Headlights blind me despite the afternoon sun. A car fills my vision. The driver’s horrified face visible through the windshield. The knowledge that I can’t move fast enough crystallizes in my mind with perfect, terrible clarity.
The impact, when it comes, is both more and less than I expect. My body lifts, weightless for an impossible moment. There’s no pain at first, just shock and the strange sensation of flying.
Then everything speeds up; the ground rushes up to meet me, my limbs no longer responding to my desperate commands.
I hear Raffaele scream my name one last time, the sound distorted as if traveling through water. My head strikes the pavement with a sickening crack that reverberates through my skull. Warm wetness spreads beneath me.
Blood.
My blood this time, not Andrea’s.
The blue Caribbean sky spins above me, clouds swirling into abstract patterns as darkness creeps in from the edges of my vision. I think of the bakery, of Onyx, of my mom. Of Raffaele’s eyes meeting mine across the terminal moments ago.
And then… I think nothing at all.
Chapter 43
Raffaele
“Alina!”
I roar her name as I watch her body collide with the car.
Time warps, stretching into an endless moment where she hangs suspended in the air before crashing to the pavement with a sickening thud.
My heart stops.
Everything stops.
Then I’m moving, shoving people aside with enough force to send them sprawling, my only thought reaching her. Nothing else matters. Not the bystanders cursing at me, not the driver stumbling from his car in shock, not the security guards racing toward the commotion.
Just Alina, lying motionless on the concrete, blood pooling beneath her head like a crimson halo.
“Move! Get the fuck back!” I snarl at the growing circle of onlookers, their phones raised to capture my nightmare. A man in a security uniform tries to step into my path. I grab him by the throat, squeezing just enough to make his eyes bulge. “Stop me from reaching my wife, and I will fucking kill you.”
He backs away, hands raised. Smart man.
I drop to my knees beside her, ignoring the sharp sting as concrete tears through my pants. Her face is ghostly pale against the stark red of her hair, now darkening with blood. Her left arm is twisted at an angle that turns my stomach. But it’s the growing puddle beneath her head that freezes the blood in my veins.
“Alina,” I whisper, my voice a broken thing I barely recognize. My fingers tremble as I press them to her neck, searching for a pulse. “Don’t you dare leave me. Don’t. You. Fucking. Dare.”
For one horrifying second, I feel nothing. Then… there it is. Her pulse is faint but steady beneath my fingertips. She’s alive. Relief crashes through me with such force I nearly collapse over her body.
“Someone call an ambulance!” a woman shouts from the crowd.
“Already did,” another voice responds. “They’re coming.”
A middle-aged man in a tropical shirt kneels on Alina’s other side. “I’m a doctor. Let me help.”
I bare my teeth at him, my hand instinctively moving to the gun concealed at my back. “Don’t touch her.”
“Sir, she needs immediate medical attention. Her head—”
“I said don’t fucking touch her.” My voice drops to a dangerous whisper that leaves no room for argument. I’ve watched men die with that tone in their ears. “The ambulance is coming. No one touches her until then.”
The doctor backs away, joining the murmuring crowd.
I don’t give a shit what they think of me. Let them stare. Let them whisper. My entire world has narrowed to the shallow rise and fall of Alina’s chest, to the blood matting her beautiful hair, to the freckles standing stark against skin gone paper-white.
