Chapter 16
Chapter Seventeen
Alessio
“Damian.” I smack his cheek several times as I stand at the passenger side door. He looks absolutely fucking terrible. His nearly naked body is covered in cuts, burns, blood and god knows what else.
“Come on, wake up,” I say as I shake his shoulders a few times. I don’t want to hurt him even more, but he needs to wake up.
I sigh and look around me for a moment. No one else is here.
We’re parked in a grassy spot behind the safe house that’s tucked into the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, about twenty-five miles from Tessari, near Sorrento.
He’s been knocked out the entire time, and I’m starting to get really worried about him.
“Damian…come on,” I say again as I look at him once more and brush my fingers down the side of his face. There are raw circular wounds along his jawline and cheek. “You’re too fucking big, I can’t carry you inside.”
His eyelids flutter and my heart leaps into my throat.
“Damian,” I say quickly and lean down closer to him. “We’re here. I can patch you up, but I need you to stand and walk on your own.”
I pat his face a few times and his eyes fully open.
“Alessio?” he asks, his voice rough and cracking.
“I’m here. Now get up, come on.” I grab his arm and start to pull him out of the car. His blood smears on my hands and I can feel some of the shallow open cuts on his arms squish and leak underneath them.
He huffs for air and then turns his torso, planting his feet on the ground.
“That’s it,” I praise him.
Damian shakes his head and opens his eyes more, seeming to become more aware of his surroundings.
“I got it,” he insists, but I continue to hold his arm as he stands up from the car. I removed his seat belt when I first opened the passenger side door.
“Don’t even try that,” I tell him snappily.
I pull the keys to the safe house out of my pocket and ignore the pain in my own body from tossing and tumbling with a few of those guards.
I was lucky in comparison to him and Rosalie…
and a few of the guards we left behind. Their bodies most likely being turned into nothingness by the fire.
If they are salvageable, Eivor’s men will make sure they’re not by the time we get to them.
I walk with Damian up the few steps of the back porch and then let him lean against the railing while I unlock the door and shove it open.
“Are you hurt?” he asks me, again. Worrying more about me than himself, despite how injured he is.
It makes my heart squeeze in my chest, but it also annoys the living hell out of me.
“Stop worrying about me, just get inside so I can take a look at you,” I demand.
I push him inside with one hand on his bare back, feeling the old scars there underneath my hand. They hadn’t made any new ones on his back at least.
Once we’re both inside, I close the door behind us and lock it. I flip on a light switch and the short hallway of the small Italian village house is illuminated in a low yellow-orange glow.
“Bathroom, now,” I say simply.
I grab him by his large, warm hand and pull him down the hallway, through the living room to the bathroom where I sit him down on the edge of the bathtub and turn on the light.
“God, you’re a fucking mess,” I mumble.
“Thank you,” he murmurs in response.
I sigh and turn on the water in the tub, finding a washcloth nearby and wetting it with hot water.
“I can barely see what needs to be stitched up with all this blood,” I comment.
I brush the washcloth along his chest and arms, noticing as he winces every now and then.
There’s a part of me that wants to say this can’t possibly be as bad as the pain of them actually inflicting the wounds upon him, but I don’t.
I know what’s its like to have someone hurt you and not be able to show them how much.
I can imagine Damian felt the same way I would in his shoes.
I’d want to keep my captors from knowing just how much they were hurting me.
So, now that he’s safe, I let him express his pain any way he wants to.
I squeeze the bloody water out of the washcloth and then rewet it.
“Why didn’t you just run?” I ask him.
Damian’s eyes shift up and look right into mine. I find myself grateful that they didn’t do anything to mar those eyes of his. Pretty as sin and reflecting my concerned expression right back at me.
“And leave you behind to clean up the mess?” he asks. “No. I couldn’t do that.”
I slowly clean along his chest, wiping the blood and what appears to be ash from his skin in gentle strokes.
“You could,” I disagree.
He tilts his head to the side slightly. “I didn’t want to.”
“Because…?” I ask him as I turn my gaze away while ringing and rewetting the cloth another time.
“You really don’t know, Les?” he murmurs in response.
I turn to look at him once more, and I lift the washcloth to his face.
“I want to hear you say it,” I admit.
Damian’s eyes darken and his voice is even lower when he speaks.
