Page 44 of Shield

Matti says nothing, putting the phone in the envelope, then walking it outside the front door.

When the door clicks shut behind him, I suddenly panic. Panic that I’m locked in, that my sister’s phone, one of my last pieces of her, is outside that door and about to go into the hands of someone who hates me. All our texts, our pictures, our shared notes. I bolt toward the door, wanting—no, needing—to have it back in my hands. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here.”

Matti steps in front of me, blocking me with his body. “Yes, it was,” he says darkly, forcing me backward with each word. “It was a mistake coming here. It was a mistake coming anywhere near me. It was a mistake ever letting me touch you, letting me come inside you, a mistake for you to come on my cock while you screamed my name. I’m the worst mistake you’ve ever made, Siena.”

I beat my fists against his chest, but he doesn’t budge. “Let me go, Matti! Let me fucking go right now! I don’t want this! I don’t want you!”

Before I can think, he wraps his arms around me tightly and picks me up, hugging me to his warm bare chest. I struggle against him as he carries me back to the living room.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, kitten, but I’m never letting you go.”

21

Matti

When I get her back to the couch, she’s in full-blown flight mode, kicking and fighting hard to get out of my arms. I sit down with her on the closest couch and wrap my arms around her.

She writhes against me. “You’re such a fucking asshole, Matti! You want me, you don’t want me. You throw me out, now you won’t let me leave. Why are you fucking with me? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I grab her wrists, pushing her off my lap and pinning her back against the cushions. She stiffens, and for a moment, I can’t breathe. She’s so gorgeous, broken open, fragile. The weight of all that I’ve done to her practically crushes me.

Keeping hold of her wrists, I pull her toward me until she is seated on the edge of the cushion, then I slide down so I’m on the floor, kneeling between her knees.

We’re on the same eye level, but the fire has left her now and she won’t look at me. It’s worse than when she was fighting me.

Pressing her fists to my lips, I kiss her knuckles andthen press them to my chest before tilting my head so that I can look into her bloodshot eyes.

“I know I’m an asshole, Siena. I can’t change that—and the truth is, I don’t want to. Out here, it’s the only way to survive.” I let go of her hands, my thumb grazing her bottom lip, slow and deliberate. “But you have to understand… as fucked up as it looks from the outside, everything I’ve done with you was to keep you safe.”

She smacks my hand away and shoves me back, standing up and backing away from me toward the table. “Youprotectme? When have you protected me? When you kidnapped me and held me hostage at the Edge for weeks on end? When you let a psycho mob boss find me and almost rape me? When you fucking killed my sister?! When you decided that destroying my family was somehow just as bad as me not giving you some stupid fucking flash drive and threw me out of your life?”

I say nothing. She’s wild right now, feral, and I step back, giving her space.

Her gaze lands on the flash drive beside my laptop, and her eyes narrow. “Which you apparently found. Did you have that when you were making me feel like shit? When you fucking sent me home, which by the way, what the fuck did you do to my house, you asshole? You tear it to shit and then think you can come in and fix it in whatever pretty way you see fit? The same way you’re trying to do with my fucking life? IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK THAT WAY.”

She’s so goddamn gorgeous when she’s angry, her rage wrapping around her like a burning halo. It’s the same fury I feel when she’s in danger. When someone tries to take her from me.

My cock moves, and it takes everything in me not to bend her over the table and fuck her into submission, show her how much I want her, need her, that I’ll burn down the entire Demonio family, all of New York, the entire fucking world if it will take away her pain.

Holding her gaze, I stand, shoving my hands in my pockets to help me maintain restraint. “Siena, you don’t seem to understand the situation you put yourself in when you drove down to that plane crash and stole Emily’s stuff. If it had been anyone but me there from the Demonio family, you would have been run off the road and left for dead in a ditch.”

Siena blinks rapidly as if that thought hadn’t occurred to her and opens her mouth to speak, but shuts it again before saying anything.

I take a slow step toward her. “I did my best to replace the furniture in your house that—a Demonio associate destroyed when he was looking for the flash drive. I wanted each item replaced with the same thing you had before, but I didn’t do a great job, I know. Olivia helped me, and so did Eleanor. Anything you don’t want, I’ll replace.”

I work hard to keep Franco’s name out of it. The last thing I want to do is break the last thread tethering her to her family. Her brow furrows, and she takes a step back, placing a hand on the table to steady herself.

“As for the flash drive, I did have that when I—when I sent you home. I wanted to protect you. I made you leave because it was the only way to keep you safe. And I know you, baby. You don’t like to be told what to do. So I let you believe the one thing I knew would make you hate me and choose to stay away from me and out of harm’s way.”

Her face blanches whiter than it was before. She grips thetable so hard that her knuckles turn white. “So now you’re saying you didn’t kill Emily,” she says, her voice raspy.

“I’m sorry, Siena. I don’t want to hurt you, and it probably wasn’t the right way to go about it, but I was desperate to protect you after what happened with Aurelio. And it worked. Until last night.”

“Why? What happened last night?” Her face is pale, and I don’t want to scare her, but I need her to understand.

“I took care of it, kitten. I never let you out of my sight. Not last night, not ever.” She looks confused and I run my hand through my hair, not sure how she’s taking this. “Since you’ve been gone, when you were back at your house, I always had eyes on you. I was always watching.”

She bristles, her cheeks pinking. “You were fucking spying on me? And that’s supposed to somehow make me feel better?”

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