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"Matteo!" I scream back muffled by the hand covering me, every fiber reaching for him.

"I said, shut the fuck up, El!" He's all brute force and boiling anger, dragging me backward. White-hot pain lances through my leg, a vicious serpent sinking venom deep.Nausea swarms, threatening to choke me, but I fight it, fight him, with everything left.

"Matteo!" It's a muffled battle cry behind Patrick’s hand. My good leg thrashes out, desperate to find his shin, anything. We're retreating, slinking like cowards toward the house's shadowed rear. "Eleanor!" Matteo's closer now—a promise, a threat, a salvation.

Every inch we move, every second that ticks by, Matteo's calls become the drumbeat of my pulse. Closer. Louder. Unstoppable.

I'm a fucking statue, frozen by the pain, as my teeth snap uselessly behind swollen lips. Patrick’s hand is a fleshy fortress I can't breach, and I curse the day vanity got the better of me and I put to much filler in them. We glide past doorways, one glowing dimly—Mrs. Tinsdale's sanctum, probably.

He halts, suddenly, and his arm slips from my waist. He's fumbling for something behind him. My legs scream under my weight, a chorus of agony that blurs my vision. Blackness nibbles at the edges, creeping closer, ready to swallow me whole.

"El—Eleanor!" Matteo's voice slashes through the haze, raw with desperation.

"Let her go, now!" His command is a thunderclap in this tense silence.

Patrick's retort is a viper's hiss. "She isn't yours!"

Metallic cold kisses my temple; the gun—a promise of oblivion. Matteo's eyes, twin storms of horror and fury, lock onto mine just as darkness claims me, dragging me down into its depths.

Chapter Thirty-One

Matteo Ricci

The night clings to Mrs Tinsdale’s house like a shroud, silent and foreboding. But nothing, not even hell itself, could keep me from Eleanor.

"Fuck!" I curse under my breath, my boots pounding the gravel driveway. I take the front door with one well-aimed kick, splintering wood flying like shrapnel. "Eleanor!" My voice doesn't sound like my own; it's a desperate roar tearing through the stillness.

Darkness swallows me whole, save for that mocking sliver of light up ahead. That's where she'll be. It has to be.

Spike and Angel are right there with me, the familiar click-clack of their guns a deadly chorus to my racing heart. We storm the lit room—empty. Just a hospital bed, cold and mocking, with cuffs dangling like some sick joke.

"Shit." I spin on my heel, back into the void, shouting her name until my throat burns. She's here. She must be. This godforsaken place reeks of her fear, her pain.

I barrel down the hallway, the darkness clawing at me,trying to slow me down. And then—a glimpse of movement, a muffled whimper.

There. The back door cracks open, moonlight slicing the gloom and there’s Eleanor, in Patrick's grasp, his hand pressed against her lips silencing her cries.

"Eleanor!" It rips from me, a gasp laced with fury and terror.

"Let her go!" I snarl, muscles coiled tight.

"She isn't yours!" Patrick's scream bounces off the walls, mania glinting in his eyes. He's lost to the madness, but he doesn't know who he's fucking with.

I'm Matteo Ricci, and hell will freeze over before I let him take what's mine.

The steel of the barrel presses cold and unyielding against my spine, but it's the gun at Eleanor's temple that has every muscle in my body seizing with dread.

"Take another step and you will never see her again." Patrick's voice is a razor blade sliding through the tension-soaked air. I don't need to see his face to know it's twisted into a sick grin.

"No!" It rips from my throat, raw and desperate. Eleanor's body goes limp, her knees buckling as she crumples into his arms like a marionette with its strings cut.

"Take another step, and I’ll shoot, Matteo." The voice behind me is poison wrapped in velvet. “Tino?” The bastard who's Enzos right hand man.

"Good guess," he sneers, a mockery of camaraderie lacing his tone.

"So, Enzo really is in on this..." I spit out, hoping to keep him talking, stalling for time.

"A little bit of yes and a little bit of no," Tino whispers, sending a chill down my already ice-cold spine. That's when it happens—a hot splash of blood against my head, the scent thick and metallic, filling my nostrils.