CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT #2
When I opened my eyes, I caught his nostrils flaring with frustration. “Continue.”
“So I went up the stairs and opened the apartment with the key the real estate agent gave me. I kept it ajar, remembering he said he was right across the street and shouldn’t take long…”
I had looked out the window. Turned around. Saw Achilles…
But he wasn’t the one who shot me.
Suddenly, the memory rushed back to me. The bullet had grazed the back of my skull. Not front. Not sides. The back. Achilles was a great shot, but he was no magician, and there was no physical way for him to reach that angle.
I cupped my mouth, tears distorting the world out of focus. “I thought…I thought it was you.”
“Piccola Fiamma.” He leaned forward and gathered me into his arms, stroking the back of my head.
The bandages were off now. The back of my head was shaved, and Lila had cut the front in short pixie waves.
She told me the black hair dye had washed out of my natural red hair.
But I realized I had not seen myself once in the mirror since I’d come to.
I hadn’t had time for vanity when I first saw Achilles here. I was too busy panicking about being murdered. But now that my face was crushed to his shoulder, him trembling with emotions, my pulse finally slowing to a normal pace, I realized I didn’t exactly look like hot shit.
It wasn’t the fact half my head was shaved—actually, that was adequately badass. It was everything else. The blue and purple bruises all over my face from the hit I took when I fell. The paleness. The flakiness of dry, air-conditioned skin. Not to mention the back of my head was stitched.
“Who did it?” I whimpered into his shirt. “Was it—was it my dad? Is that why you have him?”
“No.” He dropped a kiss to my temple, and I could feel him struggling to contain his feelings, his movements, his need to crush me with his big body and swallow me whole. “It was Tristan Hale.”
I reared my head back, staring at him in shock. “Your father sent him?”
He nodded. “He didn’t think I’d have it in me to do it, and he was right.”
“So Tristan followed us.” I pulled away, pressing my knuckles to my mouth.
I didn’t know what the assassin actually looked like.
No one did. Tristan Hale was half myth, half god.
No one knew his nationality, his looks, his homebase; he was impossible to pin down.
The only two people I knew who were able to hire him were Vello and, according to legends, Alex Rasputin.
He normally worked for corrupt politicians, especially overseas.
There were a million questions I wanted to ask, and I had no choice but to ask them one at a time.
“Did you…?”
Achilles shook his head with sorrow. “No. I had to choose between giving you CPR and killing him. He took off.”
“And Vello is fine with me being here?”
He shrugged, and I marveled at how the scars made him even more beautiful than he had been as a teenager. Like he was carved from tragedy into something invincible that nothing and no one could ever break.
“H—how?”
“I almost killed him when I got home,” Achilles confessed.
My stomach dropped, and I couldn’t breathe.
“You did?” I croaked.
“Tiernan held him down, and I nearly beat him to death… Then fucking Enzo and Luca walked in and killed all the fun.”
“Party poopers,” I muttered through my tears. “And Tiernan’s up to speed on it?”
“Everyone is. The Bratva and Irish took it personally, so let’s just say Hale’s going to stay well away from you.”
Tense silence draped across the room. Heaviness settled in my gut. Why was he here? Probably to clear the air, make sure I knew he wasn’t the one who’d tried to kill me, and move on with his life.
“I remember everything,” I whispered.
He closed his eyes, pressing his lips together tightly. He didn’t have to ask what I meant. He knew.
“And now that I remember,” I choked out, my eyes burning with tears, “I know exactly why I worked so hard to forget. I can’t live like this, Achilles.”
His expression hardened, and he reached to squeeze my hands. Mine were cold and dry in contrast with his hot, giant palms. But I found no comfort, no solace in his touch.
I was back to being this fourteen-year-old girl. Tiny and angry and hopeless.
“How do I look?” I threw his words back in his face, after all those years I’d sat there, in a hospital room, trying to atone for my sins.
Achilles didn’t miss a beat. “Still the most beautiful girl in the world. The one I walked through fire for and would gladly do it all over again just to win her smile.”
His words, which I had craved for over a decade, brushed right past me. Like a stranger on the street. I couldn’t bear the numbness.
“You lie,” I croaked.
“It’d be my honor.” He bowed his head.
“I’m sure your future wife won’t like to hear it,” I croaked out.
“There’s not going to be a future wife for me, Tierney,” he said quietly. “Unless it is you.”
I closed my eyes. “I’m broken.”
“I’m patient.”
“Are you serious right now?” I peeled my eyelids open to catch him nodding.
“I told Don Vello I wasn’t going to marry Katya sometime between breaking his nose and dislocating his jaw.
It’s you that I want. It’s always been you.
Fuck, Tier, it took me eleven years to come to terms with it, and watching you almost die to cement it.
But I’m done fighting it. And I’m willing to wait. ”
“It’s too late.” My throat felt tight, and I clenched my teeth to keep my tears at bay. “Too much has happened. Separately, and between us.”
“I made some mistakes—”
“No, Achilles! You made my life a prison of your own making for half of my existence. Even after I escaped the gulag, you made sure I’d never be truly free.
You murdered my lovers, broke into my apartment, assigned bodyguards to tail me, and refused to allow me to move, date, or marry. To move on from this, from us.”
“I know.”
“You made me your whore for a weekend, knowing my past and what I’d been through. You fucked me every three hours on the dot for the privilege of not marrying me off to a complete stranger.”
“I know,” his voice cracked.
“And then, the cherry on the shit cake,you tried to assassinate me.”
His eyes, so dark, so brutal, fastened on my own. No words left his mouth.
“And you think, after everything that happened, that I’m going to forgive you?”
“Yes,” he said with conviction.
“Why?” I spluttered. Achilles was many things—shrewd, vicious, a prolific assassin, and an impeccable, unhinged mobster. He was not, however, delusional.
“Because I’ll do anything to make you mine.” Rather than desperation, determination dripped from his every word. “Even at the price of obliterating my own life for your entertainment.”
“Too much has passed between us to make this happen,” I said.
“A lot more will happen, as you’ll soon see.” He stood, seemingly unbothered by my words. “Mark my words, Piccola Fiamma. By this time next year, we’ll be married.”