Chapter 7 #2
"Your friend can come too. The more the merrier.
" He grins. The grin is the kind that has probably worked on women who are less armed and less hostile than I am, and the fact that he's deploying it while I'm wearing two karambits tells me he hasn't looked below my navel, which is where men who are focused on tits tend to stop looking.
"Walk away," I say. "Now."
"Relax. I'm being friendly."
His hand goes to my thigh.
Not my arm. Not my shoulder. My thigh. Mid-thigh, firm, the grip of a man who has decided that touch is his right and my objection is an obstacle to be overcome through persistence.
The world narrows to the pressure of his hand and the distance between his wrist and Vita's handle and the decision tree that branches from here.
I can remove the hand, remove the fingers, remove the man from the stool with a single movement that would leave him bleeding on the bar floor before his brain registered the pain.
Giada's hand is on my arm. "Toni," she says quietly. Not don't. Not stop. Just my name, the way she says it when she's reminding me that the world outside the compound has rules that don't include carving up civilians in public bars.
I'm about to remove his hand myself, my fingers reaching for Vita, when someone else gets there first.
The hand comes from behind us. Large, fast, and it doesn't grab the man's wrist. It grabs the back of his neck.
Matteo.
He's not in a suit, just jeans, dark jacket, and the face underneath the diplomat mask is gone.
What's looking at the man with his hand on my thigh is the thing I saw in the corridor, the darkness that lives under the charm, except now it isn't a flash, it's the full display, and the full display is terrifying in a way that even I wasn't prepared for.
He pulls the man off the stool by his neck. One motion, fast, efficient, and the man's hand leaves my thigh as his body follows the direction Matteo is steering it, which is backward, off the stool, into the space between the bar and the tables.
"What the fuck—" the man starts.
Matteo hits him. Not a trained strike. Not a boxer's jab.
An open, raw, full-force punch to the face that snaps the man's head sideways and sends a spray of blood from his nose across the bar floor.
The man staggers. Matteo follows, fists coming down, a second punch, this one to the gut, and the man doubles over and Matteo grabs his hair and pulls his head up and hits him again, across the jaw, and the sound of the impact is wet, and wrong and the man drops to his knees.
The bar goes quiet in an instant. Every conversation stops, every head turns, and the bartender reaches under the counter for whatever weapon bartenders keep for moments like this.
Matteo crouches in front of the man. The man is on his knees, blood streaming from his nose, his jaw already swelling, his eyes wide, confused and afraid in the way that men get afraid when they encounter violence they weren't expecting from a direction they didn't anticipate.
Matteo says something to him. Low, close, too quiet for me to hear from four feet away. Whatever it is, the man's face goes white under the blood. He scrambles backward on his hands, gets to his feet, and runs for the door. Not walks.
Runs.
Matteo stands. His right hand is bloody. His knuckles are split. The darkness is still on his face, the mask completely gone, and the man standing in the middle of a quiet bar with blood on his fist is not the lawyer from Connecticut who charmed his way through fundraisers and political dinners.
This is what's underneath. This is what I provoked in the corridor and what he locked down before I could see the full shape of it. The violence in Matteo isn't trained. It isn't disciplined. It's fury with hands, and the fury is old and deep and has been waiting for permission to come out.
He turns to me. The bar is still silent. Giada is frozen on her stool with her wine glass halfway to her mouth. Torres is probably in the car, oblivious. The bartender's hand is still under the counter.
"Why the fuck are you following me?" I say.
His eyes are dark, a storm raging below the surface until he shakes his head and takes a breath. The darkness is receding, slowly, the diplomat crawling back over the animal, but it's not all the way back yet and the gap between the two is where the real Matteo lives.
"Because you're my bride," he says. "And nobody touches my bride."
"I'm not yours."
"You will be in four days. Until then, and after then, any man who puts his hands on you without your permission will leave the building in worse condition than that one.
