Page 107 of Winter

Knox whipped around and got to see Raffaelo’s furious face just for a second before Raffaelo did indeed blow his head off. Knox slumped to the snowy ground, the eye that was still attached to his head open and staring in disbelief.

The adrenaline left Inca then, as Raff dropped to his knees beside her, ripping his coat off and wrapping it around her, and she began to feel the agony burn through her body. He pulled his sweater off and pushed it against her wounds. “You live? You hear me? You hang on!”

Inca nodded, knowing that it was impossible to hope, but in her final moments with this man, the man she loved so very deeply, she didn’t want to be sad. “I love you so much, Raffaelo. So very much.”

Raff’s face was pale, but he had never looked more gloriously handsome to her. “And you are my life, Inca. Please, I know it’s bad, but please try …”

She leaned her head against his chest as he carried her back to his car and laid her in the passenger seat, grabbing a blanket from the front seat and tucking it around her. “Keep talking to me, Inca. Keep putting pressure on your wounds if you can—I have to drive us back through the storm.”

Raffaelo saw she was shivering violently now and knew the cold, and the blood loss meant her body was going into shock.

God, please, no.

He was having a hard enough time seeing her so badly hurt … dying.

No. No way.

Inca, his love, his life, was going to be okay.

Inca touched his face. “Where’s Tommaso?”

Raffaelo hesitated. “He’s dealing with Rosenbaum. Olly’s pretty badly hurt.”

Inca’s eyes opened wide. “What?”

Another pause. “Knox attacked him, knocked him out. We think your old friend Belinda had something to do with it, but it doesn’t matter anymore She’s dead.”

Inca moaned softly and he looked around. “Inca?”

“I’m okay—are you or Tommaso hurt?”

Raffaelo swallowed. “No, we’re fine. Look, we’ve got some people just up here; Rosenbaum gave us a few places he could think of, so we split up. It was just luck that I found you, my darling. I’m so sorry.”

“You saved me.” Her voice was growing weaker.

“Inca, stay with me. Keep talking to me …”

“I love you.”

Raffaelo couldn’t help the tears that poured down his face then. “I love you, Inca Sardee. Don’t you dare fucking die on me.”

“You’re so sexy when you curse in that accent. You wanna pull the car over and we’ll get busy right now?”

He laughed. “Even now, you’re making jokes.” He knew why she was doing it, so that when—no,if, she died—he would at least have a happy memory of their last moments together. “God, I love you so much, but I will fucking kill you if you die.”

He was gratified to hear her chuckle, but he could also hear the pain in her voice. “Baby … I want you to know … it was alwaysyou, Raffaelo. Always you…”

That broke him and he began to sob, his whole body shaking uncontrollably. “Oh God, Inca. Please don’t leave me … we’re so close, so very close …”

“I’m trying, baby. I promise. I don’t want to die.” But her voice was getting weaker. The car skidded all over the icy road, the snow battering down, almost completely obscuring his vision. For a second, just a second, he considered pulling the car over and dying with her, but something was stopping him. The promise, the hope for their future.

We have survived so far; we’ll survive now. There is a reason I love her as much as I do …

He reached back and held her hand for a moment. “We’re going to be okay, Inca. I swear we will. And I’m going to marry you.”

Inca laughed softly. “Well, you’d better …”

Hope suddenly soared as he saw the lights of the town in front of him. Raffaelo almost laughed. “Almost there,mio caro, almost safe …”