27. Luna
Wolf waits outside the door while I use the facilities and wash my hands. I look up at my reflection in the mirror, shaking droplets from my fingers into the basin, and reach up to sweep a few stray black hairs away from my face.
I hear Wolf’s laugh beyond the door, this deep, gravelly sound that sets my core alight, and has one corner of my mouth lifting with a secret smile. I pull open the door, his broad back to me, shielding me from whichever brother it is he’s speaking to, but he turns as soon as he senses the door opening. Twisting towards me with a dark, but bright smile, he takes me into his arms, pressing a kiss to my head.
“Vito,” Wolf starts, turning us back to a man who is definitely not one of his brothers, “this is my Luna.”
Suddenly, everything seems to happen in both fast and slow motion all at once.
The man’s smile drops, morphing into shock, then a sharp, violent frown. His icy-blue eyes flare wide, and before I can blink, he’s pulling a gun and aiming it at Wolf’s chest.
I think it’s my cry that startles us all, prompting the sudden sound of footfalls to come flooding into the hall. I’m in front of Wolf, despite his grunt, the harsh grip of his hand on the back of my neck, but my arms wind behind me, banding around his back, my fingers locking together, and the barrel of the gun is pointing in my face.
“You have three seconds to explain to me what the fuck is going on, Wolf.”
“What the fuck do you mean?!” Wolf explodes at my back.
“Luna,” Vito says, an accent curling my name, extenuating it with an oon sound in its centre.
The man, Vito, grabs hold of me and violently shoves me behind him, holding me painfully flush with his spine as I turn my head to find Stryder and Thorne in the mouth of the hall.
I’m trembling, my eyes wide, locked on Wolf’s brother and father, my still taped fingers fisting up beneath my chin. I can feel my tears soaking into the fabric of the stranger’s shirt, staining it with streaks of mascara. My knees wobble in time with my bottom lip and my breathing is too fast, uneven, my eyes bulging.
Lemon and rose fills my nose as I try to take deeper, even breaths, to slow my racing heart and to kill my panic. But the men are shouting, and I can’t make out anything at all, peering around Vito’s body, to stare at my Wolf with a gun in his face.
“Wolf!” I cry out, “Wolf!” I scream it this time, an earth shattering sound that has my throat cracking and aching as I repeat it in the same panicked tone again and again. “Wolf!” I struggle against the man’s grip over my back, his fingers digging divots into my spine. “Wolf!” I yank myself out of his hold, stumbling backwards straight into the wall.
The back of my head smacks into the wall, silencing my panic, and I slide down the textured wallpaper as I slump to the ground.
There’s a body sprawled out on a trolley, blood a dark crimson blooming across his chest. There are shouts, orders, instructions, the cloak of death is curling around my shoulders, a cold cape of finality as I stare at the man I can’t fully see. Doctors and nurses a closed circle around him. His brothers watch on from the hall and I’m leaving the room to speak to them. One of them shouts, another scowls, the other, he is cold and kind and calm, all of them covered in blood. I take them into a separate room, and when I go back to the man, death has moved on, and he is breathing once again.
There’s salt in the air, the breeze is too strong to be called as such, it’s a wind, but it’s warm, blowing my hair across my face like little lashes whipping my cheeks. The boy is not much older than me, but we have the same eyes and the same black hair. He passes me a rainbow pinwheel, and then takes my hand in his, stretching it out until our elbows are straight and the wind is whipping it around and around with a trilling sound that makes me bubble with laughter.
A warm hand comes over my shoulder, long fingers curling over the top of my chest. I tilt my head back, a bright smile on my mouth that makes my cheeks ache. But it only grows as I lean further back, tilting my chin with a laugh bursting free of my lips as the young woman beams down at me. Long black hair flapping across her face, her blue eyes like mine, but not quite the same, she smiles, and my chest grows as warm as my skin under the sun’s rays.
“Ti amo, dolce ragazza.”
The corner is dark, cloaked in shadows where I hide. My hand smothering my nose and mouth to hide the noise of my panicked rasps of breath. The smell of my skin makes me gag, my throat tightening and constricting until I have to retch into the cup of my palm. Cigars scent my skin, coating me in the rough, sweet aroma of him.
I ran, but I shouldn’t have.
He’s going to make me regret it.
Unafraid.
I let him take what he wants from me. Only touching my behind, never anything else.
If I’m good, it doesn’t hurt as much.
If I’m still, he doesn’t curl his fingers inside me, ensuring that I bleed.
If I bleed, it’s worse.
My lips are bitten dry, but my eyes are drier.
I don’t cry anymore.
Not for him.
Not for me.
I think of the blue eyes I don’t understand and close my own.