" He looks at his hand. The blood on his knuckles, the split skin.
He flexes his fingers once, testing the damage, then looks back at me.
"Your karambits are faster than my fists.
I know that. You could have handled it. But I got there first, and I'm not going to apologize for it. "
"I didn't ask for your protection."
"I'm not offering protection. I'm establishing a fact.
" He steps closer. One step. The proximity that has been the weapon between us since the corridor, the space where the hostility turns into more.
"The fact is that I walked into this bar and saw a man touching you and the thing that happened in my chest was not rational and it was not strategic and it had nothing to do with the treaty or the seat or the plan.
It was the simple, stupid, animal fact that I don't want anyone's hands on you except mine.
Even if you never let me fucking touch you, no one else will get the pleasure either. "
The bar is listening. Every person in this room is watching the man with blood on his knuckles stand too close to the woman with two karambits, and the audience doesn't matter because the conversation isn't for them.
"You don't get to claim me," I say. "You don't get to walk into a bar and beat a man bloody and then stand in front of me and talk about what's yours. I'm not a territory. I'm not a seat. I'm not a bloodline you can inherit."
"I know."
"Then what the fuck do you think you're doing?"
He looks at me. The mask is almost back. Almost. But underneath it, visible through the cracks, is the wanting that isn't love and isn't strategy. It's ownership without the right to own, and the contradiction is eating him alive.
"Figuring it out," he says. "Give me time. Get your ass home Antonia. Wouldn’t want Leone to find out about this."
He turns and walks out of the bar. The door closes behind him, and the noise starts again, conversations resuming, the bartender's hand coming out from under the counter, the normal rhythms of a normal bar returning to normal after a moment of violence that nobody in this room will forget.
Giada puts her wine glass down. Looks at me. Her face is doing four things at once, shock, fury, amusement, and something else, something that looks suspiciously like I told you so.
"So," she says. "That happened."
"Shut up."
"He followed you from the compound. He followed you to a bar in the city. He watched a man touch you and he beat the man half to death and then he stood in front of you and basically said you're mine with blood on his hands."
"I'm aware of what just happened, Giada. I was present."
"Toni." She leans forward. "That man is fucking insane. That man is possessive and violent and completely fucking unhinged and he just committed assault in a public bar because someone touched your leg."
"I know."
"And the fact that you're not running for the exit right now tells me everything I need to know about how you feel about it."
I look at my whiskey. The ice has melted.
The glass is warm in my hand. My thigh still feels the pressure of the stranger's grip, and overlaid on top of it, newer and heavier, the memory of Matteo's voice saying because you're my bride with blood drying on his knuckles and the darkness still in his eyes.
I should be disgusted. I should be furious. I should be on the phone to Leone demanding that the man I'm being forced to marry be removed from the arrangement for violent behavior and possessive tendencies and the general crime of being a psychopath in an expensive jacket.
Instead, the thing sitting in my chest, the thing I've been fighting since the corridor, since the gym, since the question about which blade I reach for first, is warm and angry and alive, and it's pointed directly at the door Matteo just walked through.
"Pay the tab," I say. "We're going back."
"To the compound?"
"To the compound."
"To do what?"
I finish the whiskey, set the glass down and stand with a sigh. "I don't know yet. But I'm going to find out."
Giada grins her signature chaos grin. She throws money on the bar and grabs her jacket and follows me out the door, and in the car Torres takes one look at my face and starts driving without asking where.
The compound is twenty minutes away. I spend every one of those minutes thinking about blood on knuckles and dark eyes and a voice that said nobody touches what's mine.
The rumble… oh God that rumble…
I'm not sure whether I want to feed this strange feeling inside me or kill it, and the not-knowing is the most dangerous thing I've felt since I walked through the compound gate with blades on my hips and a refusal to bow.
Vita sits in its sheath against my thigh. I don't spin it. My hands are still. For the first time in days, the blades are quiet.
The rest of me is not.