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Mariano

“ M y Annie,” the words slipped from my lips before I cleared my throat.

Sistine was still staring into the distance, ready to use the gun in her hand if necessary. I called her name, and it seemed to take her a second to blink back into reality. Reaching up, I lowered the gun. She wasn’t shaking. Yet. She was still determined to fight.

“That’s it,” I whispered to her, easing the weapon from her hand. “You can give it to me, Annie.”

Her eyes flew to mine. “Annie,” she repeated in a whisper, her Italian accent doing something special to the name. Something sweet.

I nodded. “Annie.”

“Annie…as in…Annie Oakley? Or Annie, as in…the orphan?”

“The first.” I grinned at her. “I knew it all along.”

Her mouth opened, words about to flow out, but we were suddenly surrounded by my men and men who served her family.

Adone was shouting in the streets, this is what happens to thieves who attempt to steal from the Cappello family!

He was being dramatic. Almost like a town crier.

I had a feeling it was something the family did in times like these.

And he knew for Sistine’s sake it had to seem like her shooting at the man who was out to cause me harm was just a part of their security procedures.

Maybe it was. I got the feeling it was more than that in this instance.

Even though Sistine’s face was pinched, I’d seen it right after she hit Iggy. It was a look that was a mixture of anger, focus, and…relief when our eyes met. He hadn’t gotten me.

Adone took her by the shoulder and directed her to the equivalent of police in Italy who were starting to swarm the area.

“Annie,” I called after her.

She stopped, escaping Adone’s hold. She met my eyes.

“You saved my life.” My voice was rough, like I’d swallowed sandpaper, and it was grating against my throat.

She waved a hand at me. “You are full of holes. I could not allow another one to get through, or what would all the poor damsels do without their prince?”

“You saved my life.” I wasn’t fucking around, and she heard the seriousness in my tone.

She nodded. Her face almost solemn. “It is not something I wish to do again,” she said, but her throat seemed tight. It was like she had a hard time getting the words out.

I understood what she’d meant, even though the statement could be taken in a different way. My heart seemed to rise to my throat, the beats uncontrollable, at the truth.

She hadn’t meant she wouldn’t save me again. She’d meant that she didn’t want me in danger again.

Her shoulders fell as she turned and walked with Adone to the waiting police.

Remo appeared next to me, and we watched as Adone spoke to the officers.

After, we all walked back to the jewelry store together.

While I’d had time to think about what she’d done—run after me, shoot at a cold-blooded killer, put herself in danger—my temperature started to rise.

It was a mixture of helplessness and despair. If something would have happened to her—I cut the fucking thought off. If someone would have finished that thought, I would have fucking killed them for even speaking it out loud. For giving life to it.

Sistine kept glancing at me from the side of her eye.

Maybe she felt the fire coming from inside of me.

I’d never felt anger so powerful before.

Because it wasn’t regular anger. It was that helplessness and despair again.

It wasn’t naturally inside of me, and I was fighting against it and all that just fucking happened.

I wanted to stop time. Rewind it. Take her out of the picture and back to safety.

“Fuck,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

“You are making me sick.”

My feet stopped, and I concentrated on the voice that had cut through the smoke in my mind. Sistine was staring at me, hands on her hips. We were back inside the jewelry store. I was fucking pacing.

Fucking.

Pacing.

I’d never paced in my life.

Raced.

Yeah.

But pace?

Fuck me sideways.

My hands tightened, flexed, tightened, flexed, my muscles so strained, it almost felt like they were stiff. If I didn’t roll my shoulders, maybe my muscles would become petrified, like wood.

She lifted her eyebrows at me. “Problem, Signor Fausti?”

“Not the fucking time, Sistine.” She had a flip mouth, and I wasn’t sure if I was capable of not taking control of it with mine.

Our tongues thrashing for power. Our bodies at war while we ripped each other’s clothes off.

That felt like the only remedy—the water to this fucking burning inside of me.

“You should be thanking me right now,” she snapped. “Not looking at me as if you are angry at me. I am not the one who shot at you! Although, there have been plenty of times I considered this!”

I started for her. She started for me. We both stopped before we crashed. Our eyes were daring. Our chests heaving. Our breaths clashing. No sign of surrender on the horizon.

“If he shot at me, he shot at—” I cut the word off. I couldn’t even fucking speak it aloud with the word that came last— you and the rest that followed.

She seemed to understand by what she said next. “He did not!”

“He could have.”

“ Could have. Those are the two most important words in that sentence, Signor Fausti.”

“Cut the fucking Signor Fausti bullshit.”

“Casanova Prince!” She flung the nickname in my face like she was cursing at me.

I took her by the shoulders, my hands trembling.

At my touch, probably at the searing heat coming from my palms, her mouth parted, and she breathed out.

A moment passed between us. A moment when we both seemed to get lost in each other.

And I knew then, like I knew the first time I saw her, that there was no way out.

Even if she refused to admit it, she’d ensnared me, and the thrashing of my heart was making my walls explode around me.

The only reason my heart was thrashing so wildly, though, was because it was trying to get to hers.

Maybe the intensity between us was overwhelming her. Maybe it was my eyes. The way I was looking at her, like she was my fucking future, and I was trying to figure out how to bring it closer. How to start it now.

Either reason, she yanked out of my hold.

My hands instantly felt empty.

Cold.

I didn’t fucking like it.

“If you did not know, Casanova,” she snapped, but there was no mistaking the tremble in her voice.

She was trying to tamp down the emotion.

