Page 88 of Unforgivable Ties

Vincenzo fell silent, his dark eyes softening as he surveyed my face. “You’re not scared?”

“No,” I replied. “I want this life, Vincenzo. With you.”

He brushed a stray lock of hair away from my face tenderly, his fingers lingering against the warmth of my flushing cheek.

“You can’t just say shit like that,” he groaned. He pounced on me and I was pinned on my back to the mattress. “It’s fucking hot.”

His lips crashed against mine with a possessive hunger, claiming me as his.

“I love you, Stephanie,” he murmured between kisses, making my heart flutter. “I love you so fucking much.”

My heart pounded in my chest at his confession. Last night wasn’t a dream, after all.

“I love you, too,” I replied.

I wasn’t afraid. Not of the darkness that lay ahead, not of the grim tasks that awaited me at the warehouse, not even of The Surgeon’s looming presence. Vincenzo was my rock, and as long as I had him by my side, I was invincible.

Stephanie

The bone saw made shrill, grating noises as I cut through the corpse’s rib cage. Taking out the heart and lungs was always the most work. But I had gained an impressive amount of muscle over the last few months from my late-night organ extracting.

My hands, once delicate and slender, had hardened into tools, unsparing in their precision. A scalpel felt as natural as an extension of my own fingers, its edge glistening under the harsh light.

“I can help you with that, you know,” Vincenzo frowned, looking at me from across the morgue.

“Absolutely not!” I said, pointing my gloved finger at him. “Cesare would kill me if he knew you were in here. I’d get a huge contamination lecture.”

Vincenzo chuckled, leaning against the cold metallic counter. “I think Cesare delivers those lectures just to hear himself talk.” His Italian accent thickened when he was amused.

“Shush, you!” I laughed, going back to sawing. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“Just waiting for your fine ass to finish work so I can take you out,” he said, watching my chest jiggle as I hacked away at the body.

“Where are we going at two in the morning?” I snorted.

“You’ll see, Cara Mia,” he said with that dark glimmer in his eyes. It was the look that told me I’d be getting absolutely wrecked in bed, or wherever he decided to take me tonight. “It’s a special day.”

The bone split with a decisive crack and I carefully lifted the sternum, revealing the still-intact organs nestled within. The sheen of my latex gloves reflected on the slick surfaces.

“What’s so special about it?” I asked, grabbing a pair of hemostats to clamp the blood vessels before I removed the heart.

“You don’t remember?”

I paused, tilting my head in contemplation as I clamped down onto a cluster of blood vessels. My brow furrowed beneath the glow of the fluorescent lamp, glossing over any sort of relevance today held.

“No,” I said, a bit nervously. It wasn’t like me to forget important dates.

“You saved me from dying a year ago today,” he responded.

The image of him bleeding out on the warehouse floor rushed back to me. I remembered how hurt he had been, how much blood gushed from his tattooed skin.

“And look at me now,” I teased, pointing the scalpel at him before making a delicate cut along one of the major blood vessels.

“Pretty hot, isn’t it?” he said, the glimmer in his eyes growing stronger. If he had his way, he’d rail me in the morgue with this corpse’s lifeless eyes watching.

“The big, bad Mafia man dragged me into this bloody world of his, quite literally,” I said, my voice taking on a nostalgic lilt.

A world I didn’t know I wanted until Vincenzo entered my life. I denied it for the longest time, but as I looked up at him, his dark eyes alight with mischief and an oddly endearing sense of wickedness, I knew there was no other world I’d rather be in.

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