Page 22 of The Chief (Those (Damn!) Texas Dantes #3)

HEAT SLAMMED through her—sudden, unrelenting. It snapped up her spine, warning her that this moment—this man, this impossible hunger—was about to rewrite everything she thought she knew about herself.

But the aftershock of the kill order still clung to her skin like smoke. Her body trembled with it. Not just fear. Deeper. Thicker. A pulse of memory and dread threading through the ache.

She should’ve been frozen.

Instead, she burned.

Fear writhed beside the want, two animals tangled in her belly. One snarling retreat. The other snapping its teeth at him—daring him closer.

Her thighs clamped tight. Not in invitation.

In resistance.

In rebellion against what had been done to her. Against what still hunted her. Against the sheer, naked need to be seen and touched and claimed by the only man her body would obey now.

She hated how visible it made her. How exposed.

But still… some traitorous part of her wanted him to see. Wanted him to recognize it. Her. All of her. The broken pieces and the jagged wants.

And God help her, he did.

His eyes went dark, the deepest green-blue she’d ever seen.

He reached for her with that terrible, patient strength, his hand finding her hip. His thumb grazed the edge of the bandage there—not to test, not to tease. Just to touch. To remind her he knew where she hurt. And that he wouldn’t forget.

“I should be terrified,” she whispered, voice raw.

“You are.”

“I should run.”

“You won’t.”

Her fingers twitched in his. Trembled.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

He inhaled, slow and sharp, like the words hit him somewhere vulnerable and he didn’t want her to see.

But she saw anyway.

She saw it in the way his jaw locked, in the way his breath scraped. Like hearing her admit it cracked something in him. Like he wanted to destroy whatever had done this to her—and couldn’t. Not yet.

His voice, when it came, was low. Steady.

“You didn’t notice those memories of being shot. Not at first. Your mind kept them back. But now you’re starting to remember. Just flashes. Just pieces.”

Their hands were still joined. He brought them up and pressed them flat to her chest—right over her heart. Not gently.

Possessively.

As if to claim what beat inside her. As if to say: This is mine now, too.

His touch didn’t ask. It declared.

“And I’m going to help you through it. Touch by touch. Word by word.”

The brand pulsed against her skin, and suddenly it wasn’t just heat.

It was emotion. Fear. Fury. Grief.

Hunger.

Her lips parted and her eyes stung. Cade’s reaction, the moment she was shot, she felt it.

Not the pain. The helplessness. The rage.

The unrelenting terror. The primal, chest-crushing certainty he must’ve experienced in those seconds when she fell.

That he’d failed her. That she was gone.

That the one thing he couldn’t survive had already happened.

And it had been his worst nightmare, not hers.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Because the echo of it lived under her skin now too. The way his soul shattered when he thought he’d lost her wasn’t just something she sensed.

It was something she carried.

He caught her wrist, kissed the pulse hammering beneath the skin. Not gently. Not sweetly. But with heat and purpose, like he could brand her again with his mouth alone. His teeth scraped lightly, possessively, and the pulse echoed not just in her wrist, but everywhere.

“Do you feel it?” he demanded.

And she did. She felt everything, especially the terrible clarity that came with believing, just for a second, that she was gone. His soul seemed to reach for hers, demanding she stay. Demanding she live.

Because if he had lost her, he would’ve torn the world apart. And smiled while it fell.

She nodded, a small, jerky motion that barely qualified. Her throat worked, but no sound came. Her chest was tight, like her ribs had cinched inwards and locked her voice behind bone and fear. The words were there, fighting to rise, but her body had gone mute under the weight of it all.

“Then trust it.”

She turned her face toward his. Their mouths were inches apart.

“What if the next thing I remember… ruins everything?”

“Then we ruin it together.”

She kissed him.

Not soft.

Not slow.

It was hungry. Desperate in a way that made her chest ache.

Like every barrier they’d built, every duty, every vow, every moment spent pretending they could hold back, had finally shattered.

This wasn’t just lust. It was the collision of survival and need, of pain transmuted into heat, of two people who had almost lost everything and now couldn’t stand one more inch of distance between them.

It was everything they’d denied themselves since the moment they’d been bound.

And everything they’d promised, silently, to take.

His hand tightened on her hip.

