Page 110 of Valentino

"Let me up."

"No."

"You can't just—" She shoves at my chest, but her palms stay there after the shove, fingers curling into me instead of away.

That's when she breaks.

The anger gives out, and everything under it comes with it.

Her face crumples and her breath comes apart in pieces, and she grabs the front of my shirt with both fists like she's planning to take it with her when she goes.

"I just got you," she says, and the words come out wet and furious. "Do you understand that? Twenty-five years, and I just—I finally got the one thing, the one person, and you're sending me across an ocean while strangers hunt you for money, and I'm supposed to check my phone and wait to find out if⁠—"

She can't finish it. The end of that sentence is me dead, and she won't say it out loud.

I pull her into my chest, and she folds into me, hitting me once on the shoulder out of sheer principle. Her hor tears find my skin. I hold the back of her head and let her shake.

"Promise me," she says into my throat. Her voice is small now. Stripped down to almost nothing. "Promise me you'll come back to me. Say it."

Every instinct I have reaches for the lie. It's right there. Two words. I promise. She'd sleep on the plane. She'd carry it across the Atlantic like it meant something.

And if Enzo Basile's hunters do their work, she'd find out exactly what it was worth. She'd add me to the list of people who told her pretty things and vanished. I will be many things to this woman, but I will not be another name on that list.

The truth is promises are for men who control their futures, and I gave mine away the moment I opened that door in the palazzo. I chose her over every consequence on earth.

"I can't promise that," I say.

She lets out a broken sound and presses her face harder into my chest, like she can hide from the words if she gets close enough. It tears through me.

"Listen to me." I take her face in both hands and tip it up so she has to look at me, her lashes wet and clumped, her eyes red and beautiful and absolutely refusing to look away. "I won't lie to you. Not even now, when lying would be kinder. Too many people have handed you comfort and called it love, and I'd rather cut my own tongue out than become one of them."

"Valentino—"

"What I will promise you is this." I try to catch the tears at her cheekbones and lose, because more come behind them. "I will try. I will try harder than I have ever tried at anything in my life, and I've spent thirty-eight years being a stubborn Sicilian bastard, so that should tell you how serious I am. Every man they send, I'll be smarter than. Every road they watch, I'll know a different one. I have one reason to survive this, and she's currently crying in my arms, and I plan to come back for her."

A wet, unwilling laugh escapes her through the tears, and she hates that I got it out of her. Her expression twists around it, love and fury tangled together in a way that makes my chest ache.

"That's a terrible promise," she whispers.

"It's the only true one I have."

She stares at me for a long moment, and then she pulls my mouth down to hers and kisses me like she's trying to leave a mark to identify me by later. When she breaks away, she settles against my chest, her ear over my heart, her fist still knotted in my shirt.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Valentino

"Valentino." The way she says my name tells me she has been lying there thinking instead of resting. Her cheek stays against my chest, her hair caught between my fingers, and I keep stroking through it because the motion gives me something simple to do. Something that does not require an answer.

"Mm," I say, already bracing for whatever comes next.

"What happened to your best friend?"

My fingers slow in her hair. I know which friend she means before I ask, but I need the second it buys me.

"Who told you about that?"

She lifts her head off my chest and looks at me like she knows the question hit somewhere bad. "Vittoria. Years ago. We were drunk on her mother's limoncello, and I asked why you never brought anyone to family things. She said something happened to your best friend when you were young, and that's why you don't let anyone close except family." Her mouth pulls a little at the corner, not quite a smile. "Then she got that look she gets when she's said too much and changed the subject."