Halfway to a fitful doze, I jerked up.
Movement came again, from behind me this time as Alexei slipped away, and I thought for a moment I’d imagined it.
Then I heard it.
“Em?”
I looked down to find bloodshot amber eyes staring right back at me.
“Hey.” I leaned over the bed again and cupped Mateo’s jaw. “There you are.”
Mateo slow-blinked. Then snatched a breath, stress flooding him, but I kept him down with a finger to his lips.
“They’re safe at the compound. I don’t know shit about what that means, but they’re okay. I promise.”
Fifty percent of the tension left Mateo’s body. Still unhappy, he batted my finger away and started to speak.
Stopped and tried again. “Blood.” He lifted a hand, the uninjured one attached to the IVs and made a clumsy swipe for my face. “They hurt you.”
I’d forgotten the tape at the back of my head. I had no clue what it looked like now or how bad it had been in the first place. But I looked him in the eye and told him the truth. “I’m fine.”
Because I was. “I love you.”
Mateo stilled. He was sharper and cleverer than he ever gave himself credit for, but processing those three little words seemed to take a thousand years.
He frowned. “Huh?”
I laughed with burning eyes. “I love you. I always have, and I’m so fucking sorry it took me so long to tell you.”
Dazed, Mateo stared, his fingers wrapping around my wrist, head bobbing in a slow nod. “I knew.”
“Yeah?”
“I think so.”
It was all he had. And was enough. Of course it was. He’d loved me through every violent, horrible facet of who I was. Through every bright day and dark night. And I’d love him through this.
I’d love him forever.
Mateo settled. He didn’t ask where he was, which was just as well. Beyond a clinic buried somewhere near Bath, I had no idea. He didn’t ask about his wrist either. Or seem to notice when the dodgy doctor came in and set a cast around the broken bones.
“Who else is here?”
His sudden question startled me. For the last hour, he’d seemed asleep.
I waited for the doctor to disappear, then I leaned close and spoke softly. “Alexei. Locke.”
“Locke?”
“He’s good, I promise. Folk too. He got Lorenzo.”
“That was Folk?”
I nodded. “For Rocco.”
Any doubt or suspicion in Mateo’s eyes faded. At some point, like the rest of us, he’d want to know how Folk had made that crazy shot, but his motivation was something, even dazed and confused, that Mateo understood.
It seemed to jolt something in him, though. His good hand had been loosely entwined with mine. As his gaze sharpened, his grip on me tightened to the point of pain, and he lurched upright, wrenching his casted wrist from the side table the doctor had used to treat it. “It was you. I saw you— Em,no.You—”