Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ENZO
She just looks at me and says, "I don't want to be alone tonight." She doesn't ask. She doesn't explain.
I look at her.
"Not like that," she adds, and the way she says it is careful and honest and completely without performance. "I just don't want to be alone."
I sit on the bed with her. I pull the blanket up over her and tuck it in around her and then I straighten up and reach for the lamp.
Her hand finds mine in the dark.
Not grabbing. Just her fingers closing around my hand, light and uncertain, like she's not sure she's allowed.
I go still.
"Stay," she says quietly. Just that. One word.
I look down at her in the dark and she's looking back up at me and I can see her already second-guessing it, already preparing to let me off the hook, already starting to loosen her fingers around mine.
I catch her hand before she can pull it back.
I hold it for a moment. Feel the smallness of her fingers. Feel her exhale.
"Shift over," I say quietly.
She moves toward the wall without a word and I then lie down on top of the covers because getting under them would be too much, and the dark settles around us, and neither of us speaks.
Her hand is still in mine.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathing slow, and I feel the exact moment she falls asleep because her grip goes soft but doesn't let go entirely, her fingers still loosely wound through mine like she knows where I am, even in sleep.
I don't sleep for a long time.
I just lie there in the dark and hold her hand and try not to think about how easy this feels, how wrong it is that it feels this easy, how much trouble I'm in.
The silence wakes me.
Not a sound. The absence of one. The cabin had been making its usual noises all night and then it simply stopped, and that cessation is what pulls me out of sleep like a hand around my collar, sharp and immediate.
I'm on my feet before I'm fully conscious, the gun already in my hand, moving to the door with the automatic muscle memory of a man who has been woken by danger enough times that his body handles the first ten seconds without him.
I ease the bedroom door open an inch.
The hallway is dark and still.
I slip through and move toward the stairs, keeping to the wall, and that's when I hear it below me, the specific quiet of someone trying very hard to make no sound. Almost succeeding.
Almost.
I take the stairs fast and low, keeping to the edges where the wood doesn't creak, and I hit the bottom and sweep left—clear—sweep right—
The first man comes from the kitchen doorway.
Fast and trained. He goes for my gun hand first, clamping around my wrist and driving it down and sideways, trying to force the barrel toward the floor.
I let him because I'm already moving in the opposite direction, turning my whole body into the grab, my elbow finding his jaw in the same motion with everything behind it.
He drops.
The second man comes from behind the couch.
Bigger. Broader. He doesn't go for the gun, he just drives straight into me with his full body weight and we hit the bookshelf hard enough that the whole wall shakes and books rain down around us. I lose the gun in the impact, hear it skitter across the hardwood somewhere to my left.
His hands find my throat.
I bring both arms up inside his grip and break it outward, then drive my forehead into his nose.
The sound it makes is immediate and wet and he staggers back with blood streaming down his face and I follow him, putting three hard strikes into his ribs before he can reset, feeling things give under my hands.
He swings and catches my cheekbone.
The room tilts hard.
I hit the wall and stay upright through nothing but stubbornness and the third man is already on me, the one who came through the front door while I was dealing with the other two, the one I missed on the perimeter sweep, and he has a knife and he knows how to use it.
He keeps it close and controlled, not swinging wide, working short precise thrusts that I have to move my entire body to stay out of.
I catch his knife arm on the third thrust, rotate his wrist hard, force the blade away from my body, and use the leverage to drive him sideways into the coffee table.
He goes down hard and the table goes with him.
The first man is back up.
He gets his arm across my throat from behind and his other hand on the back of my head to increase the choke, and I grab his head with both hands and pull forward and drop my whole weight down, bending fast at the waist, and he goes over my back and into the floor and stays there.
The big man swings a lamp.
It catches me across the shoulder and I go down on one knee and my vision goes white and I stay there one second too long because the third man is back with his knife and the big man is raising the lamp again and have no good options left.
The vase comes from the stairs.
I don't see it. I only hear it. The tremendous crack of ceramic connecting with the back of the third man's skull and he drops like something vital was simply switched off, the knife skittering away across the hardwood.
Isabella is at the bottom of the stairs with her chest heaving and her hands still raised from the throw.
The big man turns toward her.
I find the gun on the floor.
Two shots.
Then one more for the first man who was almost on his feet again.
The cabin goes quiet.
I'm on my hands and knees on the hardwood floor with my shoulder screaming and blood running down the side of my face and Isabella is crossing the room fast, dropping down in front of me, her hands going to my face.
"Where are you hurt?" Her voice is steady but her hands are shaking hard. "Enzo. Look at me. Where are you hurt?"
"I'm fine." I push to my feet and the room tilts slightly but holds. "We have to go. Get your shoes, get whatever you need, ten minutes."
"Let me look at your—"
"Isabella." I meet her eyes. "Later. I promise. We have to move right now."
She holds my gaze for one second. Then she nods and goes upstairs.
I collect the guns from the floor, check the door, check the windows, and when she comes back down two minutes later with both bags in her hands I feel something move through my chest that I file away for later.
We go out the back into the dark.
I drive for forty minutes without stopping, taking back roads, doubling once, watching the mirrors with the focus of someone running the numbers on whether we were followed.
Isabella is quiet for most of it, her knees pulled up, her arms wrapped around them, staring through the windshield at the dark road.
Then she says: "Who were they?"
"Killian's men, most likely." I keep my eyes on the mirrors. "I didn't have time to check."
She nods slowly, processing that. "Is this how it's going to be?" Her voice is quiet. Not afraid, just honest. "From now on. Is this what our days look like."
I glance at her.
She's looking at me with those eyes that have never once let me get away with the easy answer.
"The only thing you need to know," I say, "is that you will be protected. As long as I'm breathing, nothing gets to you." I hold her gaze for a second before I look back at the road. "That's the only thing that matters right now."
She's quiet for a moment.
Then she turns back to the windshield and doesn't say anything else, but something in her posture shifts, some of the tension going out of her shoulders, and I watch it in my peripheral vision and say nothing.
A gas station appears out of the dark after another ten minutes, small and fluorescent and completely isolated, a single pump.
I pull in and kill the engine.
We sit in the sudden quiet.
"Okay," she says, and she's already reaching into the bag at her feet, pulling out the small first aid kit. "You promised."
I look at her hands, still slightly unsteady but sure, and I think about the sound that vase made, think about what would have happened if she hadn't been awake and present and exactly herself in that moment.
"Okay," I say.