25. Contessa
25
Contessa
My heart beats in my mouth. He can’t do this. Not here. Not now. Chaos ripples through the scattering crowd.
Someone tries to grab me by the wrist. I don’t know if it’s a friend or foe. In a place like this, the shadows all feel like one and the same. I pull away, trying to keep a distance from James and my uncle, desperate to get to Salvatore before he can ruin the tentative progress that I’ve made here. Salvatore’s name is locked in my throat, perched just under my tongue. I know better than to scream for him, no matter how much I want to.
My eyes struggle to adjust to the sudden darkness. Phone lights come on, sending beams of white light across the walls and floors. Silhouettes spill toward the exits. I should be with everyone else making a break for it. If there was ever an opportunity, this is it. My one chance to get out of all this, the thin hope I’ve been hungering for day and night.
I don’t take it.
My heels snap against the polished floors, feet flying toward the sound of the gunshots.
The armed men from the balcony break into the corridor with me, like dogs baying for blood. I am reduced to a single dress in a sea of suits following the sound of trouble. The mob runs up against a locked door, moving to the next one—
Suddenly, I am ripped backwards. Someone drags me, kicking and thrashing, into the pitch-black ballroom, dragged by the waist and my hair. I am slung onto the floor.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” James snarls. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? You’re no fucking use to me dead! You’re going to ruin everything! That stupid stunt you just pulled, most people would get shot for something like that! Are you trying to set our inheritance on fire—”
I kick out from under him and try to run, but he grabs me again. His hand snaps across my face, sending me staggering.
“You better hope your father sells you off to me, because if he doesn’t, the only use he’s going to have for you is in a fucking grave. Do you hear me? You traitorous little bitch—”
Another gunshot. A different part of the building this time. I crane my head, looking out into the dark, desperate to see what’s happening. Panicked voices rise. People are spilling back into the ballroom—herded like sheep.
James hastily pulls me up, dragging me dazed but resisting toward the staircase that we entered from.
The lights blast back on, searing, blinding me with the sudden intensity of them. We freeze in place. Disjointed music skips along the track as the classical recording starts back up, filling the air over the sounds of shouting and confused cries.
Suddenly, I see what everyone is circling, explaining the hushed and terrified silence of the crowd—Marcel has appeared in the middle of the family, holding a pistol to Donny Lovera’s skull.
Salvatore’s men filter into the room, each of them with their own hostage. Some have been plucked from the crowd, but Dario is there too, in Leo’s clutches. The prisoners look a little better than they did when I last saw them—were it not for the cold steel kissing their temples.
Donny’s wife sprawls at his feet, begging and screaming for Marcel not to kill him.
Marcel veers around until his eyes finally land on me. He glances up, over my shoulder.
Footsteps on the stairs make me turn.
Salvatore descends the steps. The family sweeps back like a wave, until only James and I are standing at the bottom of the steps. There must be a dozen armed men in the room, but Salvatore’s eyes are only on me. My body lurches almost against my own willpower, jerking toward him as if drawn by some unseen force—magnetism, or the pull of the tides. A natural, instinctual gravity trying to bring me to him again. James tries to pull me back, the grip of his hand leaving white imprints on my skin, but I still rip free from him.
“Tessa!” James snarls, making a lunge for me. He misses.
I rush to Salvatore. I’m desperate to be between him and every person in this room who wants to kill him. Before I can get my arms around him, he sweeps me into a slow, close waltz, drawing me across the ballroom. We drift together to the music, a moving target, my body pressed to his as he spins me through the numb, frozen crowd.
“I told you,” Sal says against my ear, his voice ragged. “I told you that you’d never get away from me. That I would run you down to the ends of the earth.”
It feels so right to be back in his arms, and yet so, so wrong for him to be here. “Sal, don’t hurt them,” I say immediately. “Please don’t hurt them—I could be so close to fixing all of this. Please, just trust me—”
“Trust you?” he cuts across.
Only this close can I see the terrible darkness in Sal’s look, his face hollowed. I don’t know why. I thought he would be happy to see me, but he only looks murderous. He leans nearer, my stomach clenching tight.
