"You're a stubborn, psychotic bastard, Thayer," Dante mutters, applying pressure to stop the bleeding.
"And you are standing in my medical suite without giving me a situation report," I reply, my pale, glacial gray eyes narrowing into a lethal, unblinking stare. The blinding pain in my shoulder spikes, a roaring fire that completely clears the chemical fog from my brain. "The compound."
"The compound is secure," Dante answers, his tone shifting back to absolute, military precision. "The Commission breached the ground floor, but the Capos rallied. We pushed them back into the tree line and slaughtered them. The structural damage to the main house is significant, but the perimeter has been re-established. The remaining Commission rats are currently being interrogated in the sub-levels."
"Casualties?"
"Twelve of ours dead. Twenty injured," Dante reports, his jaw tightening. "But the Commission lost three times that number. They thought we were fractured. They didn't realize that nothing unites the Syndicate quite like an external threat to the Don."
I process the information in silence. The war is fully underway. The board has been violently reset, the pieces scattered in blood and ash.
But there is only one piece on the board that I actually care about.
"Where is she?" I demand, the sudden, overwhelming desperation in my chest entirely eclipsing the physical agony of my torn shoulder.
Dante pauses. The silence that stretches between us is heavy, charged with a strange, entirely foreign tension. Dante looks at me, his dark eyes searching my face, assessing the psychological state of the monster who just burned his own empire to the ground for a girl.
"She is in the adjoining secure suite," Dante finally answers, his voice dropping into a low, entirely reverent register. "She is unharmed. The medical staff checked her over. She refused to sleep. She has been sitting in a chair staring at the wall for the past eight hours, waiting for you to wake up."
The image of Sybil sitting alone in a sterile room, completely consumed by the trauma of the last forty-eight hours, makes my blood boil.
"Bring her to me," I command.
Dante doesn't move immediately. He shifts his weight, looking down at his expensive Italian leather shoes. "Thayer... when we breached that cabin."
"Speak," I snap, my patience entirely nonexistent.
"We didn't know the layout. We thought the Commission might have found you first," Dante explains, his words slow, chosen with agonizing care. "I kicked the door in. I raised my weapon."
My heart stops completely. The absolute, unadulterated violence that erupts in my mind is catastrophic. If Dante tells me he put a gun in her face, I will execute him where he stands, regardless of his loyalty.
"And?" I whisper, the demonic, vibrating frequency of my voice promising absolute carnage.
"And she was standing over your body," Dante finishes, looking up to meet my gaze directly. "She was holding your suppressed Glock. She had the barrel aimed directly at the center of my throat, Thayer. Her finger was on the trigger. She didn't shake. She didn't flinch."
The words hang in the sterile air of the medical suite.
"She told me," Dante continues, a faint, disbelieving smile touching the corner of his bruised mouth, "that if I took one more step toward you, she would kill me herself."
A profound, violent shockwave ripples completely through my nervous system.
The feral, possessive pride that detonates in the center of my chest is absolutely blinding. It is a physical heat, a dark, liquid fire that completely eradicates the chill of the IV fluids and the biting agony of my wound.
She held the line.The fragile, broken girl whose father beat the courage out of her. The sacrificial lamb who was completely paralyzed by the sight of a drawn blade just hours prior. She stood in the freezing dirt of a rotting cabin, raised a weapon against a squad of heavily armed Syndicate killers, and dared them to touch her monster.
She didn't just survive the ashes of her old life. She claimed the throne I built for her in the ruins.
"The men saw it," Dante adds softly. "The soldiers who were with me. Word spread through the compound before the surgeon even finished stitching your shoulder. The Capos were questioning your sanity yesterday. Today... they are terrified of your wife."
"As they should be," I murmur, a dark, completely unhinged smirk pulling at my pale lips. "Bring her to me, Dante. Now."
"Yes, Boss."
Dante turns and walks out of the room, the heavy, reinforced medical doors sliding shut with a quiet, pneumatic hiss behind him.
I am left alone with the rhythmic, agonizing thud of my own heartbeat. I close my eyes, forcing my body to absorb the pain, compartmentalizing the physical trauma so it does not interfere with the absolute necessity of my dominance.
A minute later, the doors slide open again.
