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I found myself fixating on the revolver again, the vicious scars and bruising covering so much of his body, and the methodical way he had hunted up the painkillers and bothered to shower and shave when I could have discovered him at any moment. He produced one of my bulkiest sweatshirts and put it on one-handed, the fabric stretching tight across his broad chest. Every one of his movements was imbued with a fatalistic, methodical efficiency—suggesting he didn’t give a damn about his own safety, so why should he care about mine.

He’d been a prisoner here for months… I knew that much. And from the way Vito’s men had treated him yesterday, not to mention all the welts and bruises, I also suspected he had taken a lot of punishment.

And the whole time he must have been planning this escape. Because it was obvious he had come to my room deliberately.

Hopelessness sapped my ability to resist.

Maybe I should have been tougher, stronger, more ready to fight… But my fevered mind just kept repeating the thought: If I just do exactly as he tells me, maybe he will let me go, and no one will get hurt. Especially me.

He’d shrugged off his response to me—so while he might be a Mafia boss and a killer, I reasoned desperately, he was too pragmatic to waste time assaulting me tonight.

‘Good to know while he might shoot you, he’s too busy to rape you,’ I grunted round the gag.

He glanced round, then gave the rope a sharp tug.

‘Stare ferma,’ he demanded, the impatient tone helping me to translate the instruction.

Be still.

Of course, that just made me tremble more. Because I was still terrified, despite my frantic attempts to reason myself out of a massive panic attack.

‘Don’t make it any worse,’ I whispered behind the gag, because I always got verbal diarrhoea in times of stress.

Sitting on the bed to put on the boots he’d left on the bedroom floor, he glared at me, his scowl visible in the light from the bathroom.

‘Silenzio,’ he demanded again.

I nodded, tears filling my eyes.

This is really not a good time to start talking to yourself, Evie.

At least I managed to keep that damn thought in my head, the way I’d learned to do in school, when the other kids had laughed at my nervous habit.

After stamping on the boots, he reached in to flick off the bathroom light and plunged the suite into darkness.

He hauled me roughly along behind him, back into the lounge. He found the shoes I had discarded by the door after my run today—when I’d been careful not to go anywhere near the other end of the island after my sister’s warning—and dropped them in front of me.

I put them on, my fingers shaking so violently it took me forever to tie the shoelaces. He waited with surprising patience, but as soon as I stood up, he yanked the rope, dragging me towards the suite’s French doors.

He slid them open, and the cool night air hit me. Rain sprinkled us both, but he didn’t seem to notice the coming storm.

He hauled me to the end of the large terrazzo, but I had less than a second to realise where he was going before he bent and hefted me onto his shoulder.

He jogged down the steps towards the pool terrace carrying me as if I weighed nothing. He edged around the side of the two-level infinity pool, to avoid us being caught in the lights which gave the water a deep aquamarine glow. He moved so stealthily I found myself holding my breath, even as my stomach bounced against his shoulder blade.

A part of me knew I should try to make some noise, to alert the men whose shouts I could hear fading away—because they were searching in the wrong place. But the scream was locked in my lungs, my horror a living breathing thing with its claws around my throat, trapping my terror inside me.

Where was he taking me? Because each step down to the villa’s private cove was another step away from safety, from security.

Hysteria brewed under my breastbone, his strength and agility so overpowering I was scared to breathe too deeply in case the movement upset him.

Good God, are you already suffering from Stockholm syndrome?

The panic tightened its grip on my neck when we arrived on the shadowy beach, and I realised his destination. A speedboat was tethered to the dock on the far end of the cove.

It was one of the patrol boats Vito always had circling the island. Some of the guards must have docked it here to help in the search.

After walking across the cove and down the short dock, Dante bent to unhook the guide rope then jumped onto the boat, which rocked furiously. The trapped shriek shot out of my mouth beneath the gag as I imagined myself toppling off his shoulder, headfirst into the water, with my hands bound.