“Kill you?” he repeated, a frown furrowing between his eyebrows.
He ran his attention over my face, checking for wounds, perhaps, or deciding how he would end me. Something that looked like worry worked across those marble, statue-worthy features, and he slowly shook his head.
“No, angel, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to marry you, and keep you... till death do us part.”
I stared at the man who seemed more devil than human and lost the battle.
Darkness swooped over me like a veil, and I fell gratefully into that sweet oblivion.
30
MASSIMO
After Katarina passed out, I lifted her carefully into my arms, pocketed my gun, and made my way from the church. I called in some favors to have the place cleaned. The fucking detective had taken so long to process my paperwork and let me go, that by the time I’d charged my phone enough to check the tracking app, Katarina had already been on her way to the church.
Even a few minutes later, and that motherfucker would have married her. What the fuck was going on? I’d grabbed his wallet before carrying my unconscious bride from the church, and now, in a cab, I went through it. He was her so-called fiancé. He had been mentioned in her admission paperwork, though I hadn’t thought of his name again until today.
So, he was Ivan Markovic. Well, ithadbeen him. Now, he was just a body on the floor, soon to be chopped up and disappeared by professionals. I took a picture of his ID and sent it to Giada to look him up properly.
Then I turned to feast my eyes on Katarina. She slept sweetly against me. Fuck, I’d missed her. Even in the short time we’d been apart, I’d really fucking missed her.
She didn’t remember me. Someone had drugged her again. I’d suspected it when I’d seen her outside Hallow Hall during the fire. There’d been a far-off look in her eyes that hadn’t been right. One thing about Katarina was how sharp she was. She didn’t just see everything, she saw beyond what others wanted to show. She saw inside.
The woman in the church wearing a bloodstained wedding dress hadn’t seen anything. She hadn’t been herself, and it hurt somewhere in my chest to think she was confused again. Alone, locked inside her own mind, when I’d told her she wasn’t alone anymore. Whoever had drugged her was trying to make a liar out of me. I wouldn’t stand for it.
As soon as we got home, it would be time to figure out why Blackwood and the holy trinity of fuckwits at Hallow Hall had kept her locked up for so long without killing her, or, given their MO, knocking her up and selling pieces of her off after she’d delivered. Nothing about Katarina Dmitrova’s story made sense.
We took a cab across town. I held her in my arms. The fucking bullet that the fucker in the church had gotten lucky with had landed somewhere in my thigh. A non-vital place, clearly, since I wasn’t losing much blood, so I ignored it. It had started to snow again. The stately streets of Torino shone with orange lamplight against the murky sky and falling snow. We stopped at a bustling ER, and I sent a message to an old Army buddy.
Half an hour later, I was carrying her into an exam room, and Filippa, one of my squad mates a lifetime ago, closed the door and eyed me.
“You don’t call or write, and then text me from the parking lot that you need help with some woman who’s injured? Mass, you know there are rules in a hospital, right?”
“And they don’t apply to this patient,” I snapped at her, my patience with the bullshit of the last few days growing dangerouslythin. “She gets what she needs, when she needs it, or I’ll go out to your waiting room and kill anyone who would be before her in your triage system, understand?”
Filippa sighed. “All too well. Why do you think I smuggled you in here? Put her on the bed.”
I carefully lowered Katarina to the paper-covered bed in the corner, sliding my hand into hers to keep some form of contact between us during her exam.
Filippa eyed that touch curiously but wisely didn’t comment while she took Katarina’s vitals.
“She’s out of it on something. Something strong. A sedative?”
“She was standing up and walking around earlier,” I supplied in case it helped.
“Maybe she has a bit of resistance to it, but it got to her in the end. What else does she take, any regular medications?”
“She was taking carbidopa and levodopa for a while.”
Filippa frowned. “Does she have a Parkinson’s diagnosis?”
I shook my head.
Filippa tutted. “Then why in the hell would she be taking that combination? It can literally cause psychosis in patients who don’t require it. Confusion and memory issues, lost time, nightmares, paranoia, voices in your head, you name it, it can?—”
“Voices in your head?” I interrupted.
Fillippa nodded. “It can cause a psychotic break that some never recover from. Trigger psychosis-like symptoms; it’s a massive risk. Why was she taking it? Who would even prescribe that?”