Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Amanda
Valentino carries me to the bedroom.
He drops me onto the mattress and follows me down, his mouth already on mine, and whatever joke that was building dissolves on my tongue.
His hands work the buttons of the shirt and he kisses every inch of skin he uncovers. Collarbone. The slope of my breast. My stomach.
He peels the shirt off my shoulders and tosses it to the floor, leaving me naked under his gaze, and he's looking at me the way men look at things they plan to ruin.
"Turn around," he says.
My brain stutters. "What?"
"Turn around. On your knees." His voice has dropped into that low register that bypasses my higher reasoning entirely. "Ass to me, bella."
I turn around and rise onto my knees, facing the headboard, my back to him, and I hear fabric hitting the floor, the soft heavy sounds of a large man undressing without hurry.
He's making me wait. He knows exactly what the waiting does to me, the bastard, because the air against my bare skin feels like a torturous tease.
The mattress dips. One knee comes up onto the bed beside mine while his other foot stays planted on the floor. I can feel the brush of hair against my thigh.
His hand slides around my throat and up, palm cupping the underside of my chin, and he pulls.
My neck arches back against his shoulder. My spine bows. I'm bent forward and pulled back at the same time, and his mouth lands at my ear.
"You remember what I told you," he says. "About what happens when everyone in the building can hear."
He pushes into me in one long, brutal stroke and the sound that comes out of me isn't a moan, it's a scream, loud enough to embarrass the dead. He doesn't pause.
"There she is," he growls. "That's the sound I wanted. Louder."
"Oh my G—" The rest of it shatters because he drives in hard.
His hand stays under my chin, keeping my head tipped back, my throat long and exposed, and there's nothing I can do with my body except take it.
I can't curl forward. I can't muffle myself in a pillow.
He's arranged me specifically so that every scream goes straight up into the ceiling, and I understand that this was the point.
He wants the evidence. He wants Rome to file a complaint.
"You feel that?" His voice scrapes against my ear, rough and wrecked. "That's mine. This pussy is mine. Say it."
"Yours—" The word splinters into a scream as he angles deeper.
"Again."
"Yours, fuck, Valentino—"
"Touch yourself," he orders.
My hand obeys before my pride can veto. Two fingers, his rhythm, and his voice in my ear telling me I'm beautiful, I'm his, that he's going to fill me up and keep me, crude and reverent in the same sentence.
"Valentino, I'm—"
"I know." His grip tightens under my chin. "Give it to me. Scream."
I do. I come apart so hard my vision whites out at the edges, screaming something that's mostly his name and partly a prayer.
He fucks me through it, snarling, and then his rhythm breaks.
He takes his cock out with a groan that I feel in my bones, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, both of us shaking like we survived something.
We collapse sideways onto the wreckage of the sheets. His arm hooks me back against his chest, and for a long time there's nothing in the room except our lungs trying to remember their job.
"Luca definitely heard that," I say, when I can finally remember how to speak.
"Good." No remorse whatsoever. His lips press against the back of my neck, soft now, unhurried, and the contrast nearly undoes me all over again.
I lace my fingers through his where his hand rests over my heart. The contentment is so foreign it almost hurts.
Valentino
I shift, and she makes a low sound against my ribs.
"Amanda."
"Mm. No. Whatever it is, no. I'm busy." Her lips move against my skin when she talks, and the warmth of it goes straight through me. "I'm doing important work down here." She says while she drags her fingers all over my body.
"We need to talk."
She goes still. The fingers stop their mapping. Then she pushes herself up on one elbow, the sheet sliding off her shoulder, and looks down at me with her hair wrecked and her eyes already sharpening. I watch the softness leave her face. I hate myself.
"There it is," she says. She sighs, and the sigh is older than she is.
"I knew you had something today. You've had it since breakfast. You get this fold right here—" she presses her thumb between my eyebrows, gentle, which is worse than if she'd slapped me, "—when you're carrying a thing you don't want to put down. So. Put it down."
I sit up against the headboard.
"You need to leave for Chicago."
She blinks. Once. Just the one slow blink, like her whole body is buffering, and then she says, very evenly, "What do you mean?"
"Enzo Basile knows it was me." The words come out flat because flat is the only way I can carry them.
"There was security footage from the palazzo.
He ran it. He has my face, and now he has my name.
He's put money on me for anyone who finds me and brings me to him breathing.
Every freelancer between Naples and Zurich is going to be hunting me by the weekend, and some of them are good at it. "
Her face doesn't move.
"There's a passport ready for you," I say. "You fly out of Fiumicino tonight. Toronto, then O'Hare. Luca takes you to the airport, Dmitri's people meet you on the other end, and Vittoria is waiting in Chicago. It's already settled."
"Settled." She repeats the word like she's checking it for rot.
"Yes."
"By who?"
"By Bruno. By me. By everyone whose job is keeping you alive.
" I keep my voice level, the way I'd keep my hands level over a wound.
"The bounty is on me, Amanda. Which means everyone near me becomes a way to reach me.
You're the softest target I have, and Basile is the kind of old man who understands exactly how to use a woman to break a man.
I've watched him do it to other people. I won't watch him do it to you. "
The bells finish. The room holds the quiet badly.
"Okay," she says. "Walk me through the part where you come too."
I don't answer. The silence does it for me, and I see the answer land in her.
"Right." She nods slowly. The sheet stays where it is and she doesn't reach for it, doesn't cover herself, just sits there bare-shouldered and furious in a way that hasn't reached her voice yet.
"You stay. In the country where every hired gun in Europe is shopping for your face.
While I drink airline wine over the Atlantic. That's the plan everyone settled on."
"If I cross a border right now, I drag the hunt with me.
Straight to Chicago. Straight to my aunt, my mother, Vittoria.
