little head of yours though. You smiled and giggled at the waitress who took your order and played with a tamagotchi keychain on your purse. ‘Get back to your crossword’, he said to himself. He was stumped. He grumbled under his breath “God damnit … word for an italian shoe …” He erased his previous answer when you turned to him and tapped on the counter next to him.

He looked up, catching your shadow coated eyes, looking questioningly. You waited for him to say something.

“Uh … yes?” He asked, awaiting your response.

You continued to play with your hair and began to speak.

“How many letters is it? And what does it start with?” You asked as you pulled out a plume pen from your purse. He was confused as to why you even cared, and pushed the crossword towards you for you to fill in for him. He watched curiously as you filled in each letter in girly handwriting, dotting your letter i’s with little hearts. You pushed it back towards him with a smile and allowed him time to look over your answers before speaking again.

An eight letter word for an italian shoe. Stiletto.

He was gobsmacked. Almost appalled that a ‘stupid girl’ finished his crossword for him. “How did you get it down so fast? How?” He looked at you dumbfounded and waited for a proper explanation. “Well, the crossword’s theme for today was fashion and well, not to brag or anything but I kind of know a good bit about it! But I was just able to tell by the length of the word it was stiletto. The other ones were all brand names or famous fashion houses and I know all about those!” He looked a little bit shocked but quickly hid it on his face so as to not offend you. He almost wanted to say something but hesitated when you received your order from the waitress and thanked her.

“Do … you normally do puzzles like these?” He questioned you. You answered silently by pulling out a book of puzzles and crosswords out of your tiny purse, wondering how it even fit in there. “Well yeah! My friends say they’re for grandmas but I don’t know I’ve sort of always loved things like this!”

You looked back at the notepad and with a smile asked him “What about you?” He felt elated, on top of the world even. “Oh- Of course! Yes I- I love doing puzzles. Do you um … come here often?” He fiddled with his hands nervously.

“Yeah! I live kind of close and they’re pretty inexpensive here. Hey I gotta go soon I seriously need to catch some shut eye, I just came back from a night out with some of my girlfriends. Here let me write my number down for you so we can, I don’t know, have ourselves a little puzzle date?” You took the corner of his crosswords in a blank area and scrawled out a set of pink glittery numbers and your name next to them. You grabbed your food and purse and waved at him as you left out the door.

Did he just get a chicks number?

#edward nashton imagine #edward nashton x reader #riddler x reader #paul dano riddler #danonation #the riddler x reader #the batman 2022

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armoredisopod · 2 years

Text

Arknights CN Thank You Celebration 2022 PVs

youtube

New Operators

Lunacub, 5* Deadeye Sniper

Let the hunt begin.

Vigil, 6* Welfare Tactician Vanguard

I am no stranger, to the use of violence.

Penance, 6* Juggernaut Defender

The law is not to be ignored, it will prove its worth.

Texas the Omertosa, 6* Limited Executor Specialist

I will keep you safe, Doctor. Not only is it necessary for the mission, but also any reunion is a rare occasion.

Also added new operators to the voucher shop

Qanipalaat, 5* Core Caster

Quartz, 4* (unknown new branch) Guard

Operator Skins Update

6 new additions for the Epoque brand

Quercus' Path Not Leads To Home - Free Login Event skin

Honeyberry's Wilderness Behind

Sora's Melodiosa

Rosmontis' Become Anew - L2D skin

Nearl the Radiant Knight's Relight - L2D skin

Passenger's Dream In A Moment - L2D + Special Voicelines skin

Announced skin reruns

Series 1 & 2 of the Ambiance Synesthesia brand skins

Epoque brand skins for Pallas, Rosa, Andreana, Texas and Dobermann

~52 other skins as part of the thank you celebration edition of Rhodes Fashion Review

If you bought Texas' skins using OP, skin vouchers will be given to you when her alter arrives

Operator Modules Update

Texas the Omertosa and Lunacub being part of branches with modules immediately gets their modules

Texas the Omertosa's module base effect: ATK increases when there are no allied units in the 4 adjacent tiles

Lunacub's module base effect: If the attacked enemy remains alive, gain 1 additional SP

Pionner Vanguard branch gets 2 module types

Module 1 given to Siege, Courier, Scavenger, Zima

Module 2 given to Flametail, Texas, Chiave, Saga

Schwarz and Hoshiguma gets their second modules

Schwarz's second module base effect: When attacking an enemy directly ahead, attack power increases and ignores physical dodge

Hoshiguma's second module base effect: DEF increases when blocking

Events and Stories

Il Siracusano, a Siracusa side story event

CC#11 Operation Fake Waves, brings a new 0011/Tempest brand skin for Aciddrop to the cc shop, along with Greyy's Eggcellent Craftsman skin for people that missed it

Operator Archives update for Vigil, Mountain, Wild Mane, Meteorite, Elysium and Spot

Misc Stuff

CN voices for Texas the Omertosa, Vigil, Penance, Lunacub, Qanipalaat, Quartz and 15 other operators

Weedy, Elysium, Asbestos and Tsukinogi added to Recruitment

Industrial Cooperation Forum - a daily orundum lucky draw with the ability to select negotiation techniques to affect the outcome, each contract can grant 300 ~ 600 orundums

Livestream Stuff

Showcased Texas the Omertosa being a 6* Executioner Specialist that can reactivate her skills upon defeating an enemy once per deployment, her skills allows her to deal Arts damage and inflict different debuffs

Showcased Penance being a 6* Juggernaut Defender with a new barrier mechanic that can also be replenished by defeating enemies, her skills focuses on increasing her damage output in different ways