“My family is sworn to protect all that is valuable to yours. This is what we do. If a trained solider of ours is not around, we take matters into our own hands. This is what I did. I am going to assume you are of some value to…someone. I did my job, Casanova!”

“Fuck the job.” I turned in a circle, running another hand through my hair. “Fuck. The. Job. Nothing, not even me, is valuable enough to trade for your life.” My eyes felt as wild as my hair. I knew it was all over the fucking place. So unlike me. “ I protect you! ” I roared, hitting my chest.

She opened her mouth to respond at the same time her eyes widened.

She realized in that moment what I’d said, and how truthful the admission was.

It shocked the fuck out of me too. I knew all of this, but the situation had unnerved me to a place I’d never been before. A place where my control had slipped.

So fucking unlike me.

She opened her mouth again, but no sound came out. She stared at me, swallowed hard, then went toward her desk. I followed. She snatched the bag with what I assumed had the necklace inside of it. She shoved it toward my chest.

“Go,” she said, and this time I felt the tremble. Felt it in her hands.

I set my hand over hers. “Swear to me you’ll never do that again—for anyone.”

“I would not have done it for anyone but you,” she whispered.

“Give me the reason.”

She studied my eyes. “I do not know.” Her voice was even softer than it was before, and then she broke the connection and looked past me. She blinked, and I realized we weren’t alone.

We had company. Remo, my men, Adone and his crew were all staring at us.

My heart kicked in my chest when I realized it was time to go.

Even if Iggy hadn’t pieced together Sistine was the reason for my visit to the jewelry store, what I’d seen from him when he found Sistine behind me was rubbing me the wrong fucking way.

It wasn’t anger, but something far more dangerous.

Interest.

I took the gift box with the necklace out of the bag and placed it on her desk.

Then I took another one of her clips. This one of a red buttercup.

Her favorite. Those and roses. Not only were they on the dress she wore the last time I saw her, but I noticed her pencils had them taped to the ends, and she had two vases, each one with one of the flowers.

The flowers were both made from silk. I placed the clip in my bag.

“We’re even now, Annie. Your clips for the necklace.” I leaned down close to her ear, and she shut her eyes as I whispered, “I’ll be gone for a while, but this between us…is just getting started.”

She trembled, then shoved against my chest. “You are missing a shirt, Casanova . Make sure you put one of those on before you leave. We do not need all the damsels fainting in the street. We do not supply enough smelling salts.” She set a dramatic hand to her head and pretended to faint.

“You’re telling me I’m faint-worthy, Annie?”

Her eyes slowly opened, but the pinched look was back on her face. She glared at me. “You are insufferable.”

She truly meant it.

I couldn’t bring myself to grin, though.

Too many emotions were swirling like a raging fucking storm inside of me.

I did as she said, though, and grabbed the shirt Adone had offered me before the situation with Iggy.

I set myself straight, as straight as a man could be on the outside when his heart wasn’t where it usually was, so close to the surface of his chest, before Adone met me in his office.

Adone cleared his throat. “What my granddaughter said is the truth. Protecting what is valuable to the Fausti family is part of our commitment to your family—to you. It is what we have always done. What we will always do.”

I looked him in the eyes and spoke to him in Italian. “I do not know what must change. I do not care how it is changed. But for Sistine, it will be changed. She puts her life in danger for no one or anything. Tell me you understand what I am saying.”

He breathed out a name, but I caught it. Luca. He was comparing me to my grandfather. He should have added Brando to that breath. My father was just as passionate about protecting my mamma as my grandfather was about protecting Magpie, my grandmother.

For Sistine Evita, I’d become both men, plus ten more.

Adone seemed to understand the look on my face.

The seriousness in the subtle threat. He nodded.

“She will not be put in danger, but as you can tell, she is, ah , hardheaded.” He gave his head a hard thump with his crooked pointer finger.

“I cannot make any promises when it comes to her own convictions and decisions.”

“She won’t put herself in any danger,” I said, refusing to admit the truth aloud. Unless it comes to me . This was all new to me, too, and it was fucking rocking the ground beneath my feet.

In that moment, I had a new understanding of my old man.

The fog we’d been enveloped in the morning I went to see Sistine had cleared, and it was like I could see him like I’d never seen him before.

This new version of him brought out awe in me.

He was able to keep up with my mamma all those years.

But the feeling was also part anger. If he’d figured out how to live with a spirited woman, why the fuck hadn’t he wrote a manual on it?

I was so fucking lost. A man without a compass.

The bag dangled in my hand as my men and I headed for the exit. Iggy would see me leaving with it and have no fucking clue that what was inside was priceless to me: the scent of a woman—apple, pear, rose, citrus, metal and leather—that had somehow become the scent of the air in my lungs.

Without it, I would die.

As I entered the front of the store, my feet almost dragging because my heart demanded I go back to her, I caught a glimpse of myself in an ancient baroque mirror hanging on the wall.

“Fuck me sideways,” I breathed out.

Mariano Leone Fausti stared back at me, but in that moment, it might as well have been my father after he and mamma had gone at each other.

My hair was a mess. My eyes still looked crazed.

My heart raced in my chest, harder than it would have if I had run a marathon.

But when I looked deeper, a woman stared back at me, and she wasn’t my mamma.

Sistine was behind me in the mirror, meeting my eyes in an unwavering stare. Her eyes lingered before she went back to her desk, leaving me feeling as if all my vital organs had stayed behind with her. I’d never felt so empty before.

The only way to retrieve what made me whole, made me live, was through her.