I hear him breathe in.
I hear something else too.
A tiny sound behind me. Soft. Close.
My stomach drops straight through the floor.
My eyes snap to the mirror.
Natalia is standing in the bathroom doorway.
For one stupid, fractured second, my brain tries to rewind the last thirty seconds of my life. Tries to calculate exactly how much she heard, what words were still hanging in the air when she walked in, whether I can still talk my way out of this.
There isn’t.
I know it before I finish turning around. I know it the way you know a car wreck is coming in the half-second before impact—total clarity, zero ability to stop it.
Standing in the doorway, her face is as white as the marble counter. Her phone is clutched in one hand, a dead screen staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes—those crystal blue eyes that have haunted my every waking thought—are wide with a horror so profound it steals the air from my lungs.
“Nat,” I breathe, but the name is a ghost on my lips.
The phone is still in my hand. Dario’s voice, tinny and distant, saying my name.
She takes one step back. Small. Instinctive. Like getting farther away from me is the only thing her body knows to do.
That step hits harder than a fist.
Tears flood her eyes, but it’s the look on her face that guts me. The shock giving way to something worse. The trust draining out of her so fast I can actually see it happen.
And there I am in the middle of it, reflected in the mirror beside me.
Not her boyfriend.
Not the man who kept her safe.
Not the man she let herself fall for.
The man who came to the island to kill her.
26
NATALIA
I’m not goingto fucking kill Natalia.
My mind is a blank, white space. A canvas wiped clean by that single, impossible sentence.
The sound of it, spoken in Luca’s voice, doesn’t just echo in the hotel room. It detonates. It’s a bomb that vaporizes the last three weeks of my life, leaving nothing but a crater where I used to be.
I blink, and tears fill my eyes for the monumental, soul-crushing stupidity of my own heart.
He’s standing there. Luca. LucaAndretti. Not just an enemy, buttheenemy. The name that has been a curse on my family’s lips for as long as I can remember. And I brought him into my home. I nursed him back to health. I touched him. I let him inside my body, whispering his name like a prayer while he was thinking about how to kill me.
I’m such an idiot.
A strangled noise, half-laugh, half-sob, claws its way up my throat.
“Natalia, please.”