Showcased Vigil being a 6* Tactician Vanguard with a wolf pack reinforcement that can grow and increase their block count and hits per attack, the extra wolves also act as extra life, his skills allows defensive and offensive gameplay

Showed the special mechanic of the new side story, there are civilians and a progress bar that slowly fills up as the level progresses, the bar will quickly fill up when a civilian or certain enemies are defeated, when the bar is full it spawns a hitman that attacks your operators and powers up enemies on the field

Removed the restriction preventing players from putting alters and their original version in the same squad/in the base at the same time, also coming with this change future alters will not give skin vouchers or material refunds and the existing alternate operator tasks will be removed from the CN version after Dec 1st 2022

Announced Italian voices for Vigil, Penance, Lappland, Texas the Omertosa and Texas are in the works

Announced CC#11 and plans to put the gamemode on hiatus after CC#12 to make some general adjustments and will return at an unknown date

Announced changes to the Stationary Security Service gamemode, making it less tedious to farm overall and adding special faction buffs

Teased a new mode for IS#3 where you can get even more buffs/debuffs in battle

Announced plans for a new gamemode 'Reclamation Algorithm' that has resource management and survival gameplay elements

Victoria lore video in the form of a folklore story being told to Reed, either a teaser of an upcoming Victoria intermezzi story event or future main story episode

Showed a picture of buildings in Yumen, a teaser for the next Yan/Sui siblings event

Confirmed Monster Hunter collab coming in 2023, and showing a collab operator being 3 Felynes stacked on top of each other

Showed the 4th official trailer for the Arknights anime

Talked about the upcoming Ambiance Synesthesia 2022, along with purchasable physical merch and an in-game shop package

Talked about the Vol. 1 RESET art book and announced a Vol. 2 art book and a collection of various settings in Terra are in the works

Showed more merch including pajamas, character figurines, plushies and a 1/2500 scale model of the RI landship still in the works

Ended the stream off with an MV of Running In The Dark by Monkey Majik ft. Amiya, Ch'en and Kal'tsit

Terra Exploration 3.0 covering Columbia, Laterano and Iberia then interrupted by an emergency broadcast from the Aegir region

#arknights #video #arknights CN news #long post

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fashionbooksmilano · 1 year

Photo

Casa Cavalli Home

by Cavalli Home, Epilogue by Fausto Puglisi

Vendome Press, Palm Beach 2023, 304 pages, 250 color illustrations, 25,4 x 33 cm, Hardcover with cloth case in four variations, ISBN 978-0-86565-422-8

euro 98,00

email if you want to buy :[email protected]

Walk on the wild side of home decor in this spectacular volume showcasing the unashamedly glamorous fusion of fashion and interiors from luxury brand Roberto Cavalli, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their homewares line

Take a deep dive into the exciting and glamorous world of Roberto Cavalli homewares and interiors with Casa Cavalli Home. From the innovative Florentine brand that has dazzled the world with red carpet and runway sensations, this ravishing volume celebrates the company’s home line ten years after its initial launch at Milan’s renowned furniture fair, the Salone del Mobile, in 2012. Casa Cavalli Home celebrates a wilder side of home decor, embodying the idea that our homes can be our most personal connection with the natural world, with designs that embrace the company’s pioneering use of animal prints, sensuous textures, and vivid colors. From furniture and luxury tableware to linen, wallpaper and tiles, each piece is handmade by experienced Italian artisans—with an attention to detail and dedication to craftsmanship that has earned them the coveted “Made in Italy” merchandise mark. Mixing audacious glamour with urban chic, and organized by their signature themes, this stunning volume is a celebration of Cavalli’s iconic, inimitable style, and the luxurious magic that can happen when home interiors meet couture.

Each copy is bound in one of four Casa Cavalli fabrics.

19/03/23

orders to: [email protected]

ordini a: [email protected]

twitter: @fashionbooksmi

instagram: fashionbooksmilano, designbooksmilano tumblr: fashionbooksmilano, designbooksmilano

#Casa Cavalli #Roberto Cavalli #Fausto Puglisi #Cavalli Home #Home Decor #Furniture #tableware #linen #wallpaper #tiles #interior design books #designbooksmilano #fashionbooksmilano

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lifestylesdr · 10 days

Link

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Bronze Splendore 140 Baked Highlighter Milani.

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kingskingsblog · 13 days

Text

Today Aamod

ByToday Global Developers

Nandgaon,Navi Mumbai,Mumbai

Today Aamod, developed by Today Global Developers, offers luxurious residential options in Nandgaon, Panvel, Navi Mumbai. With configurations ranging from 1 to 2 BHK, this under-construction project promises modern living spaces with possession scheduled for December 2024.

Featuring Italian marble finish vitrified tiles in the living and dining areas, the interiors exude elegance and style. Kitchens are equipped with granite counters for stability and anti-skid tiles for safety. The main entrance door is decorative with stainless steel fittings, ensuring both security and aesthetic appeal.

Windows are crafted from anodized aluminum sections with mosquito nets for added convenience. Electrical fittings are sourced from reputed brands, ensuring safety and reliability. Bathrooms boast anti-skid vitrified tiles, full-height dado tiles on walls, and high-quality sanitary fittings from Kohler or Jaguar.

Amenities include a clubhouse, meditation center, swimming pool, gym, and landscaped gardens, providing residents with a holistic living experience. Security features such as video surveillance and 24x7 security ensure peace of mind.

Payment details are available for various unit sizes, making Today Aamod an attractive option for homebuyers seeking comfort, convenience, and quality living in Navi Mumbai.

