Page 23 of The Savage

Her.

Lit only by the emergency strips along the cabin floor, she looks carved out of candlelight and nightmares and every prayer I ever spat at the ceiling in the dead of night.

She’s clutching her bundled things to her chest like a child clutching their comfort toy. As if I would harm her.

Okay, maybe I will. I haven’t quite decided yet.

Her hood is back on because staring at her face was shredding something inside me. Because that look of fucking terror in her eyes? It claws at my soul, even through the manic exhaustion, through the pain, through the white-hot screaming of my ribs and my arm.

But over and above that, there’s the need to keep staring, never take my eyes off her. Because I simply need to confirm she’s real.

Finally.

Two hundred and sixty days since the last bullshit dead-end rumour. Months since the burned convent report that proved nothing.

But best of all, four days since I woke from my coma and two since Nightowl’s terse single-line message:

Santa Maria delle Nevi, Sicilian Alps. Move.

According to the doctors, my brain is swollen something fucked and my ribs are hanging together by spaghetti tendons. I shouldn’t be here.

I shouldn’t be anywhere except the hospital bed I tore myself out of, with stitches still fresh, ribs still screaming, and an arm that feels like someone drove a steel rod through the bone.

Dante would maim me for even sitting upright, and Cesare would finish the job.

Orazio?

He’d have shot me in the kneecap just to stop me trying.

But none of them matter.

Not when she’s five feet away, breathing the same air again as me after all these years.

Not when I spent half my life imagining this moment and the other half hunting down every ghost that whispered her name.

I drag in a slow, measured breath, trying to keep my vision from tunnelling. The edges of the world keep dimming, tightening like a noose. Too much blood lost. Too long running on adrenaline and obsession; not enough sense left in my skull to rest when the doctors begged me to.

But fuck rest.

I didn’t claw my way out of that wreckage, didn’t survive the gunfire that took my mother and the silence that followed, didn’t tear London, Palermo, and half of New York apart piece by piece… just to let a few injuries keep me from this. From hard answers and broken vows and savage betrayal and yes, yes, yes, the sweetest, tightest pussy known to mankind.

The cabin tilts. My stomach lurches. Pain slams hot and thick behind my ribs.

One of the men leans towards me, voice tight. ‘Boss⁠—’

I lift a hand, slow but sharp enough to cut through his worry. ‘No,’ I rasp. ‘Don’t touch me.’

His eyes flick towards her. ‘Do you want her restrained?’

A growl coils in my throat, low, feral, involuntary. ‘She doesn’t get touched,’ I grit out. ‘Not by anyone but me.’

I don’t know these men, but again, I had to go with my gut, trust that Nightowl, the secretive fucker, wouldn’t choose this moment to take me out. Or enact whatever the hell their end game is. And for whatever reason, they knew I would want this kept secret, even from my own family, and they orchestrated it just so.

Fuck, I owe them. And I don’t even know who the hell they are.

The soldier nods instantly. Good. They understand. They know what this means.

The helicopter dips again, and my vision shudders. Her hood shifts with the movement, and for a heartbeat I catch the faintest outline of her face – the shape of a cheek I memorised at seventeen, the curve of a jaw I kissed on the night of her eighteenth birthday, the mouth I’ve dreamed of through every blackout, crash and coma because Giada sucking my cock was better than ten lines of coke and a ticket into heaven.