Chapter 19 Romeo
ROMEO
The blood on my knuckles has dried to a dark rust color by the time we reach my penthouse, and I can feel Savannah's eyes on me as I unlock the door.
She hasn't said much since we left—just nodded when I told her she couldn't stay there, that it wasn't safe.
Whitmore could come back or send someone else, do something worse than grab her arm and leave bruises in the shape of his fingers on her skin.
She's been quiet in a way that makes my chest tight, makes me want to pull over and check that she's still here with me instead of disappearing into whatever shocked silence has taken hold of her mind.
I see the startled look on her face when I put the keycard for the penthouse into the elevator, and I see her take it all in as I escort her inside. The luxury doesn’t startle her—Savannah comes from money, so I knew it wouldn’t, but I can see that she didn’t expect me to live in a place like this.
“I thought you lived in a dorm,” she whispered, and I can’t help but laugh, until I see the pinched, shocked look that’s still on her face and has nothing to do with my living situation.
I realize with a sick feeling in my stomach that she's in shock, that the violence she witnessed has done something to her that I can't undo, can't fix, can't make better, no matter how much I want to.
"Sit down.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend, rougher than I want it to be when she's looking at me with those wide eyes. "Please. Just—sit down. Let me get you some water."
She sits on the leather couch, perched on the edge of it.
Her sweater has slipped off one shoulder, and I can see the edge of the bruises on her arm in dark purple fingerprints.
The sight makes rage surge through me so violently that I have to breathe through the urge to find Whitmore and break more than just his nose and his ribs.
I want to kill him.
The thought sits in my mind like a stone.
I want to kill Thaddeus Whitmore for putting his hands on Savannah, for threatening her, for making her afraid, for thinking he had any right to touch what's mine.
I want to kill him slowly, want to make him understand exactly what he did wrong, want to watch the light leave his eyes while I explain in careful detail why he's dying.
I want to kill him, and the only thing stopping me is the knowledge that doing it now, without planning, doing it in a way that brings heat down on my family, that would hurt Savannah more than it would help her.
But God, I want to.
I fill a glass with water from the filter in my refrigerator, and my hands are shaking in a way that they never have after violence before. The adrenaline is finally catching up with me, the reality of what I did settling into my bones.
I broke a man's face in front of Savannah.
I broke his ribs. I made him bleed on her floor while she watched, and I didn't stop until Luca got me to.
Even then I wanted to keep going, wanted to keep hitting until there was nothing left to hit.
She saw that. She saw what I'm capable of, the violence that lives under my skin, saw the monster that my father has been training since I was old enough to throw a punch.
And she didn't run.
That thought makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with the physical exertion of beating Whitmore into submission.
She didn't run. She stood there and watched me defend her with my fists, watched me break the man she's supposed to marry.
She watched me behave exactly like the kind of dangerous criminal that everyone has warned her about—and she didn't run.
She let me bring her here. She let me lock the door behind us.
She's sitting on my couch right now, waiting for me to come back to her, and that has to mean something—has to mean that maybe she understands.
Maybe she sees that everything I do is for her, because of her, to protect her from men like Whitmore who think they can own her just because her father said so.
I bring her the water and sit down next to her, close enough that our thighs are touching, close enough that I can feel the heat of her body through the denim of her jeans.
She takes the glass with both hands, and I notice that her hands are shaking too.
Her fingers tremble against the condensation on the glass, and I want to take those hands in mine and hold them until they're steady again.
"Let me see your arm.” My voice is gentler now, softer. I’m trying not to scare her even though I know I already have. What she saw today has changed something between us that I can't change back.
She sets the water down on the coffee table, and she slides down the sleeve of her sweater slowly, like she's not sure she wants to know exactly what's underneath.
The bruises are worse than I thought, perfect impressions of Whitmore's fingers wrapped around her upper arm, like he thought he had any right to touch her at all.
The rage comes back, hot and immediate, so intense that I have to close my eyes for a moment. When I open my eyes again, she's watching me. There's something in her expression that I can't read, something that might be fear or might be something else entirely.
"Does it hurt?" I reach for her arm, already running my fingers over the bruises with a touch so light it's barely there, barely enough to feel the heat of her skin under my fingertips.
"A little." Her voice is small and uncertain. "It's not that bad."
"It's bad enough." I stand up and go to the bathroom.
I grab Arnica gel, then get an ice pack from the freezer and a clean towel to wrap it in.
When I come back, Savannah is still sitting exactly where I left her, still looking at her arm like she can't quite believe what she's seeing.
Like she can't quite process that Whitmore—her fiancé, the man her father chose for her, the man she's supposed to marry—did this to her.
I sit down next to her again and take her arm in my hands.
I squeeze some of the arnica gel onto my fingers and start working it into her skin in slow, careful circles.
I can feel her watching me. I can feel the weight of her gaze on my face as I focus on the task of tending to her injuries, of making this better, even though I know I can't undo what Whitmore did or what I did in response.
The gel is cool against her skin, and I can feel her starting to relax slightly under my touch.
I can feel some of the tension leaving her shoulders as I work my way down from her upper arm to her elbow and back up again.
"Why didn't you?" she asks finally. "Kill him, I mean."
"Because Luca stopped me." I wrap the ice pack in the towel and press it gently against the worst of the bruises. She hisses slightly at the cold but doesn't pull away. "And because killing him now would bring too much heat on my family. On you. We need to be smart about this."
"Smart about what? About killing him?" There's something in her voice now that might be horror or fascination, and I can't tell which one.
"About dealing with the threat he represents.
" I hold the ice pack in place with one hand and use the other to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
The gesture is so tender, so completely at odds with the violence that's still humming through my veins that it makes me feel slightly unhinged.
"He's not going to let this go, Savannah.
He's going to come after you. After us. After your father. We need to be prepared."
"My father." She says it like she's just remembering that he exists, like the shock has made her forget about everything except what happened in her apartment. "Oh God. Thad is going to tell my father everything."
"Probably." I don't see any point in lying to her about this. "He's probably already called him."
As if on cue, her phone starts ringing from where it's sitting on the coffee table next to the water glass, and we both look at it like it's a bomb that's about to explode.
The screen lights up with her father's contact, and I can see the panic starting to creep into her eyes.
She starts to reach for the phone like she's going to answer it, like she's going to try to explain or defend or apologize for something that isn't her fault.
"Don't.” My hand closes over hers before she can pick up the phone. "Not yet. Let me think."
"I have to answer it. If I don't, he'll just keep calling. He'll—" She stops, and I can see her trying to work through the implications, trying to figure out what her father knows and what he doesn't, and what Whitmore might have told him.
The phone stops ringing, and for a moment there's silence. Then it starts again immediately. This time, Savannah pulls her hand out from under mine and grabs it before I can stop her.
"Daddy," she says, and her voice is shaking.
I can hear Edgar Beauregard's voice on the other end of the line, even though she hasn't put it on speaker.
I can hear the rage and the volume and the way he's shouting at her like she's a child who's misbehaved instead of a grown woman who's been assaulted by her fiancé.
I take the phone from her hand—gently, giving her the chance to hold on if she wants to—and I put it on speaker so I can hear exactly what we're dealing with, exactly what threats Edgar Beauregard is making.
Exactly how much danger we're in.
"—completely unacceptable! Do you have any idea what you've done?
What you've thrown away? Thaddeus called me from the hospital, Savannah.
The hospital! He has a broken nose and three broken ribs, and he's telling me that the criminal you convinced me you weren’t sleeping with attacked him in your apartment. Is that true? Is any of that true?"