Page 104 of Filthy Little Fix
Luca checks Nyx's injuries.
But Nyx's eyes are fixed on me.
Even in the dark, even bruised and covered in dust, there's a feverish glint in them. The same look of reverence as before, but now mixed with something else. Triumph.
The blood on his mouth, on his fingers, is the same that covers me.
TWENTY-ONE
LEO
My head is hazy.It's hard for it not to be after all this. In an impersonal, generic, expensive hotel room, a man in glasses dabs antiseptic on the cuts on my face, and I can't focus on him. He pushes the crooked bone of my nose back into place, and the pain isn't pleasant—it just makes my eyes water and an imaginary nail file scrape against my bones—but I can't focus on that either. He injects a painkiller into my vein, says I wouldn't be able to swallow a pill with my face like this. Okay. I don't focus. The tramadol seeps in, clearing my head. I don't focus.
All I can think about ishim.
I didn't know if I was going to survive. If the transfer had actually happened, Ivan would have surely killed me. I can't hold my tongue. I had decided I would die laughing at that idiot for completely losing his composure over some cheap provocation, and I would fade out thinking ofhim. Imagining that, at least, it would behishands.
Honestly, dying at Dante's hands doesn't sound bad.
When he walked into that room, he didn't even look at me. He lunged at that nondescript henchman, and he must haveheard the threats they threw at me. Luca executed the other one professionally, as he should, and Dante…
The look in his eyes was horrific. It sent a dirty shiver down my spine. He tore that man apart as if he had personally offended him. Blood splattered. A trickle shot across my cheek. He didn't even notice. He just kept going until his hands were red up to the wrists, his lips pursed in hatred, his entire face smeared with blood. And I couldn't stop watching. The Dante who walked into that room was the most poetic death sentence I had ever seen. And I've never felt so safe.
I knew from the beginning that Dante wasn't like anyone else. No one had ever bothered to raise their voice for me, let alone their hands. And he crossed that room as if anyone who touched me was breaking a rule written in his own blood.
I'm not an idiot. I know it was instinct. Rage. Territory. But it wasfor me. And when he finally looked at me, with all that blood hiding his skin, I knew. I'll never be able to walk away from this.
Dante is the only light I recognize. What those guys did to me should have been a cheap, chemical aphrodisiac, finally feeling some remnant of dopamine, of adrenaline, but it wasn't. It wasn't him. It couldn't have been him.
I don't know when this stopped being chemical. It's been a while. I was flirting with death in that room—it was only when he walked in that something switched on. A spark. An instinct. My whole body responded to him.
It's the light from the hallway that pulls me back. Luca is standing in the doorway—he's just entered, and he's waiting for the doctor to release me. He looks at me. He instantly looks away when I meet his gaze.
He saw the kiss. He saw the carnage. Dante didn't push me away, not even when he was calling for him, hurrying him to leave. Dante allowed it. I held him before Luca's eyes, kissedhis face, pulled him to me. It makes me feel things I can't even name.
Luca doesn't understand what happened. He doesn't know how to deal with me now.
The doctor finishes placing a final bandage on my eyebrow ridge. "There. Try not to get punched in the face again for the next 24 hours."
I give him the closest thing to a smile I can manage. "No promises."
Luca clears his throat. "The boss is waiting for you," he says. He's tense.
I get up from the bed. I try not to breathe through my nose, but breathing through my mouth also creates a sensation of sandpaper on my ribs. One is broken. I have a compression wrap around my torso, and it makes everything even more uncomfortable.
I walk slowly toward Luca. He says nothing. I follow him out of the room—the last one down the hall is where the most feared man in the city and his siblings are. The Volkov triumvirate.
Luca opens the door for me. It's a luxury suite, bigger than my house. Svetlana is present on a large video call monitor, and Dante is standing, watching the city from the window. He turns as I enter.
A man in a gray suit with perfectly slicked-back hair stands before a wall of screens, analyzing data. That must be Dmitry, the middle Volkov brother. The three of them stare at me.
"Mr. Hays," Dmitry says. He stands up, walking toward me while closing the top button of his suit. He extends his hand to me as if he were meeting his brother's boyfriend. "You've been the center of our operations for a while—Dante talks a lot about you."
"Dima," I hear Dante complain.
Dmitry extends his hand and smiles.
"Dmitry Volkov," he introduces himself.
