“Lorenzo.”His name is out of my mouth before I reach the bottom step, and there’s nothing composed about how it comes out.
His eyes find mine across the entrance hall, and something shifts across his face in the split second before he regains control, something unguarded and raw, gone so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it.
“I’m fine,” he says, which is precisely what a man says when he is not.
“Sit him down,” I say, directing my gaze at Rafe because he’s the only man in this house I trust to do what I tell him rather than look to Lorenzo for permission first.“Take him to the sitting room.”
“Bella.”Lorenzo’s voice carries that particular note of patience, stretched thin.“It’s just a scratch.”
I glance at him.At the blood soaking through his shirt, at the bruise creeping up his cheekbone, at the split lip, which he clearly believes is a charming deflection.
“You’re not fine,” I say, and my voice comes out with a firmness that surprises even me.“And that is not a scratch.You must be delusional if you believe I’m not going to stand here and negotiate with you about it.You are going to the sitting room, you are going to sit down, and you are going to let me inspect that wound.None of those three things are optional.Do you understand me?”
The entrance hall grows quiet.
Something shifts in Rafe’s expression that might, under very different circumstances, be the beginning of a smile.But like a professional, he quickly smothers it.
I know I should not have raised my voice in front of Lorenzo’s men.I know it the way I know most things in this house, but Lorenzo can have something to say about it later, when he is sitting down, not now, when he is losing blood on his own floor.
Rafe steers him toward the sitting room with the practiced ease of a man who has navigated this particular geography more times than either of them would care to count.The idea of how many times this has happened inside these walls before I ever arrived to witness it lodges somewhere beneath my ribs and quietly refuses to leave.
As they move him into the sitting room, I turn on my heel and head straight for the kitchen because doing something is the only thing keeping me from coming apart at the seams.
The cupboard above the sink.I pull it open and start bringing things down, stacking them on the counter.Butterfly closures.Medical tape.Saline.My hands move with a steadiness I’m consciously manufacturing.The moment I stop focusing on what they’re doing, I’ll start thinking about the cut soaking through his shirt, the state of his face, and I’m not ready to think about what happened this morning or what he walked into.I will not let myself go there.
I reach up for the gauze on the top shelf.
The sound comes before I can process what it is.
One single, mechanical click.Precise and unmistakable.I grew up in a house full of men who carried guns the way other men carried keys, and that sound is embedded in my bones.
My body goes completely still.My fingers remain extended toward the shelf.Three inches from the gauze, which, under these circumstances, is utterly irrelevant now.
The barrel touches the back of my head.Cold metal against the base of my skull, pressed in with the steady, unhurried confidence of someone unafraid of what they hold or what they are prepared to do with it.The stillness of a professional, somehow infinitely worse than rage would have been, because rage makes mistakes and this man is not making any.
My heart pounds against my chest so hard it impedes my ability to process information, and I inhale through it because breathing is the only thing I can fully manage at this moment.
“Where the fuck is Lorenzo?”
The voice is low.Roughened at the edges, as if it has been lived in for a long time.I can’t place it.
“How did you get in here?”The words leave my mouth before I decide to say them, steady in a way that surprises even me.
The barrel adjusts.Just a fraction.A small, deliberate increase in pressure that says everything a man with a gun needs to say without wasting a single word.
“Turn around.”
The hairs on my arms stand up before I have even begun to move—some animal part of me registering something the rest of me has not yet caught up with.
The barrel presses harder.
“I said turn the fuck around.”
I draw in a slow breath and find what I need somewhere at the bottom of it.
“You should know there are men in this house,” I say, turning as I speak, keeping my voice level, my chin up, and my eyes forward.“Men who will put you in the ground before you reach the door.”
Then I see his face.