She gasped into his mouth, and he took it like a vow, like the sound alone bound them tighter. Like her breath, her shock, her need belonged to him now. It wasn’t tenderness. It was possession. A claiming, fierce and silent, that left her trembling in his hands.

But he didn’t take it further.

Didn’t push.

He broke the kiss, lips dragging across hers like he was starving, and she was the last thing he’d ever taste.

Elise kept her eyes closed, because opening them meant acknowledging just how undone she was.

She’d never needed anyone.

Not like this.

Not like she needed him.

That terrified her more than the bullets, more than the locked doors, more than the echo of Latin whispering in the back of her mind.

Because that fear, the fear of needing someone so badly, so completely, was a vulnerability no weapon could shield against. It meant surrendering to something bigger than violence, bigger than secrets.

It meant trusting that he would never leave.

And she didn’t know if she had the strength to survive it if he ever did.

Because if she let herself have this, let herself want him the way her body and soul already did, then losing him wouldn’t just hurt. It would destroy her.

But he was here. Right now, he was here. And his breathing matched hers. And his hand never once left hers.

“Sleep now,” he murmured. “I’ll be here when you wake.”

“And if I remember something?”

“Say it out loud. I’ll protect you, Elise. Always.”

Their palms stayed joined.

And somewhere in the back of her mind, a new image surfaced.

A face. A smirk. That unmistakable glint of a Dante ring, bold, heavy, and steeped in legacy. A symbol of power worn like a threat.

The whisper of a phrase, not to her, but about her.

In sanguine scripsi.

She opened her eyes in the dark.

And whispered back: ”I remember you.”

A name hovered on her tongue.

Unspoken.

Almost real.

Her breath caught. A tremor passed through her chest, locking her in place.

“Marcello…”

CADE HADN’T SLEPT.

His eyes tracked the shadows crawling up the walls, restless and jagged, while his pulse thudded with unburned rage. And something else. A thrum of awareness he hadn’t been able to shake since the first time she’d curled into him.

Her scent lingered on his skin, her leg brushing his thigh beneath the blanket, her breath skating across his chest like heat rising from a wound, unspoken and unforgettable.

He couldn’t stop hearing her voice, quiet, haunted, remembering that name.

But through the fury and the fear, he couldn’t stop feeling her either.

The shape of her. The heat. The ache she didn’t know she left behind.

Marcello.

The name didn’t just echo. It tunneled deep, lodged like shrapnel. It peeled something rudimentary inside him, not because he recognized it, but because she had. Not because he knew it, but because she did. And the way she’d said it, soft, wounded, half-asleep, wrapped around him like a chain.

Who the fuck was Marcello?

It made him ache. Made him burn. Not just from fury, but from the deep, maddening need to erase that name from her mouth.

Not out of jealousy, but because it didn’t belong there.

Because it marked a wound, and he wanted to be the one she said instead.

Not in pain. In trust. In heat. In every breathless, wrecked whisper she hadn’t let herself give yet.

And because whoever that bastard was, he’d carved a place inside her memory, one she couldn’t scrub clean.

Cade’s hand curled into a fist, then relaxed again against the curve of her hip. She didn’t stir. Didn’t flinch. Her breath rose and fell, quiet and level, but too uneasy to be the sleep of someone truly at peace.

He hated how still she was, as though her body hadn’t gotten the message that she was safe now. Like she was waiting for the next hit, the next blow, the next breath she might not be allowed to take.

But her body was still there, flush against his, warm and so heartbreakingly soft.

And no matter how still she lay, the brush of her breath drifted along his arm, the quiet tension coiled in her spine, the shape of her thigh pressed to his.

It didn’t slam into him like a bullet. It slid beneath his skin, gradual and relentless, like the heat of her breath lingering in the space between.

A bruised kind of wanting. A need tangled with anger and protectiveness and fire.

Cade didn’t know for certain if Marcello was the one who’d stood beside Grigor in that hallway.

The one who spoke the Latin, the one Elise couldn’t forget.

But he knew the memory led to him. The name surfaced alongside the blood and betrayal.

That kill order didn’t hang in the air on its own.

It came with a voice, a presence, and a face she hadn’t quite remembered until now.

Marcello.

Maybe he wasn’t the one who pulled the verbal trigger. Maybe he hadn’t issued the order himself. But Cade would bet everything he had, that Marcello was tied to it. That he’d been close enough to breathe in the smoke. Close enough to let it happen.