Page 32 of Taken By the Enforcer

“You should have woken me,” I murmur, stretching.

“You needed sleep.” His eyes soften.

He cleans his weapon, reassembles it, and tucks it back into its case. Then he comes to me, bending, lips brushing my temple. “Dinner soon.”

I nod.

After dinner, we sit on the balcony again, the sea black velvet under the stars. The gauzy curtains stir around us, the night scented with jasmine.

“I thought of leaving today,” I admit softly.

His gaze sharpens. “Leaving?”

I swallow. “If this wasn’t… what it is. If I wasn’t your captive. This place could be perfect.”

His jaw tightens. “Not captive. Protected. Mine.”

The words hang between us. I want to argue, but Ican’t deny the truth of part of it. He has kept me safe. He has kept our daughter safe. And he’s proven I’m his.

And maybe—God help me—I like it.

When he gathers me against him, muscular arms circling my belly, I don’t resist. I let myself sink into his warmth, my head on his chest, and wonder if we could stay this way forever.

Donatello

She finally saidit without saying the words.

I need you.

Not with her mouth, but with the way she reached for me on the deck bed—silk pillows, gauze breathing in the breeze, the sea keeping time while I made love to her like a prayer I’d been afraid to speak. Not taking. Giving. Her hands in my hair, her eyes on mine, the trust a man like me doesn’t earn but bleeds for.

I replay it in the quiet—how she softened under my palms, how she opened for me with a sigh that sounded like surrender and salvation in the same breath. Every groan lodged in my throat still lives there. I could close my eyes and map the moment by touch alone—the curve of her belly under my hand, our daughter rolling like she wanted to witness her parents choosing each other at last.

And then tonight on the balcony—I thought of leaving today.The sentence slid from her mouth like a blade wrapped in silk. She kept her gaze steady, waiting for me to rage. I didn’t. Rage is simple; what I felt wasn’t. It was colder, cleaner. A vow hardening into bone.

Let her think it. Weigh it against the taste of freedom she used to dream about. Trace her old maps in her head and tell herself there’s a world where she walks away. But there isn’t. Not anymore.

I won’t let her go.

I’ve let other things go. Territory. Profit. Men who mistook courage for suicide. Not Paolina. The woman who moans my name with her hands shaking on my shoulders and sleeps with my palm splayed over the baby we made. The woman who whisperedthank you for caringlike it was the first time anyone ever did. She belongs here—in my bed, in my house, in my life—because I built the one place on earth nothing can touch her. Protection is a cage only if the door locks from one side. I’m building us a door that opens inward, a door shechooses.

So, I keep doing it. Every day, every hour. Patience when my body riots. Restraint when the animal howls. I feed her when she forgets to eat. Make sure the doctor catches a problem before it becomes a threat. Stand between her and the world, and I don’t blink. Take her on the water so she can breathe where the horizon is wider than memory. Listen—really listen—when she talks about little things no one ever cared to notice.Which fruit the baby makes her crave. Which pages in a book make her smile.

I do the quiet work that never made my name feared but will make it loved.

She’s changing me. People like to say a man can’t soften without being made weak. They’ve never tried to keep something sacred alive. It takes more strength to hold tenderness steady than it ever did to put a gun in a man’s mouth. I still have the gun. Still remember how to use it—just remember why now.

When she told me she’d thought of leaving, I watched her throat move, the tiny tremor she didn’t know I saw. I could have argued. I could have said,not captive, but protectedand left it sharp as a command. Instead, I tucked her in, changed out of the suit that still smelled faintly of ash and ocean, and asked about her day.Tell me about your day.She looked at me as if I’d done something extraordinary. I hadn’t. Men have been asking their women that question since the world found language. But the men she knew didn’t. I will. Every night. Until the answer includes,I love youwithout her even realizing she’s said it.

Because it’s there already. In the way she watched me lift in the sun, in the way she waved at the helipad. It’s there in how she falls asleep in the courtyard and lets me carry her all the way to bed, heavy and precious, trusting me not to drop what is mine.

A few more weeks. Maybe less. Our daughter will arrive, and the world will tip again. I’ve seen men turnstupid with fear in delivery rooms—men who run rackets that could swallow cities go to their knees in front of a woman’s pain. I’m already on mine in ways I swore I’d never be. Yet I’ll rip the sky down before I let either of them bleed more than nature requires. I’ve arranged the doctor, the nurse, the backup, the generator, a second chopper fueled and waiting. I’ve drawn a circle around this island like a blade.

Anyone who crosses it dies.

But this isn’t about the plan. It’s about the promise.

Bella mia, you thought of leaving. You can think about it until thinking bores you. While you think, I’ll be here making the leaving feel less like freedom and more like loss. I’ll give you breakfasts in the courtyard and quiet hands at midnight; I’ll give you safety you can taste and a future that doesn’t ask you to shrink to fit it. I’ll keep my monsters outside the gate and my warmth inside these walls until the choice stops feeling like surrender and starts feeling like home.