The man who had once been my uncle and then my sworn enemy stared at me for a long moment with my wife’s hand on his face as if to anchor him.
“I did not imagine you would. You are both welcome in my home, Alexander, if you should wish it.”
I looked down at the woman in my arms, at the sweet curve of her face and the thick fan of her lashes resting on her steep cheeks, and I knew I would do anything to make her safe and happy. Even if it meant reconciling with a man I’d hated for over a decade.
“Fine. I will be there, but only when I am not out hunting down di Carlo’s men,” I told him.
Dante appeared in the doorway, haggard but taut with his own fury. “Hunting sounds perfect to me.”
Cosima
I woke up alone with an immediate sense of where I was even though I had been struggling for weeks with memory loss and crippling headaches that robbed me of all my senses. My belly was to the bed, my legs and arms akimbo over the large mattress and sparingly covered by a white linen sheet. I moved my masses of hair out of my face, lifting my head to gaze out the French doors to the little balcony off my bedroom at my father’s house in Niagara county. The sky was upholstered in grey suede clouds rubbed dark and light across the horizon so that only cool, weak light filtered through and cast the treed landscape in watery winter pastels.
My body still ached, and my brain still scrambled, but after six weeks of convalescing, I was almost as good as new. It was the gunshot wound to my head that caused me the most trouble, but the dull ache in my shoulder and left side were lessening every day.
I was ready for reality again.
Upstate New York was beautiful, and spending unadulterated time with my father was a blessing I would never take for granted. We went for long walks in the crisp air, cooked together, ate together, and read together on his big, cushy red couch before the fire. It was idyllic.
But it was not my life, and I was growing tired of the mundanity.
Alexander and Dante both came and left as they pleased, gone more often than not to take out the men involved in my shooting and to provide testimony in the trails of the more prolific Order members.
I missed them, but more than that, I wanted to help them.
It wasn’t good for my spirit to be locked up in a house like a princess in a tower, unable to help those who fought to save her.
I was no princess.
I was a fucking warrior, and I wanted revenge just as much as they did.
Also, Alexander hadn’t fucked me hard in weeks.
I understood why. The doctors hadn’t given me the okay for intercourse until ten days before, and while he had made me love to whenever he was there, he hadn’t been my Master since before the shooting.
I needed it. I needed his stern, calculating hands to leash my restless soul and bring me some fleeting degree of peace.
I sighed heavily, flipping onto my back to stare at the ceiling, remembering the last conversation I had with Elena before Alexander took me away to Salvatore’s.
The only person I had really said goodbye to before disappearing was Giselle, and only then because I lived with her, and due to her taboo relationship with Sinclair, which came to light while I was still in the hospital, I thought she would understand.
She did. She would not throw stones at glass houses when she herself had been involved in an affair with her sister’s boyfriend and was now pregnant with his child.
Elena, on the other hand, had not been pleased to learn more about my relationship with Alexander.
“I just don’t understand,” she’d argued from my hospital bedside, perched in an ugly plastic chair that she sat in as if it were a throne. “How could you marry a man and not tell any of us…not tell me?”
I understood her sadness. Of all my siblings, Elena was the closest only to me. This was her doing. She chafed against Sebastian’s passionate, bold nature and secretly resented him for growing up a man in our misogynistic land and therefore having more opportunities than the rest of us. Her relationship with Giselle, of course, was a frayed wire that worked only to electrocute anyone who dared to trifle with it.
My eldest sister was a difficult woman, but I had found that it was the most difficult women who were the greatest to know. She was strong and fierce in the face of adversity, a mother bear with her cub, and smart enough to outmaneuver even the craftiest of foes. She was beautiful, as cultivated and classy as a polished diamond, and just as cold. Elena had taught me so many things over the years, like how to be a strong woman, but also, how not to be. She had allowed her past traumas to calcify her heart, and as a result, she had no room in her soul for someone new or different.