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But there’s a new tightness in Elio’s jaw, his brows pinching. When I fall just a little behind, I step in wetness on the stair below him before he hauls me up to his level, and I see how much he’s still bleeding. The injury is finally getting to him. It makes him seem just a little more human.
And makes me feel a twinge of guilt.
I try to beat that down. If he hadn’t been at my house to kidnap me, he wouldn’t have gotten shot.
But if he hadn’t been there…
I’d probably be dead right now.
“Why did you take a bullet for me?” I ask quietly. I don’t really expect him to answer, but I watch him anyway. His jaw tightens further before he schools his expression into something more neutral.
“I already told you that you’re mine now, Songbird. Everything about you. That includes your life.”
“Does that mean you’ll eventually take it from me?” I stop walking, and Elio stops too, looking down at me from one step above, making him tower even more than he usually does. His hard gaze tracks over me in my entirety – my face and dishevelled hair, his jacket sagging at my shoulders, my bloodstained dress that now is nothing more than a skirt, my bare feet sticky with his blood.
“I may be a monster, but I don’t kill pretty little songbirds like you.”
“You keep calling me that. Why?” I’ve never even met the man before tonight and yet he wants me as his own personal violinist. He knows I play, but how? I’m good, but I’m not a professional filling concert halls. I have no reputation as a musician in this city. Even if I was a professional, it would take me a lifetime – more than a lifetime – to earn back 5.2 million plus interest. It makes no sense.
“You ask a lot of questions,” he mutters. He’s still holding me by the elbow, and he tugs. I take a wobbly step up to his level. I want to tell him that this is nothing. That I’ve got about a million more questions swirling inside me, banging on the inside of my skull to be let out. But I sense that now is not the time to ask, and I try to just be grateful that I’m still alive and unharmed.
We’re so close like this that my jacket-clad chest brushes his on every ragged inhale.
“You should go to the hospital,” I say. There’s the fucking guilt again. Always the guilt. Guilt that’s been with me since Mom’s death, intensifying, getting thick and ugly, as I watch Elio bleed. I shouldn’t care about what happens to him, but I do. And I hate myself for it.
He gives a soft, dark laugh. It’s a quieter version of his laugh in the car, when I’d mentioned that the police might pull him over for speeding. Apparently, going to the hospital is just as outlandish as dealing with the cops in his world.
Noted.
“No need. Morelli’s here. But good try.”
As we continue ascending the stairs, I try to figure out what he means.
But I can’t. My brain feels like sludge.
“What do you mean?” I ask, giving up on trying to guess as we reach the top of the stairs and start walking down a long hallway with hardwood floors.
“Good job trying to get me out of my own house while you’re in it.”
I blink. I hadn’t even thought of that. That if he went to the hospital and got put under for surgery he wouldn’t be with me.
“Yeah, right. You’d probably just drag me there with you,” I say with a bitter sigh. My head hurts.
I keep my eyes ahead but hear the slight grin in his reply when he says, “Smart little Songbird. Smart to try to get away from me. Even smarter to know that it will never happen.”
“But it will, won’t it? If I pay off the debt?”
My words freeze him, and his hold on my arm halts my forward progress. He pulls me around to face him. Any trace of a grin is gone, his gaze cold and narrowed as it swallows mine.
“You got six million lying around?”
“Six?” I cry, stunned. “That’s not what you told me earlier!”
“That was before I took over your father’s eight hundred-thousand-dollar debt to Severu Serpico. In fact,” he adds, his hold tightening on my arm, “I’ll probably have to throw the Camorra an extra couple hundred grand for killing three of their men tonight so we don’t start a fucking war. So, add that to your mental tally.”
I swallow hard, refusing to let tears fill my eyes. I can’t even sell the house on my own – it’s in my father’s name, and at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s mortgaged like crazy. I could sell everything I own but it wouldn’t even be a fraction of the sum. I don’t even have any of my stuff with me anyway. I’ve got nothing but this violin and the ruined clothes on my back. No money, no phone.
Holy shit.
