Page 81 of The Scars We Keep
He pulls back to do it again, and that’s where he makes his mistake.That half-second of windup, that small, greedy pause that belongs to men who are enjoying themselves too much to be efficient about it.
I catch his arm, wrench him sideways with everything I have left and slam my fist into his mouth so hard I feel his lip split against my knuckles.I don’t give him a single breath to recover.I’m already on top of him before he lands, deliver one more hit across the jaw that snaps his head back against the gravel, then grab a fistful of his hair and drag him up to his knees.
“Look,” I say, breathing hard, blood on my mouth and his.I hold his head up by the roots of his hair and make him see every one of his soldiers, face down in the gravel, dead.“Look at what you brought them to.”
Blood runs down his chin and drips onto the gravel near his knees.His eye is swelling shut.Two of his teeth are somewhere on the ground, no longer in his mouth.And still the defiance sits in him like a coal that refuses to go out.I almost respect it.Almost.
“I’m not going to leave your body here like your men,” I say, crouching to his level.“I’m going to let you walk out of this so that every morning you wake up breathing is a reminder that it is because I allowed it.And the morning I change my mind, you will not see it coming.”
He looks at me through the one eye that is still open and curses in Italian—something old, words passed down through generations of men who never knew when to stop.
Then he reaches for the knife at his ankle.
I catch it half a second too late.The blade opens a line across my side, and the burn is immediate.My men are on him in seconds, guns trained, a semicircle of cold steel.Blood soaks through my shirt and every cell in my body is screaming at me to put a bullet in his fucking head and end it right here.
Instead, I hit him in the throat.
He chokes, hands flying to his neck, the knife gone, defiance finally flickering.
I shove him face-down into the gravel and stand over him—breathing hard, my side burning, looking down at what remains of the man who put his hands on my wife.It’s not enough, but at least it’s a start.
Rafe appears at my side, gun still drawn, someone else’s blood drying on his cheek.“You want him dead?”
I look down at the bastard at my feet.Nose wrecked.Mouth ruined.One eye is already swelling into something that will take weeks to heal.He stares up at me from the gravel, and still he won’t shut his fucking mouth.
“You’re only being kept alive so you can carry a message back to your father,” I say.“Consider it a courtesy.The last fucking one you’ll ever get from me.”
He sneers through the blood.“GO FUCK YOURSELF!”
I slam him back into the gravel and haul him forward again in the same breath, closer this time, that he has nowhere to look but at me.Nothing to focus on but the absolute certainty sitting in my face.
“Isabella does not belong to your father, your family, or you,” I say slowly, the way you say something you only intend to say once.“She is mine.And the next time either of you reaches out to her, I will cut your fucking throat.”
For the first time since he stepped out of that car this morning, something real breaks through.Not smugness, but fear itself.
“Tell your father I understand his game now,” I continue, holding his gaze.“He can come for territory.He can chase the power he has been salivating over for years.But if either of you so much as breathes in Isabella’s direction again.I will burn every Serrano name out of this city until your bloodline is nothing but a warning people whisper to their children at night.”
Luca swallows.Hard.The sound of a man digesting something that won’t go down easily.
I release his shirt and drop him back onto the gravel, like the afterthought he is.I turn and walk away.
My ribs ache with every breath that suggests Luca Serrano and I are going to be having a conversation through my body for the next several days whether I want to or not.My cheek is already swelling, pulling at the skin in a way that is going to be impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t here.Blood runs warm from my lip and from the cut along my side.I feel every single hit he gave me.Good.That means I’m still standing.
Chapter Nineteen
Isabella
Thehousegiveshimaway before he reaches the door.
It’s something in the quality of the silence that precedes him, the way the men stationed at the entry hall shift their weight and exchange looks they think I cannot read from where I’m sitting at the top of the stairs.I have been in this house long enough to understand its rhythms.Long enough to know the difference between the ordinary silence of an afternoon and the particular kind that descends when the men inside these walls are managing something and doing so quietly because there is a woman in the building they don’t want upset.
I’m already moving before the front door opens.
He comes through it, and the sight of him drives every coherent thought I have straight out of my head.
Lorenzo De Luca, who walks through every room he enters as though he owns it, who wears his authority the way other men wear skin, comes through the front door looking like something the cat chewed up and spat onto the mat.His lip is split in a way that will not be pretty tomorrow.His cheek bears the beginning of a bruise that is still deciding how bad it will be.His jacket is gone entirely, his shirt untucked, and the blood-soaked material clings to his left side.He is upright and walking.I hold onto those two facts and build a wall around him.
Rafe is at his right.Two more men come through the door behind them, and the entrance hall fills with bodies and the low, taut energy of men who have just come from somewhere none of them will tell me about.
