Chapter 18 #2
“I didn’t think I needed anyone,” she whispered. “Not like this.”
I took her hand and brought it to my mouth, pressing a kiss to her cold knuckles before folding both of my hands around it to warm it.
“You don’t need everyone,” I said. “You just need the right person.”
That drew a broken little sound from her throat, half laugh, half sob, and the noise pierced me harder than I wanted to admit.
“She’s still in there,” she said, finally letting the fear have a voice. “It’s taking so long, and nobody’s telling us anything, and Mom keeps pretending it’s fine, and Dad looks like he wants to punch walls, and Adam is—” She stopped abruptly, her whole face tightening.
I leaned a little closer. “Adam is what?”
She closed her eyes. “There. Hovering. Smiling. Acting helpful. I know he hates that I’m not scared of him anymore, and I know he’s going to try something, and I’m so tired, Pietro.”
The last words came out small enough to cut me open.
And that was the moment. The opening. The clean, honest chance to tell her what my father had learned, what I now carried in my own hands like something sharp and poisonous: the Albanian connection, the layer beneath Adam’s charm, the part of this that reached wider and deeper than she understood.
I should have told her then.
Instead, I looked at the exhaustion in her face, the fear she was already dragging behind her, the trust that had brought her out into the rain to find me, and I stayed quiet.
She had enough on her plate. Enough for one night. Enough for one body and one heart already stretched too thin.
It was an understandable silence.
A loving one, if I wanted to dress it up.
It was still a lie.
I reached for her and drew her across the center console and into my lap as carefully as I could manage in the cramped space.
She came without hesitation, curling into me in a way that felt more intimate than anything we had done in bed.
I wrapped both arms around her and held on while she tucked her face into my neck and breathed me in.
“There,” I murmured against her hair. “Let him hate it. Let him see exactly how little power he has left.”
She shivered once.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted.
“Yes, you do.”
I felt her lift her head slightly. “I do?”
“You came out here,” I said. “You asked for what you needed. You’re still standing.
And you’re doing all of it while the thing you fear most is learning, in real time, that it no longer owns you.
” I brushed my thumb over the damp edge of her cheek.
“That sounds like you know exactly what you’re doing. ”
She looked at me then, and some of the panic eased.
“I love you,” she said, as if the words were waiting under everything else.
I touched my forehead to hers.
“I know,” I said quietly. “And I love you too.”
This time when she nodded, I felt it all the way through her.
For a while after that, we stayed exactly like that in the hospital parking lot, the rain falling softly around us, my arms locked around her while her breathing matched mine. The surgery dragged on inside, the night stretched with it, and the whole world narrowed to one simple, sacred fact.
She asked.
And I came.
Then I felt her tense in my arms.
I looked up and saw him.
The man I wanted to hurt in ways that would have satisfied something ugly in me.
Despite the world I had been born into, we did not choose violence lightly. We were not animals. We were not psychopaths. Outside of Matteo, who enjoyed pain a little too much for anyone’s comfort, most of the men in my family did not take pleasure in suffering for its own sake.
This man?
This one I knew I would enjoy hurting.
He stood there under an umbrella, scanning the lot with a chastising look of impatience that made my teeth ache. Like he had any right to search for her. Like his presence here was natural and mine was not.
“There must be news,” Emily whispered, already pulling back. “I’d better go before he sees you.”
She slipped out of the car so quickly it irritated me, though I could not decide whether it was because she meant to protect him from me, which I found offensive, or protect me from him, which was perhaps worse.
Albanian or not, I was more than capable of dealing with some polished little police chief’s son.
She had barely shut the door before he spotted her. Even from where I sat, I saw the flash of surprise in his face before it hardened into something narrower and meaner.
He couldn’t properly see me through the rain-dark glass, but I straightened anyway, every instinct in me going cold.
I lowered the window a fraction, fully aware I was trespassing and equally aware that my father and Hoka would both look at this exact moment with expressions that said we warned you.
“Where did you disappear to?” he asked.
Emily shrugged and tried to move past him, but he stepped sideways and blocked her path.
My fingers twitched.
The weight of the gun against my ribs felt much too familiar.
The rain had stopped for the moment, but she was still damp and cold, and that bastard was standing between her and the hospital doors.
Then he spoke again, and whatever fragile self-control I had left burned away.
“Who’s the guy?” he asked, his voice low and ugly. “You’d rather sneak off with some stranger in a car than wait for news about your sister? Very classy, Emily.”
I am going to kill him.
The thought arrived with startling clarity. Not metaphorically. Not someday. Immediately.
But Emily, God help me, held.
“I can do whatever I like, Adam,” she said. “I don’t belong to you. And I assume, since you’re hovering out here like this, you’re the messenger. What happened?”
His mouth tightened.
“The surgeon came out. Everything went better than expected. Sophie’s in recovery.” Then, after the briefest pause: “Assuming you care.”
“You can leave us alone now,” she said. “You’re not welcome.”
“Careful, Emily.”
“Or what?”
I loved her for that.
Hoka was right. My woman had fire in her, the kind worth preserving at any cost.
“Yes,” I muttered softly to myself. “Or what?”