Our foreheads touch, bringing us together, as though we are the only two in the room. “I don’t repeat mistakes,” he whispers against my lips. “Did you tell them how you begged me to fuck you? Did you tell them how easily you spread your legs for me?”
“What are you talking about—”
“It’s too late to play innocent now, Contessa. Not with me, and not with them.”
“No, that’s not—I’m not playing at anything.”
My words falter. Is this somehow part of his plan? Am I supposed to play along? I can’t read him, and I can’t break away from him. I’m terrified that if I step too far, someone will feel brave or panicked enough to try and shoot him. Right now, we are a clumsy target, no clean shot.
“Sure you are. Just like you played me, just long enough until I dropped my guard with you,” he says, the words like venom in his mouth. Like I’ve poisoned him. “I should have known better.”
The words throw me out of the tempo, my feet stumbling over themselves. I’m indignant as he goes on about how I’ve betrayed him .
“You’re the one who left! I got pulled out of that house in the middle of the night,” I say, now meeting him step for step, word for word. “I didn’t play you, Noctus played us . And he sold me right back here, right back into this mess—”
Salvatore’s dismisses me, looking over my shoulder at our mortified onlookers.
“Noctus was with us.”
“All night? You had eyes on him every hour?”
He doesn’t answer me. His stubborn silence digs under my skin.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” I seethe, “When someone leaves you. When you think they don’t care enough to stay, even when you might never see them again. Why would I be the one to leave, Sal, when all I did was beg you to stay with me?”
“We found the shoe you lost on the way over the wall,” he says, so coldly matter-of-fact.
“Should we play Cinderella? See if it fits?”
“Noctus told me you were hurt,” I interrupt, ignoring his taunting, desperate for him to hear the truth. “He said you needed me, and I believed him. He put me in the back of a car; I never went near the wall!”
I can see it in his eyes—there’s some part of him that wants to believe me so badly, but I don’t know how to convince the rest of him. He has to understand. He has to. I can’t have him right in front of me and lose him like this. Donny’s wife’s sobs grow more hysterical by the minute, filling the sudden silence that sweeps in between us.
“You’ll say anything to save them,” he says, so sure of himself. “Anything to take the path of least resistance. Spill the least amount of blood. Do you know how pathetic it is,” he asks, “that I know that, and I still want to believe you? What the hell did you do to me to make me like this—”
My hands slam into his chest, forcing us apart.
“I loved you.”
The words stop Salvatore in his tracks. The cold haze in his eyes has lifted like a fog as he stares at me. Only me. He does not see it when James slides up behind him with a pistol. My eyes give it away before I can even gasp. Salvatore reacts whip-sharp, like muscle memory. He grabs James’s arm over his shoulder, snapping the bone in one clean motion, faster than I can see. I stumble away from the sudden brawl.
A shot goes off. They both lose their hold on the gun, and it skitters across the ground.
Salvatore rips James over his shoulder by his broken arm, like he weighs nothing. The smaller man lands hard, the breath knocked out of him, his arm twisted at a sickening angle through his rumpled suit.
Life or death, both men reach, single-minded, for the lost gun—
They find it already in my hands.
An unspeakable power surges through me as I stare at them. For the first time in months, I am the only one holding the key to my future.
I walk up to them as if possessed.
I take aim. In a moment of blinding clarity and simple, cold resolve, I lift the gun and pull the trigger.
I don’t feel the shot. I don’t hear it.
I only see James slump, all the fight going out of him, his mouth open and eyes empty.
Salvatore’s fingers slowly unflex, dropping the dead man to the ground.
I stare down at the warm corpse.
I study him, though it is more to see a part of myself dying, bleeding out on the floor. I begged James to be my first, once. I never thought it would be this first.
My hands are numb, blood rushing like the crash of the ocean in my head. I feel the bewilderment in Salvatore’s dark stare. It burns me up a little. The path of least resistance my ass.
“You and my father both,” I say, softly, “you both think I could never do the things you do, when all I ever asked for was a reason.”
He’s staring at me as though he’s never seen me before as we come face to face again.
His silence burns. I can see him wrestling with the truth, even as it spills out red across the floor. This is for him . On instinct, I look him over. He wasn’t hit.
