Unbroken (The Protectors 12)

I nodded and took a sip of my coffee.

“You and Luca going to check on Gio today?”

“The doctor thinks today might be a good day for Gio to see Luca. I guess the medication they’ve put him on is supposed to start kicking in and calming him down without knocking him out, you know?”

“Yeah,” Magnus said with a sigh. “Just tell your brother… just tell him that no matter what he sees today, his kid’s still in there.”

The confirmation that the boy in the hospital was, in fact, Gio, had come in the night before. The second we’d landed in Seattle, Ronan had taken some blood from Luca for a DNA test. He’d already had a lab waiting to run the results, something I suspected the wealthy surgeon had paid quite a bit for. We’d had the results that the boy was Luca’s son in less than twenty-four hours.

But Luca had known just by looking at his picture that the boy who now called himself Nick was his child. He hadn’t doubted it for even a second. And he believed that as soon as Gio saw him, this nightmare would end.

I wasn’t so certain.

I’d seen the results of long-term mental torture for myself. Yes, Gio was a fighter, but he’d been programmed to believe something and that was what he would probably fight for first. Like Aleks, at some point after he’d been taken, his brain had made the switch from needing to fight back and escape to needing to do whatever was necessary to survive.

I downed the rest of my coffee and pushed the cup away. Magnus took it, then said, “Can I fix you something while we wait for the grits?”

I shook my head.

“When was the last time you ate?”

The question came from Aleks and it actually felt like a balm on my soul. All the stuff with Gio was still there, but it ducked behind the shadows for now so that I could take pleasure in having the man I loved back in my arms.

Aleks’s fingers slid up my back and along the nape of my neck as he sat down next to me. He turned my head so I was looking at him.

“Not sure,” I admitted.

“Grits will be a while,” Magnus said with a wink.

“Magnus, do we have any cereal with the tricky rabbit on it?” Aleks asked.

“No, but I know who does,” Magnus returned. “Let me make a call.”

Magnus stepped out of the kitchen and I used the opportunity to pull Aleks to me and kiss him deeply. He moaned under the onslaught and then tried to crawl into my lap. Someone clearing their throat had us separating.

Dante was standing in the kitchen, his hard eyes on us. “Aleks, I think we need to talk about some rules when it comes to having your… friend… over.”

“Boyfriend,” Aleks slowly corrected as he eyed his brother suspiciously. I was glad that there was nothing meek or nervous in his manner. I also liked that he was still touching me.

“Like maybe when you have a friend in your bedroom, you leave the door open.”

“Do you mean all my friends, like Caleb and Remy, or my naked sex friends, like Vaughn?”

I had to give Aleks credit because his timing was stellar. Dante had just taken a sip of coffee when Aleks said the words “naked sex.” Dante choked and then spit out the hot coffee. “Because I closed the door when Vaughn and I got home the first night. We were naked but we were too tired for sex.”

I laughed as Dante glared at his brother. Whatever the pair had talked about the night before seemed to have given Aleks a newfound sense of freedom. He began trailing his fingers up and down my arm as he continued with, “So I should leave the door open when Vaughn and I want to have naked sex, but close it all the other times?”

“One trickster rabbit cereal coming up,” Magnus announced as he returned to the kitchen. He patted Dante’s back. “What’s got you looking so surly this morning, MawMaw?” he asked.

Dante ignored the nickname and went to clean up the coffee he’d spit out. “I was just telling your future brother-in-law that we need to come up with a few ground rules if his fri—”

“Boyfriend,” Aleks smoothly interjected.

“…if his boyfriend” – Dante swallowed as if the word left a bad taste in his mouth – “is going to be staying with us.”

“What kind of rules?” Magnus asked. He winked at me and Aleks from behind Dante’s back.

“Like no more closing his door when he and Vaughn are in there,” Dante said, sounding proud of himself for how reasonable he’d made the request sound.

“I think that’s actually a good idea,” Magnus said.

“You do?” Dante asked in surprise as he watched his fiancé pull out a container of milk from the fridge, then go search for some bowls and spoons.