Page 69 of Ruthless Vows
I yank her to the window of the suite, which is on the second floor of the building, and peer outside. I signal out the window just as planned, and my men start firing from the tree line, taking the guards below us out.
I descend with Giana in one arm and the other just barely grasping the bricks to get us down from window ledge to window ledge. I let go and allow us to fall once we’re low enough to withstand the fall, and the gunfire intensifies, more guards running to our side of the building, more guards falling to their deaths as my men take them out one by one.
My men cover us as I run with Giana in my arms and my head down, praying a bullet doesn’t blow through me and hit her.
I’m getting her out of here if it’s the last fucking thing I do.
Getting her out and taking her home with me.
Where she belongs.
The momentwe got into Dante’s blacked-out SUV, I collapsed onto the seat and passed out from sheer exhaustion. My adrenaline plummeted as I relaxed into his arms.
Safety.
Such a foreign and usually fleeting emotion.
But in his arms, cocooned in all that he is, safety felt almost like an understatement.
I’m completely incapacitated for God knows how long, until a crackling fire starts to stir me awake. The warmth from the popping embers heats my face and my chilled body, bringing me a warmth I don’t deserve.
Not in the aftermath of what we just did in order to escape my wedding.
“Sweet angel.” His voice beckons me as his touch lights something else inside me. Something only aflame when he’s near. “You’re waking up. Finally. You’ve been out all day. It’s nearly midnight.”
My eyelashes flutter open in anticipation of seeing him again.
Dante.
God, Dante.
“I thought all of this was a dream,” I say, fully awake now as I sit up.
In the strange in-between of asleep and awake, I replayed today’s events in my head, thinking the takedown of the guards and Santiago was just a fantasy…assuming Dante crawling through the window of my bridal suite was some fever dream that could never happen in real life.
Could never happen inmylife.
Dante’s been sitting next to me this whole time. Or at least now, as I wake, he’s sitting at the end of a love seat, where my feet were draped over his lap. He’s changed his clothes and is now out of his bloodied suit and into a dark-black suit jacket, a white collared shirt, and a new pair of black pants. I immediately look down at myself and realize I’m in a nightgown, my skin washed from where it was previously stained with the blood of the man I mercilessly killed. The man whose blood was quite literally on my hands.
Did he have a wife?
Children?
I shudder, gulping down the terror rattling my bones.
“How did I—”
“I cleaned you up and changed you, princess. Had the gown from…”
My heartbeat falters.
“Your wife,” I finish for him, feeling dirty in a dead woman’s lingerie.
Dante nods, and I squirm, unable to get a woman I don’t even know out of my head.
“We have a lot we need to talk about, Giana,” he says, as if I don’t know that.
As if I don’t know the past two weeks of my life have been nothing short of absolutely insane. One would think growing up in a mafia family myself, this wouldn’t all be so fucked up to me. But the way my father has kept me sheltered…