Chapter 5

The sound of it came first — wrong and delicate and entirely foreign in the stillness of Dante Romano’s penthouse.

A scrape of metal against glass, tiny and precise. The faintest click of a lock. My skin prickled before my brain directed it to a logical conclusion.

I’d been standing with my back to the window, glancing upon the burn of the city like a constellation of small betrayals, when

Dante rose from his desk. He heard it as a hunter hears wind rustle. “Get down.”

There was no room for any argument with the command. I wasn’t moving until his body moved me. He was all motion and intention — pulling me low, tossing the entire width of him across my shoulders like armor.

Glass flew off near us, glimmering rain. Hot, terrifying bullets tattooed the marble where my head had been a moment before.

Dante’s thigh hit me over and over, his forearm pressed over my shoulders. His chest was a great home above my own, a tough, living roof; his heart pounded under my cheek like a caged one.

He smelled of gun oil and whiskey and a little of something bad, an odour unrelated to cologne and all about war. I was a child again, for a breath.

Breathless and pinned, waiting for the end of the world. “Stay. Down.” His voice sliced across the confusion, collected, and cold.

He was gone in a blink, scurrying back to the side, and, pulling a gun from the small of his back the way one would take a pen out of a drawer. Two shots, clean and horrible.

A grunt. Then an out-of-body silence so deafening it roared, interrupted only by the sound of my ears ringing and the thunder of my pulse.

I lay on a tableau of shattered glass, glinting like ice and watched Dante fade into shadow and motion. He moved with that ruthless, clinical efficiency I had only ever seen in boardroom meetings and in the thin-sliced video footage the security teams flashed to us when a deal had gone bad.

Quick feet, no wasted motion. He climbed over to the shattered window, aimed, fired again. Someone screamed — a human sound cut off mid-curse — and fell onto the abyss.

When the scream was silenced by the city's atmosphere, a distant car alarm changed to the tone of alarm. I was frozen among the brilliant shards, the world made up solely of the metallic smell of fear and his name reverberating in my head like a judgment.

My fake fiancé had just slaughtered me in my living room. Not hesitating. Not feeling sorry. Not moving with a flicker. Dante spun back and locked his dark eyes on mine.

I’d learned to see him angry, sharp, charming. I’d observed him strategize like a man who mapped a rival’s heart and struck a killing blow in a quarterly report.

But now — up close, breath ragged, blood streaked across his jaw from a kill too near to be pretty — he was something else. He was a predator who had been allowed to be honest.

Striding toward me, each step a promise. His hand — heavy, sure — skimmed over my arms, along my ribs, down my legs. Not intrusive; inventorying.

Checking for wounds. Counting me as one would count a prize. "Are you hit?" he asked, and it was an almost soft question in the aftermath.

"N-no." My voice was small and sharp with adrenaline, brittle. He pointed my chin towards the light, turning my face so that he could see the pale of my skin, my tiny cut petticoat of the glass.

His thumb pressed under my jaw with a force that was not tender nor sadistic — only efficient. "You’re shaking.” His eyes moved with the knife-thrust of a knife to my fingertips, plunging them deep and deep enough that I could see more than worry; I saw calculation, ownership and a heat that frightened me.

“Because someone just tried to kill me in your living room,” I said, teeth chafed as I tried to extract my dignity from the pieces of the shattered carpet.

His mouth quirked. A barely perceptible smile arched one side. “Correction — they tried to kill me. You were collateral.” The way he phrased it should have hurt me; it should have been a reductive rejection.

The pronoun did land heavy instead, like a claim. They were trying to kill me. You were beside me. Which in his voice sounded to me like you are mine to keep safe.

He ran his thumb on my throat again, a blank look, he couldn't look away. The skin there shivered as he pressed his hand against it to the hand that had been many times over used to giving orders and taking names.

“They’ll never touch you. Not while you’re mine.” The word of mine slipped into the room and sealed it. My indignation rose, hot and bright. “This was your idea! If you hadn’t dragged me out here—if I hadn’t gotten out of my own house—maybe I wouldn’t be—”

He interrupted me as he always had — close, not in argument. He slid his hand down from my jaw to the nape of my neck, and before I could express my anger, he had me stifled in the weight of a body and heat of breath.

“Bella,” he murmured. That one tiny syllable sparked something ridiculous and awful in my chest. “Don’t confuse cause and consequence. They were after you the moment you called my name.”

