A ruthless outlaw.
A romantic knight.
I couldn’t be tamed.
Mywife.
Mylife.
The beat of my heart.
The air in my lungs.
I fell to my knees behind her.
A summer storm.
It howled outside of our window. It wasn’t as strong as the storm that had caused so much loss and devastation, but it was strong enough to make one of the shutters beat against the villa. Rain pelted. Lightning lit up the room, shocking the small form of my wife in the bed. Thunder rumbled and, in my mind, I fucking could have sworn she trembled.
Her back was to me.
She refused to look at me.
She barely ate.
She barely got out of the bed.
She shivered from the cold. Always cold now.
Hannah had sent over the quilt from Wyoming. I had covered her with it, but she took one look at the blue pattern close to the center and set it beside her, trembling even harder.
It had been two weeks since we arrived home, and she was becoming a shell of the fiery woman she had once been. She had grown an attachment to the dogs. They slept around her,protecting her, and when they would go outside, she stirred, like she didn’t fucking feel comfortable unless they were beside her. They did their business and ran back in. They felt it, her weakness, and they had been bred to protect the weak.
I was with her nonstop, the same as the dogs. Unless I took the seat Marciano had left for me outside of our door. At times, the anger in me became so great, I had to take a breather, but I couldn’t be far from her either.
We were both stuck in hell, except it seemed as if we were stuck in two versions of it, a wall between us.
My hands curled around the handles of the chair in our room beside the bed, my knuckles burning from the strain.
Another shock of lightning lit up the room.
Thunder rattled the panes.
My wife made a whimpering noise.
I stood, and she turned to face me.
Slowly, I sat back down in the chair, keeping my eyes on hers.
It was the first time she’d met my eyes since she woke up in the hospital for longer than a few seconds. It was the first time she stared at me. I exhaled, slowly, silently, the immense pressure in my chest lessening by a breath. I kept anticipating that she would turn over and give me her back. It seemed as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t know how. Like she had forgotten all her words.
She was always full of them.
I was like my old man in that way. I didn’t have many to spare, even if, on the inside, I was flooded with emotions. Maybe that was the fucking problem. I knew what love felt like—my mamma and sister made sure all of us men had known what it was our entire lives. When it knocked on our door, we’d recognize it. Still. No matter how much mamma loved me, or my sister thinned my skin a bit, there was no erasing or lesseningthe Fausti blood humming through my veins. At the sound of battle, I was prepared in an instant.
At the sound of my wife whimpering, I was fucking lost, overwhelmed by emotions.
Maybe if my wife would’ve said, “I’m dying inside—I don’t know what to do with all this pain,” I would have repeated the words to her. I couldn’t. They were stuck in my chest, and I couldn’t dislodge them. Couldn’t share with her my weight if she was already feeling weighed down herself.
