Page 119 of Forsaking All Others

He gurgled and thrashed.

“No one comes for me and mine and lives to tell the tale,” I said on a low murmur in his ear before I gripped the back of his sweaty hair and dragged my knife along the open cut, deepening it like a butcher tearing through tendons.

He was dead before he hit the floor when I released him.

The only sound in the room was the faint slosh of blood seeping through the drain in the floor and the soft but rapid hush of Fia’s loud breath.

I cleaned my knife off on my pant leg and then accepted the cloth Ciro handed me to wipe it down properly. I took my time because the blade deserved it and only an idiot wasn’t careful with his weapons.

But also because I could feel Fia’s eyes branding holes into my back.

This was who I was.

Dario might have run the Outfit, the boss who signed death certificates with his right hand.

But I was the weapon in his left.

If she wanted to know who I really was—Luca, the shade of a man who had been resurrected from death to dole it out—she had to know the truth.

My language was written in blood.

My entire life philosophy condensed into the notion of an eye for an eye.

So I cleaned my blade and sheathed it while Cesare and Ciro busied themselves, the former speaking in a low voice on the phone, no doubt asking after these unknown Sicilians Joey had spoken of, while Ciro cleaned up the rest of the equipment we’d used.

Fia just breathed and stared.

I stopped prevaricating.

If she was going to look at me with that expression again, the one that labeled me a monster, I wanted to get it over with and bury this insane seed of hope that was threatening to germinate in my chest.

“Leave us,” I ordered my men, who did so without hesitation, closing the door with a clang behind themselves.

Only then did I pick up Joey’s foot, limp and heavy in death, and drag his carcass toward where I knew Fia stood. I turned when I felt her warmth at my back and dropped Joey unceremoniously to the floor.

The bullet wound to my arm throbbed like a second heartbeat but not nearly as strong as the one in my chest that thundered madly as I finally faced the only person I’d ever cared to impress.

“A present,” I told her, searching her beautiful face, tipped up to look at me with wide, unblinking green eyes. “I promised you, if someone ever tried to hurt you, I would rip out their throat.”

She stared at me for a long moment, the silence pulsing in tandem with my heart.

“With your teeth,” she added, gaze lingering on my mouth. “But you didn’t do that.”

“No,” I agreed softly, the torture chamber suddenly like a confessional, a sacred place that demanded whispers.

“Why?”

“Because I want to kiss my wife with this mouth,” I echoed my words to Joey. “I want to sink to my knees and use it to unravel her.”

“You still have blood on your face,” she noted, reaching up with a steady thumb to touch the tip to a drop of Joey’s blood on my chin. “You’re covered in it.”

Without hesitation, I lifted the end of my shirt to wipe the gore from my skin. When I finished, Fia’s eyes were lingering on my abs, her lids heavy and mouth parted around heavy pants.

“I didn’t mind it,” she breathed more than spoke, looking back up at me with dark eyes. “It feels like seeing you for the first time.”

“What do you see?” I asked thickly.

Like a vampire, I couldn’t even see my own reflection in the mirror anymore. I had no context for a sense of self beyond my obsession for this woman and my drive to kill.