And fuck me, but I did.
So many years of lying and recrimination for my wavering emotions, and I was still exactly where I had been the day I left Pearl Hall in a bloodstained wedding dress.
Inevitably and eternally in love with Alexander.
The knowledge settled over me just as his arms did, warm and secure. I thought of how he’d taken twenty-five lashings for me, of how he’d married me against the Order’s rules, and how he’d watched over me like some dark guardian angel for the four years of our separation.
I thought of all the ways the man without a heart loved me back.
My face tipped up so I could look into his polished silver eyes and his perfectly symmetrical, utterly gorgeous face, and I knew I would never feel more myself or more at home than I would exactly where I was at that moment, in his arms.
“Not evil,” I whispered to him, pressing my hand to his throat so I could cup his pulse. “Just damaged.”
I watched as his face went soft, as the hardest man I’d ever met exposed the hidden, tender heart of him, and I forgot Dante was in the room. I even forgot to breathe.
He leaned down to press a kiss to my mouth and then sharply bite my lower lip. “I was born and made of monsters. Nothing can change that.”
“Nothing, but you,” I stressed, gripping him tighter. “And you want to, don’t you? You have been already.”
“I have.” He smiled slightly, but his eyes were still haunted. “Nothing will really be changed until the rest of them are taken care of.”
“You’re trying to take down the Order?” I asked, shocked despite the clues he’d already given me.
The idea of Alexander going after the most powerful scion in Britain made me hot with delight and cold with anxiety. Even though I’d somewhat foolishly decided to take them on myself, I didn’t like the idea of Alexander doing the same. He was too embroiled in their world to make a clean exit, and I worried what the ramifications of his decision to end them would mean for him.
“Why do you think I stayed away, little mouse?” he asked with an arched brow. “Why do you think I ended things so brutally with you in Milan?”
“To keep me safe.”
God, it hurt how obvious the truth was, how painfully it ripped down my spine like teeth opening a raw wound. Of course, he would have been protecting me because that was what he had strived to do almost from the outset.
Use me, yes, but only for his own pleasure, his own ends.
The idea of someone else touching me or manipulating me had always driven him mad with possessive fury.
“You expect me to believe you’ve turned against everything you’ve ever known?” Dante demanded, stepping forward into our space, using his sheer mass to threaten Alexander to tell the truth.
This wasn’t about me. This anger and aggression stemmed like the poisoned roots of a dead tree from the brothers’ own lasting toxic relationship long before they’d met me. This was about Dante disbelieving his brother could ever be anything other than his enemy because that was what they seemed born to be.
Alexander settled Dante with a long, hard glare that shackled him where he stood. “Quite frankly, I don’t give one royal fuck what you believe. The only concern I have involving you at the moment is why the fuck you haven’t left Cosima’s apartment yet. You clearly aren’t needed, and from now on, you won’t be ever again.”
The words landed as they were intended to, more brutal than the physical blows he had landed on Dante’s person. My handsome friend flinched with their impact, his open face closing like an agitated anemone. His eyes cut to me, searching for solace.
I bit my lip because I didn’t know how to give it to him without upsetting the new balance I’d found with Xan. Without giving Dante hope when there was none.
He read into my hesitation, and in minute ways—a slump of his wide shoulders, a crease in his red mouth, a tightening of the skin beside his eyes—Dante shut down. I watched as he disassembled his emotions with painful calculation because he was an open man unused to hiding how he felt, and I hated that I was in the position to decide between two men I loved in such very different but elemental ways.
“Dante, bello, please, I’m not asking you to trust Xan, and I’m not asking you to help us with this, but if he really is taking down the Order and Noel, you have to know that I need to help him. Not just for Xan, but for me.”
I tried to step out of Alexander’s arms, but he wouldn’t have it, and a part of me understood why. This was a stand-off about many things, and one of them was me.