But I hadn’t been expecting this.
The sight of Bianca Belcante held trapped against a man with a gun held to her temple.
Her eyes found me instantly, too blue in the bloodless expanse of her horrified face.
She clawed at the arm around her neck, blood trickling from the deep wounds she had inflicted on her attacker. It did something to allay my fear, to see that small sign of her courage and fight. To know that maybe I’d given her the courage to stand up for herself when she’d never known how to do that before me.
But that small pleasure was lost in the avalanche of cold rage that blurred my vision momentarily and eradicated whatever logic I’d thought to shackle my fury with.
I was all wrath.
All violence.
My entire body vibrated with it, finger clamped too-tightly around the trigger of the gun as I brought it up to aim at the face of the man who dared to touch what was mine.
I’d burn Inequity to the ground myself before I let another man get away with touching what was mine.
And he wasn’t just touching her.
He was threatening her.
The barrel of a Ruger GP100 grinding into her temple. The brutal, almost suffocating hold on her neck.
I wasn’t just going to kill this motherfucker.
I was going to dismantle him.
Piece by fucking piece.
Atom by goddamn atom.
So he felt every single inch of his incremental march toward death.
So he begged me, fucking wept for me to end him.
And oh, that would be sweet.
Not sweet enough to eradicate this brutal fury, this crushing fear, the kind of which I hadn’t felt since the day Bryant found out about my romance with Grace Constantine when I was seventeen.
But it would go a long way to making me saner.
To making Bianca safer.
“You’re a dead man.” The words tore up my chest, savaged my throat and cut through the air like knives.
The man holding my woman shifted his face out from the shadows, from the cloud of her golden hair and I saw with shocked clarity that it was Santo.
The gun in my hand dipped, dropping almost impulsively, because I knew this man.
I almost trusted him, as far as I ever trusted anyone.
And he was not someone I ever would have guessed would hurt what was mine.
“Tiernan,” he growled. “Tell your guard dogs to lower their damn weapons.”
“Not a chance,” I returned coldly, stepping forward with my gun once more trained dead center in his forehead. “If you release Bianca now, maybe I’ll kill you quickly.”
“Tiernan,” he said flatly, as if I was being unreasonable.
“Release her right this fucking minute!” I roared, the words echoing in the now near-empty casino.
Above us, the mammoth chandelier rattled gently.
Santo’s dark brows cut high into his forehead, clearly shocked by my outburst. “I wouldn’t hurt her,” he said slowly, almost condescendingly.
“He’s the one,” Bianca countered and her voice was calm, so calm.
Pride surged amongst the fury in my chest and ebbed.
“He’s the person who abducted me when I was a girl,” she told me, wincing slightly as my men stepped closer and Santo pressed the gun hard enough to her temple to blanch the skin.
Fury so bright, it whited out my vision.
Through it, I was only vaguely aware of growling, “Drop the damn weapon or I’ll drop you right now, Santo.”
Something changed in Bianca’s face, something important, but I couldn’t see beyond the veil of my own feelings like a red curtain hanging between us.
“I wouldn’t ever hurt her, you fucking stronzo,” Santo gritted out. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to protect her.”
“Prove it then,” I goaded, jerking my chin at Hank, who stood directly behind Santo, giving him the signal to put the man down if he didn’t immediately obey.
I was done fucking around with Bianca’s life.
Each second she spent pressed close to potential death made me feel dangerously close to my own.
“Drop it,” I demanded for the last time.
Santo had never been an idiot, far from it, and he’d never had a death wish.
So, after a fierce curse in Italian, he loosened his hold on Bianca, shockingly pressed a brief kiss to her temple, and stepped away.
My men were on him in an instant, shoving him to the ground and wrenching his hands behind his back to cuff them.
But I was only distantly aware of it, because my focus was on Bianca.
It took me two steps to reach her and when I did, I hauled her into my arms roughly, unable to gentle the ferocity of my need to feel her against me. One hand cupped the back of her head, feeling the smallness of her and a resulting echo of panic in my soul. She was so fucking young, so slight and untried in the ways of this horrible world.
The cruel irony was obvious to me. Once, I’d so deliberately put her in harms way when now, all I wanted to do was protect her from everything, even something so slight as a fucking papercut.