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dankusner · 15 days

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The Vatican’s Secret Role in the Science of IVF

On a spring day in Rome, 1957—the season of Pope Pius XII’s Ash Wednesday Mass, wisteria blooming by the Spanish Steps—30-year-old Bruno Lunenfeld gave one hell of a presentation.

What he said had the potential to shape the course of history in ways even the Vatican couldn’t foresee.

Inside an imposing L-shaped building that stretched down Via Casilina and then along Via L’Aquila, in a wood-paneled library distinguished by rows of leather-bound books and cream floor tiles spangled with stars, the dozen or so board members of a pharmaceutical company listened as Lunenfeld described his findings.

For four years he had been developing a therapy that would induce ovulation in women struggling with infertility.

What he needed now was the support of the Istituto Farmacologico Serono, whose own staff scientist, Piero Donini, had been working on a similar endeavor, and who had facilitated Lunenfeld’s trip from Israel to Rome.

The men listened politely, but at the end of the presentation they told him, with regret, that they couldn’t help.

They believed certain hurdles to be insurmountable.

It seemed unlikely, for instance, that Serono would be able to procure the vast quantities of one specific essential substance without which the drug couldn’t be made.

Lunenfeld left the library.

Nearly 70 years later, looking back, he won’t be able to remember whether or not he was crying.

What he does recall is that a member of the board by the name of Don Giulio Pacelli—pictures will show the Italian prince to have had the strong features and thick dark hair, receding sharply at the temples, of a Fellini heartthrob—approached him in his despair.

Lunenfeld wasn’t Italian or Catholic.

He didn’t realize the currency of Pacelli’s name in a city like Rome and certainly couldn’t have understood his connection to the pope.

Still, the prince had something else to offer, equally potent and instantly recognizable: belief.

“I have an idea,” he said to Lunenfeld. “Let’s talk.”

30,000 LITERS

“I will tell you exactly the number of nuns we needed for the initial phase,” Lunenfeld says to me.

The 96-year-old endocrinologist is calling from his home on the Florida coast, in Delray Beach, just a short drive from Boca Raton.

He can’t immediately find the figure in his files but, he assures me, he knows he has it somewhere.

I tell him I recall reading that it was 300 nuns.

“Could be, could be,” he says patiently.

Then he locates the slide he was looking for.

“No, I think we only had a hundred nuns.”

Later, that number would expand, but over the first year, he says, “we had a hundred nuns recruited, which gave us 30,000 liters, and the 30,000 liters gave us a hundred milligrams of the substance which we needed. And this was enough to make 9,000 vials of 75 units, sufficient for 450 ovulation induction cycles.”

What Lunenfeld is explaining is that it took 100 postmenopausal nuns one year to produce 30,000 liters of piss.

All that urine, collected and processed by Serono, eventually helped create the drug Pergonal, which aided in the first successful IVF pregnancy in the United States, as well as countless pregnancies, in vitro and otherwise, worldwide.

And in certain ways still does.

Serono phased out Pergonal in 2004.

Later that year, the nearly identical brand-name competitor, Menopur, gained approval for use in the US and remains a leading IVF drug today.

In 2022 Menopur turned $802 million in global sales for Swiss-owned Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

That fall, “changes made in the manufacturing process” of Menopur’s ingredients caused a yearlong global shortage, sending patients scrambling to internet pharmacies and online message boards, desperately searching for vials of the drug.

For now, the supply chain has unkinked—at least, as long as IVF is legal.

In February, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people, with a concurring opinion by Chief Justice Tom Parker that quoted scripture.

To continue IVF while complying with such a ruling would set assisted reproductive technology back decades.

But the ruling is just the latest potential roadblock for a substance that, as Lunenfeld has described it, turned “urine into gold”—on a road dotted, at every turn, with disparate and powerful men.

A thing nobody tells you about trying to get pregnant is all the pee.

There is, of course, the ubiquitous at-home pregnancy test.

If it detects the presence of human chorionic gonadotropin, which the body begins producing shortly after implantation and is excreted in urine, the test flashes a smiley face or darkens a line, the happily ever after of the conception “journey.”

But if you don’t get pregnant the first time you glance unprotected at a penis—as some sixth-grade health classes may lead you to believe—you might purchase an ovulation predictor kit.

The cheapest version of these are small test strips which, when dipped into urine, measure the body’s levels of luteinizing hormone (LH), a rise in which triggers ovulation.

If you purchase a 50-pack on your cell phone late one night, your social media algorithm may start serving you alternative methods of pregnancy prediction, like the scientifically unfounded sugar test (pee on sugar crystals and read them like tea leaves, approximately $5) or more advanced tech, like the Mira, Inito, or Oova, to catch the fertile window by tracking LH, follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), and more (pee on dipsticks and insert them into a digital device, $150 and up).

Your acupuncturist might suggest the Dutch Urine Test, a $499 panel “that provide[s] a complete evaluation of sex and adrenal hormones.”

The instructions before a pelvic ultrasound will be to drink 32 ounces of water one hour prior, because a full bladder will help reposition the bowels for a clear view of the uterus, but after the external exam the tech will send you to the bathroom to urinate because the intravaginal imaging requires an empty bladder.

On the TryingForABaby Subreddit, a refrain: “Pee on everything!”

THE G CLUB

Bruno Lunenfeld was born in 1927 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna; his father, David, was a lawyer whose office represented the House of Habsburg, a fierce opponent of Nazism.

As Adolf Hitler’s influence grew throughout the ’30s, David began making plans for his family to escape the country, only to be detained by Nazi forces.

In 1938, Bruno, a round-faced 11-year-old with wide, inquisitive blue eyes, joined a Kindertransport bound for England.

