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No mask. Luca has never once followed a rule he could break in public.
He pauses in the doorway and lets the room look at him.
I was eighteen when he gave me my first front door. It took me two years to notice it only locked from the outside, and that he kept the only key.
He liked to leave marks where my sleeves would cover them. He called it being careful with me.
Six months free, and my arm still remembers the shape of his fingers.
When I turn back, the Big Bad hasn’t so much as glanced at the doors.
He’s watching me. Only me.
My fingers, gone white around the edge of the table. The breath I can’t quite get all the way down.
“You know him,” he says quietly.
“Just someone I used to know.”
He studies my face for a long moment, and I have the strangest feeling he can read everything I just didn’t say.
“He came in without a mask,” he says.
“He wants everyone to know who he is.”
“I know who he is.” Something in the way he says it, flat and quiet, puts ice in my stomach. “What I don’t know yet is what he did to put that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“The one that makes me want to break something.”
I should be scared of a stranger who says a sentence like that. I am, a little. Mostly I’m warm. Mostly I’m staring at his mouth, wondering what it would feel like to be wanted that much by someone who could actually back it up.
No man has ever wanted to break something for me.
“I should get back to work.” I slide out of the booth and pick up my empty tray. My voice comes out thinner than I want it to. “Enjoy your Macallans, sir.”
“Bella.”
I stop.
“If anyone in this room lays a finger on you tonight,” he says quietly, “point.”
A beat.
“That’s all you’ll have to do.”
A shiver goes through me, and it isn’t fear. It starts at the back of my neck and rolls all the way down, hot and slow, until it settles low in my belly. My nipples tighten under the silk. A man just offered to hurt someone for me, and my body heard it as a love letter.
It should sound like a joke. It doesn’t. It sounds like a promise, and the worst part is how much I want him to keep it.
I don’t answer. I can’t. I walk away with my heart going like I’ve just run up four flights of stairs, and I don’t look back, because if I look back, I might go back.
I make it to the service bar.
Luca’s green eyes find me across the room. He doesn’t come over. He just raises his drink to me, smiling.
My left arm goes cold, just above the elbow. The same spot.
