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The footsteps stop, and I look up from the puddle I’ve made on the floor into the eyes of a cold-blooded killer. He doesn’t have to say a word. He only has to stare down at me with dark, dead eyes for me to know exactly why he’s here. What he came for.
This is it. This is where I die. Wet and naked on a cold tile floor.
He raises his gun, aiming for my head.
A burst of something warm, red, and sticky splashes the wall, floor, and open door. It lands on me too. I can’t process either the ear-splitting sound that preceded the splash or the splash itself, looking down at the blood now running over my arms and chest.
It’s not my blood.
The man’s body hits the floor like a ton of bricks.
It’s then I see the man behind him who blew his brains all over my bathroom.
Luca Santoro.
His face is a hardened mask of fury and hatred, and I recognize it as the same expression he wore in his office when I walked in on what he did to the bloody, broken man in the chair.
He steps over the corpse, and nothing matters more than getting away from this monster because he might have saved my life, but he might also want to take it himself. I slide away and throw an arm over my face, unable to stop from cringing and shaking.
His hand closes around my forearm, and I fight to pull away, but he doesn’t twist. He doesn’t squeeze, break, or explain what brought him here in the first place. He simply lifts me to my feet.
“That settles it,” he grunts out. “You’re coming with me.”
8
LUCA
“I don’t understand.” She’s shivering, naked, wet with water from her bath and the blood of the son of a bitch whose useless life I ended. “What are you saying? What do you mean?” she questions, one right after another.
“You’re in shock.” And I have a problem on my hands, one big enough that even the sight of a wet, naked body like the one in front of me doesn’t register. There’s no going back now. I’ve staked my claim. There’s a dead assassin at my feet and a growing pool of blood painting the tiled floor. We don’t have time for her to break down.
But that’s what she’s determined to do. Her teeth are chattering, and her eyes bulge until they’re too big for her face. I doubt she realizes she’s completely exposed to my gaze. She’s so overwhelmed by the past few moments. “I… am not going anywhere with you.” Her weak attempt at freeing herself from my grip is laughable. My fingers only dig into the soft flesh of her upper arm until she sucks in a pained wince.
“Here’s what you’re going to do if you plan on living to see tomorrow,” I whisper, hauling her in close until I can smell her fear. “You are going to drain the water from the tub. You’re going to get in the tub, and you are going to turn on the shower, and you’re going to wash yourself off. Got it? Or do I have to do it for you?”
That’s what shakes her out of it. The idea of me bathing her was all it took to make her upper lip curl in a disgusted sneer and to cover her tits with her free arm. “Hell, no. I’ll do it.”
One look at the colorful span of skin on her right leg makes me think otherwise. “You’re sure you can handle it?” I ask, raising a brow.
“Yes.” Her gaze hardens, her eyes narrowing. “I can do it.”
“Good. Make it fast.” I release her, noting where her gaze immediately falls, the semi-automatic on the floor beside the toilet. “I’ll pick this up for you,” I offer, taking it and leaving her groaning softly as if she was planning on using the damn thing on me.
Too predictable.
Then I leave her to it, heading to her bedroom and grabbing a cheap tote bag from the top shelf of her closet. I move quickly, pulling clothes from her drawers and shoving them inside the bag. Once the shock wears off, she’ll wonder how I knew where to find everything. That’s a situation I can address later once I have us out of danger. Because whether I want to admit it or not, I’ve inserted myself into the situation and chosen my side.
What the hell am I thinking? I’ve been accused of going rogue in the past, following my own rules, essentially telling naysayers to fuck off if they have a problem with my decision-making. But this is a lot even for me.
What was the alternative? Letting one of Vitali’s thugs run her down today, allowing one of them to murder her in cold blood? If anybody is going to do that, it will be me. He will not have the satisfaction of claiming her life.
And unlike him, I prefer to do these sorts of things myself. I don’t send thugs after a wounded woman. Only some fucking coward would do that. If I’m lodging a bullet between her eyes, I’m looking into those eyes while I do it.
“Luca?” Her voice is shaky when she calls me from the bathroom after she’s finished and the water is off. “There’s too much blood. I can’t step over it.”
I reach into the linen closet between the bedroom and bathroom and pull out a handful of towels, which I then drop on the floor. Like magic, they go from white to red. A second layer helps conceal the blood pooling on the white and black checkered tile.
When I reach out to help her, she pointedly ignores my outstretched hand, stepping carefully onto the towels rather than dipping her bare feet into the blood of the man who was moments away from ending her life before I caught up to him.
