“You came out here,” I said. “You asked for what you needed. You’re still standing. And you’re doing all of it while the thing you fear most is learning, in real time, that it no longer owns you.” I brushed my thumb over the damp edge of her cheek. “That sounds like you know exactly what you’re doing.”
She looked at me then, and some of the panic eased.
“I love you,” she said, as if the words were waiting under everything else.
I touched my forehead to hers.
“I know,” I said quietly. “And I love you too.”
This time when she nodded, I felt it all the way through her.
For a while after that, we stayed exactly like that in the hospital parking lot, the rain falling softly around us, my arms locked around her while her breathing matched mine. The surgery dragged on inside, the night stretched with it, and the whole world narrowed to one simple, sacred fact.
She asked.
And I came.
Then I felt her tense in my arms.
I looked up and saw him.
The man I wanted to hurt in ways that would have satisfied something ugly in me.
Despite the world I had been born into, we did not choose violence lightly. We were not animals. We were not psychopaths. Outside of Matteo, who enjoyed pain a little too much for anyone’s comfort, most of the men in my family did not take pleasure in suffering for its own sake.
This man?
This one I knew I would enjoy hurting.
He stood there under an umbrella, scanning the lot with a chastising look of impatience that made my teeth ache. Like he had any right to search for her. Like his presence here was natural and mine was not.
“There must be news,” Emily whispered, already pulling back. “I’d better go before he sees you.”
She slipped out of the car so quickly it irritated me, though I could not decide whether it was because she meant to protect him from me, which I found offensive, or protect me from him, which was perhaps worse.
Albanian or not, I was more than capable of dealing with some polished little police chief’s son.
She had barely shut the door before he spotted her. Even from where I sat, I saw the flash of surprise in his face before it hardened into something narrower and meaner.
He couldn’t properly see me through the rain-dark glass, but I straightened anyway, every instinct in me going cold.
I lowered the window a fraction, fully aware I was trespassing and equally aware that my father and Hoka would both look at this exact moment with expressions that saidwe warned you.
“Where did you disappear to?” he asked.
Emily shrugged and tried to move past him, but he stepped sideways and blocked her path.
My fingers twitched.
The weight of the gun against my ribs felt much too familiar.
The rain had stopped for the moment, but she was still damp and cold, and that bastard was standing between her and the hospital doors.
Then he spoke again, and whatever fragile self-control I had left burned away.
“Who’s the guy?” he asked, his voice low and ugly. “You’d rather sneak off with some stranger in a car than wait for news about your sister? Very classy, Emily.”
I am going to kill him.
