Chapter 54 Bella
BELLA
The heart monitor beeps in a rhythm I've memorized better than my own pulse.
For three days, I’ve sat in this chair, watching the slow rise and fall of Slava Romanov's chest like it's the only channel left on television and the remote is missing.
Lydia brought me a change of clothing on day two, and I've been cycling between the same two outfits like a capsule wardrobe influencer with a very niche aesthetic: hospital girlfriend chic.
Slava is alive.
But he hasn’t woken up.
The bullet missed anything critical by the kind of margin that makes surgeons use words like lucky and remarkable and makes me want to throw up because there is nothing lucky about the man you love getting shot.
The doctors have told me three times—because I made them repeat it until I can almost believe them—that he will make a full recovery, but I still won’t leave his side. Not until he wakes up and looks at me with those winter-gray eyes that I can’t lose.
My fingers rest on his chest. I can feel his steady heartbeat moving under my palm. The bandage at his left side is a new landmark added to the countless scars already dotting his body.
A story written into his skin in a language that only the two of us will ever read.
I stroke his dirty blond hair. Even now, it’s swept back, because Slava Romanov does not do disheveled.
For three days, I replay the final moment of his consciousness over and over on loop in my head.
He loves me.
He told me he loves me on a blood-soaked street in New York City, with his life leaking out between my fingers and his eyes going soft in a way I'd never seen them go soft before. And then he said good when I said it back before his eyes shut.
I touch his jaw with my fingertip, stroke the sharp cheekbones with my thumb, and press a quick kiss on the small scar bisecting his chin.
His lips part slightly from the touch, and I swear I can hear them taking shape to say malyshka in a voice that can melt steel.
The world outside this room has been busy for the last three days.
Nico is the Don of the D’Ambrosio Family now and he’s been quickly but efficiently ending the war with Slava before it spirals out of control. Alik negotiated on behalf of Slava with him, and less than forty-eight hours after Don Leo’s death, the guns fell silent.
Anthony is also safe.
He's staying at Slava's penthouse, and according to Lydia, he and Alessandro have already become best friends, with passionate arguments about whether T-Rex or Spinosaurus would win in a fight.
Once the war and the children were settled, Alik came by, stood in this hospital room doorway with his massive arms crossed and his face arranged in something that, on a normal person, might be recognized as discomfort.
He grunted something at me and it’d taken me almost a full five seconds to realize it was an apology.
And when I accepted his apology, he grunted again, and left.
I look at Slava's face. The bruising has faded from deep purple to a yellowish green that looks terrible but means he’s alive and healing.
My hand rests on his chest and I think about how I once walked into his office all those months ago with a fake last name and a revenge plan, and I barely recognize myself.
I had been so certain of my hate for him. I treated every interaction like a chess move, carried every smile as a loaded weapon, and used every moment of proximity to extract the maximum damage while looking for a way to hurt this man that I decided was a monster.
But the monster I built in my head was never real. If he was, he wouldn’t have stood on a balcony and dared me to kiss him and then walked away shattering when I did. He wouldn’t have carried me home in his arms after thugs tied me to a chair and put a gun in my mouth.
He wouldn’t have dove into the water to save me from drowning. He wouldn’t have warmed me up in front of a fire as hypothermia threatened to take me away from him.
And he most certainly wouldn’t have chosen to save my nephew before coming for me—because he knew that's what I would've wanted.
Because he understood me that completely.
The monster I built in my head wouldn’t ever love me.
I stroke his hair one more time. His eyelids flutter for a moment, and then open—slowly at first, like someone surfacing from deep water. When they open, those familiar gray eyes are unfocused and hazy.
Then they find me and I watch recognition flicker across his face like watching a sunrise in real time.
"Hey." My voice cracks on that single sound.
“How long?" His voice is rough and deep, in that unhurried register that I have been aching to hear.
"Three days."
He processes this. Blinks. I can see him cataloguing—the hospital room, the IV, the bandages, the beeping monitor, me. His eyes settle on me and stay there.
I lean down and kiss him.
It's long and tender and I pour every sleepless hour of the last three days into it, every terror and every relief and every moment of sitting in that godawful chair watching his chest rise and fall, waiting for him to come back to me.
When I pull back, there's a tiny smear of lipstick at the corner of his mouth, and I reach up to wipe it away.
"Do you always kiss me like that after I wake up from a shooting, Ms. Farnassi?"
The smile breaks across my face before I can stop it. He's been conscious for thirty seconds and he's already doing this—the low voice, the formal address, the raised eyebrow, and the whole insufferable package.
"Only when you get involved in a shootout like that,” I tell him. “And create a full-blown PR nightmare that'll take me weeks to put down, Mr. Romanov."
He smiles. “Still trying to make me look like a respectable businessman."
"That's what you pay me for."
