Page 88 of Where the Wicked Reign

~Julian~

“I’m fine,” Caterina insisted. “It’s just a minor flesh wound.”

“If you say you’re fine one more time, I’m gonna gag you with my fucking cock,” Nico rumbled in that dangerous tone of his.

“Wow,” I uttered, eyeing him as I took another swig of my bottle of vodka while I watched Milo stitching up Caterina’s wound on my chaise.

Nico was standing there tapping his foot and flicking his Zippo on and off like crazy.

“She needs to keep calm and control her breathing, so cock-sucking is off the menu,” Milo told him over his shoulder as he concentrated on what he was doing.

“I’m just… pissed,” she told Nico.

“Let me guess, because, in your mind, we took over your mission? Put down too many hostiles for your liking? Didn’t save enough for you?”

“No,” she murmured, and it had me worried because her usual bite wasn’t there with her response to him when he pissed her off or challenged her.

“Then what?” Nico snapped, barely keeping his shit together in light of her being hurt.

“Because you were right… about me not being a team player.”

“Uh, darlin’, you saved Milo’s life,” I pointed out.

“Literally,” Milo affirmed. “I saw where that fucker was aiming with that blade. If you hadn’t blocked him, that wound would have been fatal for me.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I know, but… I’m not used to… to… the distractions. And I wassodistracted tonight. As soon as we were all on that battlefield, sharing it, inside the house. I’m not used to having others there fighting alongside me, to being concerned for other people while I’m in combat. It threw me off. Majorly. I should have… I should have been able to react faster, more efficiently, so I wasn’t taken out of the fight when I stepped in to help Emilio. I… I have a lot to learn, I guess, where the teamwork part is concerned.” Emotion swam in her eyes and she brought her hand up to scrub over her face in a bid to both contain it and to hide it, it looked like. “I thought I was an asset, but… I didn’t even get to finish the mission and—”

“Stop,” Milo said, stilling with his stitching and lifting his head. “You saved my life.That’sultimate teamwork. You could have gone the other way and focused on the takedown, the rest of us be damned. You would have got what you wanted that way—eliminating that human trafficking ring of your father’s and undercutting his power, delivering him a hell of a blow. Instead, you went the team route, you went withus.”

Nico pocketed his lighter and knelt down beside her head, actually showing a shit-ton of tenderness as he wiped her tears away with the pads of his thumbs and told her, “You’re not used to working as part of a team? I knew that with us going into this. We all did. And you’ll learn. It takes practice. Julian was a lone wolf, a lot like you before Milo and I came along.”

I stepped forward. “It’s true. And I didn’t try to embrace it like you did tonight either. Not at first. Honestly, I was a bit of a shithead about it. You’re not. You’re trying. And, for the record, watching you take down some of those fuckers was a hell of a turn-on. You’ve got major skills, Cat.”

“Cat,” Milo chuckled. “There it is again.”

I lifted a shoulder. “I like it.” I eyed her. “You cool with that?”

She actually smiled. “I can work with it.”

Nico lifted his chin at me, silently thanking me for cheering her up a little.

“The mission was a success,” Nico told her. “All enemy targets were eliminated, the hostages have been transported to a secure facility for care and their protection. Julian has framed two of the buyers, like we planned, who Santino will blame for this takedown. The sleazy fuckers will likely be put down by his soldiers too, so we’re also ridding the world of them as well. Aside from you being stabbed, it couldn’t have gone better.”

Her emerald eyes shone at his words as the realization began to set in. “The beginning of what’s coming to them.”

“The beginning of the end,principessa.”

“All done,” Milo said, taping a gauze pad over his supreme stitching. “Antibiotics?” he asked, eyeing me.

“Being delivered in ten minutes.”

He nodded. “Good.” He moved back and started clearing up his equipment and disposing of the waste in the small garbage can that I’d brought in from the kitchen. “You’ll be okay with some restandtaking it easy for a few days,” he told Cat. “Take the painkillers every four to six hours, and the antibiotics four times a day until they’re finished.”

“Understood,” she said, carefully starting to sit up.

As she did, Nico snatched one of my white cotton robes off the back of the adjacent couch where I’d left it earlier after retrieving it for her.

“I’ve got it,” she told him when he tried to help her into it to cover her bra and panties. All lace, Nico’s favorite. He’d barely noticed, though, with the injured state of her. That was all he could see.

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