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“Wait,” I say as Anya’s face pops into my mind. “There is someone I would like you to call.”
* * *
“Oh, honey,” Anya says as she steps into the hospital room less than an hour later, her face folding in concern as she crosses the room to be by my side.
Nicolo Marchetti follows her quietly through the door, his expression reserved as he remains silent and watchful.
“Have you heard any news?” Anya asks, drawing my eyes back to her worried blue ones.
My chin trembles as I shake my head. “He’s still in surgery,” I murmur. And then I lose it, breaking down in tears.
Anya pulls me into a tight hug, her hand stroking my hair as she tries to soothe me. “Shhh. It’s alright. Everything’s going to be fine,” she assures me. “Ilya’s strong. He’ll pull through.”
I sob harder as my confession bubbles up to the surface. “It’s my fault. He used his body to protect me,” I stutter between gasps for air.
“What do you mean?” Anya asks gently, her arms continuing to hold me in one piece.
“We had just gone out to dinner at Cité, and oh, Anya. You were right. I thought he was going to nullify our contract–and I guess, in a way, he did. But then he said he wanted to try dating me for real, and…” I trail off as I start to cry harder when I think about how, for a brief moment in time, I had everything I wanted.
“Whit, that’s wonderful,” Anya says warmly, and I shake my head as I try to pull myself together.
“As we were leaving, this car pulled up. It all happened so fast, but these guys rolled down the windows and started shouting in Russian. Then they pulled out these guns, and just…” I hiccup in my effort to maintain control of my emotions. “I didn’t know what to do. I froze, but Ilya didn’t hesitate. He stepped in front of me, shielded me, and they just… opened fire.” I shudder, convulsing, as I relive the moment, that terrifying look of determined resignation on Ilya’s handsome face, the sensation of his massive body going limp in my arms. “And now I feel like I’m going to lose him just after we made things right,” I murmur.
“Who did this?” Nicolo growls, startling me from my reverie.
When I look over at him, I’m amazed to see the ferocity on his face, the way his hands fist at his sides. He looks livid, which surprises me. I wasn’t under the impression that he and Ilya were anything even in the ballpark of friends.
“I don’t know,” I confess. “He’s been dealing with some kind of territory conflict for almost a year now, but just yesterday he told me it was over. He’d resolved it…” My eyes grow wide as I wonder if he might have been wrong, that this was some kind of retaliation for whatever he did.
“You said they spoke Russian?” Nicolo demands, all business.
I nod.
“Those fuckers crossed territory lines without permission. Seems they have a complete disregard for boundaries. The Cité is Marchetti territory, so it was as much an act of violence againstmyfamily as it was on Ilya’s.”
The viscous snap to his voice ignites a sense of vengeance in me, and suddenly my moment of overwhelming hatred as Ilya’s would-be murderers got away comes back to life. I’d been so helpless, sitting there on the blood-soaked cement, that I hadn’t been able to fully address my wrath. I couldn’t leave Ilya. But now, Nicolo seems to have taken up my fury in a way that makes my heart pound.
“I might not be much help in here,” Nicolo says, glancing around the hospital room. “But I’ll join forces with Ilya’s men and hunt the snakes down. Cut off their heads before they have time to slither back into the hole they came from.”
For the first time in hours, strength returns to my limbs, and I’ve never felt so grateful to Nicolo Marchetti in my life. I sit up straighter and nod, my lips pressing into a determined line. Anya’s arms drop from around my shoulders as she turns to face her man, concern etched across her brow.
“Nicolo, wait,” she says before he can turn and go.
He stops short as Anya strides across the room. Her hand reaches up to cup his cheek, and he covers it with his own hand.
“Please, be careful,” she murmurs. “These men are armed and clearly dangerous. I don’t know what I would do if…”
She lets the possibility go unsaid as her eyes flick in my direction. She seems to have caught her poignant words a fraction too late. A stab of pain and loss rips through me as I realize where her mind was going. She doesn’t know what she would do if anything happened to Nicolo–like something’s happened to Ilya. For all her comforting words, Anya’s just as uncertain Ilya will survive this as I am.
“This is what I was born to do, love,” Nicolo says with a shocking amount of tenderness. His fingers brush a lock of Anya’s golden hair back over her ear, and he leans in for a passionate kiss.
I look quickly away from the intimate moment, and an aching hollowness throbs in my chest.Was it just a few short hours ago that Ilya and I were kissing without regard for the witnesses around us, so lost in our own world that everything else just melted away?It feels like a lifetime ago. Since then, I’ve watched the man I love die at least twice.
The door whispers shut, as Nicolo departs without another word, and then Anya crosses the room to be by my side once more.
“What if they can’t save him?” I breathe, looking up into Anya’s kind eyes. “What if he doesn’t make it?”
“Nothing is going to stop that man from coming back to you,” Anya says confidently, once more. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you, and he won’t let something as insignificant as a bullet get in the way of that.”