(He would later learn that Nazi soldiers forced his father and uncle onto a Dachau-bound transport train, and that his uncle was shot and killed en route, while his father was later moved from Dachau to Buchenwald.)

While at a camp in Dovercourt waiting to be placed with a British foster family, Lunenfeld took 10 British pounds secreted into his sock by his mother, bought his own ticket to London, and found a policeman who eventually united him with an uncle living nearby.

He attended various local boarding schools until 1940, when members of the French military reunited him with his parents, who had escaped to Mandatory Palestine—“It was not Israel” at that point, Lunenfeld says—though he never understood how.

At school in Tel Aviv, Lunenfeld struggled to learn Hebrew, having been raised on German and then English.

Following the Italian Air Force’s bombing of the city in September 1940, his parents enrolled him at St. George’s, a British boarding school in Jerusalem.

Lunenfeld became interested in studying medicine after a close friend died of polio, but Israel had no medical school.

He ultimately earned his MD and PhD at the University of Geneva—where, he notes ruefully, he worked in French.

For his doctorate in endocrinology, Lunenfeld studied under Hubert de Watteville and Rudi Borth, who were working with the Swiss pharmaceutical firm CIBA to test an oral drug designed to ease the symptoms of menopause.

During clinical trials on patients experiencing vaginal dryness, hot flashes, and brain fog, Lunenfeld and Borth began experimenting with the patients’ urine, injecting small amounts into immature mice.

(Scientists already knew that urine contained hormones; in one early pregnancy test, developed in the 1930s, doctors injected rabbits with women’s urine, then killed and dissected the animals to examine their ovaries, which developed growths in response to pregnancy hormones.)

Lunenfeld, Borth, and de Watteville hoped that the menopausal urine might hold answers to what caused the unpleasant symptoms.

Instead, the injections caused the mice to ovulate and even “hyperovulate,” in which ovarian follicles develop into not one but multiple mature eggs.

Equally surprising was that after Lunenfeld treated the same menopausal women with a 90-day course of CIBA’s drug, which contained estrogen and testosterone, the women’s urine stopped the mice from becoming fertile.

Lunenfeld and his professors hadn’t simply stumbled upon a potential treatment for women experiencing amenorrhea—a lack of menstruation that can mean they’re not ovulating—they had discovered a contraceptive too.

At the time, the research had limited funds, provided by the Swiss government.

“We had to decide, are we going into the direction of contraception, or are we going in the direction of infertility?” Lunenfeld says. “I was biased, of course. This was just after the war, and so many people got killed. So I thought, Maybe the better thing now is to go into infertility and help women who couldn’t have babies, to have babies.”

But Lunenfeld, Borth, and de Watteville couldn’t simply begin injecting would-be mothers with human waste.

“We had to test biological studies, biochemical studies, biostatistical studies, and so on,” Lunenfeld recalls.

They didn’t have the knowledge or manpower.

At the time, Lunenfeld had just finished consulting on a film for Hoffmann-LaRoche (now known as Roche AG, one of the biggest public pharmaceutical companies in the world).

The producer was a German refugee who’d caught the last train into Switzerland.

Over dinner at a Geneva train station with de Watteville and the producer, Lunenfeld listed the five people in the world who could help them.

The producer made him a bet:

That night Lunenfeld would send five telegrams, inviting them to Geneva.

If they accepted, de Watteville would pay for their travel and accommodations.

If they declined, the producer would buy him two cases of his favorite wine—Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

By the end of the next day, Lunenfeld had received affirmative responses from all but one.

“The guy from Scotland,” Lunenfeld says, “sent it by post.”

In the summer of 1953, Lunenfeld and his adviser had convened a murderers’ row of endocrinologists, chemists, biologists, and others to develop standards, assay procedures, and purification methods for this miracle substance extracted from the urine of postmenopausal women.

What to call it?

The summit landed on “human menopausal gonadotropin,” or hMG. And they decided to call themselves the G Club.

“ALL THE URINE IN THE WORLD”

Nearly three decades prior to Lunenfeld’s research, scientists had discovered gonadotropins, a family of peptide hormones that control ovarian and testicular functioning.

They extracted these hormones from the blood of pregnant horses (dubbed Pregnant Mare Serum Gonadotropin), which could stimulate ovulation in humans when injected.

But women treated with these gonadotropins also formed neutralizing antibodies.

The urine-derived hMG, which contained a naturally occurring combination of FSH and LH, had no such limiting side effect.

In a 2004 issue of the Human Reproductive Update journal, Lunenfeld described the production of hMG as “a relatively simple procedure.”

A chemist mixes menopausal urine with activated kaolin clay—shaken, not stirred.

“The suspension is left to settle at room temperature and then centrifuged.”

Liquid is discarded, kaolin is eluted, proteins are washed, acidified, precipitated, filtered, and treated.

It wasn’t the method of purification but the means of collection that proved challenging.

The average adult produces somewhere around 2 liters of urine per day.

“It takes about a day’s supply of urine from 10 women in order to produce a single therapeutic dose,” Lunenfeld told the Silicon Valley–founded nonprofit Israel 21C in 2012—in other words, one New York City water tower’s worth would be needed to run clinical trials.

To present his findings to Serono that spring day in 1957, the company had agreed to put Lunenfeld up for three nights in a “very nice hotel, a beautiful little thing” owned by the sister of someone in Serono management.

But the discussions between Lunenfeld, Prince Pacelli, and Serono’s chemist Piero Donini required more runway.

For nearly two weeks, Pacelli “took care of everything,” Lunenfeld says, extending his hotel stay with “full board for me.”

