The guard swears under his nose, turns to run out of my cell as I press harder into the wall, just as another bang cuts through the space and the metal door I thought of as the exit doesn't open. It'sripped off.Metal screams against concrete as it swings inward, landing several feet away. Men in tactical gear flood through the gap. Weapons up.
They sweep the floor in seconds, disarming the guard who started running away before he even had a chance to blink.
And behind them.
The man in the doorway is covered in blood. Face, hands, the body armor over what used to be a black shirt. All slick and dark, catching the swinging bulb's light in wet streaks. He's taller than I remember. Or maybe everything else has gotten smaller. Probably both.
I don't recognize him at first.
Not because he looks different. Although he does, god, hedoes.But because for weeks I've been building him into a memory so polished and far away that he stopped being a person and became a concept. A smell I tried to reconstruct from nothing. A voice I played on repeat until the tape wore out. Something that lived in dreams and not in actual reality.
Except here he is.
In actual reality.
His eyes are wrong. That cold, bottomless brown I know, the color I fell into and couldn't find the way back. It's crackedopen. Something unchained stares out from behind the face I memorized. Whatever leash he kept on the thing behind those eyes has snapped, and what's left isn't pretending to be civilized.
His gaze finds me.
I watch him take in the whole picture in about two seconds. Me against the wall. Torn shirt. Wrists bleeding. Skirt ripped. The guard disarmed by my cell door, hand bleeding, belt still hanging open.
Every civilized layer on Elio Marchetti's face simply evaporates.
He doesn't reach for a gun. Every man in this room carries one. Enough firepower to level the compound twice. None of it matters.
None of it is enough for what his body needs to do right now.
He crosses the space in three strides, hauls the guard up by the throat. One hand, like the man weighs nothing, like he's peeling something off the bottom of his shoe. The guard's feet leave the ground as his hands claw at Elio's wrist. It's useless, like scratching marble.
The crack is sharp and clean. A single twist, and the guard's head snaps to an angle that necks don't go. His lifeless body drops to the floor.
"Elio." His name leaves my mouth before I can stop it. Barely a sound.
He stands there watching me, fists clenching beside him as if he's stopping himself from moving.
"Violet." It's just one word. Just my name. But as soon as it leaves his lips I break into a run.
His fists unclench and he moves to meet me as I lunch myself into his arms, big fat tears streaming down my face.
He came. He fucking came for me.
His arms close so hard my ribs scream and I don't care. I don'tcare.Because his chest is solid and warm, and hisheartbeat is slamming against mine so hard I can feel it through the blood-soaked armor and he's real, he's warm and real andhere,and I can't...
I didn't make him up.
I cry.
Ugly. Gasping. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere underneath the basement of yourself, from a room you sealed off and told yourself you'd never need again. Three weeks of not doing this and apparently my body has been keeping a tab.
His arms pull tighter, his hand cradling the back of my head, pressing my face into his neck as he says something in Italian I can't translate through the crying, but I don't need to, and then?—
"You're safe, tesoro." His voice is wrecked. "I've got you."
Twenty-two days.
I dig my fingers into his shirt under the vest because I keep slipping on the blood and I need something to hold onto, and that's just where we are right now. I am clinging to a man covered in corpse-blood and it is the most comforted I've felt in three weeks.
He smells like blood and smoke and cordite and death.
