I tighten my grip on Marisol.
“Dino. This way,” Elio barks.
Blindly, I follow him.
Everything except Marisol is a blur.
Thank God Elio’s house is so fucking big. He has a whole room that he’s kind of repurposed as a makeshift hospital room. It has a bed in it, various medical supplies, and a cabinet full of shit to patch people up long enough to either get to a real doctor… or to get better.
It’s where Elio left me after he tortured me. Nice of him, I guess, but at the time I think we both were thinking he was just doing it to rip me apart again.
I’m the only one, I think, who knows exactly how sadistic Elio can be.
Well. I’m the only one who’s lived to tell the tale.
But I’d do the same or worse to anyone who tried to hurt what’s mine too. Fuck I’d kill me. So I don’t blame him. I had no choice but to rat out Luna’s location to the Irish Mafia in order to protect my girls.
I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know Elio’s power and reach. With my siblings' help I had no doubt he’d get to his little girl before anything happened to her. It’s fucking sick that I had to place my niece’s life in danger to save my girls and my woman, but that’s the savage hand I’m dealt with.
Gently, I put Marisol down on the bed. Her beautiful light brown skin looks so ashy and pale, and it makes me feel like I’m the worst fucking person on earth.
I have zero doubt in my mind that whatever happened to her, happened because of me.
I’m not just bad luck. I’m a fucking curse.
And my heart sinks as I realize that I must have brought Marisol down with me.
“How long until the doctor’s here?” I hear Caterina’s voice float over my shoulder.
“He’s pulling up the drive,” Elio rumbles.
I nod. I feel useless. Unsure of what to do now. My hand slides down Marisol’s arm, then hovers above her fingertips.
I wish I could just hold her hand.
Studying her in the bed, it’s like seeing a ghost. I can see the beautiful girl that I fell for all those years ago, but more than that, I can see the stunning woman that she’s become.
Her face has lost all traces of the roundness from when I first met her. She’s still got gorgeous hair, so dark brown that it’s almost black, and it hangs just past her shoulders. There are new freckles across the bridge of her nose, though, and a scar that crosses one of her perfectly groomed eyebrows.
That little fucking scar makes my chest hurt with anger.
“Dino,” Caterina says quietly. “I need you to step back.”
No.
I fight down my compulsion to snarl at my sister. “I’ll step back when the doctor gets here.”
“He’s here,” she adds softly.
I look up to see an older gentleman standing in the door. Idon’t recognize him, but the little twitch of his eyebrow when he looks at me tells me that he recognizes me.
With a sharp jerk of my head, I narrow my eyes at him. “You know me?”
“It’s nice to see your neck healed so well,” he says in a heavily accented voice.
That’s one fucking way to put it.
Elio did a number on me. My vocal cords are still shot, and the way he sliced my stomach open?