“Where’s the man who shot her? Do we need to worry he’ll be coming here to finish the job?” Z asks as he stares down at Valentina’s wound, stitching her up.
“He’s dead. I shot him.” Fury replaces my fear momentarily as I wish I could shoot the man over and over again. His instant death was too good for him. For what he did to Valentina, I’d much prefer to torture him by ripping off each fingernail one by one and then slicing his balls in pieces.
“Is Jeremy taking care of the body?”
“He has it under control,” I reassure.
Z nods but peels his eyes from the bullet wound to look at Rowan. “You need to have security positioned at every entrance. Call Dex and let him know what happened and that someone found out that Valentina and Atlas are here. More assassins could be coming.”
Rowan obediently does as he asks without saying a single word. I have to hand it to that woman. She doesn’t seem the slightest bit frazzled or afraid. She’s almost a mirror image of Z.
Z then looks at me. “You need to call your father. If you were followed leaving the hotel, there’s a high chance he was followed too.”
“I will,” I say as I point to Valentina. “Just focus on what you’re doing right now. Don’t you dare let anything happen to her.”
The thought of losing the woman I…love…is far worse than anything else in the world right now.
“She’s going to be fine. I promise you,” Z reassures as he returns his attention to his work. “She’s strong and will bounce back being her sassy self. You just need to calm the fuck down.”
Hoping to God that Z’s correct, I walk over to the other side of the bed from Z and sit beside Valentina, taking her hand in mine. “Baby, if you hear me, it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine. You just let Z take care of you. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you. I love you. I love you so much. You open your eyes so I can say those words to you over and over again. Wake up. You come back to me.”
Chapter Twenty-two
VALENTINA
A shooting pain in my shoulder is the first thing I feel as I regain consciousness. As if no time has passed, my memory takes me back to the restaurant. I’m running…maybe this is all just a bad nightmare? Any minute I’ll wake up and realize I’m back in New York.
I’ve just about convinced myself by the time I finally pry my eyes open to find I’m back in our room at The Whitehall. I try to move my head to get a better look at the room, but the second I move, the pain spikes.
“Shit…” I mutter, returning to my original position in an attempt to make the pain stop.
Atlas’s face is immediately just a few inches above me. “Oh, thank God, you’re awake.”
When he moves, I become aware of his hand resting intimately on my stomach. My mind is jumbled, trying to remember what happened. The last thing I can remember is leaving the hotel.
“Well, that was one hell of a date,” I croak, my voice is still not ready to get back to work.
“That’s not funny,” he argues.
“You look like shit.” Apparently, my internal filter is no longer working since I hadn’t really intended to insult him, at least not this time. Still, it was true.
“Worrying that you were going to die for the last twenty-four hours will do that to a guy.” He defends before asking, “How are you feeling?”
“You may look like shit, but I feel like it. Or more like a truck ran over me while I was asleep.”
“I’m not surprised. And it wasn’t a truck…it was the fucking assassin.”
The mention of the man with the gun spikes my heart rate. “Is he—”
“He’s fucking dead,” Atlas interrupts me. “I wish I could bring him back to life just so I could kill him slower next time.”
I don’t answer with words, but the relief is real at knowing that at least for a few minutes, we don’t have someone trying to kill us.
I’m not used to just lying in bed so I gently push against Atlas’s chest, trying to get him to move away enough that I can sit up. But the second I try to roll even a little bit, a shooting pain consumes my left shoulder and I wince in pain.
“Shhh… you need to stay still. I don’t want you to pull your stitches out.”
Stitches… for what?
Despite not saying anything out loud, he anticipates my question. “The asshole at the restaurant shot you in your shoulder. Z says we were really lucky because the bullet went all the way through you without nicking any of your major organs. Still, you lost a lot of blood and have wounds on both the front and back of your shoulder that will need to heal.”