Scarred Regrets (Bellandi Crime Syndicate 5)

Six months later

Scar held my gaze as the buzz of tattoo guns worked in tandem. Even from his place in the chair right next to me, even knowing the most recent ink he’d added to his collection, the distance felt too great.

All I wanted was for him to be beside me, for him to breathe the air I breathed.

That feeling had never lessened; it had never stopped or paused or diminished. If anything, it grew every day as our relationship settled. As the mundane routine of a normal life became our reality, with the violence of the past behind us.

This man who had killed my mother had somehow become my very reason for living.

For creating a life with him so beautiful I could never have imagined it in my wildest dreams.

Scar stretched across the distance between us, touching his free hand to the butterflies that fluttered up my forearm. It had taken over a year for me to be willing to mark my skin with something permanent for him in the same way he had me, but the words Scar’s Butterfly were hidden in the details of the butterflies’ wings.

I wouldn’t let Darragh take that from me, the memory of his knife cutting through my skin like something from another life.

One that had never been mine.

Every time I looked at the butterflies on the side of his neck, my heart fluttered. Every time I saw my mark on his skin, it gave me a sense of pure satisfaction and pleasure that I wanted Scar to have too.

So I’d marked my skin with his name, with who I was to him permanently, claiming him as my husband and the father to the children we’d adopted and loved in the way we’d both needed as children.

He was my everything.

“Now you’ll have your heart on your own body,” I said, teasing him as his dark eyes lit with something so agonizingly sweet that tears stung my eyes.

“Cuore mio, my heart will always exist only inside of you. It would cease to exist without you,” he murmured, squeezing his fingers around my forearm. “You saved me just as much as I did you.”

I smiled, knowing the words were true. I may not have pulled him off a railing and stopped him from plunging to his death, but he’d been a hollow shell of the man he’d proven to be, disbelieving the love he’d been capable of giving.

He just needed someone to open him up to it again.

I sniffled, turning my attention down to the newest tattoo on my skin. Ada stared intently down at the ink she put onto the back of my hand, wiping the excess away so she could make sure it was all even. The half a heart was done in grayscale, the jagged lines of the broken edge lining up with the skin where I would bend back my thumb.

Scar sat in his chair next to mine, the male tattoo artist finishing up the matching one on his hand as the two set down their tattoo guns in tandem.

My husband stood from his chair and held out a hand to help me from my seat. He pulled me into his arms, bending his thumb into the palm on his left hand. He held it in front of me as I raised my right hand, mimicking the positioning and touching it to his.

All the jagged edges fit together seamlessly, an echo of the way our souls matched.

Two halves.

One whole.

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