The other clearly cruelly laid out a line between them: say Romano, draw danger. Put me in the thick of this, make yourself a target. My lungs stuttered.

Everything about the truth of his words — the confidence in them — hit me like cold iron. I wanted to throw my anger at him. I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t be owned, and wouldn't be used as bait in a war between families.

Yet the cadence of his voice, the heat of his body atop mine, pinned me in a place I did not wish to give up. And then — god forbid — his mouth was at mine. It wasn’t soft.

This was not the angle practiced by a man kissing for cameras. It was violence and surrender braided together: possession, claim, rage and relief knotted into a hard, urgent mouth.

He took me like a man taking what he has decided cannot be taken. My muscles buckled, fingers interlaced with the material of his shirt as if trying to keep a grip would keep me tethered to the world.

My nails sank into his back in a reflex that was an offering: I was his, at least in that breath. Sheer oxygen left my brain.

I wanted to shove him away, to scream, to turn him on to explain how it was possible for someone like him to kill with nothing but his calm face and then kiss you as though you needed some air.

For my life to become leveraged, I wanted to get him to stop and scold him. I should have been furious. But instead I tasted the edge of metal and fear and something along the lines of longing.

Fear and desire that twisted into an ache that clotted the space separating us. My breath sounded in a ragged breath as he swallowed it down deep and fought it and shoved his mouth deeper into mine until I forgot the glass and the gun and the world outside of that small, brutal arena.

When he kissed me, both of us were panting. My lips were swollen. My pupils were blind with dislocation, filled with a hunger that I did not yet have vocabulary for. “That,” he said, thumb dragging over my lower lip, “is what happens when someone tries to steal what’s mine.”

The words should have worked hard inside me--this is how I looked at them: people steal things all the time and have always, this is that, for centuries; it did not make one person someone other than themselves, but it rewiring the tone of my voice, the total ownership in it rewired something inside of me.

“You think this is a game?” I shot back, voice rough. “Do you think kissing me after I kill someone makes it—makes me—”.

“Alive,” he cut in, the one syllable a punch.

"It makes you alive. And I will do it again. Every time it happens.” But the vow waited between us like a sick jewel, so heavy its weight.

The stillness came back in more quickly than the shards did. She was bathed in light from the city lights, glowing on her skin, glowing into the earth, dark and duller.

For just a moment the penthouse seemed surreal: I was on stage after the curtain fell. My phone buzzed on the side table; he didn't look away when he answered. “Clean it up,” he says, a cold blade in his voice now. “And double the guards. Anyone who breathes near her dies.”

He shut the phone and looked me in the eye. I licked my cracked lips; fear and adrenaline made the gesture awkward. The room seemed too small and very wide simultaneously.

“You can’t keep me here like a prisoner,” I said, my words an anguished challenge. I read like a victim made up to sound indignant, resentful, in charge.

My hands trembled anyway. His jaw worked. He slid his hand down my arm, then moved in a slighter motion than the rest of him.

It tightened when I shivered, not cruelly but possessively, like a bag closing around a prize. “You’re not a prisoner,” he said. “You’re under my protection.

There’s a difference.” I gritted my teeth and locked eyes with him. “And how long does your protection last, Dante? Until you get bored? Until you find someone else — another woman to use?”

My words were acid, meant to scrub the truth from his face. He didn’t let me finish. He met up with my challenge the way he met everything, with action rather than argument.

His mouth came down on mine again, hard, less reticent. He kissed me as if the world were about to fold in on itself if he hadn't. I fought, protested at first but then followed his frantic rhythm; fingers raked at his shirt, not fighting it but eating it in the same luscious rhythm.

The kiss ripped something away; as he was able to break free and he did, our foreheads held, breaths ragged and melded.

“I’ll keep on,” he whispered into the hollow of my ear. “Until I’m on the ground.”

The silence after that was deeper than any silence we’d experienced together. My breath hitched. For the first time, I lost my justification of thinking or sarcasm.

The only thing there was was the pulse of him against me and the words he had declared, under gunfire and glass shattering, that if it helped me to stay alive, he would go to hell and return.

For the first time, I had believed him to be right. I could not sleep that night. It wasn’t fear from the attack; it was the memory of the way I had held his head, the iron taste of his kiss still on my tongue.

They were supposed to have me as a pawn, a name to throw against the wolves to scatter. I refused to be a weakness. And then I realized something worse and better and truer: she wasn’t my weakness. She was my only obsession. God help any who tried to take her.