Page 45

“No it doesn’t. You know it doesn’t. It can’t.”

The silence that followed was broken a beat later by the ring of the doorbell.

Her stomach plummeted to her feet, all the blood in her body seeming to drain with it. Her brother was early.

Still unable to look at Elvira, Mattia got to his feet and breathed deeply.

The time had come. Elio was early, but that was good. Sitting in the cramped living room with his men and Elvira had let his mind run to places he couldn’t afford to let it go, but couldn’t keep it from.

It was their last minutes that had kept replaying themselves on a loop. Elvira’s words: you’re willing to die and willing for me to die, to save the legacy of a monster.

The two mercenaries got to their feet too. They both aimed their guns at her.

She was on her feet, her gun aimed at Mattia. Her eyes were stark. Pleading.

Didn’t she understand it was too late? There were no brakes for the wheels he’d set in motion, but as he stared into her pleading eyes, his heart thumping painfully against his ribs, he found himself suddenly wishing there were, and as he thought this, the last thirty-six hours sped through his mind, from snatching her off the street to the glee in her eyes when she produced her cereal box toy gun to the moment their fight turned into a passion neither had any control of.

He’d just spent the most thrilling thirty-six hours of his life with this feisty, passionate, beautiful, vital woman, and he was damned if he was going to let anything happen to her.

“Ready for me to take her, boss?” asked the meathead everyone called Bob for reasons he’d never cared to understand.

Mattia looked at his men in turn. “No one touches her but me. If she’s hurt in any way, I will hold you both responsible. Understood?”

Whatever happened, his sassy, beautiful, avenging angel would make it out of this unhurt. That much he could give her. And give himself.

His men nodded.

“Good.” To Bob, he said, “Open the door.”

His eyes locked back onto Elvira. Raising his gun, he moved toward her.

“Going to use me as a human shield, Esposito?” she asked, a strange high pitch in her voice.

“No.” He gave a half-smile. Now that he knew what he had to do, a sense of calmness had settled inside him, much like when he’d taken the gun from her. “I’m going to be yours.”

“What?”

“Stay behind me.”

Bob was sliding the bolts off the door.

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t stop the wheel turning, El, but I can stop you getting hurt if your brother’s here with an army.” He knew Elio would have given instructions that his sister must not be hurt, but in the heat of the moment, anything could happen.

The bolts and chains had all been pulled back, the key sliding into the lock.

He threw his gun onto the sofa and repeated, “Stay behind me.”

Smiling at the shock on her face, he turned his back to her and raised his hands in the air.

Whatever happened in the next few minutes, Elvira was not going to die.

“What are you doing…?”

But Elvira’s panicked cry had barely left her tongue when she felt a wave of shock sluice through the body that had parked itself directly in front of her, followed by a hoarse, “What the hell are you doing here?”

A wave of shock sluiced through her own body when she heard a feminine voice she recognised give a curt order of, “Leave us.”