Lunenfeld remembers the prince as broad-minded and widely studied.

By day the men talked logistics; in the evening, Lunenfeld joined Donini at his home for dinner presided over by a white-gloved servant.

The head of Serono, Pietro Bertarelli, and his son Fabio (who would become CEO in 1965) were also present for discussions.

A fanciful booklet that Serono produced in 1996, provided by the Merck archive, paints the story of seven people sitting around a table discussing the logistics of the proposed project.

“I need the urine of thousands of menopausal ladies,” an anonymous interlocutor says. “We can collect urine, we will collect urine, we need to collect urine…I need all the urine in the world!”

“There could be no contamination of pregnancy,” Lunenfeld tells me.

The introduction of hormones from even one pregnant person would ruin the batch.

In the immortal words of Mel Brooks: Send in the nuns!

We won’t be hearing from these women, the linchpins to this story.

Details on their exact location and order are lost to the maw of time—or perhaps buried as a line item in the Vatican archives.

(The Vatican did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

Given their already advanced age at the time of Serono’s collection, it’s safe to say that none are alive today and few, if any, are likely to have direct familial descendants.

A representative from Merck Serono declined to answer questions about the women, citing a lack of documentation.

Lunenfeld never met them.

“Nuns present a special case in terms of memory and representation, since often their beliefs cause them to shy away from both,” writes Flora Derounian, a lecturer at the University of Sussex.

Her 2023 book Women’s Work in Post-War Italy includes oral histories of nuns who lived in beautiful apostolic “mother houses” in Rome between 1945 and 1965, two of which functioned as retirement homes, where young novitiates cared for elderly sisters—likely a similar arrangement to the casa di riposo that Serono ended up tapping.

Most would have entered the convent at age 18, having relinquished their given names and taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

They slept in single rooms with a bed and a desk, ate simple meals, fasted on Fridays.

They lived regimented days, focused on obedience to the Mother Superior and guided by the tolling of bells.

On a call, Derounian describes the communal wardrobes the women shared, from their black and white habits—some of which included a cornette, an elaborate veil “pointed almost like an admiral’s hat”—down to socks and undergarments.

“Their individuality was subsumed in the congregation,” says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who oversees the History of Women Religious, an academic organization devoted to the study of Catholic sisters.

Even so-called “particular attachments” between nuns were discouraged.

In exchange, Sprows Cummings says, they received a path to education and protection from unhappy marriages, divorce, and death by childbirth.

“Not only were they not pregnant, but would have never been pregnant—the vast majority of them, if not all of them.”

Serono’s donors may have dwelled in the quiet halls of a contemplative convent, which emphasized prayer, or an apostolic one, whose sisters served in such roles as teachers, nurses, or seamstresses.

Some made products: herbal medicines, biscuits.

Others, in Rome, cleaned and cooked at the Vatican.

The very elderly of all orders spent much of their time murmuring prayers.

“The structure of convent life would’ve been, at that point, essentially unchanged for centuries,” says Sprows Cummings—and the convents, she says, “were bursting,” their numbers nearing an all-time high.

If the nuns in 1958 were informed of their new ministry, “at a time when everything was on the verge of changing, with the birth control pill,” they might have seen it as “a way to cement the Catholic teaching about how important it is to be open to babies, and to have as many babies as possible.”

According to Lunenfeld, the nuns were Pacelli’s “fantastic” idea.

After days of mulling over logistics—and behind-the-scenes talks to which Lunenfeld was not privy—the prince took the proposal back to the Serono board, joined by Lunenfeld.

“He presented the project to them. And then he said, ‘The pope is interested.’ ”

IL NIPOTISMO

At 5:30 p.m. on March 2, 1939, a puff of white smoke appeared from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel—and then promptly turned black.

Confusion reigned until, according to Inside the Vatican magazine, the secretary of the conclave sent a note to Vatican Radio that regardless of what color the smoke appeared to be, it was white.

The cardinals had elected an inside man, the first Roman pope since the 18th century. Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli took his papal name, Pope Pius XII, on his 63rd birthday.

The Pacellis—Don Giulio included—were members of the black nobility, aristocratic families with titles granted by the Church and deep loyalty to the papacy.

Eugenio’s grandfather, Marcantonio, had served as minister of foreign affairs under Pope Pius IX and in 1861 founded the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano;

Eugenio’s uncle Ernesto had founded the Banco di Roma in 1880.

And in 1929 his elder brother, Francesco, a legal adviser to Pope Pius XI, had negotiated the Lateran Treaty with Benito Mussolini, which granted Vatican City sovereign independence.

Pius XII had a serious look to him, owllike, with dark eyes made larger behind wire-rimmed glasses.

His pale skin, as correspondent Corrado Pallenberg put it in his 1960 book, Inside the Vatican, “resembled old parchment, yet at the same time it had the surprisingly transparent effect, as if reflecting from the inside a cold, white flame.”

Pius XII had served as an ecclesiastical ambassador to Germany under his predecessor and was widely believed to have been elected due to his experience in diplomacy.

A few days after his election, Pius received a congratulatory telegraph from Hitler.

“A rather cold and uncommunicative person,” Pallenberg wrote of Pius, “he did not feel at ease in the Vatican world, 95 percent of which consisted of easygoing, jovial Italians who enjoyed good food, amusing talk and a bit of gossip.”

As a boy, one of Pius XII’s favorite games had been pretending to give Mass.

He surrounded himself with a group of confidants that included his personal doctors; the Bavarian nun, Mother Pascalina Lehnert, his housekeeper for more than 40 years; and, after Francesco died, his brother’s adult sons.