“I care about you, Alessio,” he tells me. His face draws in even closer and I stop wiping at his jawline to observe his mouth. His lips are cracked slightly, and it only makes me lean down further.
“Do you?” I ask him with a small smirk on my face. “I couldn’t tell.”
Damian growls low in his chest and reaches a hand up to grab at my shirt near my shoulder.
“Don’t make me say I’m falling for you, Dresvanni.”
I can’t help but chuckle. My ears and neck heat up. Every part of me feels as though it’s covered in goosebumps as I lean in even closer and our lips nearly touch.
“I won’t if you won’t make me say it,” I agree.
The next thing I know Damian’s lips press to mine. He kisses me firm and passionate. The kiss of someone who didn’t know whether or not they were going to make it out alive. I kiss him back with all the urgency of a man who didn’t know if he was going to see Damian again.
The kiss is somehow more intimate than any of our kisses before, despite being softer and closed mouth.
I pull back from the kiss to look into his still bloodied face. “I’d prefer if you didn’t get captured again,” I whisper.
He smiles at me. “You and me both, baby.”
I snort. “You were just waiting to call me that, weren’t you?” I shove his shoulder slightly and he winces but there’s still a smile on his face.
That crooked smile and glittering eyes makes my heart sing in a way I never knew I could feel before. For a man I only met a few weeks ago. It seems crazy, but wilder things have happened in my life.
Bloodier and nastier things.
So, this good thing? I plan on holding onto it.
“Maybe a little, it just came out,” Damian replies.
I shake my head, then continue to wipe at his face until it’s mostly clean of blood and sweat. I toss the rag to the side and grab a dry one, rubbing along the beads of water left over on his bare skin.
“If I could kill them again for hurting you, I would.” My brow furrows as I dry him off and take a look at the wounds left in his flesh.
“I’d rather they hurt me than you,” Damian admits.
The heat in my neck starts to travel down to my stomach and groin. Warm and pulsing.
“You could’ve died,” I remind him.
He puts a hand over mine and the washcloth. “I know. It’d have been worth it.”
The dry cloth is discarded and I lean in to press my lips to his again. This time harder. He gasps softly and I slide my hand up to his cheek, feeling the smooth skin between several small cuts there.
My breath catches in my throat at the taste of him. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. Unique to him. Musky and sweet all the same.
Damian places his hand on my thigh and I realize just how close we are as we sit on the edge of the tub.
I open my eyes and move back. “Let me make sure you don’t need stitches,” I insist.
He whines softly. “Do we have to?” He leans in again but I don’t let him catch my mouth.
“I don’t know about you but I’m not interested in taking care of you if you get sepsis, Day.” I grab his arm. He lets me.
I look over his wounds one by one, ignoring the small cuts and the shallow wounds, but there’s a couple larger and deeper slices that could definitely use some stitches and dressing.
I lean over to the cabinet under the sink just nearby and pull out the first aid kit. It’s got a few extra things that might not be in there for the average person. A sterile needle and the appropriate thread being one of them.
“You know, I had to sew up my own wounds a few years ago in Cuba,” Damian tells me.
“Is that where the scars on your thighs came from?” I ask as I prepare the needle.
He shakes his head. “No, but close. Knife to the stomach.” He looks down briefly. “It’s barely visible now.”
“I took a knife to the side a year ago, still hurts if I bend too far to the right,” I explain.
“Most of my scars hurt when it’s raining, but not any other time.” Damian’s face pinches slightly as I start to stitch up one of the wounds on his arm.
“Don’t like needles?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Who does?”
I laugh. “You’d be surprised. I know a guy who likes to be—”
Damian cuts me off with a clicking of his tongue and I roll my eyes at him.
“Go through all this and can’t hear about a little needle play,” I tease him, motioning over his body.
“You’re just lucky they didn’t threaten me with a needle to the eye or I might’ve spilled my guts,” he says.
I lick my lips idly as I finish up the first wound and get started on another on his leg. “I’d have to kill you then if they didn’t.” My words are dark and low, but I meet eyes with him and he smirks at me.
“I’d probably let you.”
I scoff. “That’s just toxic,” I say. “Maybe I’ll have to promise not to kill you so that you don’t get your rocks off.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t ah—keep.” I go a little deeper than needed with the needle and he gasps softly.
“Sorry,” I mumble before continuing. “I’ve done this before, but I’m not a doctor.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”