“A lifetime,” she echoes, the surety in her voice making my cock hard again. The alternative will never be an option for her. I’d make her love me, even if she had none of it left to give. “What happens in seven days? Who’s Grayson?”
“He’s the warning blizzard. Next Friday, the hurricane hits.” I pause. There’s no way I can walk away from her now, but we’re dead if we run. “Ada, I don’t have time to explain, I just need you to—”
“In seven days, we’ll be free to be together, and this man is going to help us,” she says, deducing the headlines for herself.
“Him, and the cartel he works for.” I slide my hand up to her face to palm her jaw again. “We’re going to annihilate the Red Compass. Everyone who hurt us will die… Our son—”
She quickly presses a finger to my lips, as if she can’t bear for me to say his name. “Please don’t hate me.”
“I could never hate you.”
“Kirill stole him.”
“And I’ll get him back for you, I swear.”
“Not for me, for us.” She reaches up to replace her finger with her soft lips and sweet breath.
I nod, murmuring another oath into her mouth. “For us.”
“Did you kill Zaccaria, like you killed Guido Rossi?”
“I’m going to kill all of them, Ada.”
“Kirill said you’d been in jail.”
“I saw an opportunity.”
“Is Aiden okay?”
“He is now. He’s lording it up in Monaco, spending half the time depriving a bunch of rich arseholes out of their euros, and the other half laundering drug money. I’ll take you there some day.”
I’m going to show you the world.
“I can taste your conflict when we kiss.” Her blurted out assertion takes me by surprise, echoing Grayson’s words from yesterday. “You said we only had an hour, which means you need to leave soon.” She goes to push me away, but I catch her wrists.
“Not without you. You don’t get to walk away from me…ever.”
“But that’s the conflict, isn’t it, Frankie?” she argues quietly. “We don’t have a choice.” She slides off the desk and starts to pull me towards the door. “It’s the silence behind your words that betray you. They always did, even when we were kids. There’s a reason you can’t take me with you tonight, am I right?”
How can she be so calm when it’s dissecting me from the inside out?
“Fuck, Ada. Don’t ask me to make this decision. I can’t leave you with that animal.”
“It’s seven more days, not fourteen years. I can do this, and so can you. We have to. For Alex…”
For us.
I know she’s right, but it’s like she’s stabbing me with the truth.
“I’ll bend the rules,” I snarl, fighting it to the last. “I’ll find a way to keep you safe.”
“Stolen moments, Frankie.” Her voice is shaking now, giving her sadness away.
“No, Ada.” I tug her to a stop on the threshold of the room and crowd her up against the doorframe, craving her body one last time before I go. “These are the moments we’re stealing back.”
I’m scaling the outside wall, trying not to castrate myself on the barbed wire, when the first black Range Rover appears in the distance.
Dropping down onto the grass verge, I keep low to the ground as it passes, and then I’m crossing the road to the empty property opposite.
Soon after, the second Range Rover appears, then a third and a fourth. No Ferrari, though. No Semenov.
At least that’s something, right?
Wrong.
It’s just a stay of execution, and I’m chuckling bitterly to myself about it as I approach the SUV. Most men I know tell themselves anything to avoid the ugliness in front of them, but I know the truth.
I shouldn’t have left her. We didn’t have a choice.
We’re not making this sacrifice for ourselves now. We’re doing it for our son.
“What’s so funny?” drawls a voice from the darkness. “Your dick can’t be that small, surely?”
I pull my gun so fast the man leaning against my car doesn’t have time to curse. When I blink and see the familiar face grinning back at me, I blow out a relieved breath.
“Christ, Aiden, what the hell are you doing here?”
“There are a lot of religious connotations in that sentence,” he muses, lifting a half-eaten apple to his mouth for another bite. “Are you part of the God Squad now? Maybe they can pray you up a bigger dick if you ask the congregation nicely?”
Rolling my eyes, I holster my gun. This isn’t the same edgy man who was waiting for me outside La Bastille in France. The is Aiden Knight back to his ruthless, swaggering, bitchy best.
He finishes up the apple and chucks the core over his shoulder. “Thought it was an appropriate snack to have. Remind me again, is library girl called Ada or Eve?”
“Don’t push it, Raven,” I warn. “It’s been a hell of a night. Tell me why you’re in the middle of suburbia at ten p.m. on a Friday evening, in a country you haven’t visited in over a decade.”
He stretches his legs out in front of him and yawns. “Grayson asked me to check that you were upholding your side of the bargain. No last-minute deviations or…procurements.” His gaze starts to wander over my black jeans. “Is that Ada Semenov in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”
“Don’t call her that. Where’s Issa?”
“In Monaco.”
“She okay?”
“She’s eight months pregnant and feeling it, so perhaps you should be directing that question at me? Last week I nearly lost my left nut sack because her pomegranate salad was too cold. A day later, it was too warm. I don’t even make the fucking food. I have a Michelin star chef at my disposal, but I’m the man who knocked her up so I’m the first in the firing line.”
I smirk and silently high five Issa for giving her husband hell. She’s as sweet as she is strong—a stunning force of nature that he never saw coming. She played Aiden at his own game, then hit him with a Full House for her final hand. She didn’t just win the jackpot. She reformed the unreformable playboy.
Then I think about Ada, all alone and terrified with my baby growing inside her, and the moment loses its humour. She kept the pregnancy so hush-hush, even Silas didn’t know about it until after Alex was born.
“Did you see her?”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“Did you fuck her?”
“Would you like me to shove my gun where the sun doesn’t shine, or ram it down your throat instead?” I move swiftly toward the driver’s side before I start acting on my threat.
“Did you really stay the whole hour?” he drawls. “You haven’t been with a woman in so long I imagine it was more of a sprint than a marathon.”
“Remind me, whose private jet you’re taking back to Monaco again?”
Now it’s his turn to laugh. “I’ve missed you, you miserable cunt. Sinning and winning is no fun without you.”