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I didn’t want to let her out of my sight.
She danced as if it was any other night. Tonight, her hair was a long, brown ponytail that swung every time she propped her heel between the bars of the cage. She shimmied down to the floor and popped back up, pretending to scale the back wall of her miniature prison. Ass shaking, breasts bouncing. Smile never faltering once.
Until I approached her after the second set, and her face turned into a pale mask.
She didn’t address me, didn’t even look my way. Just walked past me as if I didn’t exist. As if I hadn’t been inside her seven days ago.
Had she forgotten already? Because I sure as hell hadn’t. I would never forget.
I waited outside her dressing room, as always. I didn’t know what else to do. There was no way I’d let her walk out alone and take the subway home. Even if Marco and his men saw me with her and decided I’d been lying, I didn’t care.
Taking care of her was what I did. We’d only had so few weeks together, but I couldn’t stop now. Whether or not she hated me—for good reason—her safety was paramount.
Unless I was inadvertently putting her in more danger. I still couldn’t quite figure out their end game. Did they want us together or apart? Would it be easier for them to harm her if I got jealous and steered clear? Or did they think I was too stubborn to listen to their directives?
Times like this, I missed Dante with a fierceness that tempted me to pick up the phone. Strategy was his bread and butter, and he’d been raised with it at the forefront of his mind. He was very much his father’s son, and with his contacts, he’d be able to tell me what lay ahead.
He might also be the one holding a gun at the end of the road.
I wanted to trust him. Good goddamn, I needed to trust someone. He’d been like my other half for the first decade and a half of my life, but he was a different man now. Family only held sway when it didn’t interfere with the needs of the organization. I’d heard too many stories of fathers killing sons, and friends leading friends to the slaughter.
Loyalty to the family was all that mattered. Not the blood one, but the one you’d given an oath to. And Dante wasn’t on my side.
No one was on my side. No-fucking-one.
She came out of the dressing room and didn’t so much as skip a beat as she walked past me. I followed her to the street, expecting her to fall into step with me even if she had no intention of speaking to me. As long as I could drive her home safely, I didn’t care. But she turned toward the subway as if I didn’t exist.
I’d already become a ghost.
If she wanted to work it that way, fine. As long as she got in my truck, she could ignore me until the end of time. I wasn’t leaving without her.
I shadowed her for a moment, then grabbed her waist and hauled her over my shoulder, carrying her in a firemen’s hold up the street, dodging people while she cried out and slammed her fists into my back. Their power was always a surprise. She’d been a surprise from the moment I’d laid eyes on her.
People stared at me, wondering if they were witnessing a crime in progress, but an icy stare from me was enough to have them looking away. A six-foot-three, heavily tattooed and muscled man with murder in his eyes wasn’t the kind of guy anyone wanted to take on this late at night.
She stopped fighting by the time we reached the parking garage. Stopped making any sort of noise at all.
Once we reached my truck, I let her slide down my body and searched for a way to apologize. Regardless of the situation, I hated to humiliate her and take her choices away—again.
Her eyes were puffy and red, and it hit me like a sledgehammer that she must’ve been crying.
“Fuck, baby, I’m so—”
Her leg came up so fast that I didn’t have a prayer in hell of avoiding it. She moved like a damn ninja, as fast as her sister ever had in the ring. And drove her knee right into my groin, dropping me where I stood.
“Don’t you ever, ever, touch me again. Do you understand me? You lay your hands on me once more, and this is going right in your goddamn eyes.” She waved a can in my face, and I wasn’t sure if it was pepper spray or napalm. “And I’ll hope you fucking end up blind.”
Staring up at her as she glared at me with hatred and fury in her fiery blue eyes, I fell so far that there wasn’t a bottom. No end to the well inside me for her.
Christ, I loved her. So much that the burn in my chest was ten times the one in my shriveled sac.
Clutching my aching balls and trying not to writhe on the concrete was a hell of a time to realize the truth. Or to admit it, finally, at least to myself.
I’d committed the ultimate betrayal toward Emilia, and it wasn’t because I wanted to walk away from this vendetta so close to achieving what I’d been striving toward all along.
It was this, the love I had for Carly. That was the betrayal.
That was the thing that could save me.
