28. In Too Deep #3
Consumed by whatever demon had possessed him, he didn’t let Orlando finish his sentence or hear me screaming at him to stop.
His fists pummelled Orlando’s face, and the sound of bone cracking filled the air until my ex was a bloody heap on the cobbled ground, barely conscious.
I grabbed Santino’s shirt when there was finally a pause in his brutality and shoved him back.
“Stop! Sani—stop!” I grabbed his face, forcing his attention to me. His onyx eyes, full of beautiful savageness, finally locked with mine, and I flinched.
He was a predator mid-kill, full of controlled madness and a thirst for violence. I stepped back from him, which seemed to spark a flicker of humanity as he stared at me, breathing hard.
He turned to the girl, kneeling beside Orlando’s groaning body, and said with detached calmness, “Call an ambulance. I broke his nose and a rib. If you both want to live another day, you never saw us tonight. Understand?”
She bobbed her head frantically, her bottom lip quivering as tears cut through her mascara streaks. She thought he was a monster. Then she looked at me as if I were one too.
Sani grabbed my hand and yanked me back down the street toward his bike. One of his men appeared, handed him our helmets, then retreated. Sani shoved one into my hands, then put his on, snapping the visor down so I couldn’t see his face.
“Should you be driving?” I whispered, my voice trembling. Surely, he had too much adrenaline to focus on anything, especially controlling a superbike.
“Get on the bike, Aria.” He swung his leg over and revved the engine, waiting for me to join him.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Orlando’s date phoning the emergency services, and a couple who had just spotted them from across the road were racing over to help.
Bile rose in my throat. I gripped Sani’s shoulders, climbed on, and kept my eyes closed for the entire ride home as the shock of what had happened finally caught up with me.
When the bike pulled into the underground garage, I couldn’t get off it quickly enough.
Orlando was a dickhead, but did he really deserve to be beaten to a pulp and put in the hospital for it?
And Sani hadn’t said a word to me the entire ride home.
He stayed silent even as he took the helmet from my hands, placed it back on the storage unit with his, and strode towards the lift.
Not. One. Fucking. Word.
“Are we going to talk about what the hell just happened?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady as the metal doors shut.
He stretched and studied his bloodied knuckles as if they belonged to someone else. “What’s there to say?”
I swallowed. “That you lost control? You could have killed him, Sani. One punch would have sufficed.”
His mouth twitched. “I’m not a one-punch kind of guy.”
Clearly.
I stared at him while he refused to look at me.
He was still vibrating, his muscles tense and his expression dark, though he was doing a better job of containing it now.
But that darkness was still there. His face was cold and distant, almost unrecognisable as the man I’d spent the last few days with.
“What happened? One minute you were with me at that bar, and the next—you were gone.”
“He disrespected you. I won’t have anyone disrespect my wife.”
I stepped closer to him. “That’s not what I meant.” I’d never seen anyone turn so quickly into a different person. The raw aggression and rage were hard to stomach. “It’s as if a switch flipped inside you. You went somewhere else. Somewhere I couldn’t reach.”
He finally looked at me, his gaze no longer burning like black coals of hellfire but smouldering, not quite extinguished—enough for me to see the man I knew beneath it.
The doors opened, and he turned, walking away into the bedroom. I followed him, feeling on edge, sensing he needed some space, but I was too intrigued by this side of him. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him in the dressing room, ripping off his clothes and pulling on a pair of gym shorts.
“What are you waiting for me to say, Aria? This is who I am. I lose my shit sometimes. I see red. Tonight… was a ?lot. Piero. Mamma. Raya. And then seeing that fucking stronzo looking at you like he had the right.” His jaw tightened.
“Then I find out he’s the cheating prick who hurt you?
He made you doubt your worth and close yourself off to trusting me with your heart.
So yeah, I wanted to ?kill him. Maybe I would have if you weren’t there.
I don’t know. But if you thought that was bad…
” He pointed towards the front door, his nostrils flaring as our eyes locked.
“You don’t know half of what I’m capable of. What I enjoy.”
I held his gaze, refusing to cower as he expected me to. “Tell me then.”
He swore, rubbing his hand down his face and resting the other on his hip. “No.”
“Tell me, Sani. Give me your worst. If you truly want me to stay in this marriage, I have to know who my husband is.”
When he looked at me, I saw fear. Not mine, but his. “It’s too soon. You’ll leave. You’ll hate me. You’ll think I’m sick, twisted, and fucked up. And I am, Aria. I am.”
“Try me.”
He exhaled, staring at me. I waited.
“You really want to know who you married?” He ground his jaw as I nodded.
“Fine. I started fantasising about killing men when I was six. I was obsessed with violent video games because they helped me imagine I was ending the men who killed my papi. And when I finally got a real gun at thirteen, I shot a soldier in the thigh. Not for any reason other than I wanted to know what it felt like to make someone bleed. I liked it. When I was seventeen, I killed for the first time. I shot a man in the eye, stabbed another to death, and then caved in a man’s skull with a headstone for hurting Raya.
And I didn’t feel a single ounce of remorse. I never do.”
He took a few steps towards me, and my breathing struggled to keep up with my rapid heartbeat.
“I’ve tortured hundreds of men. Made them scream, beg, and piss themselves.
I’ve lost count of how many men I’ve killed who didn’t deserve the air they breathed.
I rarely remember their names, but I always remember how.
I like to make my kills memorable. I love the fucking drama of a death.
The last man I killed, that sick fuck Damiano, I smashed his head against the cell bars until his skull fractured and fit through them.
Then I gouged out his eye and forced it down his throat before slowly easing a sharp hairpin through his temple.
All because he planned to rape you, Aria.
And I enjoyed every second of making him suffer. ”
A tear slipped out of the corner of my eye before I could stop it.
“That’s the other side of me. And I won’t change.
I’ll kill again. I’ll protect the people I love without remorse for what I have to do to keep them safe.
That includes you. If someone disrespects you, they’ll most likely end up in hospital or worse.
And I’ll still sleep easy at night.” He exhaled, his eyes softening as his shoulders deflated.
“I’m not going to force you to stay with me, Aria.
I never have. There’s the front door. The same one that’s been there the entire time, yet you’ve never tried to leave.
You aren’t my prisoner. You’re my wife. If you need to leave me, I won’t stop you. But I can’t watch you do it either.”
He walked out of the bedroom, the sound of his footsteps on the wooden floor growing distant as he made his way to the gym.
I didn’t know how long I sat there, digesting everything, trying to make sense of what I felt and what I knew I should have felt. The two weren’t the same. A sane person would leave. Run for the hills, as far away as possible from the man who had just confessed ?the darkest parts of himself.
That’s what he expected me to do. That’s what I knew I should do. So why did I walk into the dressing room, unzip my dress, and take a shower? Why did I grab my phone and delete the recording that could have destroyed him?
When he’d been confessing all his horrific sins, that tear didn’t slip out because I feared him. It was because I feared myself for not caring. I knew at that moment that it didn’t make a difference. I was already in too deep.
I’d stay.