He reaches out and scrubs his thumb against my lip. It comes way bloody. The dull pain from James’s strike throbs under my skin, forgotten in the chaos. I pull his hand away. There are lives hanging in the balance, and a dead man bleeding on a polished floor. The danger is still all around us, and I have no time to untangle the mess of emotions I hold for this man.
“I thought…” he begins.
“You already told me what you think about me. Right or wrong, you were very clear about that.
Now deal with this,” I demand, gesturing toward my family, the hostages sweating and sobbing in the clutches of his men.
“Contessa, I didn’t—”
“Fix it, Salvatore .”
He grimaces, jaw shifting as I cut him off. I still have the gun, and he glances at it, as if questioning if I’m threatening him. I feel the terrified eyes of my family on me. Half of them probably want me to pull the trigger; the other half, terrified that I might, and plunge us all into worse danger.
“I don’t need this to get my way,” I scoff. I offer it to him as it’s utterly worthless.
A handful of people cry out as I give the gun back over to him, as though I’ve lost my mind. As if I’ve shot the wrong man, my so-called fiancé dead on the floor.
Someone demands to know whose side I’m on. A gradual outrage and panic is starting to swell, even with Marcel barking orders and threats, Donny sagging against his grip.
“Enough!” I yell over them. “James Serra knew this was a set up, and he and my father shoved all of you in here with me to be bait. That man was no ally to anyone in this room, and he wasn’t my fiancé.” My eyes drift to Salvatore instinctually, at the utterance of that word. Our eyes do not meet. “I want to get us all out of here alive. Please, just let me do that—”
I look to Salvatore again, demanding answers without a single word uttered between us.
“A trade,” he finally says. “You come with me, and I leave the hostages behind. You are our ticket out of here. I leave with you, or none of us make it out. Those are the stakes. All or nothing.”
My heart clenches. It should be such an easy choice. Go with Salvatore. Free the hostages. It would have been so perfect, so ideal—
“No,” I say, softly.
Even Salvatore looks surprised. When he came up with this plan, I’m sure he thought I would crawl at his feet, begging for their lives, so happy to trade up mine to save them. I know better now.
“I was kidnapped into wedlock by you. Sold off by Noctus. Bought back by my father.
I’ll be damned if I am shuffled around as a part of another deal. You should beg me to spare your life and come with you.”
For a long moment, we size each other up, Salvatore reading me as if looking for one of my tells, some kind of bluff. My heart flares at his look, the soft, knowing smirk and adoration in his eyes when he doesn’t find one. The way he looked at me that first night, as if he had never seen anything he wanted more.
“I won’t beg for my life, Tessa,” he says, “I made that deal with myself a long time ago.
But I’ll beg for you. On my knees, if that’s what it takes.”
“Why?” I ask, his devotion tearing me in two. “Why do all this, why take such a stupid gamble for someone you think is so worthless—”
“I don’t think that—” he tries.
“You said it yourself, Sal. Over and over. You think I’m some weak, pathetic thing—”
“No, Tessa—”
“ Daddy’s little —”
He pulls me into a sudden, searing kiss. His hand cups the small of my back, the other tightens in my hair. For once, he is not trying to overwhelm me with his touch and his proximity, he’s just desperate to stop me from saying those words, kissing them straight out of my mouth.
He clutches me to his chest and doesn’t let go, as if I might disappear from him again.
“Stop it,” he says, an order as much as it is a plea. “I should have never said it. God, I never meant it. I was the one who failed—the second I walked out that door and let all this happen. You were right. You asked me to stay, and I should have stayed. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry—”
I’m sorry. Two syllables that sound so unnatural on Salvatore’s lips, as if he really never has said them before and they have a bitter taste on the tongue.
He kneels. For a moment, I think he really is going to beg me on his hands and knees in front of everyone here—I never really expected him to be that desperate. Salvatore doesn’t seem like a man who bows easily. But he drops down to only one knee and takes the engagement ring from his pocket.
Every person in the room watches him intently, his every motion regarded with suspicion and judgment. So many unfriendly faces, witnessing their most dangerous enemy drop to his knees— for me .
“I was going to force this on your finger tonight like I could make you wear it,” he admits, “like I could make it mean something. You’re mine, Tessa. To me, you’ll always be mine.