Straight to you." I lean forward, elbows on my knees, because I need her to understand the plan, not forgive it.
"Here, I'm hard to get to. I know this country down to the dirt.
There, I'm not protecting you. I'm bringing them to your door. "
"Don't explain it like I'm one of your men. I get it. I'm not stupid, Valentino. I understand the plan is smart." She swallows. "I'm asking about the part where nobody asked me."
"Because your answer was going to be no."
"My answer is no."
"It's not a question anymore. The plane leaves at eleven." I make myself hold her eyes while I say it. "I'd rather you walk onto it. But you're getting on it either way, bella, and I think you know me well enough to believe me."
She laughs once. Then she's up off the bed, pulling my shirt from the floor and dragging it over her head.
"You know what's funny?" She buttons one button, gives up on the rest, and turns back to me with her arms crossed.
"I spent twenty-five years being handed itineraries.
School schedules. Holiday plans. Settled arrangements from people who loved me in theory and managed me in practice.
And I told myself you were different, because you made me believe my answer mattered. "
"Amanda—"
"So answer me one thing." Her voice drops, and that's worse than shouting.
"The passport was ready yesterday. Bruno called you yesterday.
Which means this morning, breakfast, the bedroom, all of it—" she gestures at the wrecked sheets between us like evidence at a trial, "—you already knew.
You had me twice today, and the whole time, you knew you were putting me on a plane tonight. "
"I knew last night," I say. "I knew at breakfast. I knew when I carried you in here, and I knew every minute after. If I had it back, I'd still take every hour I had with you."
Her mouth opens. I keep going before she can stop me.
"You want me to say I feel guilty. I don't. I had one day left with you, and I took it. I wanted breakfast. I wanted the bed. I wanted you laughing before I became the man who sent you away.”
She stands there in my shirt with one button done and her arms wrapped around herself, looking at me like the damage is still happening.
"That's the most selfish thing anyone has ever said to me," she says.
"Probably."
"And the most honest."
"Also probably."
Her chin trembles once. She stops it out of spite, and Dio, I love her for that. The fury is all she has left to stand on.
"Get back in bed," I say.
She huffs out a laugh. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me. We have hours before the airport. You can spend them standing in the corner hating me, or you can come here and hate me where it's warm." I pull the sheet back on her side. "Be angry next to me, bella. I'm not asking you to stop. Bring it with you."
"No."
Her arms tighten across her chest, and her bare feet stay planted on the cold floor. The shirt swallows her to mid-thigh, and she has never looked more like someone I don't deserve.
"Amanda."
"I said no." Her voice climbs. "You don't get the last day, Valentino. You don't get to plan my exile, screw me twice on the way to it, and then pat the mattress like I'm a dog who'll come when—"
I'm off the bed before she finishes.
She gets out half a syllable of protest before my arm hooks around her waist and her feet leave the floor. Her elbow catches my ribs and her heel cracks against my shin hard enough to sting. I take both hits without slowing.
I put her down on the bed and follow her, caging her in with my arms before she can roll for the edge.
"Let me up."
"No."
"You can't just—" She shoves at my chest, but her palms stay there after the shove, fingers curling into me instead of away.
That's when she breaks.
The anger gives out, and everything under it comes with it.
Her face crumples and her breath comes apart in pieces, and she grabs the front of my shirt with both fists like she's planning to take it with her when she goes.
"I just got you," she says, and the words come out wet and furious.
"Do you understand that? Twenty-five years, and I just—I finally got the one thing, the one person, and you're sending me across an ocean while strangers hunt you for money, and I'm supposed to check my phone and wait to find out if—"
She can't finish it. The end of that sentence is me dead, and she won't say it out loud.
I pull her into my chest, and she folds into me, hitting me once on the shoulder out of sheer principle. Her hor tears find my skin. I hold the back of her head and let her shake.
"Promise me," she says into my throat. Her voice is small now. Stripped down to almost nothing. "Promise me you'll come back to me. Say it."
Every instinct I have reaches for the lie. It's right there. Two words. I promise. She'd sleep on the plane. She'd carry it across the Atlantic like it meant something.
And if Enzo Basile's hunters do their work, she'd find out exactly what it was worth. She'd add me to the list of people who told her pretty things and vanished. I will be many things to this woman, but I will not be another name on that list.
The truth is promises are for men who control their futures, and I gave mine away the moment I opened that door in the palazzo. I chose her over every consequence on earth.
"I can't promise that," I say.
She lets out a broken sound and presses her face harder into my chest, like she can hide from the words if she gets close enough. It tears through me.
"Listen to me." I take her face in both hands and tip it up so she has to look at me, her lashes wet and clumped, her eyes red and beautiful and absolutely refusing to look away.
"I won't lie to you. Not even now, when lying would be kinder.
Too many people have handed you comfort and called it love, and I'd rather cut my own tongue out than become one of them. "
"Valentino—"
"What I will promise you is this." I try to catch the tears at her cheekbones and lose, because more come behind them.
"I will try. I will try harder than I have ever tried at anything in my life, and I've spent thirty-eight years being a stubborn Sicilian bastard, so that should tell you how serious I am.
Every man they send, I'll be smarter than.
Every road they watch, I'll know a different one.
I have one reason to survive this, and she's currently crying in my arms, and I plan to come back for her. "
A wet, unwilling laugh escapes her through the tears, and she hates that I got it out of her. Her expression twists around it, love and fury tangled together in a way that makes my chest ache.
"That's a terrible promise," she whispers.
"It's the only true one I have."
She stares at me for a long moment, and then she pulls my mouth down to hers and kisses me like she's trying to leave a mark to identify me by later. When she breaks away, she settles against my chest, her ear over my heart, her fist still knotted in my shirt.