Santino’s jaw flexed so hard I heard it crack. For a moment, something raw and wounded flashed across his face. Hurt, beneath the rage. Then it was gone, replaced by cold fury.
He stepped back, releasing me like I had burned him.
“Fine,” he said, voice flat and terrifyingly calm. “Keep your secrets.”
He turned and walked away without another word, disappearing into the house like a shadow. The door slammed behind him with finality.
I stood there on the gravel driveway, blood still seeping from my side, tears sliding silently down my cheeks. The lie sat heavy in my chest, colder than the coastal wind.
A young maid appeared at the side entrance, eyes wide with concern. “Signorina Aurora…”
I cut her off, voice trembling. “Get me a pregnancy test. Discreetly. No one can know. Especially not him.”
The maid’s eyes widened further, but she nodded quickly and disappeared back inside.
I wrapped my arms around myself, staring at the closed door where Santino had vanished.
The devil was furious.
And I was terrified I had just made everything worse.
Chapter Twenty-One: SANTINO
Icouldn’tsleep.
The room was quiet except for the soft, steady rhythm of Aurora’s breathing beside me.
She had curled against my chest sometime in the night, one small hand fisted in my shirt like she was afraid I’d disappear if she let go. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow in wild, silken waves, catching the faint silver light filtering through the heavy curtains. Each strand looked like liquid obsidian, shimmering with every subtle shift of her body.
She looked peaceful. Safe. So heartbreakingly vulnerable in a way that made something primal and possessive stir deep in my chest, a beast I’d long thought buried beneath layers of ice and calculated violence.
I should have felt victorious. Another enemy erased. Another message written in blood. But instead of the cold satisfaction that usually followed a kill, all I felt was a sick, crawling dread lodged deep in my gut, twisting like barbed wire.
For a few seconds today, I had almost lost her.
The image wouldn’t leave me no matter how hard I tried to shove it down.
Aurora sitting on that stone bench in the garden, completely unaware of the danger closing in, her dark hair catching the last golden light of the dying sun. The gun rising behind her, steady and merciless. The split-second before Matteo launched himself like a fucking missile, tackling the shooter to the ground in a blur of fury and desperation. If he had been half a second slower… if his instincts hadn’t been sharpened by everything I’d drilled into him…
I closed my eyes, but the darkness only made it worse. All I saw was Angelo.
Blood on concrete. Snakes hissing in the shadows of that abandoned warehouse. My brother’s body broken and still while I screamed his name into the void, my voice raw until it cracked.
The metallic taste of fear and failure still coated my tongue years later. I couldn’t save him. I should have been there. I had failed the one person who had ever truly mattered to me before Aurora crashed into my world like a storm I never saw coming.
I wouldn’t fail her. Not this time. Not ever.
My arm tightened around Aurora instinctively, pulling her closer until her heartbeat thrummed against my ribs in a steady, reassuring rhythm. She made a small, sleepy sound, half sigh, half murmur, and pressed her face into the crook of my neck, her warm breath fanning across my skin.
The trust in that unconscious movement gutted me. After everything I’d done, stealing her, breaking her walls, claiming her body and soul, she still sought me out in sleep.
The warmth of her body against mine, the soft curve of her hip under my palm, should have calmed the storm raging inside my chest. Instead, it only made the fear sharper, more vicious. Because now I had something to lose again.
Something precious.
Something I would burn the entire world down to protect.
The door opened quietly, a whisper of sound that wouldn’t have woken most people.
