“He trusts that if he tells me to kill you, I will.”
I breathed out, and his lips parted, breathing me in.
“Will you?” I whispered.
“You are my only oath,” he said in Italian. Then he started the car and pulled out of the garage.
I looked out of the window. “Don’t let them take me,” I said.
“If they take you, they take me,” he said.
“I mean—if we have no way out. I don’t want to die by anyone’s hand but yours.”
He was so quiet that I had to look at him to make sure he was still in the car. Then my body was slammed into the door when he abruptly cut across traffic, sending cars swerving and horns blaring, as he pulled to the side of the road.
“What are you doing?” I rasped out, even though I wanted to yell it. I couldn’t. My heart was lodged in my throat.
He took my face in his hands, so hard that I came close to trying to rip out of his touch. It was uncomfortable. His eyes on mine were even more so.
“I’m not fucking planning your death,” he said.
I heard it then. Something the opposite of hesitation, of indifference. The intensity of it scared me more than anything had in my entire life. Even more than death.
They say love and hate are separated by a thin line. He was switching lanes on me like a maniac. I couldn’t decide in that moment which lane we were in, though.
His voice reflected hate, but his eyes showed nothing but love.
My hands trembled, but I found the strength to move, to reach up and hold on to his. “All right,” I whispered. I held on to him tighter when he didn’t budge. “I won’t ask you to break the oath between us.”
I wasn’t sure if those were even the right words to use, but I was trying to speak to him in a language he knew better than English or Italian. I spoke to him in a code that spanned hundreds of years. A code that was honored as much as it was feared.
He searched my eyes before his mouth came against mine in a kiss that I thought might have reopened my lip. His touch was rough too, especially when he ran over the scabs left on my cheek.
“Aniello,” I hardly got out. “I can’t b-breathe.”
He broke the kiss and his hold on me, sending a surge of air through my lungs. It was like taking a first breath after being consumed by smoke.
He put the car in gear and tore away from the side of the road. I watched his face closely as he drove. I couldn’t read him. He’d buried his feelings too deep for me to understand.
It wasn’t until after we arrived at Club D that I knew exactly what he wanted from me.
Exactly what he needed.
Me.
We walked in separately, and right after he came through the door, he ordered me into his bath suite.
We didn’t come out until the next morning, the sun burning through the windows and curtains, orange and red flames streaking across the sky, predicting the oncoming heat of the day.
Our game with fire had begun.
22
Rosalia
The closer we moved toward the summer event, the hotter the days became. We were nearing August, and the weather seemed almost symbolic.
The fire Aniello and I had started was inching closer. I felt it around us—in the tension in the air. An oncoming storm of flames.
