Emperor of Wrath: A Dark Mafia Enemies To Lovers Romance

It’s white when I open my eyes.

Bright.

And…

My nose wrinkles.

It smells like bleach.

My eyes close again. But then I open them once more. The bright white light assaults me again, just a hazy white glow, and somewhere above me, a face I can’t quite make out hovers.

“Where…” my voice sounds very far away. “Where am…”

“You’re in Heaven, Annika,” a ghostly, vaguely feminine voice whispers. “And I am God.”

My throat bobs.

“Yes, motherfucker. God’s a woman.”

My brows knit. My vision begins to clear as the haze melts away.

Freya is grinning impishly down at me.

“Hellooo, Annika,” she coos in that weird, ghostly voice. “Welcome baaack.”

She yelps as I sit bolt upright, my pulse spiking wildly. Next to me, a bunch of beeps speed up, and an alarm begins to chime frantically.

“Where—” I look at her bleary-eyed and woozy, my head swimming as I try and focus. “What the fuck…”

Suddenly, a door bangs open. Two women and a man in white are all up in my face: prodding and poking, telling me to take a breath and calm down. They’re asking me my name, what fucking month it is. If I know how I got here.

Good question. I don’t even know where the fuck here is.

“Where is he?!” I scream, whirling. “Where’s⁠—”

Something very nice hits my bloodstream and instantly, I’m chilling the fuck out. I drop my head to the side, looking curiously at the needle one of the women has just stuck into a tube that’s running into my wrist.

Neat.

Then it all fades away.

Things are less chaotic when I next open my eyes. I blink, frowning as I turn to the side. Freya grins sheepishly at me.

“Frey?”

“Okay, that’s on me,” she blurts, looking guilty. “When you were waking up before, I was trying to be funny…”

“Wellll, maybe that was NOOT so funny…” I throw at her, doing my best impression of her weird ghost voice from before.

She smirks. “Not bad.”

“Not as bad as your hospital humor,” I grumble. “What the hell happened?”

“I’m pretty sure I freaked you out and sent you into a panic attack,” she says with another sheepish look. “So, yeah, that’s my⁠—”

“Where is he?”

She doesn’t respond quickly enough for my liking.

“Where is he?!”

I sit up again. Freya is right there, taking my hand and soothing me as she looks me in the eye.

“He’s okay, Anni. I mean, he’s going to be on a bunch of antibiotics for a while—you both are. That water was disgusting. It’s sewer run-off.”

Bile rises in my stomach, but I muscle it back down.

“But he’s fine. He’s out of surgery for the bullet wound, and he’s sleeping.”

Then it all hits me at once: the kidnapping, the needle in my arm, the bomb, Kenzo, Valon, the swim…

I frown as I look at Freya.

“How am I alive?”

She grins. “Because you’re a badass? I’m pretty sure you broke some sort of breath holding record getting you both out of there⁠—”

“No, I mean, I was poisoned.”

She shakes her head. “No… You weren’t.”

“By Valon, yes,” I insist. “He injected me with something⁠—”

“A slow-acting sedative.”

My brow furrows. “What?”

“You were mumbling something about poison when they got you in the ambulance so they ran a blood test, and that’s what came back. You got drugged, Anni. But with a slow-acting sedative, not poison.”

The door to my room opens. I look over and smile weakly as Takeshi and Hana walk in. Hana’s got a bandage wrapped around her forehead and over her eye, and Takeshi’s nursing some wicked bruises, but they both grin as they walk over to me.

I wince as Hana hugs me fiercely, choking a sob into my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she blurts.

“For?”

“Saving our idiot brother’s life,” Tak growls quietly, smirking.

Hana smiles. “He’s out of surgery. And it went really well. Clean shot through his side. He lost a lot of blood, and he’s on some major antibiotics. But he’s going to be fine. He’s just sleeping⁠—”

The door opens. Mal’s brow furrows when he sees Freya, but then he looks at me and smiles one of his small, private smiles.

“Just thought you’d like to know,” he growls. “Kenzo’s awake.”

The feeling when he looks at me as I’m wheeled into the room is like a high no one on Earth has ever felt, making me want to scream and cry and laugh and throw up all at the same time.

But instead of whatever all that craziness would look like, I just choke out a sob as Hana and Takeshi push my wheelchair over to Kenzo’s hospital bed.

He doesn’t just look “okay”.

He looks alive.

The color is back in his face, as well as that fire I love so much in his eyes. When he smiles at me, it’s enough to break my heart and put it back together again.

We’re not even all the way at his hospital bed before I’m lurching like a drunk out of the wheelchair and climbing in with him, careful to avoid his injured side. He winces but chuckles as he wraps his arms around me, tilts his head to the side, and kisses me.

Slowly.

Madly.

Deeply.

At some point, our family and friends tire of being ignored while I kiss my husband, and they all file out of the room. Later, a nurse comes to tell me politely I need to go back to my own room. When I ignore her, another one comes to say it less politely.

I still don’t leave.

Eventually, Sota comes to visit, hugging us and grinning. He also talks to the head nurse, who apparently knows him personally. After that, people stop trying to tell me to leave.

Good. That is not happening.

There are no stars in hospital room ceilings, not even in Japan. So instead, it’s the soft blue glow of the machines beeping quietly around us that we look up at together.

His hand finds mine. I turn to him, our eyes locking.

He tells me I’m a little thief who stole his heart.

I tell him that’s beyond fucking corny, and we need to work on his lines.

He asks me if I would prefer “messy little cum slut” as a term of endearment, and I get a little wet before it occurs to me that fucking him right now would almost definitely rip his stitches out.

So I don’t.

Instead, I just tell him I love him.

He says it back.

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