Plenty of popes kept family close.

The word nepotism stems from Gregorio Leti’s 1667 book Il Nipotismo di Roma, or The History of the Popes’ Nephews, an often-ribald account of the Renaissance-era golden age of popes granting wealth, titles, and special privileges to their relatives.

(Some of whom were whispered to be secret sons of the popes themselves, as in the case of Alexander VI, “a barbarous, lascivious Pope” who took “great delight to be embraced and caress’d by fair Ladies; whence the numbers of his Bastards was very great.”)

Of Pius’s nephews, Carlo, the eldest, was regarded as the favorite.

He alone, wrote Pallenberg, had access to the pope’s apartment for private meetings.

But all enjoyed privileges, some of which began even before their uncle became the Lord’s earthly shepherd.

Marcantonio, the middle brother, presided over a flour mill, a sink and toilet manufacturer, and a real estate and construction empire.

The youngest brother was the one and only Don Giulio Pacelli, “a well known man about the Vatican,” as a reporter once described him.

In 1940, Pius XII officiated Giulio’s wedding in his private chapel; three years later, Giulio named his first son Eugenio, after his uncle.

Giulio was also a lawyer and a colonel in the Noble Guard, a group comprising sons of aristocratic families that saw no active military service (which did not stop him from wearing a uniform of a crisp dark jacket with gilded embellishments and gold fringed epaulets, knee-high leather riding boots, a helmet, and a saber).

Among his business positions (for which he favored the less flamboyant uniform of a dark suit over a white shirt and tie), Giulio was a representative to the administration of the Propaganda Fide, then the Church’s missionary arm; a member of the boards of both the railway Ferrovie del Sud-Est and the Pacelli-founded Banco di Roma;

president of the Swiss arm of that bank;

vice president of an Italian gas company;

papal envoy to Costa Rica;

and an executive committee member of Gherardo Casini Editore (the house that, incidentally, published the Italian version of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics in 1951).

And for a time he was the president of a company on whose board he served for more than a decade: Istituto Farmacologico Serono.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

On December 8, 1953, Pius XII celebrated a new pontifical initiative: the opening of the Church’s inaugural Marian Year, aimed to “revive Catholic Faith and earnest devotion to the Mother of God” that the observant might “conform their lives to the image of the same Virgin.”

The day was a triumph, but a few weeks later Pius XII suffered a debilitating attack of hiccups, vomiting, and nausea, for which he sought treatment from one Paul Niehans. (The Swiss surgeon and former Protestant minister practiced a controversial “rejuvenation treatment.”

At the Clinique La Prairie on Lake Geneva, he injected the buttocks of his famous patients—rumored to include King George VI, Hedda Hopper, and Somerset Maugham—with the cells of fetal lambs and calves, delivered via cesarean section from the bodies of their freshly slaughtered mothers. For the pope, he made house calls.)

By the power of God, Niehans’s ministrations, or pure luck, Pius XII recovered, only for his illness to fell him again in late 1954.

His doctors and nephews arrived at his bedside, believing the end was near.

But a week later the pope was asking for an egg. “Tell him he can have not only one egg, but two,” Time reported a gastrointestinal specialist telling his personal physician, “and have them flipped with Marsala, if he agrees.”

Conception, immaculate and otherwise, was much on Pius XII’s mind in the final years of his life.

The Second World Congress on Fertility and Sterility—for which Lunenfeld’s own Professor de Watteville was one of 12 committee members—convened in Naples on May 18, 1956, for a nine-day summit: some 180 paper presentations, excursions to Amalfi and Pompeii, parties and fashion shows “to entertain the ladies,” and a special pilgrimage to Rome for an address from the pope.

“It is entirely true that your zeal to pursue research on marital infertility and the means to overcome it,” Pius XII told his listeners, as translated from the original Latin by Ronald L. Conte Jr., “engages high spiritual and ethical values, which should be taken into account.” He also said, “As regards artificial fertilization, not only is there need to be extremely reserved, but it must be absolutely excluded.”

A year later, Lunenfeld sat with Giulio Pacelli and Piero Donini, musing over the design needs of the special toilets they planned to install in the convent.

They settled on a teardrop-shaped container akin to a small trash can, lined with a plastic bag.

Throughout 1958, elderly nuns hiked up their habits, crouched over the containers, and voided their bladders.

Serono employees collected the bags of urine and transported them to the Rome laboratory at Via Casilina, where technicians emptied them into metal tanks for processing.

(During a 1930s Netherlands-based urine collection program, the people tasked with picking up donations were called pissmannekes, or “small piss men.”)

By 1959, Serono had harvested enough hMG to begin trials on infertile women.

Lunenfeld, back in Israel, where he was working as a visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, wanted to treat his own hypothalamic amenorrheic patients with the drug, hoping to induce ovulation.

The head of the hospital instructed Lunenfeld to inject himself with the substance.

If he didn’t sustain any major side effects, they’d go forward with treatment.

Lunenfeld wasn’t particularly worried about what it might do to his own reproductive health.

For one thing, he says, “I already had a son.”

After the first injection, which an intern administered, Lunenfeld ran a high temperature, an effect of protein buildup in the solution.

He and Donini increased purification methods and Lunenfeld continued to test and burn.

On the fifth attempt, they were in the clear.

Lunenfeld never patented his findings, which could have made him a very rich man.

He says his greatest compensation was the ability to bring the research material and lab equipment to Israel, a “gift” from Serono.

For a short time there, he ran a urine collection program at local elderly care centers, where postmenopausal Israeli women occupied themselves by making baby clothes for the future children their urine would, ideally, help conceive.

