Chapter 8
EIGHT
KITTY
Playlist recommendation:
Beggin’ - Joel Sunny
Be prepared.
I was no Girl Scout, but I was a Frasier and our family motto was: Je suis prest.
I AM READY.
I wasn’t.
But I wasn’t about to lose now.
Dying was not on my agenda.
So, when Stan’s driver surged up from out of nowhere, doing a great impression of a zombie, I was ready for him.
My finger caressed the trigger of his gun.
Did the bullet go wide?
Yes.
Was that annoying?
Hell. To. The. Fucking. Yeah.
Did the recoil make me feel weaker than a newborn?
Goddammit. It did—
“KITTY!”
Stan turned my name into a roar, a plea, and a prayer all at once.
It imbued me with the strength I needed to shoot my assailant again. This time, my shot was true because he flopped backward—on this occasion, less walking dead and more vampire the moment the sun rose.
“Stan,” I sobbed as I scrabbled for the door, desperate to set my sights on him, fervent with the need for him to take over.
I was so ready to be the damsel in distress, you wouldn’t believe it.
When I finally saw him, I could breathe again. Deep and full, not shallow and panicked.
He was here. I’d made it. Survived—
Wait.
He was covered in blood. Not drenched, not like me. But it speckled him. And most of it was his. He’d been shot. At least grazed. On his throat.
His fucking throat.
I’d come a hairsbreadth from losing him.
Seeing that had me wobbling on my feet and grabbing for the wall to prop me up. I was as close to my knees colliding with the floor as he’d been to dying before he caught me in his arms and hauled me against him.
The pressure of him, the sheer force he put behind that hug was like the shock of a defibrillator to my senses and I needed it. Needed this. Needed him.
My lips sought his.
But it wasn’t a kiss I was looking for—just a union.
And as if he’d read my mind, he settled his mouth to mine then, pressing our foreheads together, invoked, “Chista è da me, liunissa.”
The words meant nothing to me, but they didn’t need to. I didn’t complain when he garbled something else in Sicilian, endless reels of words as he held me like he’d never let me go.
It gave me leave to sag into him.
To let him hold me up.
“Never again,” he snarled, his embrace tightening to the point of pain as he switched to English. “I will not lose you, Kitty. You, my lioness, are a force to be reckoned with, but I will not—” He derailed into Sicilian again.
That I still found the language pretty was a stroke of luck for both of us. After tonight, I never wanted to hear Italian again.
Even though I didn’t understand every word he said, with my adrenaline crashing and exhausted beyond belief, his praise sank into me like ibuprofen in my battered body.
“Take me home, Stan.”
And crazy as it might have seemed, impossible and delusional and those fancy words in between, I wasn’t talking about my family’s building in Midtown…