Page 75
Her forehead drops against mine. “But I’m not afraid of you.”
She looks at the bullet wound in my side. It’s almost gone, the skin smooth and pink, and she traces it with her fingertip and her brow furrows with the analytical expression I’ve been in love with since the first time I saw it.
“You were shot.”
“It’s healing.”
“It’s healed. That was a bullet wound sixty seconds ago and now it’s a freckle.” She looks at me. “This is going to take some getting used to.”
I laugh, then pull her against me and hold her and breathe her in. The warehouse smells like blood and metal and gunpowder but her hair smells like vanilla and her skin smells like home.
Roman appears in the doorway. He takes in the scene: his brother standing naked, holding his mate, surrounded by the wreckage of three men who made the worst decision of their lives. Roman’s expression cycles through surprise, amusement, and something softer.
He bends. When he straightens, the old steel is in his hand. Blood fills the grooves. He looks at it, then at me. “You dropped something.”
He tosses the knuckles. I catch them with my free hand.
Sophia looks from the scarred steel to the bodies around us. “Those have a story, don’t they?”
“Several.”
“I’m going to want to hear them.”
“You will.”
Roman pulls off his jacket and tosses it to me without comment. I catch it and drape it around Sophia’s shoulders because she’s shivering, the adrenaline crash settling in, the cold of the warehouse floor finally reaching her now that the crisis is over.
“DeSanto?” I ask without letting go of her.
“Not yet.”
I look at Sophia. She looks back at me. Her hand is on my chest, over the bond, over the doubled heartbeat that’s thundering between us, synchronized again, louder than it’s ever been. The wolf in my chest settles. Not with the temporary satisfaction of violence or the fragile peace of avoidance. With something deeper. Something permanent.
She’s here. She saw all of me and ran toward me anyway. Everything else, I can handle.
Chapter Thirty
Sophia
We go home.
To the penthouse. The place where he cooked for me and I sat on his counter and we burned risotto and I fell asleep every night to the doubled heartbeat and woke up every morning to the heat of his skin against mine.
Roman drives us. Dominic is in the backseat wearing Roman’s jacket and gray sweatpants, and I’m tucked against his side in a blanket with his arm around me and his mouth against my temple and neither of us speaks for the entire drive. We don’t need to. The bond is wide open, pouring everything he feels into me and everything I feel into him, and the communication is so complete that words would be redundant.
He loves me. I can feel it like standing in sunlight, warm and constant and coming from everywhere at once. He loves me and he’s terrified and he’s relieved and he’s carrying a threat of regret. He’s also grateful, and underneath all of it, deep in the place where the wolf lives, there’s a stillness I’ve never felt from him before. The natural stillness of a creature that has found its home and stopped searching.
Roman drops us at the building. Dominic thanks him with a look that carries more weight than any words, and Roman returns it with a nod that says everything brothers don’t say out loud.
We ride the elevator up. Forty floors of silence and the humming of the bond and his hand in mine, his fingers threaded through my fingers, his thumb tracing the bones of my wrist where the zip tie left red marks that are already fading.
The door opens. The penthouse is exactly as I left it. The notebook is gone from the coffee table because I took it with me. Everything else is the same. His jacket on the hook. My sweater on the chair. Two wine glasses in the drying rack from the last dinner we had together, the one before everything broke.
I walk inside. He follows. He closes the door and stands with his back against it and watches me move through the apartment, touching things, reclaiming the space through contact. My hand on the kitchen counter where he lifted me. My fingers on the bookshelf where his six-language collection lives. My palm flat against the window where the city glows forty stories below.
“I’m going to say some things,” I tell him without turning from the glass. “And you’re going to listen. And when I’m done, you’re going to tell me if you can do what I’m asking. And if you can’t, I’m going to walk out of this apartment and I’m not going to come back.”
“I’m listening.”
