Page 70 of The Scars We Keep
No one stops me.
The rain hits me instantly.Cold.Hard.Perfect.
It plasters my hair back from my face in seconds.Soaks through my clothes, down my throat, into the hollow between my breasts, along my ribs.It turns the world sharp, immediate, and mercilessly present, leaving no room for old bruises, no room for my brother’s hands.
It’s just water and my breathing.
I walk down the terrace steps and into the garden, past the rose beds and the stone urns overflowing with rain.I don’t stop until I reach the far edge of the lawn, where the dark hedgerow rises high enough to swallow the house from view.Then I sink onto the wet stone bench and tip my face up to the sky.
Water lashes my skin, but I sit there anyway.
Chapter Sixteen
Lorenzo
Bythetimethecar turns through the gates, the rain is coming down so hard it smears the world beyond the windows.The storm has teeth tonight.It claws at the glass, hammers the roof, and turns the long drive into a river of black water.Vito slows at the front of the house, the wipers working overtime, barely keeping up with the sheet of rain trying to blind us.
The men stationed at the entrance are soaked to the bone, dark suits plastered to hard bodies, rain dripping from their hair, guns hidden beneath fabric grown heavy with water.None of them move.They stand there in the downpour as if carved from the same brutal stone this house was built from.
I am finally home.
Home.
The word settles in my chest and lingers.
For the first time, I don’t experience that old, restless itch under my skin.That constant pull toward violence.That need to keep moving, keep hunting, keep watching my back, because the next betrayal is always crouched around the next corner waiting to strike.
Tonight, it’s quieter inside my head.Maybe because there is relief that I didn’t kill Matteo.Not when I saw him with Emery—his hand on her back, his mouth softening as she spoke, the full curve of her stomach carrying the future he tore the empire apart to protect.
I finally understand it now.Why he did what he did.Why a man can spend his whole life believing he is built for power, for blood, for loyalty, only to meet one woman and realize none of that means shit when her life is on the line.
A woman changes you.She sinks beneath the skin, beneath the armor, beneath every brutal thing you built to keep yourself standing.Then one day you realize your pulse depends on another person breathing.You become a wound with a pulse.Every breath she takes matters.Every threat aimed at her lands in your chest before it ever reaches her.Every choice starts bending around her without your permission.
It’s pathetic, weak, and also the truest thing I have ever felt.
That’s what love does in a world like ours.It doesn’t make a man soft.It makes him vicious and terrifying because the second a man has something to lose, he becomes capable of a whole new kind of brutality.He fights for one heartbeat, for a tiny bit of peace in a life that has never offered him any.
Maybe that should unsettle me more than it does, because somewhere along the way I have become the same kind of man who walks into blood with one name on his mind.Isabella.
The car comes to a stop in front of the house, the engine humming low before it dies.One of my guards is already moving, quick down the steps, shoulders hunched against the storm as he yanks the door open for me.
I get out of the car and walk away before he can say a word.
The rain hits cold against my face.It’s sharp at the back of my neck.It soaks through my suit in seconds.Thunder growls overhead, as if the sky has its own grudge tonight.
I take the steps two at a time, already thinking about where to find Bella.
I can see it too clearly.The way her eyes lift when I walk into the room.The way she pretends she didn’t miss me, because God forbid that woman ever hands over a soft truth without trying to stab me with it first.The way I drag her into my arms anyway and kiss every smart-ass answer right off that wicked mouth until she forgets whatever insult she had lined up.
I am halfway through the front door, rain dripping from my coat onto the marble, when instinct sinks its teeth into me.
Something is fucking wrong.The foyer feels off.
I see Rafe first.He’s standing near the foot of the grand staircase with two of the others, their postures rigid, hands clasped in front of them.Rafe’s broad shoulders are locked tight, his jaw set, his dark eyes fixed on me the moment I step through the door.
“Boss,” he says.
I stop dead in the middle of the foyer.“What?”