His mouth curves. That dangerous, slow half-smile that I used to find infuriating and now find irresistible for entirely different reasons. Then the smile softens into something quieter.
Something real.
"Thank you," he says.
"For what?"
He's silent for a moment. His gray eyes search mine, and I watch him assemble the words with the careful precision of a man who does not say things he doesn't mean.
"For letting me believe I can love again." His voice is low. "For letting me let go of the vengeance. For staying."
My throat tightens. The bruises on my neck—Don Leo's fingerprints—are still visible, still fresh, and yellowing at the edges but not yet gone.
"Where else would I go?" I whisper.
He takes my chin in his hand. Warm callouses hold me softly for a moment. Then, he pulls me close and kisses me.
It’s not his hungry kiss that drains the air from my lungs, but it leaves me breathless all the same.
When we part, he looks into my eyes, holding my gaze until the entire hospital room dissolves and there is nothing in the world except the space between us.
"I love you, Bella Farnassi."
"I love you too," I say.
I kiss him again. And again. And somewhere between the second and third kiss, my mouth finds his ear.
"Don't you want to know what's on the schedule for tonight?" I murmur against his skin. "When we go home?"
His hand tightens on my waist. "Tell me."
"I want you to put me on my hands and knees."
His breathing changes. I can feel it—the shift from steady to shallow, the chest under my palm expanding faster.
"I want your fist in my hair."
His fingers flex against my hip. The heart monitor picks up speed, and somewhere a nurse is probably wondering why his vitals just spiked.
"I want your cock all the way down my throat while you call me good girl."
The sound he makes—low, rough, somewhere between a groan and a growl—sends heat dripping through my center.
My hand slides down the sheet and finds him already hard.
The warm, silky skin pulses between my fingers as I wrap around him, and he twitches in my grip—thick and insistent and very, very awake.
“And I don’t want to fucking wait.”
"Then don’t," he says. "If you don’t want to wait, then be a good girl, Ms. Farnassi, and open your pretty little mouth."
I give him a look, and then start kissing my way down his body.
My lips move along his jaw, past the column of his throat, and down the hard muscles of his chest. My tongue carefully laves each ridge of muscle on his torso, careful to avoid the bandages, and memorizes the familiar topography of scars and muscle and warm inked skin.
His stomach tenses under my mouth. I pull the sheet lower and lower.
Then, his cock slides past my lips, heavy and thick with the taste of masculine salt. His heady musk fills my lungs with each breath, and my mouth opens further to take him down, down, down until my eyes water and roll back into my head.
His hand finds my hair. Not a fist—not yet, that's for tonight—but his fingers thread through the dark strands and hold, and the sound that comes out of him is the sweetest thing I've ever heard from him.
I take my time taking him apart with my mouth the way he's taken me apart with his—systematically, thoroughly, with the focused devotion of someone who has spent months learning exactly what makes him tick and unravel.
"Good girl." His voice strains until it breaks into something raw and desperate with each slow drag of my tongue, my lips, and the hollowing pressure of my cheeks. "Fuck—good girl."
He comes with my name on his lips and his hand in my hair and his entire body shuddering like something breaking free. I suck out every last drop from him as his balls empty, and swallow every last drop—hot and thick and so uniquely him—until there is nothing left.
I lick my lips clean, and then I lean up to press a final kiss against his mouth and let him taste himself on my lips, whispering. “Whose good girl am I?”
"Mine." His voice is raw, sated, and spent. “Always fucking mine.”
“Good.”
My fingers trace the edge of his bandage, checking that we haven't reopened anything. His hands move through my hair, and I lean into the touch.
"One more thing," Slava whispers against my hair. "We’ll need to update your paperwork."
I look up at him. "My paperwork?"
"Bella Creminelli doesn't exist." He cups my face, tilting it up toward his. "Not anymore."
My heart is already climbing toward my throat.
"What do you mean?" I can feel it coming, the way you feel a wave building before it arrives.
His thumb traces along my jaw, and his winter-gray eyes shimmer.
"Because when we leave," he says. "I want to make you Bella Romanov."
There’s no ring, and he can’t get down on one knee.
He's not asking for my hand. He's stating his intention to give me his name. Because that’s who he is and what he does.
Because both he and I have known that this was the inevitable conclusion the first time he ever called me by the fake name of Ms. Creminelli.
That name has served its purpose, and now like the hate I once held for him, it starts to dissolve around us.
And in its place is Romanov. He’ll give me his name, he’ll give me his world, and I know he’ll give me his life.
"Yes."
It’s the simplest word I can say, and yet it carries the full weight of everything in the world.
A smile breaks across his handsome face. He kisses me and I kiss him back, while my new name settles in my heart like coming home.
Bella Romanov.
I think I'm going to like the sound of that.