And I did.
I slept through the car ride home and through Xan carrying me into the building up to my apartment. I slept when he took off my slinky dress and replaced it with his button-up, and I only woke when I heard a raised voice in the living room.
I froze immediately, then slunk out of bed and crept to the door to peek out, seeing Dante pacing powerfully back and forth in the kitchen, an agitated panther to Xan’s lounging, regal lion.
“You aren’t good for her, and you fucking know it,” Dante was saying. “You say you’ve changed, but if you were suddenly the better man you claim, you wouldn’t be here endangering her like this.”
“I didn’t say I was a good man,” Alexander retorted drily, swirling his whiskey in his glass. “I said I had changed for the better.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“For who?” Xan challenged idly. “For Cosima or for you?”
There was a percussion beat of silence.
“For her.”
“No, not for Cosima. You understand this even if you don’t want to, but Cosima is drawn to the dark. Those things which make me less like a hero and more like a villain, she is entranced by like a moth to a flame. As long as I don’t let her burn up, there is not harm for her in my badness, only lust and passion and connection.”
“Armchair psychologist now?”
“I believe that is you, Edward. It’s hard to believe you are the same man with a master’s degree in behavioral psychology from Oxford, isn’t it? Tell me, does that degree help you manipulate your Made Men?”
Ice and fire.
Alexander and Dante.
One wasn’t exactly better than the other, but they were both formidable, both with egregious flaws and defining strengths.
I was trapped in Alexander’s icy embrace, and I was happy there, but I could understand the allure of the other’s heat, especially as he fought for me.
Going up against Alexander was not for the weak hearted.
Dante sighed loudly, raking his hands through his thick hair so that it clumped into wavy ropes over his skull. “Tore and I could give that to her in small measures. She was happy enough without you.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
I swallowed hard at the quiet pride in Xan’s voice. He had missed me too, and that small thought opened a wealth of treasure in my chest. It felt monumental that he should have missed me all that time just as intolerably as I’d missed him.
“You know,” he continued conversationally, “I knew you’d convinced her to move to America years ago. I had these vivid dreams about finding you and ripping you apart with my bare hands…the only reason I didn’t was because my sources told me how much she relied on you, how much you had done and continued to do for her.”
There was another vibrating pause.
“Considering that and the fact that I now know for certain Salvatore did not murder Mum, I’m still loathe to do so, but I must say…thank you.” I watched Xan tip his glass to his lips and drain the liquid. “Thank you for taking care of her when I couldn’t. For keeping her living as much as you could when I wasn’t there to take care of her.”
Dante seemed struck dumb by Xan’s words, even more so than I was mouth agape crouching at the door to my bedroom. He was suspended in the amber of his brother’s unusual gratitude, his big body lax but utterly still, his eyes glazed as his mind worked furiously behind them.
Finally, he reanimated, and he did so to look at Xan from under lowered lids and nod once, firmly, slowly. “I didn’t do it for you, and I would do it again, forever. The thanks, though…it’s appreciated.”
Alexander nodded once in return, noble in his graciousness.
I loved him so vividly at that moment that even the colours in the dark seemed brighter than ever before.
“You love her,” he said, and it was not quite a question, but still, Dante hesitated and then responded.
“I do. Not exactly the way you worry about. Though I have to say, it’s hard to look at a woman like Cosima and not covet her, let alone know a woman like her so filled with love and light despite her dark past and not want to fight every day to be worthy of some significant part in her life.”
I fell back to my bottom on the ground, rocked by his words.
“I told her once,” my husband said softly with a tiny smile tucked into the crease of his left cheek. “For the first time in my life, she made me feel like a hero, instead of a villain. She does that to people, makes them feel ten feet taller.”
“You love her,” Dante said, the words lined with bitterness. “You don’t deserve her, but seeing as she obviously loves you back, I guess I’ll have to live with it.”