With a brutal thrust, he plunged it into my side, and searing pain followed.
As he withdrew it, I gasped for air and tried shooting out my hand out to grab his neck, but exhaustion weighted my movements.
The world undulated around me. My ears tuned back into the screams.
Natalia’s screams, as they mixed with the house alarm.
My vision blurred. I focused everything on getting the phone up to my ear.
I heard my name. I grasped for it. “Cristiano—” Her voice—small, terrified. “Cristiano!”
Get to the cellar. My knees buckled, and I fell onto them, but only one thing mattered—the shrieking of the woman I’d protected as a baby, a child, and now as my wife. They could not, would not, be the thing I heard as Hell pulled me under. I couldn’t go down in fear that she was being hurt. That another man had entered my bedroom. Cornered her when she needed me most. That he’d do all the unspeakable things I’d been fighting against. Put his fucking hands around the delicate throat I’d promised her only I would ever touch. My entire body burned at the thought that anyone would get close enough to her to broach the gates of Heaven—my goddamn Heaven—which I’d barely tasted and had never even breached.
Anger surged in me as the worst possibility of all hit me. I forced myself to my feet with everything I had and managed to wrap my hands around the fucker’s neck. Belmonte-Ruiz would not take my wife from the Badlands and into a worse hell than the one where I was headed.
I squeezed with the strength of a body that had faced death countless times and was still standing. A body that had taken down men three times the size of this scum. A body that had triumphed.
And then I reached into the depths of my reserves for even more—the reserves that had kept me alive in the past, the ones that I’d always fallen back on to save my own life. Now, I called on them for Natalia.
But the body I’d always depended on, which had stumbled but never fallen, that had racked up kill after kill—it failed me now. My vision darkened as I dropped him and fell back onto my knees, wheezing for breath.
I couldn’t slip into the darkness. I fought against it. To lay my eyes on her and know she was okay, to kiss lips I’d barely begun to learn. To speak the things I couldn’t imagine never saying . . .
I mouthed her name. I needed to return to her, to my . . . my . . . “Natalia—”
“Don’t worry about Natalia.” It took every effort to lift my head and meet the Belmonte-Ruiz member’s eyes as he stood over me with his bloody dagger. His mouth slid into a menacing smile. “Your wife is next.”