Only then did I notice the blood pumping from a wound on his shoulder.
‘Vito, you’re bleeding!’ I whispered, the words like sandpaper against my throat, the noose of panic tightening around my neck.
The housekeeper from the evening before appeared, also with a pistol in her hand. Lorenzo, the burly bodyguard who had been on the yacht, was right behind her, holding another of those fearsome assault rifles, his suit jacket gone, his shirt soaked through with sweat.
‘Gli uomini di Dante,’ he growled, then spat as if the name Dante was a bad taste in his mouth.
‘Padrino!’ the housekeeper gasped, then rushed forward. Dropping her gun into her apron pocket, she pulled out a roll of gauze. She tried to press the bandage to Vito’s shoulder, but he brushed her away.
‘Dopo, non è niente,’ he said, the fury on his face sent shockwaves through me while he spoke to Lorenzo in Italian. His tone was low, but his voice was steady, his expression unmoved. He looked calm and cold, his features cast into harsh lines. I didn’t recognise him as my seductive, playful, demanding lover.
The popping noises faded, drowned out by the sound of sirens in the distance.
Turning, he grasped my arms.
‘You must leave Naples. Now. Lorenzo will take you to London. Never speak of this night to anyone.’
What? Why?
So many questions battered me. But I was shaking so hard I couldn’t make sense of any of them.
‘What about you?’ I forced the question out past the ball of emotion cutting off my air supply. ‘I don’t want to leave without you…’
How could I leave him—when he was hurt?
I hadn’t been hit. He’d saved me from the bullet and taken it himself. That was all my exhausted mind could seem to process.
He chuckled, which seemed incongruous in the circumstances. My confusion spiked—equal parts horror and humiliation. Why was he laughing? What was funny about this hideous situation?
‘You cannot save me, Mia, when I do not wish to be saved.’
What did that even mean? Before I could gather myself enough to ask, he yanked me up on tiptoe.
Clasping me against him, he slanted his mouth across mine, capturing my gasp of surprise and the sob of need. His kiss was deep, forceful, demanding, pressing my breasts against his chest, almost as if he were branding me as his. The familiar heat—which he had conjured so effortlessly through the night—made my sex clench and release, my clitoris swell and ache, even as terror and confusion made my heart pound hard enough to be heard in Rome.
But when he thrust me away, the smile was still there, cynical and arrogant and cruel.
‘It was only my cock that wanted you, Mia, nothing more.’
The words were harsh, insulting, making me feel used. I’d known this was a one-night stand, a booty call, a hookup…but it had felt like more when he’d worked me into a frenzy, when he’d held me in the moonlight, when he’d dived across the bed and yelled my name.
‘Get her out. I don’t want her here,’ he said, addressing Lorenzo in English, clearly for my benefit.
‘No, I won’t leave…’ I shouted, feeling bereft. But also confused. I couldn’t leave him, not like this…
I tried to fight off Lorenzo’s hold, desperate to know why Vito was treating me like this… But the bodyguard’s arms were like iron bands as he dragged me towards the back of the house. I watched Vito stride towards the front entrance, drawing his gun from his shorts, his body magnificent and apparently unbowed by the injury.
He didn’t look back. Not once.
Nausea rose up my throat, the metallic scent of blood from the sheet wrapped around me—Vito’s blood—curdling my stomach, as I was bundled into a car. All the fight drained out of me. The strange sense of dislocation, of drifting outside my own body, was weirdly comforting, as if this was all happening to someone else. Someone that wasn’t me.
Lorenzo shouted something in Italian to the driver. I could see police cars amassing outside the front gates as our car sped through the trees towards the back of the estate. A gate opened, and the car was ushered through. Then the driver put his foot down, throwing me back into the seat. Lorenzo grabbed my seat belt and put it on. Then he handed me my purse.
I looked inside it with shaking hands to find my phone gone.
‘Where’s my phone? I have to call my sister,’ I managed, even now not quite able to forget my responsibility to her. ‘She won’t know where I am…’ I managed.
We were all supposed to be catching our budget flight together this evening, and my luggage was back at the hotel. Why had they taken my phone?
