Page 163 of Vow Of Fire

“Fuck him,” Dante growled, burying his face in my hair. “I thought I was going to lose you.”

His hands trembled as he snapped the plastic restraints binding my wrists with brute force. “Let me look at you. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, as he cupped my face in his hands. “Honestly, he didn’t hurt me. You got there… in time.”

“I’d burn the whole city down before I let anything happen to you.”

My heart swelled.

“I shouldn’t have said those things. I was trying to protect you. I thought if I put some distance⁠—”

“I know,” I whispered. “That’s why I put your watch back on. I know you were doing it for me.”

His eyes gleamed silver as he stared at me. “I love you, Ophelia. Tomorrow, I’m putting the biggest ring in Manhattan on your finger, so every bastard in this city knows you’re mine.”

I let out a sob, just as sirens ricocheted across the water. The adrenalin must be messing with his brain.

“Do you really mean that?”

“Baby, I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

He kissed me then. It wasn’t gentle. His hand slid into my wet hair, holding me in place as his mouth crashed against mine with all the fear he’d been carrying since I’d been taken. It wasn’t a question or a celebration. It was a claim. A desperate, furious reassurance that I was alive, that I was standing in his arms, that no one had managed to take me from him.

When he finally pulled back, his eyes were filled with a look I recognized.

“I love you too,” I whispered, as the sirens grew much louder.

He pressed his lips against mine one more time, then, eyes sparkling, said, “Hold that thought. We’ve got to go.”

Mikhail’s men had already loaded Vincent’s body into the back of a van. Mikhail himself was nowhere to be seen.

Dante took my hand, lacing his fingers tightly through mine, and together we ran for the SUV. We pulled away, disappearing around the corner just as the docks were lit up by NYPD squad cars.

42

THE NEW ME

Evelyn

“Dante, I have to get back. This is a very important exhibition,” I murmured, as he kissed my neck.

He had me pinned against the desk in my office while the private viewing of my latest acquisition, Leo Marcelli, unfolded in the gallery down the hall.

The retired don had taken weeks to persuade, but with Isabella’s encouragement, and a little careful diplomacy on my part, he’d finally agreed to exhibit.

The collection was breathtaking.

Rendered in oils with remarkable confidence and restraint, Leo’s paintings captured New York not as tourists imagined it, but as those who belonged to it remembered it. Rain-slicked avenues glowed beneath amber streetlights. Sunlight spilled between towering brownstones, turning fire escapes into lacework and taxi cabs into flashes of gold. Steam curled from subway grates like ghosts of the city’s past, while anonymous figures hurried through the streets, each carrying a story the viewer would never quite know.

They weren’t merely cityscapes, they were love letters to Manhattan. Intimate, nostalgic and unmistakably authentic, each canvas revealed a city that was gritty and glamorous, brutal and beautiful.

It was a portrait of New York through the eyes of a man who had lived every triumph, heartbreak, and secret it had to offer.

“Mm…” Dante murmured, pulling down the strap of my gown so he could reach my breast. “And I’m about to give you a very important orgasm.”

He covered my nipple with his mouth, and I gasped. All thoughts of the party flew from my head, replaced with the glorious sensations pulsing through me with every hard suck. This man knew exactly what to do to reduce me to a puddle of lust.

In the month since my rescue, he’d come to know every curve and fold of my body, as I had his. At first, I’d worried that we’d get tired of ripping each other’s clothes off and having sex in every conceivable position in every room in his penthouse, but we hadn’t.