Page 110 of Brutal Devil
“My right foot,” she manages, before biting her lower lip.
I tend to it, finding the glass shard and removing it before pressing gently with my thumbs to make sure no other fragments are embedded in her skin.
“Better?” I ask.
She sniffs. “The glass is gone. But my heart still hurts.”
Fucking fuck. That’s like a knife to my chest. A hardened criminal who spent the day helping to torture a man to death, brought low by the sorrow of one woman.
“I know,amore mio,” I rasp.
“That bastard killed my family, Priest. Everyone except for my mother, and only likely because the cancer took her before he could be bothered. My father was wounded saving his father in an ambush. Papa would have died forZioEdoardo. They were blood.”
She’s crying again by the time she finishes, and I can’t bear the sight. I knew that finding out the truth of what happened to her brother would wreck Luna, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would fuckingruinme.
The hell with cleaning up the broken glass and spilled wine. My woman needs me.
I scoop her into my arms, pulling her from the barstool. And then I carry her out of there, still not giving a damn about the broken glass or my own bare feet.
She’s all that matters.
Chapter 26
LUNA
I wake up in bed with Priest, wrapped in his arms, my head on his chest.
The steady thud of his heart is under my ear.
I’m naked, but last night wasn’t about sex. In fact, we didn’t even bother with fucking, content to just be. Instead, he carried me to the oversized jet tub in his bathroom, and we soaked in it together. He let me cry my heart out. He listened to me talk about Leo, about how close we were growing up. About our silly inside jokes and how I pleaded with him to go off to college rather than staying here in the city, learning from our father.
But Leo chose this world. And it ended him.
A shiver goes through me, chased by the knife’s edge of sadness. I miss my brother. Since the day I learned he was gone, I never stopped. Last night, learning the truth about what happened to him brought everything back. Suddenly, it was five and a half years ago, and I was eighteen, about to graduate from high school, attending my big brother’s funeral.
He was twenty-one when that bastard Amedeo the Animal ordered him to be killed. Twenty-one when a bullet lodged in his brain and left him on life support for three days—just longenough for us to say our goodbyes. For me to sit at his bedside and hold his hand. There had been so many lines protruding from him. But he’d still somehow looked like himself, like the brother I’d always looked up to. Like he was sleeping.
Only, he never woke up.
A sob works its way out of me, and I try to swallow it quickly down. To hold my breath. I don’t want to wake Priest any more than I want this day to begin. Because I know what’s at the end of it.
“Hey.” The deep, sleepy rumble of my husband’s voice vibrates in his chest.
His warmth radiates into me like a furnace, and his muscled strength feels far more reassuring than it should. I don’t want to leave this bed or his arms.
I inhale deeply, bringing Priest’s scent into my lungs. I don’t know what will come of this day, of his plan to kill Amedeo, of our marriage. But what I do know is that I’ll never forget the way it feels to lie here like this with him.
“You okay,amore mio?” Priest asks.
“No,” I whisper. “I’m not okay.”
In truth, I don’t know if I ever will be again. Everything I thought I knew about my life, my world, has been shaken. Family has proven to be the enemy. My father gave me away. My future has been paused. Everything that’s happened since my return has proven to me that no matter how far I go and regardless of how much time passes, I’ll never truly be able to outrun this place, this world.
The stain of the Mafia will forever mark me.
“How can I make it better?”
His hand is on my head now, gently stroking my hair.
