Her face is carved from ice. There is no warmth, no defiance, no fire. The woman who kissed me with such desperate, consuming hunger just hours ago is gone. She looks at me with an indifference that cuts far deeper than any sniper's bullet ever could.
"Alive?" she hallows. She looks down at the white silk of her dress. "Is that what you call this, Cassio?"
"I saved you," I tell her, reaching my hand out. My fingers are trembling. I am the Don of the Vellutini family, a man who commands an army, but right now, I am begging a ghost to let me touch her. "I took the bullet. I kept you safe."
She steps back, recoiling from my outstretched hand as if I were diseased.
"You didn't save me," she whispers, her eyes dropping to my hands.
I look down. My hands are coated in thick, dried blood.
"You locked me in a vault and waited for the monsters to come," Noemi lashes on. "You told me you owned me. You treated me like a piece of territory. You don't know how to love anything, Cassio. You only know how to conquer."
"No," I choke out, panic seizing my lungs. "That's not true. I need you."
"I am going home," she states flatly.
She turns her back on me and begins to walk toward the heavy oak doors of the penthouse.
"Stop!" I roar, lunging forward, but my feet are glued to the floorboards. I can't move. I am paralyzed by my own sins. "Noemi, don't walk out that door! You belong to me!"
She doesn't even look over her shoulder. "I belong to no one. Especially not a monster."
She opens the door. Dario Lombardi is standing on the other side, smiling that weak, pathetic smile. He reaches his hand out. Noemi takes it.
The door slams shut, the heavy deadbolt sliding into place with a sound like a guillotine dropping.
"NOEMI!" I scream, tearing my own vocal cords.
I am left entirely alone in the gilded cage I built, drowning in the silence, suffocating on the bitter realization that I pushed her away because I was too fucking terrified to admit she had become my entire world.
I fight the paralysis. I fight the darkness. I tear at the fabric of the nightmare with everything I have left, clawing my way upward through the suffocating heat of the fever.
Wake up. Wake the fuck up.
Light pieces the darkness.
A sharp, jagged spike of physical pain rips through my right shoulder, anchoring me violently to the physical world. I gasp, my chest heaving, my lungs dragging in air that tastes like antiseptic and copper.
My eyelids flutter open. Everything is a blurred, spinning mess of gray and white. I blink rapidly, fighting the heavy, drugged sluggishness weighing down my brain.
The ceiling comes into focus. The modern, minimalist light fixtures of my penthouse bedroom.
I try to shift my weight, and the agony in my chest flares so brightly my vision whites out for a split second. A harsh, broken groan escapes my lips.
"Cassio."
The voice is real this time. It isn't a phantom of my fevered brain. It’s breathless, frantic, and right next to me.
I slowly turn my head against the sweat-drenched pillow.
Noemi is kneeling on the floor beside the mattress.
She is a complete, beautiful wreck. The emerald silk dress is torn and heavily stained with dark, dried patches of my blood. Her dark hair has escaped its elegant twist, hanging in chaotic tangles around her face. Her makeup is smeared, dark streaks of mascara tracking down her pale cheeks.
But her eyes.
Her dark eyes are wide, glassy with unshed tears, and locked onto my face with a ferocity that steals the breath straight out ofmy lungs. She is gripping my left hand in both of her, holding onto me like a lifeline.