“Oh, shut up, Cosima, you have no idea what this is like! How…how humiliated I feel. Every person in New York knows that Daniel left me for my little sister. She orchestrated the total and utter devastation of my life as I knew it!” Her face was expressionless in its grief and rage. “Little Miss Beautiful, no one would ever leave you, would they? Oh, wait…” Her smile was razor thin and cut deep into the tender flesh of my heart. “Someone has.”
I suddenly felt explosive with rage. It screamed through my molten blood and clawed at my throat to escape, but the look in my sister’s eyes smothered the flames and turned them into smoky sorrow.
“Grow up, big sister. Being hurt does not give you free license to be cruel. It doesn’t matter that it left your heart in tatters; it happens to the best of us. You have a choice to make, and you better do it quickly because if you keep on keeping on the way you have since Sin left you, you won’t have anyone left to bitch to.” I disentangled my hand from hers and turned my head. “Now, could you please leave? I’m exhausted.”
She hesitated for a long moment before standing up, planting a kiss on my forehead, and leaving. One week later, during my last night in the city, she had shown up at Giselle and Sinclair’s housewarming party to throw a tantrum about their surprise pregnancy.
I supposed, unhappily, that she had made a choice about what kind of victim she wanted to be.
One who remained a victim forever.
I was stirred out of my reverie by the sound of voices downstairs and a heavy tread on the creaking wooden stairs. A moment later, the door opened on my Alexander, his hair wind tousled into rows of flaxen wheat, his silver eyes glittering with victory.
“We found him,” he told me with cold triumph that felt like a trophy tossed between us. He closed the door and went to me, crawling over my prone body on his hands and knees so he loomed over me. “We found the bastard who shot you, and my beauty, we killed him.”
“I told you, I don’t need you to go on a killing spree for me,” I reminded him even though the thrill of knowing the man who had tried to kill me was gone made my heart palpitate.
“I did terrible things to steal your love. Do you think I won’t commit crimes even more atrocious to win you back?” he asked, with such solemnity it felt like a preacher asked me to disavow a lesson from God.
“No,” I said honestly and watched him smile. “And I can’t say I don’t love you for that.”
His joy skittered over me like an electric current, rippling gooseflesh across my skin. I wrapped my arms and legs around him to pull him down on top of me and smiled in his face.
“Thank you,” I breathed against his lips because I sealed my gratitude with a long, lingering kiss.
He took control of the embrace, hauling me even tighter against his body, his tongue plundering my mouth until I whimpered.
“One less evil against us,” I said breathlessly when he pulled away.
My fingers played in the hair over his temple, stroking over the flecks of silver there that made him look deliciously distinguished. He smelled of cold, clean air and just a hint of his forestry scent. I pressed my nose to his throat to get closer to the scent.
He was curiously still against me for a heartbeat before he tipped his head to ask quietly in my ear, “If all the monsters were slayed and all the obstacles were removed and the only thing left was you and me, would you stay?”
“Would you ask me to?” I countered even as my heart began to beat so forcibly I wondered if it would crack a rib.
“Yes,” he said simply as if it was obvious.
“Why?”
“Would you stay?” he reinforced with a gritted kind of determination as if he couldn’t begin to answer for his motivation unless I responded first.
“I’d need a reason.”
I didn’t. The reason was him; it always had been. I’d learned my reason for living was me. No one could take my life from me again unless I let them. But my reason for happiness? That was answered by the man on top of me, every diamond hard, brilliant cut, multifaceted inch of him.
He spoke slowly, each word had weight and substance like a physical thing polished and placed before me, a jeweled necklace of a phrase. “Would you stay…if I told you I love you?”
Every molecule of my being stopped functioning. My breath evaporated in my lungs, my heart calcified and ceased to beat, my body went numb with shock.
“I thought you didn’t have a heart to love me with?” I asked carefully because this could very well be too good to be true.