Her voice cuts through the red like a scalpel.
"He's down." Steady. Certain. The voice she uses when she's the only thing standing between a person and something irreversible. "He's not going anywhere."
I stay where I am.
The man beneath me has gone completely still. Not tactical stillness — the stillness of an animal that has looked into something's eyes and understood exactly what it is. He's not moving because moving would be the last thing he does, and some animal part of him has done the math.
Smart.
I stand.
My men floodin thirty seconds later, jammer down, comms restored. Caruso takes the two in the entryway without comment. The one in the kitchen isn't a concern. I did the shoulder on purpose.
I'm not proud of the part where I almost didn't stop.
I'm looking for Serafina when I find her already working — crouched beside one of my guards, a first-aid kit she pulled from under the sink in hand, gauze pressed to a thigh wound with both hands. Calm. Precise. Three men just breached her building, and she's on her knees saving mine.
Mine.
The word surfaces without permission and I don't have time to process what it means, so I watch her instead. The way her hands move — no wasted motion, no hesitation, the economy of someone who has done this in rooms far worse than my kitchen tonight. She guides his hands to the gauze, tells him he's okay in the voice that makes people believe it, and then stands.
Turns.
Her eyes move over the room — splintered cabinet, man on the floor, the blade still in my hand. She catalogs it all. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't step back.
Then her eyes come back to me.
And stay.
Her cheeks are flushed. Lips parted. Her chest rises and falls faster than it should, and it's not fear — I know what fear looks like on a person. I've watched it up close more times than I can count. Fear makes people small. It hollows them out.
Serafina is not small.
Her pupils have swallowed most of the green from her eyes. Her throat works. She's looking at me the way she looked at me in the kitchen ten minutes ago — like I'm something she hasn't decided whether to run from or toward, and her body has already answered the question her brain is still pretending to debate.
She just watched me dismantle three men with my bare hands.
And she's standing there wanting.
It detonates low in my gut, slow and absolute, the kind of realization that rewrites something structural. Serafina Virelli — who saves lives for a living, who walked away from all of this at eighteen because she wanted to be the opposite of everything our world makes — just watched me be exactly what she left, and her body is saying yes.
I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want to cross this room right now.
I don't cross the room.
"He's still conscious." She tips her chin at the man on the floor. Steady voice. The pulse jumping in her throat says otherwise. "Question him before you do anything permanent."
"I was planning on it."
"Good." Arms cross — the shield. The one she raises when desire and fury are occupying the same space and she doesn't trustherself to hold them separately. "Then I'll go deal with your man's leg."
She walks past me.
Close enough that her scent hits me — warm skin and clean soap and underneath it something that's just her, something I have apparently memorized without permission and filed somewhere I can't reach — and I feel it in my jaw. In my hands. In places I have no business feeling anything.
I watch her until she's gone.
Then I crouch in front of the man on the floor and become someone else entirely.
