Chapter 3 - In the Dark
A deafening explosion shattered the reinforced glass of the eastern balcony.
The shockwave threw me backward. Before I hit the ground, a heavy weight crashed into me, shielding my body. Roman.
Gunfire erupted, the staccato crack-crack-crack echoing through the massive living space as bullets tore into the expensive leather furniture and pulverized the drywall.
“Stay down!” Roman roared over the noise, his hand pressing the back of my head into the floor. Despite his injury, he moved with lethal fluidity. He drew a matte-black handgun from the waistband of his sweatpants and fired blindly into the darkness toward the balcony.
A man screamed.
“Dante!” Roman shouted.
“I’m on the perimeter, Boss! Three hostiles in the stairwell, two on the terrace!” Dante’s voice echoed from the hallway, followed by the booming roar of a shotgun.
“Silas found us,” Roman said, his breath hot against my ear. “We have to move to the panic room. Can you run?”
“Yes,” I choked out, my ears ringing.
“On my count. One. Two. Go!”
Roman pulled me up by my arm, keeping his body positioned between me and the shattered windows. We sprinted across the dark apartment. The air was thick with the smell of cordite and pulverized concrete. Tracers lit up the darkness like deadly fireflies.
Roman fired twice more, taking down a shadow that stepped through the broken window, before shoving me into a heavy steel door disguised as a bookshelf in his office. He slammed his palm against a keypad, and the door hissed shut just as a barrage of bullets hammered against the other side.
Inside the panic room, emergency red lights flickered on. It was a concrete bunker equipped with monitors, weapons, and medical kits.
Roman dropped his gun on the table and leaned heavily against the wall, clutching his side. Fresh blood was seeping through his gray shirt. He had torn his stitches.
“You’re bleeding,” I gasped, rushing toward him, my hands automatically reaching for the hem of his shirt.
He caught my hands. His chest was heaving, his eyes wild with a feral, protective fury. “Are you hit? Nora, look at me. Are you hit?”
“No, I’m fine. But you’re not—”
He didn't let me finish. Roman pulled me flush against his chest and crashed his mouth down on mine.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was desperate, bruising, fueled by adrenaline and the raw terror of a near-death encounter. My mind went blank. Every rational thought, every warning about who this man was, burned away in an instant. I fisted my hands in his shirt, kissing him back with an intensity that shocked me, opening my mouth to the taste of whiskey and danger.
He groaned, pressing me back against the cold concrete wall, his uninjured arm wrapping around my waist to lift me onto my toes. His lips moved to my jaw, down my neck, claiming me in the dark while a war raged outside our steel door.
“I told myself I would keep my hands off you,” he breathed against my skin, his voice rough and ragged. “I told myself you were just a civilian. But you’re not. You’re mine. Silas made a fatal mistake bringing you into this, because now I am going to burn his entire world to ashes for daring to shoot at you.”
I pulled his face back to mine, my thumbs tracking over his sharp cheekbones. “Then let me fix your stitches so you can go kill him.”
Roman let out a dark, beautiful laugh. He rested his forehead against mine. “You are a terrifying woman, Nora Hale.”
The monitors on the desk suddenly flared to life. The security cameras showed the penthouse. It was a ruin of shattered glass and blood. But Dante and a heavily armed reinforcement crew were walking through the debris. The hostiles were dead.
May you like
Roman looked at the screens, his eyes hardening back into obsidian stones. The moment of vulnerability was gone. The Boss had returned.
“Patch me up, Nora,” Roman said softly. “It’s time to go on the offensive.”
