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“Yes, we do.”
Morana indulged in his gruff tone for a second, before the words broke through. He was leaving?
That knot in her stomach tightened, an odd kind of panic filling her for some reason. After the past few hours, the past few weeks, after making certain she wouldn’t run away when she’d wanted to, he was going to leave the city behind? And her? Right after she’d made the gamble of her life?
Her heart sunk.
Gripping the blankets in her fists, she tried to keep her head quiet and focus on what they were saying.
“Are we going to address the very big elephant in the room?” Dante.
“I don’t see one.” Blase. Indifferent. Him.
She heard Dante sigh. She was pretty sure that sigh had been his friend for a long time. “What were you doing at that bastard’s house tonight, alone of all things?”
That had so not been the elephant in the room she’d imagined. But who were they talking about?
“Paying him a visit,” Tristan Caine answered.
Her eyebrows went up at that tone inviting challenge.
Dante didn’t disappoint.
“Things are already fucked up for you at the moment, Tristan. In case you’ve forgotten, someone is out for your blood-”
“Someone always is.”
“-and you just keep feeding it fuel. We do not need Gabriel Vitalio going cocky-assed on us right now, not when we’re here.”
One.
Two.
Stunned.
Morana looked up at the ceiling, stunned out of her freaking mind. He’d visited her father? At his mansion? Alone? Was he insane?!
Her brain supplied her the image of his hands on cue - those bruised, broken knuckles that had told her, even as he’d kissed her, that he’d made someone’s night hell. She’d vanished and he’d gone to her father’s mansion alone and yet made it out? And now had broken skin on his knuckles?
What. Had. He. Done?
Breathing heavy, heart racing like a wild horse out of control, Morana couldn’t even begin to grasp the implications of this. She just couldn’t.
And yet, there was something else too. A novelty. Because she had fallen down the stairs and he had punished her father. Because she had gone missing and he had walked into the lion’s den and burned it and made it out unscathed. The novelty of feeling like this, for the first time in her life, dampened her eyes. Having been alone for all her existence, with the knowledge that nobody would break a sweat if she disappeared, the fact that this man - the man who had hated her for twenty years of his life - had broken flesh made her heart clench in a way she’d never experienced before, in a way she could not understand. Only feel.
Taking a stuttering breath in, she kept listening, her knuckles white from gripping the sheets.
“It’s a good thing we won’t be here for long then, isn’t it?”
A long pause.
“Does that include Morana?” Dante asked quietly.
Morana’s heart battered in her chest, hammering with a force that mingled with the inexplicable emotions inside her, as she waited for a response from him, to understand what he would do. Because while he’d given her silence, he’d also given her actions. She needed his actions now.
When he didn’t say anything for long moments, Dante sighed again, and her heart slipped. “Tristan, she’s his daughter. As much as I understand why she’s been here, we can’t let this go on. Vitalio might retaliate. And it could end nasty. You know that.”
More silence.
