Chapter 17 Angelina #2
What does it say about me that I can't look away? That I don't WANT to look away?
Adrian's nose is shattered, his lip split wide and pouring blood down his chin, his body hunched around his midsection where Cole's fists did their invisible damage. Cole hasn't said another word since that first quiet command. He doesn't need to. His fists are saying everything.
And I'm standing here with my thighs pressed together and heat flooding through me.
His hands. Two nights ago they held me with reverence. Now they're covered in blood. Both versions, the gentle lover and the violent protector, are the same man. The same hands.
I can't look away.
Adrian slides down the wall when Cole finally releases him, leaving a red smear on the cream-colored paint like a gruesome brushstroke. His nose is shattered, his face already swelling into something unrecognizable, blood dripping onto his expensive Italian suit.
Cole crouches down so they're eye level, his voice dropping into something barely audible. "Come near them again, either of them, and diplomatic immunity won't protect you from what I'll do."
Then he stands and turns to me. His eyes are still cold, still holding that terrible emptiness, but when they find mine something softens. Just for me. Only ever for me.
"We're leaving."
He doesn't touch me. Just waits, giving me the choice Adrian never bothered to offer.
I step over Adrian's legs, my heel catching on his ankle, and I don't care. Don't look down at him crumpled and bleeding. Don't want to examine too closely why satisfaction is curling through my chest where horror should be.
The door closes behind us. I don't look back.
But I feel Adrian's blood drying on Cole's hands as he guides me toward the exit, his palm hovering near my lower back without quite making contact. I smell copper and violence mixing with cedar. I feel the heat still pulsing between my thighs with every step.
I should be horrified. Disgusted. Ready to call security.
I want Cole's hands on me, the same hands that just made Adrian bleed, proving they know how to do something other than hurt.
The drive home passes in silence.
Traffic crawls through the city. Red lights, stop signs, and a woman with a stroller crossing at the intersection like the world hasn't just tilted sideways on its axis.
Everyone going about their normal lives, completely oblivious to the fact that the woman in this SUV just watched a man get beaten bloody and didn't do a single thing to stop it.
And liked it. Don't forget that part. What does that make me?
I stare out the window and try to find Judge Castellano somewhere in the wreckage of the last hour. She's supposed to believe in due process, in the rule of law, in justice that happens in courtrooms with evidence and arguments and the careful application of precedent.
She's supposed to be better than this.
Maybe she never existed. Maybe she was always just Angelina in a black robe, pretending to be someone worthy of the title.
Cole's hands rest on the steering wheel, his knuckles split and dark with dried blood. The leather streaked with blood, and the splits crack wider every time he flexes.
I stare out the window. Watch buildings blur past. Try not to think about what just happened.
I can't stop thinking about what just happened. I should call someone. My therapist. A priest. The police.
My thighs press together again. Still wet. Still wanting.
Definitely not Uncle Sal. He'd just be annoyed I didn't let him handle it first.
The almost-laugh catches in my throat. Comes out as something between a breath and a sob. Cole glances at me but doesn't say anything.
Good. What would I even tell him? "I think I might be broken in ways I didn't know about until I watched you beat my ex-husband bloody and realized it was the hot"?
Because I am fine with it.
That's the part I can't look at directly. The part that feels like staring at the sun.
Adrian is bleeding in my chambers right now.
Maybe he's managed to drag himself up and he's calling his diplomatic contacts, threatening retaliation, spinning this into some story where he's the victim.
His credentials are scattered across the floor with his blood, and I'm sitting here replaying every blow like highlights from a game I didn't know I wanted to win.
Nonna Rosa would be horrified.
Or maybe she wouldn't. She grew up in a world where men settled things with their hands and women pretended not to see. "La famiglia prima di tutto," she used to say. Family before everything.
Maybe I'm more like her than I ever wanted to admit.
The traffic light turns red. Cole stops. His knuckles crack again on the wheel.
I keep looking at his hands.
Those same hands held me like I was precious. Made me feel beautiful for the first time since—
Since Adrian.
My fingers move before I consciously decide to let them, reaching across the console, that small barrier between us that suddenly feels like miles.
I touch his right hand. The one that broke Adrian's nose. The one that split Adrian's lip. My fingertips trace the ridge of his knuckles, the torn skin, the dried blood caught in every crease and whorl.
He glances at me but doesn't speak. Doesn't pull away.
Neither do I.
The light turns green. He drives one-handed, and I keep my fingers on his damaged knuckles, feeling the small movements of tendons as he steers. Blood flakes off onto my skin.
I don't wipe it away.
The SUV turns onto my street, and my house appears at the end of the block—white porch, black door, the flowers Chesca and I planted in the spring still blooming in their neat rows.
He pulls into the driveway and kills the engine.
The silence between us is thick with everything we haven't said, heavy with the weight of what just happened and what might happen next.
I should go inside. Take a shower and process this like a rational human being. Journal about it, maybe. Schedule an emergency session with Dr. Peters. Do all the healthy, responsible things a functional adult is supposed to do when their worldview gets shattered.
My hand is still resting on his.
"Angelina—"
"Don't." I finally turn to look at him—really look at him. Blood drying to rust on his white shirt. More blood cracking across his hands. And his eyes, dark and patient and hungry in a way that makes my breath catch. "Don't apologize. Don't explain."
His jaw tightens, but he nods once.
I pull my hand back and get out of the car. Walk to my front door on legs that don't feel entirely steady.
The keys scrape against the lock because my hands are shaking—not from fear this time, but from something else entirely. It takes me two tries to get the key in. Three to actually turn it. I push the door open and turn around.
He's still in the car. Engine off. Giving me space.
Space I don't want.
Go inside. Shower. Process. Be a functional adult.
I am so goddamn tired of being functional.
"Come inside."
I don't recognize my own voice. Lower, and I don't care.
He doesn't move. He's watching me through the windshield, waiting for me to be sure.
"Cole."
His hand moves to the door handle.
"Come inside."
He doesn't ask if I'm certain. Doesn't offer me an out or a chance to change my mind. He just opens the door and crosses my driveway with those bloody hands hanging at his sides, weapons he hasn't decided whether to sheathe.
He stops in front of me on the porch. Close enough that I can see every crack in the dried blood on his knuckles.
The setting sun catches his face and gilds him in gold, and he looks like something out of the stories Nonna Rosa used to tell me when I was small.
Not the gentle saints with their lambs and their halos, but the other ones. The angels with flaming swords who guarded the gates of Eden. The kind of holiness that came with a body count.
What am I doing? What am I about to do?
I step backward into my house and hold the door open for him.
I guess I'm about to find out.