It was hard for me to breathe when I thought about the countless seconds, minutes, hours, days that we would never be able to recover because of the space between us.
Space she had chosen to accept.
What fucking new idea was she coming up with?
Was she laughing, thinking about how I threatened to kill a fake fairytale creature because it made her fucking smile?
Was she thinking about the iced coffees she loved? How we’d take time out of every day to grab her one? How she’d make me try them all with a knowing grin on her face? Yeah, some of them were fucking delicious for a girlie drink.
Was she sick? Her allergies might be causing havoc on her system…
My entire body turned at the same time Guerriero’s did. If I kept thinking of all the things she might be doing, if she was sick…
Maybe I would chance fate again and see how far Guerriero could take me over the ledge again.
All the possibilities of what she could be doing…
It was fucking with my mind. I needed something easier to deal with. Using all my physical strength to keep me from dropping hundreds of feet to my death seemed like a bright fucking plan.
ProzioTito was prone to say that the mind was as powerful as the body.
Once the mind gives in…
I was sick without her.
We rarely raced back to my property, but Guerriero seemed to sense something else from me. He picked up speed, and even though he wasn’t racing as fast as he was before, he was moving fast enough for the wind to whistle past. Even though it was winter, and the weather was cool, I was saturated with sweat.
Apollo and Zeus were there to greet us, turning in circles and giving the occasional bark, but they gave Guerriero a wide berth. He was an insane stallion, and they knew it. Everyone who worked for me, and all the other animals, couldn’t deal with the motherfucker.
I even had to install two doors to his stall that were pulled by two ropes on either side. When I wasn’t around, the men would open the gates this way to let him out of his stall and to a private area I created for him to graze. The men could clean his stall this way.
Guerriero tore through the open door into the stables, and it was like the motherfucker knew. An old wooden sign had come unhinged with a storm. One chain popped, and it hung crookedly, still swinging. It hung so low that my head hit it.
I dismounted the insane horse, and we faced off. He was breathing heavy, his nostrils flaring, and he bared his teeth at me.
“Go!” I flung my hand out. “Get back in your stall, you motherfucker.”
He lifted his lips, baring his teeth again, before he stomped once and went to eat his chow. Even though I felt it, I set a hand to my head, pulling back an entire palm smeared with blood. In the cool air, full of humidity from an oncoming storm, I smelled the scent of wet penny. My own blood. I removed my riding shirt and stuck it to my forehead. It didn’t take long for it to saturate the fibers. It ran down my face, my temples. It was running down my chest, dripping on either my riding boots or the ground. I was leaving small splatters in my wake.
My feet stilled, and the lone stallion tattoo came to mind. He wasn’t so fucking alone anymore. Even the thought of my wife kept me company, whether she was beside me or the memory haunting me.
Haunting me becauseshehad made the choice for us to separate to fucking prove something.
“Fuck me sideways,” I said, and it was as if somethingclickedinside of my brain, the fury taking over.
I was about to slam my fist into the side of the barn when I heard it.
A footstep.
Lev, the Russian assassin who had always followed my mamma around, stepped out of the shadows, his eyes narrowing on my head.
“We must fix this,” he said. He motioned for me to take a seat on an old stool. He went for the first aid kit Mamma left in the stable. She was always ten steps ahead. She said it came with the territory of being a son mamma.
I wiped my forehead, the salt on my skin making the cut burn—it was a distant fire during a blizzard, though. “You’re here,” I said. “That means you have something you want to tell me.”
He nodded. “The man you call Iggy.”
Iggy.
