The door explodes inward. Light floods the darkness, so bright after hours of nothing that I throw my arm up to shield my eyes. A silhouette in the doorway. Broad shoulders. Gun raised.
And then.
“Isabella.”
I’d know that voice anywhere. In a crowd, in a storm, in the dark at the end of the world.
Lorenzo.
He crosses the room in three strides. He doesn’t speak. Can’t. His mouth opens and nothing comes out, his jaw working around words that won’t form. Blood on his face. Gunpowder in his hair. His eyes wild and desperate and wet in a way I’ve never seen them.
He came. He actually came.
My legs give out. My knees buckle and I’m falling, and he catches me before I hit the ground. His arms close around me and his knees hit the concrete beside mine and we’re both on the floor, both shaking, neither of us able to stand.
“Breathe.” His voice against my hair. Broken. “Breathe for me, Isabella.”
I breathe. Because he asked. Because his voice is the fixed point and my lungs remember how to work when he tells them to.
I try to say his name. What comes out is a sound I don’t recognize. He makes a sound back. Rougher than mine. His chest shakes against my ribs where he’s holding me so tight I can barely breathe.
Neither of us speaks. We just hold on. On the floor of a concrete cell in a trafficking compound, covered in blood and soot and hours of terror, and we hold on like the world will end if we let go.
I don’t know how long we stay there. Long enough for my breathing to sync with his. Long enough for the shaking to slow from violent to steady.
He breaks down first. A sound tears out of him. Not a word. Just a raw, gutted noise that might have been my name if his throat hadn’t closed around it. He presses into my hair. His shoulders shake. And the man who acts like he’s incapable of feeling comes apart in my arms.
I hold him tighter. I press into his chest. Kevlar and sweat and the copper tang of violence. His pulse hammers against my cheek, fast and hard, and his breath comes in shattered gasps against my hair.
“You came,” I finally manage. The first real words between us.
“I’ll always come.” His voice is wrecked. Barely there. “Isabella. I’m sorry. I should have trusted you. I should have?—”
“I know.”
“I locked you up like you were mine to protect instead of a capable woman who deserves to make her own choices.” He pulls back just enough to look at me. Devastated. “I was wrong.”
I study him. The blood. The bruises forming on his jaw. The way his eyes are wet and he’s not even trying to hide it.
“Yes,” I say. “You were wrong.”
“I know.”
“Don’t ever do it again.”
“I won’t.”
I believe him. Not because he’s saying all the right things, but because of the way he’s looking at me. Like he’s seeing, finally, that I’m not a fragile doll that needs to be locked away.
“Okay.” I take a breath. Force my brain to shift gears, to remember that we’re standing in the middle of a compound that’s probably still full of people who want us dead. “We deal with this later. Right now. Sofia.”
Her name snaps the focus back into him. His nostrils flare. His grip on my hand tightens until the knuckles go white. But he doesn’t let go.
“This way.” He takes my hand, keeps hold of it as we move toward the door. His earpiece crackles. He presses it, listens. “Marco cleared the basement level. She’s in the next section.”
Another room. Another door. My pulse is screaming in my ears, so loud I can barely hear the distant sounds of gunfire and shouting. Years of searching, of sleepless nights, of guilt eating me alive. And Sofia is behind that door.
Please be alive. Please. Please.
