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“I’m not running back home.” I stepped closer to her, pleading now. “You understand, don’t you? If I go back home, it’ll only prove to Redmond that he never should’ve let me leave to begin with. He’ll never make that mistake twice.”
Her jaw flexed. “Better that than—”
“Than what? Being free? Making my own decisions?”
“It’s not like that.”
“But it is and you know it.”
She pulled at her hair, the frustration evident. “You know I feel for you. I never wanted you to get trapped by your family. I understand how that feels better than you might think. But I also can’t sit around and watch you get pulled into an Oligarch war. You’re in over your head.”
“I’m close. Something happened between my uncle and my mother thirty years ago, and I’m starting to think it’s all connected. Silvano, Uncle Cedric, Grandfather, Mother. There’s a straight line from one to the other. I want to see where it leads.”
Palmira watched me carefully. Sirens blared in the distance and she shook her head miserably. “Call Nervosa. Tell him to pick us up.”
“Really? Why?”
“He can keep us safe. Better than I can, at least.”
“I’m amazed you admitted that.”
“Yeah, well, he has an army and I don’t.”
“I thought you were an army.”
She laughed and stalked off again. I hurried to follow, phone in my hand.
Chapter 21
Nervosa
“I’m going to cut his throat and watch him bleed like a fucking animal.” I paced back and forth across my office, rage rolling through me like a thunderstorm. “How dare he do that!”
“You don’t know it was Silvano,” Melanie said, watching me with a deep frown. “It could’ve been—”
“Who, your uncle? He doesn’t have hired thugs.”
“One of the others then.”
“Griffin wouldn’t. Liam—” I hesitated, grinding my jaw. It was something Liam might do under the right circumstances, but this didn’t sound like him. “I don’t think it was Liam.”
“Then I suppose that leaves Silvano, unless you have some other enemy I don’t know about.”
“Unfortunately, I have dozens of them.” I slammed my hand down on my desk, seething with rage. “Silvano, that fuck. I’m going to cut his throat for this.”
She laughed and stretched. “I don’t know why you care so much.”
My eyes widened. “You don’t know why I—” She laughed, grinning at me, and I let out a slow breath. Some of my anger drained away at the sight of her teasing smile. “This isn’t the time to mess with me.”
“I know that, but you’re being so serious, and I wanted to lighten the mood before you did something stupid.”
I rounded on her and approached. She shifted back in her seat, a large, padded armchair near my fireplace. I got down on one knee in front of her and took her hands, and her eyebrows raised up so high I thought they might fall off her forehead and float into space.
“Melanie,” I said.
“What are you doing? You don’t have a ring, do you?”
“No ring. Not this time. But I do want to make a promise.”
She sucked air between her teeth and shook her head. “No thanks. A promise from you is like making a deal with a viper. You’ll turn around and bite me soon enough.”
I ignored that. “I swear, I’ll help you find what you’re searching for. I swear I’ll keep your safe. And I swear I’ll punish Silvano for this.”
“You don’t even know it was him.” Her voice was small and timid. “They didn’t attack me.”
“They attacked Palmira. What do you think was coming next?”
She chewed her lip. “I don’t know.”
I reached up and touched her cheek. So smooth and beautiful. I wondered for the thousandth time how I’d gotten so wrapped up with someone so exquisite and kind.
“Trust me, it was him. He wants to hurt me for going to your brother. You’re the target, since he can’t reach me.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“No, nothing’s fair. But please know that I’m doing what I can.”
“I believe you.”
I leaned forward and kissed her. Just a gentle peck on her lower lip, but she leaned down and opened her mouth, and she flooded me with her taste and body, the softness of her tongue, the delicious tang of her teeth. I loved touching her, feeling her react to my pressure, and tumbling down into the deepest, darkest pit of lust and need.
She freed me. In the same way that coming out here was freedom to her, falling in with her was freedom to me. I was suffocated by expectations, by my family and my power, by my past. All the traumas of my childhood, of watching my parents spiral into oblivion, of working to feed my mother’s addiction, of struggling and sleeping in cars, all that worked in me like a stormy ocean, but it quieted when I was around Melanie.
She centered me. She woke me up from a nightmare. I saw myself as though from a distance, and I didn’t love the image: a man riddled with fear and rage, his heart blackened by time and hate, riddled with a shattered and horrible past.
