Chapter 18 #2
Our eyes meet across the warehouse and every shattered piece of the last three hours fades. She's alive. She's on her feet. And defiant as ever.
The guards in the room raise their weapons.
I handle them. My body moves on muscle memory and decades of training and the cold precision of a man who has one purpose and will not be stopped.
Four men. Thirty seconds. They go down and I don't register the details because my eyes keep pulling back to her.
She's standing. She's breathing. She's alive.
I run all those facts through my head again to help keep me from turning feral.
Seamus backs against the wall and my hand closes around his throat before he can open his mouth.
I lift him off the ground with one arm, his polished shoes kicking against the wall, his fingers scrabbling at my wrist, and the pulse hammering beneath my fingers feels like a countdown.
His throat is soft under my grip, the cartilage flexing, and one squeeze, one real squeeze, would crush it.
His face turns purple. His eyes bulge. The wet, choking sounds coming out of his mouth are nothing like the smooth voice that destroyed Onyx's mother.
Every cell in my body says finish it. End him. The twelve-year-old boy who survived Volkov and the forty-four-year-old man who found the woman he loves tied to a chair with blood on her face are in complete agreement for the first time in thirty years. Kill him.
"Kon." Her voice reaches me through the red haze, cracked and raw and shaking. "Kon, please. Come back to me."
My hand tightens. Seamus's kicks grow weaker.
"Please." Her voice again. Closer now. Breaking on the word. "I need the man, Kon. Not the Beast. Come back."
The man she's calling for is the one who cooks breakfast and grows roses and sat outside her locked door all night without knocking. That man doesn't kill with his bare hands in a warehouse while the woman he loves watches.
The Beast inside me wants to squeeze the life out of the man who hurt the woman I love. But one look in her eyes and I can't find it in me to be that man in front of her.
I let go.
Seamus drops to the concrete, gasping, clutching his throat. I stand over him, my hand still curled in the shape of his neck, the phantom pulse still beating against my fingers.
I turn toward her.
She runs. Crashes into my chest so hard my wounded arm screams and my ribs protest and I do not give a single damn because her arms are around my neck and her face is pressed against my throat and the warmth of her body against mine is proof that she is here, she is real, she is alive.
I wrap both arms around her and hold on with everything I have. My face buries in her blood-matted hair and beneath the copper and the smoke I catch it, honey and musk and her, the scent that has become my definition of home.
She pulls back. Grabs my face in both hands, her palms warm and sticky with blood against my jaw, her blue eyes swimming, tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt and dried blood on her cheeks.
"I love you." She says it looking straight at me, no darkness, no sleeping, no whisper she thinks I can't hear.
Full volume. Full force. Her voice cracks on every word and she doesn't care.
"I love you, Konstantin. I should have said it weeks ago. I should have said it every single day since you saved me. In my heart of hearts I know I loved you the night you scooped me up and placed me on your lap. You comforted me and my heart fell for you then. I just couldn’t admit it. "
"The night I put you in my lap, huh." My voice is rough and my throat burns but the memory hits me square in the chest. Her body shook against mine. The way she curled into me like she'd been waiting her whole life for a place where she belonged. "That's when you knew?"
My thumb traces the line of her jaw, wiping blood and tears in a smear across her freckled skin. She leans into my hand and the trust in that small gesture almost breaks me.
"That's when my heart knew. My brain took a little longer to catch up."
"Stubborn to the core." I press my lips to her forehead, tasting salt and grime and the copper edge of dried blood. She's warm. She's alive. She's in my arms.
"Look who's talking." She laughs through her tears, the sound wet and broken and perfect. "I love you, Kon. I was so scared when—"
"Shh, you don't have to say it." I kiss her left cheek, then her right, my lips lingering on the bruise Seamus's backhand left on her skin.
My mouth moves to the hollow beneath her ear, pressing against the pulse hammering there, and I hold my lips to that spot until the rhythm steadies against mine.
"I love you, огонёк." My voice breaks against her neck.
I let it. "Ya tebya lyublyu. I love you.
I'm sorry. For everything. I never wanted you to see this side of me. I'm so sorry."
Her fingers slide into my hair, gripping the blood-soaked strands at my nape, and she pulls me closer instead of pushing me away.
"You came for me." She presses her forehead against mine, our breath mixing, both of us wrecked and bleeding and shaking. "You saved me, bled for me and you lost so much in the process. There is nothing to be sorry for."
Then her hands start moving. Running over my chest, my arms, my torso, frantic, checking for wounds with the desperate urgency of a woman who watched me take two bullets and spent hours thinking I bled out on a rooftop.
"You were shot. I watched you get shot. Twice. In the chest." Her voice pitches up, the journalist's composure crumbling under the weight of relief and residual terror.
I show her the field dressing on my left bicep. "Arm. Through-and-through. Missed the bone."
I lift what's left of my shirt to show the graze along my waist. "Side. Superficial. Bled a lot. Looked worse than it is, I promise."
She stares at the wounds. Blinks. Processes. Her journalist brain runs the calculations and arrives at the conclusion her heart hasn't accepted yet.
"Those aren't chest wounds."
"Nyet."
"He shot you from ten feet away and missed your chest. Both times."
"Brennan couldn't hit the broad side of a building under pressure." My mouth twitches. "Turns out the man's only skill set was throwing punches. Marksmanship wasn't in his job description."
