“It’s nothing more than a scratch. I’m still standing.Capisci?”
Her gaze darts frantically between mine.
Then it slows. Holds steady.
And I’m not sure why my insides flip and twist with dizziness. Almost elated by the fierce thing that looks like trust in her eyes.
But I throttle it before it consumes me whole.
Even as I suspect it will bloom until it overtakes every corner of my existence.
Lucia
The world doesn’t come backin tiny fragments of relief.
It slams into me. Hard.
Sound, heat, the echo of gunfire still ringing in my bones, the smell of blood sharp in my nose, and Giovanni, right in front of me, too solid, too close, his hands on my face like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip.
He faced bullets that could’ve torn him to absolute pieces.
That memory of those tense seconds alone in the car, when I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, shatters my calm and my relief.
I shove at his chest, fury breaking through the shock. “You absolute asshole! W-what if something had happened to you? What if?—”
“What?” he cuts in, voice rough. “What if I’d done nothing? Just let them have you? Only over my fucking dead body,” he seethes.
My breath stutters.
A sob rips through me. Then he’s yanking me into his body suddenly, hard and uncompromising, one arm braced around my back, the other at my hip, grounding me, claiming me, anchoring me to the fact that we are both still alive.
I feel everything then.
The fear. The rage. The heat still roaring through my veins.
And something darker. Something feral.
“You…this scared me, Gio,” I whisper, my forehead pressed to his chest, to the blood-warm fabric of his shirt.
His voice drops. “Good. Means you’re beginning to understand what you are to me.”
I pull back, my hands sliding up his arms, over muscle, over the place where he’s hurt, my body buzzing with too much sensation to contain.
“You could have died,” I say as I stare down at the smear of his blood on my fingers.
“Don’t let the Brioni fool you,ragazza. It’s been a while, sure, but nothing has changed. This life, with all its dangers and thrills, still flows through me. And whatever comes, I triumph. Every fucking time. Don’t forget that.”
The words hang between us, heavy and unavoidable.
And then something in me breaks open.
I grab his face and I leap up into him, kissing him with all the raw desperation fuelled by the fact that we are here, breathing, touching, and while he arrogantly believes he’s invincible, tomorrow is not guaranteed.
He kisses me back like he’s been starving.
The gun he was still holding clatters to the ground, forgotten, and his hands are everywhere.
My back hits the cold concrete wall and his body shields me from the world, from everything, mouth hot and unrelenting and his breath harsh against my skin.
