I shove myself upright, stumbling toward the sinks. My reflection is a horror—blood smeared across my chin, mascara smudged, terror widening my eyes. I push out the door, legs barely functioning. The café falls into stunned silence when the first gasps ripple across the room.
A woman puts a hand to her chest. Someone else whispers, “Oh my God.”
Stacy shoots out of her seat like she’s been shocked, horror twisting across her features. “Briar?”
I can’t speak. I shake my head and the tears finally break, hot and choking. The security team reacts instantly. One of them is already calling backup, the other wrapping an arm around me protectively, steering us out through the cafe, which watches in horrified silence.
We’re rushed into a black SUV at the curb. Doors slam. Engines roar. We speed away. I hear the bodyguard in the front seat speaking urgently into his phone. “Possible assault. Moretti needs to know now. Subject evaded on foot. Redeploying coverage grid.”
My heartbeat slams like gunfire. From the back seat, Stacy’s crying, clutching my hand so hard it’s turning white. “Briar, Jesus Christ, what happened?”
I try to speak, but the words dissolve.
Then I hear it—Lucien’s voice, roaring through the phone the guard holds to his ear. I can’t make out the words, but the rage is unmistakable, low and lethal. The SUV turns sharply, not toward the office but toward the private entrance for Lucien’s loft. Men are already waiting there, armed, tense, swarming around the vehicle.
The doors open and Stacy helps me out. My knees nearly buckle. We’re guided straight to the elevator and up, the numbers blurring.
When the doors slide open, Lucien is there.
His expression stops my breath.
He moves fast—too fast—and suddenly his hands are on my face, gentle but trembling, eyes scanning every inch of me with devastation and fury. “Briar,” he breathes, voice breaking on my name.
I flinch instinctively, body locked in terror, and the devastation in his eyes cuts through me like a blade. He stares at my blood, my trembling, my ruined face, and something inside him combusts.
I see it, silent as the grave but it’s there. His chest heaves, fury clenching his jaw, tightening so hard a muscle leaps in his cheek. He looks like a man holding himself together with threads.
Stacy swallows hard. “She needs medical attention.”
Lucien lifts his gaze, dark and lethal and vibrating with violence. “Who did this?” he asks, voice quiet. Deadly.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
He already knows.
His eyes burn like fire catching oxygen. And then, softly—terrifyingly— “Matteo Romero just signed his death certificate.”
NINETEEN
LUCIEN
I stand in the kitchen,watching the kettle boil, but I’m not really seeing it. My hands are shaking, fists clenching and unclenching against the marble countertop. The doctor has just left. Briar is in the bathroom, being helped into the shower by Stacy.
My chest feels like it’s been split open and wired with explosives.
Her lip is stitched—three tiny sutures threading through swollen flesh, a butterfly bandage reinforcing the edges. She’s lucky the blow didn’t break the skin on her chin too, only splitting her lip. The doctor said the cut was clean enough that it shouldn’t scar.
Lucky.
There’s nothing lucky about any of this.
I don’t want her to have even a shadow of Matteo Romero left on her body. I don’t want her to ever look in the mirror and see a reminder of the hell that man put her through. He has taken enough. He doesn’t get physical scars too.
But that terror ends today. For good.
I thought the warning I sent through my men would’ve been enough to keep him away—enough for him to understand that Briar is under my protection and that there are consequences to touching what’s mine. I thought he’d disappear into whatever gutter spawned him and stay there.
But it seems Matteo is determined to die—and so now he will.
