“I fucked up!” Mia said, cracking. “I fucked up. I asked Tori for help. Angelo said he needed something more to find Xavier and I pressed her to tell me where Xavier was. She mentioned that he’d been calling in to check on Gabe. You interrupted us at the christening, or she’d have told me something more. She told Gabe, and he got under my skin so I... I sort of told him about Silas and the shooting.”
I bit the inside of my cheeks so hard that I tasted blood, the soft flesh giving way to the sharp edges of my teeth. Mia had given away every card that we had.
“They know about Angelo,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“No,” she said desperately. “No. I never said a thing about Angelo.”
My heart rate dropped a few beats. Not every card then. But enough that I needed to do some damage control. “I’m going to kill Angelo for getting you involved,” I said, looking Mia in the eye. “Then I’m going to kill Gabe for thinking he had any right to warn you of anything.”
“No!” Mia yelled. Her hands shot out and grabbed my shirt to stop me from turning away. “This isn’t their fault. It’s my fault!”
“Let go,” I told her, looking down at her hands. “I’m not standing by and letting people drag you into a mess and threaten you because they don’t have the balls to come and speak to me.”
“I’m already involved in this mess!” she argued. We were both up to our necks in it.
“I’m not having it, Mia!” My palms slammed into the bookshelf behind her, causing it to rock with the movement. She didn’t flinch, confident in the knowledge that I would never take my anger out on her in that way.
“So, you’re just going to kill them?”
“It’s long overdue.”
“You’re a psychopath!” Mia shouted at me, trying to get through to my clouded logic.
There was a point in our relationship where that would have had some impact on me. When Mia first came into my life, she was completely unaware of the darker parallels than ran along her, day to day. Every fight we had, she used my job as a weapon against me. And then things changed. We changed. I realised that no matter what I did, no matter how tight the demons held onto me, Mia would always look at me like I had granted all of her wishes. The world that she saw as black and white had blended together until everything was grey, and even Mia had stepped into the ambiguous waters rather than sitting on the side lines.
“So are you,” I hissed in return, bringing my face close to hers. “I’ve seen what happens when you lose control, princess. If you think I’m a psychopath for protecting my family then you’re right there with me.”
“We can’t keep doing this,” Mia said, moving her hands up to my face. She didn’t argue the point I’d just made because it was the truth. Mia could be equally unhinged as I was if you knew the correct buttons to press. “We can’t keep doing this,” she repeated the words slowly and clearly.
I pushed my forehead against hers. “I won’t stop, Mia. You and Link are the most important things in my life. Do you understand that? I don’t care about anything else. I will destroy the entire world if I have to in order to keep you both safe. Keep you both with me.” There wasn’t a single thing I wouldn’t do. Mia was the reason behind my existence. I would serve a thousand years and more in the depths of hell if I had my family with me every waking moment in this life.
Every fibre of my being wanted to find Angelo and beat the shit out of him for screwing up the simplest instruction of asking myself or Dante if he needed anything. He’d been happy to hand over the information he found but at risk of looking like an idiot or perhaps because he feared me slashing his pay, he’d gone to Mia when he struggled.
There was an uncontrollable desire to find Gabriel and let all of the underlying tension finally spill over. Killing Gabe would be a sure-fire way of getting Xavier back here. Fuck the promises I made to Mia about minimal casualties. She’d forgive me, given time.
“Please,” Mia said, pushing back against me. Her lips brushed against mine as she spoke. “Please. Not now. I need you.”
Those three words were like a panic button in this relationship. Everything was dropped and nothing else mattered when one of us uttered those words. I exhaled a shaky breath, pressing down on every natural instinct that ran through my veins.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered quietly, sagging against me. The adrenaline that forced her to fight dissipated away as she told me she needed support.
I exercised every morsel of restraint I had. My fingers reached out and tipped her chin up so she could look at me again. “Stop apologising.” It was a filthy habit she had learned, and I was yet to break her out of it.
“I fucked up,” she told me again.
“And I’ll fix it,” I replied, kissing her. “I’ll always fix it.”
I’d made the mistake of believing and choosing people over her once before and I would never do it again. She was the only person I would forgive without hesitation. Mia could cause disaster after disaster, and I’d be there to clear up the fallout.
She reached up and kissed me, full of want and need and I knew that she was drifting. I knew that she needed something to tether her back to the present. She’d lost control and she didn’t know how to get back on track, but I’d find a way for us. It was a blip and I could resolve the situation.
My hand slipped down the space between us, under her pants and the lace of her underwear to find her already wet for me. I’d noticed the way the danger scared and thrilled Mia in equal parts. Anytime I came home from a job it ended in the same way, with her wrapped tightly around me until she could give me no more, fulfilling both our needs. She whimpered as I drew my finger along her slit. “You leave everything to me from now on. Understand?” I asked, biting the skin on her neck and sucking the spot. She moaned in response. “Mia?” I pulled back to look at her.
“I understand,” she told me, pupils growing larger as she locked eyes with mine.
“This isn’t a joke, princess.” I pressed on her bundle of nerves and her knees buckled but I kept her upright.
“I know. I know,” she agreed, hips moving to get what she wanted.
