Page 53 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Non mi interessa cosa ha detto. Trovala.”

Italian. Sharp, clipped, impatient Italian, and my body reacts before my brain finishes translating, every muscle locking up like someone yanked my emergency brake.

I don’t care what he said. Find her.

I abandon the raspberries mid-transaction—sorry, raspberry lady—and drift sideways behind the bronze statue of some nineteenth-century mayor with a magnificent mustache. My heart is doing a drum solo against my ribs. It could be tourists. It could be anyone. Sixty million Italians exist, and statistically, some of them vacation in the Black Forest, and I’m being paranoid, and⁠—

I peek around the mayor’s bronze elbow.

Marco.

He’s standing by the fountain in a charcoal coat that costs more than the fountain, frowning down at his phone like it personally offended his mother. Two of his men flank him, the big one with the neck tattoo and the quiet one who always scared me more. Marco scrolls, scowls, says something I can’t hear, and the quiet one nods.

Every drop of blood in my body evacuates to my feet.

He’s still here. It’s been weeks. Weeks of me building a new life, bribing notaries, buying light bulbs, falling in love with a corpse—and Marco is still in Germany, standing in my market town, telling people to find her.

Find me. Because who else? What else could keep a man like that in a country whose bread he complained about for the entire trip?

I press my spine against cold bronze and try to become architecturally invisible. Why is he still after me? I’m nobody. I’m a waitress who looked good on his arm. I have no money he knows about, no secrets, no leverage. Men like Marco replace girlfriends like they replace cars. There’s no rational reason to spend a month combing the Schwarzwald for one runaway fiancée.

Unless it’s not about wanting me back. Unless it’s about the fact that I left. That I made him look like a man whose porcelain doll walked off the shelf, in front of people whose opinion is the only currency he actually respects.

That thought is so much worse.

Marco lifts his head and scans the square, and I stop breathing. His gaze slides over the raspberry stand, the fountain, the mustache mayor.

I pull back behind the statue and count the mayor’s bronze coat buttons and pray to a god that Aldric insists doesn’t hang around us.

When I risk another peek, Marco is walking away, toward the parking lot on the far side, his men falling in behind him like expensive shadows.

I go the other direction. I don’t run, because that would be super suspish, but I do the speedwalk of a woman whose parking meter expired an hour ago, cutting between the cheese stall and the flower stand, down the side street where I parked. My hands shake so hard it takes me three tries to hit the unlock button.

The Porsche chirps. I drop into the seat, lock the doors, and just sit there for a second, gripping the wheel, breathing like I ran here from Bern.

“Okay,” I tell the dashboard. “Okay. He didn’t see you. Nobody followed you. You’re a mysterious silver-haired heiress and he’s looking for a broke waitress. Different tax brackets. Practically different species.”

The dashboard doesn’t answer, which I appreciate, because if it did, I’d have bigger problems than the mafia.

I take the long way home, with two extra turns and one deliberate loop through a village with a church and four houses, my eyes flicking to the mirror the whole time. Nobody follows.

At Blackthorn Keep, I park in the courtyard, kill the engine, and sit for one more minute, deciding what to tell Aldric.

He will not react proportionately. There’s no version where he nods thoughtfully. There’s a version where he sharpens the greatsword, and a version where he stands at the gate for a week like a gargoyle with abandonment issues, and a version where he marches into town glowing blue and makes the evening news.

I need a plan first. I need to think. I need…

I walk through the atrium, out the garden door, and every thought in my head files for unemployment.

Aldric is gardening. Topless.

He’s in the tomato rows, tying vines to stakes, and he’s stripped to the waist in the afternoon sun, and I stop dead on the gravel path like I hit the invisible wall the curse used to keep around this place.

I bite my lower lip. The light does obscene things to him. It pools in the valleys of muscle across his back, makes old scars gleam silver, turns the wolf tattoos into moving shadows when his shoulders roll. The blue glow of his heart is faint in daylight, just a cool shimmer between the parted ribs, like sun through stained glass. His black hair is tied back with a strip of leather, a few strands escaping to stick to his neck, and when he reaches up to loop twine over a tall stake, his entire torso flexes, and my knees send me a formal notice of resignation.

Marco. I should tell him about Marco.

I will absolutely tell him about Marco.