AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A broken laugh falls from my lips as Luca slides a cell phone into my palm with a soft smile. Looking down, I see that Rafe has already answered. Putting the device to my ear I listen to his breathing.
“Are you okay?” he asks softly, nowhere near the demanding tone I am used to.
“No, I’m not.”
“Willow,” my name is a broken sound torn from his chest.
“I need your help.”
Chapter Thirteen
Promise Me Vengeance
Rafe
I need your help.
Those four words explode inside my chest. She’s asked, and there’s only one thing I can do in answer. “What do you need?”
A wretched sound that shreds me from the inside out rips from her throat. “I don’t know. People are dead, Rafe.”
Fuck.
My heart stops. “Diego?”
“Bleeding out. Uh, Thalia is fixing him,” she whispers. “And Luca … they are the reason I’m calling.” Her voice grows smaller by the minute.
“Pride sucks, huh?” I’ve had my own share of this over the years, and seeing my own life fall apart right as my father passed the Gallo mantle makes me wonder if both our families aren’t stuck in some perpetually twisted, cursed loop. Her sharp intake of breath tells me she’s not ready to give up just yet. Good. That’s the wife I know and fucking worship. “Not the way you’re thinking. I meant me,” I say, softly. “I’ve been falling over my ego and insecurities for nearly thirty years, Willow. I understand.”
“Thank you,” she says, her words hardly more than a breath.
“If you two are done schmoozing, can you get your fucking ass here please, Rafe?” Luca yells from what sounds like the other end of the world.
“Where are you?” I ask when Willow giggles, then cuts the sound off, like she’s appalled at the inappropriate noise. “Don’t. I fucking love your laugh. Where are you?” And who the fuck died?
“At the docks. Regina…” A loud wail rises from wherever she is.
My sister. But the sound that breaks my heart is one I know, one I remember from the day our mother died. It takes less than a few seconds to recognize the voice as my kin, and what happened. Shit. Devon. So much for my truce.
“Konnor is going to be pissed.” I rake a hand through my hair, scoring my scalp with my nails. “I’ll be there in less than ten.”
“Thank you, Rafe,” she says, a haunted, strained silence between us before I end the call.
Willow might still love me, hell, need me even, because I pushed her into a frenzy she shouldn’t have ever engaged in, because of me. But fuck me if I won’t take out my fear on her stunning fucking flesh tonight when we are alone.
She’ll remember walking away from me. And I’ll make sure she never does it again.
Ever.
****
Soft footsteps follow me up the stairs and along the corridor, with no hesitation. Willow hasn’t spoken to me since we left the docks, and a sort of pensive silence develops between us.
When I reach the door of our room, the room where I have been sleeping alone for the past week, I hold it open and usher her inside, trailing my fingers along the slope of her back to the curve of her ass. Her clothes are trashed, covered in blood and grime from the docks, but I don’t care.
All it shows is that when she got one of her people shot and another dead in her care, she didn’t back off or run away from her failure. Because that’s a setback every one of us in this life face at some point. The crucial answer she gave is the right one, the one that says she’ll continue to be formidable, fierce, relentless.
Beautiful and stunning and so goddam fuckable. Though no one else gets the right to that except me. Not even Dom, though that was fun at the time. From now on, though, Willow is mine and mine alone.
