5. CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE
Alina
Alina couldn’t remember the last time she’d truly taken a break. No weekends. No day trips. Not even a single morning without scanning her work email. After her breakup, Jess and Mara staged a well-meaning intervention in the break room.
“You need to get out of town,” Mara declared. “Literally leave the state before you diagnose yourself with compassion fatigue.”
Jess nodded so hard her hair bounced. “Someplace with sunshine. Or alcohol. Or both.”
Alina rolled her eyes but had to admit they were right: she was running on empty. Physically, she was tired but fine. Mentally, she was frayed—haunted by Dante’s intense gaze, the memory of Evan, and the ache of wanting something she was too afraid to admit she craved.
So, she did something out of character: she booked a flight. A short trip to a sleepy coastal town with a budget hotel and a boardwalk. A place where she could kick off her shoes, touch the sand, and remember how to breathe.
She packed light—a few changes of clothes, a book she’d probably never open, and a stubborn hope that distance might reset her. She didn’t tell Dante. She didn’t owe him an explanation, and she didn’t want him to follow. She convinced herself he wouldn’t. That, she lied to herself about.
The airport felt alien compared to the hospital: louder, brighter, chaotic in a way that didn’t need her to fix anything. For once, she could just exist. No alarms. No patients. No Dante. She kept repeating that last part in her head.
After checking her bag and grabbing a coffee, she found her gate with twenty minutes to spare. She sat by the window, watching planes taxi, the engine hum oddly soothing.
Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. Again.
Unknown: Don’t get on that flight.
Her stomach clenched. She stared at the message, irritation flaring.
Alina: Who is this?
No reply. She exhaled, told herself it was a wrong number or a prank, and stowed the phone.
A man plopped down next to her—mid-40s, sweating, jittery, eyes darting as if he expected danger to drop from the ceiling. His leg bounced so fast the chair vibrated. Alina eased away. He leaned in.
“Take this.” He pressed something into her palm—a small black flash drive.
“Sir, I think—”
“Don’t let them see it. Don’t—”
A gunshot cracked across the terminal. Screams and shouts erupted. The man beside her stiffened, then collapsed onto her, pinning her to the seat.
Alina sat trapped beneath the dead man’s weight, the world reduced to shrieking chaos and the warmth of blood soaking through to her arm.
Her mind refused to process the violence, choosing instead to hyperfocus on the smallest, most irrelevant details: the way the stranger’s suit smelled faintly of hotel soap, the sticky slide of his hand as it fell from her shoulder to the floor, red pooling in the space between the terminal chairs.
Already, her chest ached from holding her breath.
She forced herself to exhale and found her mouth full of the metallic tang of someone else’s panic.
Her vision tunneled. She couldn’t move; she couldn’t shake the dead weight pinning her.
She couldn’t believe this was real—until another gunshot ripped through the concourse, closer this time, and the man slumped harder, as if the sound itself had finished the job.
A primal instinct kicked in. Alina jerked her knees up and half-rolled the man off her lap, his head hitting the vinyl seat with a wet thud.
She dropped to the floor, crawling behind the row of chairs, clutching the flash drive so tight the corners bit into her palm.
Airport security uniforms swarmed the far end of the gate area.
Someone screamed for help. A rolling suitcase tumbled down the concourse and people stampeded in its wake, every one of them running for a different exit, none of them looking back.
Alina pressed herself flat to the carpet, heart pounding so violently she thought she might vomit.
She dared a look at the scene behind her: the man who’d given her the drive now bled quietly onto the gray floor, his lifeless hand pointed directly at where she lay.
She tried to scream but produced only a strangled gasp.
The next shot shattered a wall of glass overhead.
Shards rained down in a windchime chorus, sparking pinpricks across her scalp.
Move. You have to move. She crawled for the nearest column, keeping her head down, every instinct screaming at her to stay invisible.
She didn't dare loosen her grip on the drive.
Behind her, the world warped into a single pulse of noise: screaming, the metallic bellow of security alarms, the rasp of her own lungs. Two men charged past her hiding spot, shouting orders, guns drawn. Alina shrank back, tucked her knees to her chest, and waited.
And then, suddenly, a hand clamped tight around her upper arm.
She jerked, nearly slamming her head against the column. Before she could bite, scratch, or scream, she heard a low, inhumanly steady voice in her ear: “Come with me.”
