I'm staring at the ceiling tiles—counting them, actually, because it's better than thinking about everything else. I just start on the ones in the corner when the hospital room door slams open with enough force to rattle the walls.
Dante appears like a storm given human form, his face pale beneath his tan, his blue eyes wild with something that looks dangerously close to panic.
I freeze. Not like I was going anywhere, but holy shit. The man looks crazed.
Did Alexei tell him? Is this him angry?
"Hannah." My name comes out rough, broken. "Fuck, Hannah."
Before I can respond, before I can tell him I'm fine, he's at my bedside. Not standing over me with that careful distance he usually maintains but climbing right into the narrow hospitalbed with me, gathering me against his chest like he needs the contact to confirm I'm real and alive.
"I'm okay," I say, though my voice comes out muffled against his shirt. "Dante, I'm okay."
His arms tighten around me. I feel him shaking. Actually shaking, this man who took a bullet and pretended like he got scraped was trembling like a leaf in a storm.
"Alexei called," he says into my hair. "Said you fell down the stairs. That you were bleeding. That?—"
He doesn't finish, but I hear what he's not saying. That he thought he'd lost me. That for however long it took him to get here, he was reliving Katya's death, imagining another woman he cares about dying because of his world.
"I'm fine," I repeat, letting my hands come up to rest against his chest. I can feel his heart hammering beneath my palms. "Just clumsy. I got dizzy and missed the banister."
"You could have died."
"But I didn't."
"You could have." His voice cracks on the words. "Hannah, when Alexei called, when he said you were hurt, I?—"
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and what I see in his face makes my breath catch. Raw fear barely contained. The kind of vulnerability he never shows anyone.
"I should have been there," he says. "I never should have left. If I'd been home?—"
"It wouldn't have made a difference." I reach up to touch his face, my fingers gentle against the sharp line of his jaw. "Dante, accidents happen. It's not your fault."
"Everything is my fault." The words are bitter, self-condemning. "You're in danger because of me. Because I brought you into this world, because I can't let you go, because I'm selfish enough to keep you here even though it's destroying you."
The honesty in his confession steals my breath. "You're not destroying me."
"Aren't I?" His thumb traces the bandage on my head with heartbreaking gentleness. "Look at you. Hurt, trapped, kept away from your family. How is that not destruction?"
I don't have a good answer for that. Because he's right—I am trapped, and it is destroying parts of who I used to be. But it's also building something new, something I'm not sure I want to name.
"Can you take me home?" I ask instead of trying to explain the complicated tangle of my feelings.
"The doctor wants to keep you overnight. Observation for the concussion."
"I don't want to stay here." The hospital room feels too exposed. I’ve gotten used to living within the insulated walls of his compound. "Please. I just want to go home."
I realize too late that I called his estate home, that somewhere in the past weeks it's become more familiar than my own apartment in Chicago. The acknowledgment should terrify me, but I'm too tired to examine what it means.
"I don't want to," he says quietly.
"What?"
"I don't want to take you home." His arms tighten around me again. "I want to keep you here where there are doctors and nurses and monitors that will tell me if something goes wrong. I want to know that you're safe."
The raw need in his voice undoes me. "Dante?—"
"But I will," he continues. "Because you're asking me to. Because what you want matters more than what I need."