In 1962, the first previously amenorrheic, infertile woman treated with hMG gave birth to a healthy baby.

Two more women became pregnant, though they later miscarried.

Still, this was an enormous success, and the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (today worth $16 billion), working in conjunction with Serono, registered the compound as Pergonal.

That year Lunenfeld became the head of the Institute of Endocrinology at Tel-Hashomer Hospital, now called Sheba Medical Center.

Under his direction, the program grew exponentially, and the institution became a World Health Organization international reference center for fertility-promoting drugs.

One former research assistant, Danny Lieberman, who performed data science in Lunenfeld’s lab in the mid-1970s, describes him as “a paper machine” whose 20-person team published something like 100 research papers in a single year—the entire physics department, by contrast, might produce five.

But what particularly distinguished Lunenfeld, Lieberman remembers, was his broad, inquisitive interest in how science functioned within real human lives.

He once happened upon the nonobservant Lunenfeld, kippah on head, poring over the Torah.

Lunenfeld had been attending weekly study sessions with a rabbi in the hopes that he might learn how to better treat the some 20 percent of his patients who observed the Halakhah, which places constraints on sexual relations according to monthly menstrual cycles.

“I am sad about the suicide which Israel is committing,” Lunenfeld says today.

During his conscription in the Israeli army, he served under Yitzhak Rabin, who would first become prime minister in 1974.

The two remained friends.

When a far-right extremist who opposed Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords assassinated the prime minister following what was widely seen as a peace rally, “for me, this was the end of Israel,” Lunenfeld says. “It was not what I fought for.”

The United States granted Lunenfeld a green card in 2001, and for much of the year he resides in Florida, returning to Tel Aviv to visit his children and grandchildren who still live there.

His eldest son, Eitan, is the head of the IVF unit at the teaching hospital for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The Lunenfelds are part of a long lineage of fertility specialists in Israel, where the birth rate remains substantially higher than that of other industrialized countries.

Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (2023), by Israel-born Tamar Novick, a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin, traces a decades-long Judeo-Christian effort to promote fruitfulness in an unfamiliar climate—from Alsatian Christian missionary beekeepers, to dairy farmers during the British mandate, to Israeli scientists, including Lunenfeld—alongside the ways in which the knowledge and practices of the Palestinian people shaped European governance and settlement in the region.

Novick has a fascination with the science of excrement, plus a wry sense of humor; “Taking the Piss” and “Deep Shit” are the titles of two recent presentations.

Her current project is entitled Fountain of Knowledge: How Science Turned Urine Into Gold.

In Milk and Honey, Novick writes that with the Industrial Revolution, “technology did not replace religion as a colonial device but instead was blended with aspirations to salvage the land,” becoming “crucial for seizing control over lands and people.”

Religion, science, and politics intertwined. “Reproduction is such a fertile ground to think about this merging,” she tells me. “Those three elements are always at play.”

DEATH AND TAXES

During the fall of 1958, a depleted Pius XII retired to the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy See’s 135-acre summer palace situated high in the hills above Lake Albano, just southeast of Rome.

In the palace courtyard, uniformed schoolchildren gathered to pray, and a knot of reporters set upon the few figures allowed in and out of the residence.

On October 9, while lying in his single brass-frame bed, Pius took his final breaths.

“A small crowd of people was present in the Pope’s bedroom when he died,” reported The Catholic Standard and Times the next day. Among them were princes Carlo, Marcantonio, and Giulio.

The death of a pope is always an upheaval, but in recent decades perhaps for none more personally than the three nephews, who learned firsthand the mortality of blood ties.

Within months, according to one of several articles published by Der Spiegel that year regarding Vatican finances, the commander of the Noble Guard suggested that the Pacelli brothers take a hiatus from their duties within the unit, and the boards of multiple companies requested their resignations.

While abrupt, this was merely the apotheosis of public frustration that had been long brewing around the financial advantages afforded the three men through their relationship to the pope.

And Giulio Pacelli was at the center of the ire, which dated back to his 1946 appointment as papal envoy and plenipotentiary minister of Costa Rica.

The following year, the government had taken aim at tax evasion with an article in the Italian Constitution of 1947 decreeing that “all shall contribute to public expenditure in accordance with their means.”

Pacelli, an Italian citizen, nonetheless hoped to make use of a technicality that exempted diplomatic representatives of foreign powers living in Italy from the tax.

Members of the Vatican State Secretariat obligingly agreed.

The Italian government did not.

For nearly a decade Rome and the Vatican argued the issue, during which time Pacelli’s fortune grew.

In 1955, the Christian Democratic Party minister of finance broke with precedent and popular opinion, officially granting Pacelli immunity.

But by the spring of 1958 (as the nuns diligently urinated), political parties had begun wielding the issue as anticlerical ammunition: “The Pope’s Nephews Don’t Pay Their Taxes” read the headline of L’Espresso, a left-wing weekly.

Later that summer, the same magazine published a list of 11 Catholic laymen who managed the substantial spending power of the Vatican, which included the three Pacellis.

Together, the brothers held positions on some 50 supervisory boards, and their personal combined net worth had dilated to an estimated 18 billion lire, 10 billion of which Giulio held primarily in foreign investments—the equivalent of about $170 million today.

To many, Pius XII’s death marked the beginning of a shift at the Vatican. His successor, John XXIII, convened the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II, which made a crack in the inscrutability of the Church (and coincided with a mass exodus of women religious).

According to Der Spiegel, after learning that certain banks and industrial plants had made overtures to some of his family members in Northern Italy, he forbade his rural relatives from accepting supervisory board positions during his tenure—in response, perhaps, to the complications caused by the Pacelli brothers.

