All it means is that I know exactly what I’ve done. And now I have to live with that.”
My heart broke for him.
You didn’t know.
“Doesn’t matter, Winter. There’s no life for me in Sinners Bay anymore. I don’t know who I am. I’m not a Calabresi and I can never be a Romero. And it doesn’t matter if my true brothers would welcome me into their arms, because I could never look them in the eye without knowing the pain I’d delivered into their hearts. I didn’t come up this mountain to hide, I came here to be lost. Because that’s what I am, baby doll, in every sense of the word. And I don’t plan on being found.”
I found you, I wrote, a smile twitching at the corner of my mouth.
A low laugh escaped him. “Pretty sure my mutt sniffed you out.”
I shook my head innocently, leaning back as I finished using the clippers on his beard so he had a layer of neat stubble and all of his beautiful face was revealed. He was even more handsome like this, the angles of his face hard and fierce. His mouth was a line of discontent, but as I surveyed him, it pulled up at both sides until his smile formed two crescent moons either side of it. Handsome didn’t cut it, he was the sort of attractive you saw in movies. Hollywood would have taken him from me in a heartbeat if they found their way up this mountainside.
I grinned at him as I lowered my hand to write on his chest once more, my stomach flipping and flopping as he stared at me with an intensity that made me blush. No, I found you under a mile of hair, mountain man. You’re not lost anymore.
Two weeks was a hell of a long time to spend cooped up in a small cabin with one person and as the days drew on, I found my attention fixed on my savage girl more often than it should have been. But it was almost impossible for me to tear my attention away from her when she was flourishing before my eyes. Three solid meals a day plus as many snacks as she wanted had done a lot to help take the edge off of that starved look she’d had. Her bones no longer pressed through her skin, and her wide eyes didn’t look so sunken. I’d thought she was stunning before, but now that her cheeks had rounded out and I could no longer count her individual ribs when her shirt was off, I found myself addicted to studying her.
I’d managed to convince her to stop dropping her clothes in front of me without a thought and for the most part she kept herself covered now, but I was still helping tend to a few of the worse wounds she had. There was a particularly nasty gash on her back which kept opening up again whenever it seemed to get close to healing. Luckily I had some first aid supplies and I’d been applying cream as well as bandaging it for her and after she’d gotten over the initial fear of letting me tend to it, we were definitely making progress towards healing it for good.
Winter sat in front of me on the other chair from the dining table which she’d flipped around to straddle backwards while I worked. Goosebumps peppered her skin as I applied the antiseptic cream to her wound and carefully re-dressed it for her but as I finished, my fingers trailed across another scar beneath it. It was faint and almost white with age, but to the right of her spine, I could make out the outline of a grid with circles and crosses filling the spaces on it.
I released a long breath, an animalistic growl rumbling through my chest as I closed my eyes against that image, imagining the pain she must have been in as those fucking monsters did that to her.
“We need to get you out of here, Winter,” I said in a low voice, my fingers still caressing that scar like it was the only thing keeping me from storming out of here right now and gutting every single one of them for what they’d done to her.
She stilled beneath my touch and I could sense the panic in her, the confusion, the fear.
“It’s for your own good,” I continued. “The storms are finally lessening and we’ll be able to head down the mountain