She blinked, and some of the steel slipped out of her spine.
I took a step toward her. Stopped. “I’m not a good man, Veda. I know this. Yet you took this cold, dead heart of mine and made it beat again. For you, Veda. All for you. I let you in. Let you know me. And you betrayed me.”
She reached for me across the space between us, her face crumbling as fresh tears streamed down her cheeks. “Luca.” Her voice cracked. “I love you.”
Her words stabbed through me, opening fresh wounds that I feared would never heal. Because they were too late. I closed the distance between us and took her face in my hands as I searched for the storms in her eyes. But they weren’t there. There was only fog and shadows. With a growl, I took her mouth hard, bruising her lips as I poured every fucked up thing I was feeling into the kiss. And when I broke it off, she knew.
“You love me?” I asked her.
She tried to nod her head, but I still held it between my palms. I could crush it so easily. So fucking easily. “Yes,” she whispered.
Leaning down, I licked the seam of her mouth, then kissed my way up to her ear. “Then RUN,” I told her. “You have thirty minutes.”
I dropped my hands and backed away as the walls crashed down around my heart and ice filled my veins. It was comforting, in a way, to go back to being the man I was before I knew her. I knew this man well, and he did what he had to do to survive.
Veda’s eyes searched my face. Searching. Searching. Always searching. But whatever she found made her suck in her breath in terror. Without a word, she spun around and ran for the door. Flinging it open, she ran past Enzo and Tristan, and I heard her bare feet on the hard tiles of the great room.
“Let her go,” I told them when they looked at me in question. Turning away, I walked across the broken glass to pour myself another drink, leaving bloody footprints on the way. I didn’t feel the shards slicing the bottoms of my feet. I didn’t feel anything. “Enzo.”
I heard him come into the office. “Yeah.”
“Take her out of this house. Give her enough money to go wherever she wants to go. Bus. Plane. I don’t give a shit. Make sure I can’t track her.”
“I’m on it.”
He left, closing the door behind him.
I walked back across the glass to my chair and sat down in the silence, my hands gripping the arms tight enough to hold me there. A few minutes later, I heard the front door close.
And the last remnants of my heart shattered.
* * *