Chapter 10: The Shot in the Dark
It was the eleventh night when the perimeter
alarm Romeo had wired into the fence line
finally screamed to life.
He had Isabella flat on the kitchen floor behind
the island before she'd even fully registered the sound, his body already a wall between her and
the window, gun drawn and steady in a hand
that had gone completely, professionally calm.
Through the gap in the curtains he could make
out two shapes moving through the treeline —
scouts, not a full assault team, someone
testing the location's defenses rather than
committing to a hit tonight. That, at least, was
a mercy.
"Stay down. Don't move until I come back for
you." His voice had dropped into a register
she'd never heard from him before — flat,
precise, utterly without hesitation.
"Romeo—"
"Stay down."
He was gone into the dark before she could
argue, and the next several minutes were the
longest of Isabella's life — crouched behind a
kitchen island in a cottage that suddenly felt
paper-thin, listening to sounds she couldn't
identify and didn't want to. Two muffled
impacts. Silence. Footsteps on gravel, too
measured to be anyone but him, and still her whole body flooded with relief only when his
silhouette filled the doorway again, unharmed.
Afterward, hands still shaking with the tail end
of adrenaline, she grabbed the front of his shirt
in both fists. "Are you hurt? Romeo, look at me
— are you hurt?"
"I'm fine." His hands came up to cradle her
face, checking her over with the same fierce
urgency, some instinct far older than any
training he'd ever received. "Isabella. Look at
me. I'm fine. We're fine."
And then neither of them was thinking about
the two men in the treeline anymore, or what
Enzo would say when Romeo called it in, or
what any of this meant for tomorrow. She
kissed him first — or maybe he kissed her,
neither of them argued about the sequence of
it later — and it tasted like gunpowder and
terror and relief and something that had been
quietly building since a hotel hallway three
months ago when he'd first introduced himself
with a handshake too formal for what his eyes
were already doing. "This is real," she whispered against his mouth,
fingers curled into his shirt like she could hold
the moment still by force. "Tell me this is real
and not just the adrenaline talking."
"It's real," Romeo said, and for one perfect,
foolish night, believing it was the easiest thing
in the world.
As they laid in each other's arms.