Then his eyes found me, and everything in him changed.
Not enough to erase what I had just seen. But enough that I watched the killer in him recede behind something rawer and more frantic, something that almost looked like fear. He crossed the last few steps quickly and dropped in front of me, one hand going to my cheek while the other checked me with fast movements that should have felt clinical and instead felt shaky.
“Emily.” My name sounded shattered in his mouth. “Sweetheart.”
I tried to speak and couldn’t. I had things to say, but I was staring at the blood on his hand where it touched me so carefully, at the shirt stained with the proof of what he had just done, at the impossible fact that none of it made me want to pull away.
“Pietro…I’m okay,” I whispered. Neither of us believed it.
His hand went into his coat pocket then, and when it came back out, my seashell bracelet lay in his palm.
For one second, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
He had carried it with him the whole time.
Through the panic, through the search, through the drive here, through the bodies now cooling on the warehouse floor, he had kept hold of the one small, stupid, fragile thing no one else would have known mattered.
He slipped it back around my wrist with blood still drying on his knuckles.
“You left this,” he said quietly.
And that was what broke something open in me.
Not the dead men. Not the blood. Not even the sight of him walking toward me through carnage like it belonged to him.
The fact that in the middle of becoming everything he warned me he was, he still remained exactly the man who knew what mattered to me most.
My breath hitched. His hand moved to the back of my neck, steadying, grounding, and when he said, “I’ve got you, sweetheart,” I believed him in a new and far more dangerous way than ever before, because now I understood what those words meant when they came from a man like him.
And as he gathered me into his arms with blood on his shirt and death still warm in the room around us, I knew with a strange clarity that nothing between us would ever be simple after this.
Only truer.
CHAPTER 22
PIETRO
It had been the longest two days of my fucking life. I had not slept a single hour and was running on caffeine, determination, anger, and fear.
I turned Boston upside-down looking for her, and while my father and Olivero both had moments of doubt, my belief never wavered.
She would not have left.
When we got wind of the Albanians, it started feeling like proof, and with that came guilt, harsh enough to join the already explosive mess inside me. Then Derek got a glimpse of her laptop signal, no more than a second, but it was enough.
After that, we moved.
I knew there would be blood. I knew it before we arrived. But knowing it in the abstract and seeing her on that sofa were two very different things. The moment I noticed the red mark on her cheek, something in me gave way, and I became the monster I always knew I carried inside me.
And then I touched her with hands still coated in someone else’s blood. In the aftermath, that seemed like a worse violation than the killing itself.
When we got back to my apartment, my father, Olivero, and the men stayed outside, and I was grateful for it. I took Emily into the shower and cleaned her as gently as I could. I noticed her hands had stopped shaking when I took them in mine to rinse the dried blood from her knuckles. She did not mention it, nor did I. But at one point she looked down at her own hands with an expression I had not seen on her before. She wore the look of a woman who had made decisions under pressure and was grappling with their implications. I did not interrupt her thoughts.
And while the water ran over us she told me what had happened. She told me about Adam, about his cousin, about the absurd, pathetic logic of kidnapping her to remind her who could keep her safe.
By the time she finished, guilt had replaced everything else in me so thoroughly that it felt like I had swallowed lead.
I kissed her forehead, promised her safety I could not guarantee, and took her to bed.