That’s just who I am. It’s in me, and I can’t change that. But if you want me to beg—this is as close as I’ve ever gotten.”
I believe him. Salvatore has admitted to me he hates being out of control. It can’t be easy for him, putting himself in the humiliating spotlight like this.
“Give me a chance to make it right. To fix it. Having you back in that house, in that room—that’s not what I want. I could have you within arm’s reach, and still not have you back in the way I need.”
I feel what he means so keenly: I felt it most in that last full day we spent together. Such a grim, hard day, but one that let me look into a future where we were right for each, where we were the doses of each other’s medicine. I’ve thought back on it over and over since we’ve been apart. I wonder if he has, too.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life—even if that’s just the next five minutes—trying to get you back.
You said I wasn’t ready to accept this, and you were right. I didn’t know how to be loved, or what the hell I was supposed to do with it. But I know I won’t make that mistake again.”
I gaze down at him, finding it hard to breathe, as if he has slipped his hand between my ribs and taken my heart in a vice. I ache to forgive him. To collapse into his arms, kiss this all away, go right back to that moment before all this happened. I hold my ground against the urge, digging my feet in.
“…Is there a question in there somewhere, Salvatore?”
His eyes shift, hesitance hardening his expression. He smiles grimly.
“A room full of men who want to kill me, and I haven’t been nervous until this moment.”
I wait, refusing to rescue him from the moment. It goes against his instincts to ask .
“Will you be my wife, Tessa?”
I wonder what would happen if I said no.
“Considering the mess you’ve made of all this, everything you’ve done…”
Salvatore’s face hardens, bracing himself for the killing blow.
“I will. God knows it might take you fifty or sixty years to make this up to me…”
For the first time all evening, I see a glimpse of him— my Salvatore—somewhere in the relief behind his dark eyes. The ring slides back on my finger, where it belongs. My hand finally feels whole again.
“Then I better start now.”
He rises finally, and I pull him into a desperate kiss: a message for him and my family both. He clutches me to him. Though I would never know it by looking at him, I feel the despair in him, the tightness of his fingers and the tremble of his breath. The man has skirted so close to ruin.
When our lips finally part, I mutter, “You can start with the hostages.”
Salvatore obeys.
I see the mixed reactions in the faces of my family—the suspicion, the terror, the bitterness. I keep myself between him and the crowd.
“Everyone here has witnessed that I am going with Salvatore Mori voluntarily. If my father tries to send anyone to retrieve me, they are sending him to die. I beg you not to make that mistake again. Please inform my father that I am, in fact, still engaged, and thank him for the engagement party. It was very kind of him to host this on our behalf,” I say, stepping back to slide my arm through Salvatore’s.
Salvatore arranges it so that hostages will be walked down to the main level, though I negotiate that only Donny should have to walk. Dario is in a worse state, and I leave him with my family to take care of. It’s practical, kinder, and it will keep many of them busy as we leave.
“Wait,” someone calls out, desperate and brave, before we can make our exit. The room bristles a second time. “Where did the men go into the corridor? They left us, and they never came back. What did he do to them?”
I glance back toward the empty corridor I had tried to follow them through. They never did return.
“You’ll find your men locked in the fire stairs,” Salvatore says. “The shots were to draw them out, get them trapped. We didn’t hurt anything except their egos.”
Though I believe him, I know my family will not.
“How do you lock someone in a fire stairwell?” I ask.
“By having the keys,” Salvatore says. At my confused stare, he adds, as if it is the simplest truth in the world, “I bought the building.”
…Of course he did.
My eyes trail over the ballroom around us, the security cameras overhead, the doors that didn’t open—I give him a look. I don’t have to roll my eyes for him to know what it means, earning me that maddening signature smirk I have missed so much.
A car waits outside. Two men accompanying us to take Donny into their custody, and the exchange is smooth, if tense, guns pointed until the moment the car is speeding off into the city.
The silence rushes in. Marcel sits in the passenger’s seat. Salvatore and I are in the back of a car. I am dressed up, sprawled on his lap. We are going to his house. I feel as if I have been catapulted through time, landing right back here, right where it all started.
This time, when Salvatore kisses me in the back of the car, as if he is claiming a part of my soul, I kiss him back, and claim a part of his.