Page 8 of Savage Claim

I took my eyes off Artem. Isabella had gone pasty; her eyes kept rolling back in her head. God fucking damnit. “Give her to me,” I demanded, trusting Damian to cover me, as I crossed the space to them.

Elio gently passed her into my arms. “Dolcezza,” I murmured, touching her face softly. “Stay awake.”

Her hazel eyes landed on me, but she couldn’t focus. “Lorenzo,” she breathed out.

I nodded. “I’m here,” I told her. “I’m with you.”

That seemed to be the permission she needed to let go entirely. She fainted in my arms. “Take her out,” Elio said. “We’ve got you.”

Unsurprisingly, Santino had slipped out of the room the second our attention had been diverted. “Find that Rossi fucker. I want him.”

“We know,” my cousin said. “Go.”

Damian fired once more towards Artem, and we heard a pained grunt. “Finish that, Damian,” I commanded as I carefully carried Isabella from the room.

The hallway smelled like blood and gunpowder. There were bodies on the ground, and Samuel reloaded his weapon. “I’ll get you out,” Samuel said.

Once we got to the door that we’d come in through, Samuel went back to help Elio and Damian clean up.

Renaldo was waiting at the SUV, and when he saw me, he climbed behind the wheel, while I got into the backseat with Isabella. “How many came out of the building?” I asked as I cradled her to me.

“I put down a dozen,” Renaldo said. “No one that looked particularly important; they all had Volkov’s mark.”

A dozen dead Russians, plus however many didn’t run. I was going to have a hell of a time cleaning this up. “I’ll need to call the Russian Syndicate.”

“You need to sleep,” Renaldo harrumphed. “You’ve lived four different lives in the last six hours.”

He wasn’t wrong, but the chastisement made me grit my teeth. “Mind your fucking business, all right?”

Renaldo scoffed, but he nodded, nonetheless. “Of course, Don Vitali.”

CHAPTER 7

Lorenzo

While we were waiting for Damian, Elio, and Samuel, I looked down at the woman in my arms. I pulled her shirt up to check where Artem had cut her. It wasn’t terribly deep, but the wound was oozing blood. I put my hand over it and pressed.

Isabella’s eyes opened, and she wriggled in my grip, trying to get away from me. “Calm down,dolcezza,” I murmured to her.

Her eyebrows wrinkled inward. “Hurts,” she said.

“I know,” I said, but I couldn’t let up. Losing too much blood couldn’t be good for her or the baby. “You’ll thank me later.”

Her body jerked, and it took me a moment to realize that she had just laughed. “Doubt it,” she murmured. Her unfocused gaze met mine. “I’m mad at you.”

I let her see the cold, naked fury on my face. “I’m furious with you.”

We stared at one another for a long while, and then her head leaned against my chest. “Can we go home?” she whispered.

My heart thudded against my breastplate. She had used that word before to describe the estate, and I had corrected her then. That was before I had asked her to be my wife.

Fuck, I really had asked her that, hadn’t I? That was before everything had imploded. I could take it back, easily, but the longer I sat there and thought about it, the more I wanted to mean it. I wanted her to say yes.

I brushed her hair behind her ear. “We’ll go home as soon as Damian and Elio finish up,” I promised.

She dozed against me, and some ten minutes later, the three men came running from the building. Elio got into the passenger seat; Damian and Samuel opened the hatch and climbed inside. “Go,” Damian shouted up to Renaldo. “We set the building on fire.” He looked at me. “It was the best way to cover up the bodies.”

If the police did a proper search, they would find corpses with bullet wounds, but the building was a Russian front. The chances of them doing any deep investigation were slim. “Good,” I said as Renaldo turned over the engine. “Is Artem dead?”

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