Vatican II heralded larger financial changes.

Back in 1942, Pius XII had created the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or IOR, to serve as the Vatican’s financial stronghold—the profits of which, under the Lateran Treaty, were exempt from Italian taxation.

A decade later, according to Lunenfeld, the Vatican acquired a 25 percent stake in Istituto Farmacologico Serono.

In 1968, Italy’s parliament voted to resume taxing dividends on stocks held by the Vatican.

Consequently, the Vatican decided it would be prudent to relieve itself of some of its major investments.

The IOR turned to Michele Sindona, a financier with ties to both Hollywood and the Mob, who for years had been insinuating himself into Vatican financial affairs, acquiring banks and holding companies in which the IOR retained significant stakes.

The IOR sloughed Serono off to Sindona as well. By 1971 it still held at least a 3 percent stake in the pharmaceutical company, but that year, Italy approved the marketing of contraceptive pills, and certain church-versus-science discrepancies became too obvious to ignore:

While Serono had been producing a contraceptive called Luteolas for some years, because the pill was illegal, they had billed it as a treatment for “gynecological disorders.”

When the pill went public, according to Der Spiegel, Giulio Pacelli finally resigned as president of the Serono board, citing the Vatican’s firm stance against birth control.

Fabio Bertarelli, who had taken over from his father as CEO of Serono, had been fighting to secure ownership of the company for decades.

As the Italian government issued warrants for Sindona’s arrest in 1974 on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy, the financier fled the country and Bertarelli scooped up his Serono shares, gaining a majority stake in the company.

(After allegedly ordering a Mafia hit on the bankruptcy lawyer tasked with liquidating one of his collapsed banks, Sindona died from cyanide poisoning in an Italian prison.)

By 1990, the company was supplying half the world’s fertility drugs, and Bertarelli was worth $1.5 billion. Upon Fabio’s death in 1996, control of the company moved to his son Ernesto who, four years later, listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and in 2007 sold the family’s majority stake to Merck for $13.3 billion. Later that year he commissioned a 318-foot superyacht, the Vava II.

THE FANTASTIC DRUG

In the beginning, Pergonal did its job too well. A 1965 issue of Life described it as “the fantastic drug that creates quintuplets,” as women in California, New York, and Sweden gave birth to sets of many babies.

Urine collectors recruited donors through door-knocking campaigns and made daily drop-offs to plants in Umbria and Benevento; from there, refrigerated trucks transported frozen hormone adsorbate to Rome.

Soon Serono added collection centers in Argentina, the Netherlands, and Spain to the ones in Israel and Italy, with 600 women contributing, which could produce 40,000 ampoules per year—then enough to treat the worldwide population of hypopituitary-hypogonadotropic amenorrheic women.

The introduction of IVF—for which multiple mature eggs are ideal—and new protocols prescribing hMG to patients with tubal factor infertility increased demand.

By 1985, 2,000 women in the US were prescribed the drug. Soon patients worldwide required 30 million liters of urine; when hMG became part of a protocol in male factor infertility, the number ballooned to 70 million.

(Lunenfeld turned his own research to male infertility and founded the International Society for the Study of the Aging Male in 1997.)

In 1995, despite twice-daily pickups from 100,000 urine donors, a shortage of Pergonal caused panicked patients to hoard prescriptions. “I feel like an addict,” one woman told The New York Times.

Eleven years later, Serono phased out Pergonal (focusing instead on another fertility product, Gonal-f, made from hamster ovary cells) and Ferring released Menopur.

Citing proprietary information, a Ferring spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions (including where urine is collected, and whether donors are compensated), and sent a statement which read, in part, “Ferring believes that everyone has the right to build a family and to choose their own path to parenthood. We recognize and work to address diverse family building needs and fertility journeys, including for the LGBTQ+ and ‘single parent by choice’ communities who use in vitro fertilization to start or grow their families.”

(The website of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Institut Biochimique SA, which produces a similar menotropin, Meriofert, is more transparent about its sourcing: “Every day the urine of pregnant or post-menopausal donors is collected in rural Chinese villages.”

A representative for IBSA declined to provide information on donor compensation, stating that “IBSA decides to cover product topics only in scientific journals.”)

In February, Pope Francis, who last year reaffirmed the Vatican’s anti-IVF stance, addressed the general assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a papal-appointed body responsible for developing Catholic teachings and positions on such topics as abortion, artificial intelligence, and IVF. “For those committed to a serious and evangelical renewal of thought,” Francis said, “it is essential to call into question even settled opinions and assumptions that have not been critically examined.”

(A few weeks later Tim Kaine, who is Catholic, brought to the State of the Union, as his guest, Elizabeth Carr—America’s first IVF baby, courtesy of Pergonal.)

While the pope made his address, Lunenfeld and his wife were in the middle of a vacation to celebrate his 97th birthday, beginning with a cruise from Fiji around New Zealand and Australia.

From there he continued to Singapore, where he reunited with old colleagues, including three of Serono’s former Singapore-based representatives.

At one point during our conversations, I ask him about his own relationship to religion.

“This is very strange,” he says, “very strange.”

He has a hard time defining it. His wife, who’s agnostic, calls him religious.

He doesn’t keep kosher, but he prays every morning.

“I believe in God because so many things, good things, happened to me. Thinking of the Kindertransport, something must have helped me, somewhere,” he says. “This is something which is troubling me a lot to understand—and there’s no way to understand.” No small thing for someone whose life’s work has been tracking down answers.

“Everything was miracles.”

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