She twisted, expecting a gunman. Instead, she looked up into the face of Dante, who wasn’t running from the chaos, but moving deliberately through it—toward her.
His dark suit was immaculate, unmarked by the violence, his eyes so cold and steady they looked painted on.
He crouched so his mouth was inches from her ear, every muscle in his face set to a level of focus she’d never seen.
He barely glanced at the body sprawled behind them. “We need to move. Now.”
She stared at him, vision juddering from fear. “Dante—what—”
“Questions later. Up.” He wrapped a hand around her elbow, not cruel but unyielding, and hauled her to her feet in a single motion. For a wild, humiliating moment, she nearly collapsed against him, her knees weak as water.
Together, they kept low, moving along the row of seats and ducking behind a battered advertising kiosk just as a third gunshot ricocheted across the terminal.
The sound was close—too close—and Alina realized with creeping horror that whoever was shooting was no longer aiming randomly. They were aiming at her.
Dante pressed her flat against the kiosk, chest to her back, one hand braced against the aluminum beside her head. His breath was slow and steady, but his other hand hovered near his jacket pocket—ready to draw something ugly and final.
Alina shivered, not from fear, but from the absolute certainty in his touch.
She’d watched him in the hospital—the predatory focus, the way he scanned a room, the way he anticipated threats before anyone else noticed them.
She’d known, in an abstract way, that Dante was dangerous.
Now, pressed against the trembling aluminum, she felt the last of that abstraction dissolve.
He peeked around the edge, eyes flicking left to right. “Two shooters. One at the exit, one moving this direction. Others are decoys.”
Her brain lagged. “How do you know—”
“Later,” he said, and it sounded less like a demand than a promise. He scanned the crowd, picked out the only path not under direct fire, and nudged her forward. “Stay behind me. If I say down, you drop.”
She wanted to argue that she wasn’t built for this, but her mouth was dry. She gave a numb nod.
Dante led her in a wide arc around the gunman at the exit, cutting through a family cowering beneath the check-in desk.
He moved like he’d rehearsed the route, sweeping the glass-strewn floor with his foot before each step, never once exposing his back to the room.
Alina followed, each footfall a study in controlled terror.
Her calf muscles screamed, her ears rang, her knees threatened to buckle.
But she kept moving. If she stopped, she’d freeze and drag Dante down with her.
At the end of the concourse, they ducked into a maintenance hallway. The walls were a sterile, soothing hospital green—a surreal contrast to the carnage. The door banged shut, and absolute silence settled over them.
Dante didn’t let go. He kept one hand locked around her wrist, the other reaching into his jacket. He produced a slim, unmarked phone, thumbed out a text, then finally looked her in the eye. “What did he give you?” The words were clinical, as if he were triaging a wound.
Alina stared at her fist. She’d forgotten she was still holding the flash drive, her own nails cutting half-moons into her skin.
She opened her palm. The little black rectangle glinted up at her.
Dante’s face shifted. A steel curtain dropped over his features—a mask of calculation and something darker, something that made the chaos outside seem gentle.
“Where did you get this?”
She stammered, “He shoved it at me. Said not to let anyone see it.”
Dante’s mouth tightened. “Did anyone else notice?”
“I… I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He nodded once, pocketed the flash drive, and stepped closer. It was the proximity of a man who could kill a stranger and then walk away without breaking stride.
“What is it?” she managed, her voice thin.
He took a slow breath, as if deciding how much truth she could handle. “The reason you’re not safe.” The words hit her harder than any of the gunshots.
She looked up at him, searching for remorse. What she found was resolved. “What happens now?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Now? You come with me. And you don’t let go of my hand, even if you want to.”
Her whole body wanted to rebel, but her fingers betrayed her: she gripped his wrist in return, digging in hard enough to feel his pulse. “I’m not—”
“You don’t have a choice,” Dante said. He pressed her to the wall as heavy footsteps sounded at the far end of the hallway.
Alina felt her pulse spike, but she wasn’t afraid of the men chasing them anymore. She was afraid of the man standing in front of her—the man who’d just reordered her entire universe in thirty seconds.
She pulled air into her lungs. “Dante—what is this?”
He looked at her—not past her, not through her, but at her. For the first time, she saw the truth behind his perfect composure: he wasn’t only dangerous. He was involved. Deeply, irrevocably, and now, so was she.