He wasn’t guilty, of course.
I’d been the one to kill Giuseppe di Carlo.
But after years of living under the influence of the Order, I knew how powerful manipulation could be, and right now? The public wanted Dante to go down for these crimes.
“I won’t let it happen, my beauty,” Alexander swore, leaning down into my ear to whisper the words there like a prayer. “I will go to the ends of the earth to make sure he does not suffer any more for us.”
I smiled thinly at him but took his hands in mine for comfort and rubbed the golden band on his ring finger. “You once told me that not everyone deserves a happy ending. Can you honestly say we do? That the brother you hated for the last two decades does?”
He tipped my chin with his knuckle and fused his gaze to mine. “If anyone deserves a happy ending, it is the people who suffer while finding it. I promise you, wife, this too will pass, and one day soon, we’ll all be drinking together and reminiscing about this exact moment. Do you believe your husband?”
I looked into the eyes I’d memorized the first time I’d seen them in a back alley in Milano, the ones that had been waiting for me when I woke up for the first time in Pearl Hall’s ballroom, and I thought about how he had promised me both times that he would be there waiting for me.
He was not a man who gave up, no matter the circumstances, and I knew this was just one more obstacle for him to cut his teeth on.
He was the hero of my story, but as any good reader knows, the hero would always become a villain if his loved ones were threatened.
And Alexander was all too willing to go to war for his brother and his wife.
“I believe you,” I told him.
And even though it took years and twisted turns we never could have predicted, in the end, I was right to.
Two years later.
I had never been in so much pain before. Not in my entire life.
God only knew that was saying something.
My entire body felt like a building burning down, the seams aching to hold up the increasing weight of walls as it threatened to cave in, the wood sweating from the heat as it rose higher and higher.
It was pure agony.
But I gloried in it.
Not because my Master was using one of his many wicked toys to draw whimpers and sighs from me. Though he was, in essence, also the reason for this pain.
But because I was sweating and heaving and splitting apart at the seams between my thighs to give birth to the baby we’d made together.
“Why in the bloody hell is she in so much pain, Doctor?” my husband snarled at the country’s most renowned obstetrician. His handsome face was screwed up tight, his skin red with the force of bottling up all his considerable rage.
It went without saying that after everything we’d been through together, Alexander didn’t like to see me hurt.
“This is a completely natural process, your Grace,” Dr. Reinhardt promised, totally unfazed by the large, angry man scowling at him from my bedside. “Your wife is doing amazingly well considering the size of the baby.”
This placated him slightly. It pleased some manly sensibility in my husband to know that he had produced a big, healthy baby, and more, that I was doing so well under stress.
Praising me was the quickest way to get on Alexander’s good side.
As long as that praise was platonic.
Even then, if it was from a man who was unattached or in any way handsome, he might make a point to threaten him as a friendly reminder that I was, and always would be, his.
Pain ripped through my groin and up my spin to resonate in my brain like a radioactive strike.
Alexander cursed bloody murder at the guttural groan that sprang from my ravaged throat, but he took up his position by my side once more and let me grip his hand so hard his joints ground together in protest.
“You are so beautiful,” he told me in a broken voice as he leaned over to press his forehead against my sweat-soaked one. “You are so beautiful to me. At this moment, more beautiful than any other. No one has ever been prouder or more in love with their wife than me, do you understand that, my beauty?”
I nodded, my teeth gritted so tightly I could speak as another contraction rippled through me.
“Okay, time to push, Lady Greythorn,” the doctor encouraged me from his intimate position between my legs.
It had shocked me that Alexander had allowed a male doctor to be my obstetrician, but he was the undisputed top doctor in the United Kingdom.
And he was also gay, happily married to his childhood sweetheart.