She stares at me for three full seconds, her bloody face cycling through relief, disbelief, and a fury so hot it could melt the concrete beneath our feet.
Then she punches my good arm. Hard.
"I thought you were DEAD, Konstantin." Her voice echoes off the steel rafters and her blue eyes blaze with a fury that has nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the terror she's been swallowing for hours.
Her chin trembles and her nostrils flare and she jabs her finger into my chest hard enough to make my wounded side protest. "I sat in this warehouse for HOURS thinking you bled out on that rooftop.
HOURS, Kon." Her voice cracks and she swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing blood and tears across her cheekbone.
"Do you understand that? I thought I was never going to see you again. "
"I'm not dead." I catch her hand before she can jab me again, wrapping my fingers around her fist, and the corner of my mouth pulls because she's yelling at me. Hand to God above, I have never loved her more than I do right now.
"I can SEE that." She hits my good arm with her free hand, softer this time, the punch landing without force before her fingers uncurl and flatten against my chest, pressing over my heartbeat.
Her palm settles there and her shoulders drop as the steady thud registers beneath her hand.
The fury drains from her face and what replaces it is raw and open and wrecked.
"Don't ever do that to me again. Ever." Her voice drops to a whisper. "I will kill you myself."
"That would be counterproductive."
Her jaw tightens and for a second I think she might actually hit me again. Then the corner of her mouth twitches and the laugh that escapes her is half sob, half surrender.
"I don't care." She presses her face against my chest, right over the roses, and her shoulders shake with laughter tangled up in tears and exhaustion and a relief so total it breaks her down before it builds her back up. I know because I feel the same way.
"I hate you so much right now."
"You love me. You just said so. Several times."
"Both things can be true."
I hold her. The warehouse is being secured around us.
Luca is sweeping rooms. Rafael has our men filing in through the east entrance, handling Seamus with the quiet efficiency this family has perfected over two decades.
Declan is on his knees near the wall, hands behind his head, offering no resistance.
He meets my eyes once, briefly, and in his gaze I read a resignation that borders on relief.
Rafael approaches, his suit still crisp despite the hour, his dark eyes sweeping from Onyx in my arms to the blood soaking through my field dressings to Seamus slumped against the wall still clutching his throat like a fucking pussy. Rafael takes it all in with a single measured look and nods once.
"She good?" His voice is low, pitched for my ears only.
"She's good." I tighten my arm around her. "She punched Seamus before I got here. She’s a fighter."
The corner of Rafael's mouth lifts. He looks at Onyx with an expression that falls somewhere between admiration and amusement. "That's our girl." He winks at her and the future of our motley family of fighters, assassins and ruthless mafia men flashes across my mind.
We’re going to be okay. I know it.
"Let's hand these fuckers over to the men at Genesis." I shift Onyx against my chest, my jaw tight, my eyes cutting to Seamus and then Declan. "I'd like to have a long conversation with the Malone men later. When I've had some sleep and my woman isn't bleeding."
Rafael claps my good shoulder, careful of the wounds, his grip firm and warm. "Consider it done, brother. Take her home. We'll handle the rest."
I turn to Onyx, "Can you walk?" I ask against her hair. Onyx nuzzles into me, her face pressing deeper against my chest, and the trust in that gesture tightens my throat. I swear viciously under my breath at the circumstances we’re in. I never wanted her to live even a day of violence.
Her brows do a cute scrunch. "Of course I can walk."
I pick her up anyway. She protests, slapping my good shoulder, but her arms wrap around my neck and she doesn't actually fight it. I carry her through the warehouse, past the bodies, the loading dock, and past the guard still unconscious near the entrance.
"You know you don't have to carry me," she murmurs against my neck, her breath warm on my skin.
From this day forward I will consider every sensation and emotion a blessing.
I could have lost all this, but by some miracle we are still breathing.
That's enough for now. "You've been wounded.
I can walk," she tries again, but there's little fight to her efforts.
"And yet you're not fighting me on it."
"I'm tired, Kon. Not stupid." She tightens her arms around my neck and presses her lips against the pulse point below my ear. "Take me home."
A crackle of energy pops and hisses between us I can’t wait to cash in on. Later. Once the pain stops.
Luca has the SUV running and waiting for us. He takes one look at Onyx in my arms and his expression shifts from operational focus to genuine relief, his tight expression relaxing. He opens the back door without a word.
I set her in the back seat and slide in beside her. She immediately tucks herself against my good side, her head finding the hollow of my shoulder, her hand resting on my chest over the roses.
The city scrolls past the tinted windows. Streetlights and traffic and the ordinary pulse of a world that kept spinning while mine nearly ended.
"Kon?"
"Mm."
"I deleted the Syndicate file. Before the attack. Before Brennan came through the door." Her voice is quiet, muffled against my shoulder. "I want you to know that."
"I know." I press my lips to the top of her head. "We'll talk about it later. When we're both cleaned up and neither of us is bleeding."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
She's asleep within minutes, her body going slack against mine, her breathing deepening, her fingers curling into the fabric of my ruined shirt. The bullet graze on her temple has stopped bleeding but the dried blood in her dark hair catches the passing streetlights in dull flashes of red.
My garden is destroyed. My home is wrecked. The woman I love has a bullet wound on her head and I've got holes in my arm and my side and my knuckles are split to the bone.
And I have never been happier in my entire life.
Because she's alive. She loves me. She's coming home.
And this time, I'm never letting go.