“Of course, Noel is a monster.” He opened his hands, clenched them around empty air, and released them with shaking fingers. “And I did monstrous things at his bidding, in his image. I am my father’s son.”
His wry twisted lips, self-depreciating and full of personal loathing, sliced my heart into ribbons. God, but this beautiful man thought he was uglier than his demons, and it broke my fucking heart.
I went to him before I could even think to curb the impulse, my arms slipping under his suit to press him so hard into my body it was as if I sought to absorb him into myself. Maybe my love would filter his self-disgust and leave him clean, reborn, and ready to adore himself as much as I did.
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.
“Dante,” I beseeched again. “You said you wouldn’t leave me alone in this.”
His eyes sliced up to his brother, filled with glittering acrimony like an obsidian blade, and then back at me. I watched his fists clench and unclench as he fought with his decision.
Fear bloated under my skin like infected tissues, filling me with the uneasy belief that he might walk out my door and never again return.
“Ti voglio bene, fratello,” I told him.
I love you, brother.
Because the fractured brotherhood between Alexander and Dante might never be mended, but Dante and I would always be siblings of the heart.
He smiled thinly at me and turned to pick up his discarded gun before tucking it into the back of his waistband. His eyes were carefully void as they swept over me in Alexander’s embrace, and when he walked by me to the door, and said, “I’m sure you know by now that sometimes love is not enough,” it wrecked me just as surely as one of his bullets to my heart might have killed me.
Cosima
“If you tell me you slept with my brother, I’ll kill him.”
I was in the kitchen pouring a large glass of Glenfiddich scotch when Alexander said the words calmly, factually as if discussing the weather.
I ignored him, focusing on my task as I pulled two crystal cut tumblers out of the cabinet and filled them with three generous fingers of the amber liquor. Without offering the second glass to Alexander, I tipped the first to my lips and let the flaming liquid score a line of heat down the back of my throat. I dropped the empty one to the black granite countertop and tossed back the second before refilling one and offering one to Xan.
“Drink?” I asked slightly breathless from the burn of the alcohol.
I needed the bracing pain to settle me moments after Dante had stormed out. My stomach was cold with indecision and the fear that my Dante was gone for good. I needed the heat of the scotch to burn the feeling away, if only for a while.
Alexander stared at me through the shadows of my unlit apartment, the dark making his glower dominate his forehead like a crown of thorny anger.
“Cosima, if you slept with my brother, I promise you, I will kill him,” he repeated, this time with all the considerable force of his dominant personality and ire behind the words.
I wrung my hands together and wondered briefly if I should tell him the truth.
I had slept with Dante. Many times.
When I first moved to New York City, I was a mess of emotions barely contained by thin skin and brittle bones. I cried more than I spoke, and it took me weeks to smile.
Only Dante brought me solace, a hot shot of scotch whiskey to soothe my hollow belly, a velvet blanket wrapped around my shoulders to stave a cold even sharper than the
one I’d felt my first few weeks in Pearl Hall’s ballroom.
He held me until I slept, force-fed me, and tried everything to make me smile.
I’d substituted one Master for another, though Dante was considerably kinder and infinitely less harmful to my heart. He’d even befriended Sinclair when I’d lived with him in an attempt to rope another person into a tag team to get me out of the house and living again.
“Yes.” I looked Alexander straight in the eye as I confessed, my chin tipped high, my shoulders squared. I wouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for my need or my relationship with his brother. “I slept with him dozens of times when I first arrived, though neither of us really slept.”
Alexander’s rage perfumed the air like gasoline and hot stone. I knew he was ready to explode, to break apart into an inferno he didn’t have the right to light.
I held up one hand to stop him and willed it not to shake.
It was a wonder I was even standing after everything I’d been through as of late, so I let myself have the slight tremble in my fingers.
“I had hellacious nightmares that kept me up for hours. I’d wake up sobbing and thrashing so hard, I would have hurt myself if Dante didn’t hold me down, and even then, sometimes I’d hurt him. I cried so much I went cold, and my body trembled so hard from the shock of it I couldn’t hold still enough to fall asleep at all. He lay beside me through all of it because he knew, unlike anyone else in my life, not even my family, especially not them, that I’d been through hell and come back to the world of the living something other than fully human. Something haunted and broken and dark.”
I slanted a long, sizzling glance at Alexander, hating him at that moment the same way I had three years ago after he’d eviscerated me in Milan.
“If you want to condemn me for taking the only solace I could from the only man I could ever hope to find it in, then go ahead, but you’ll be less of a man for it.”
We stood facing off for a moment that seemed suspended in time when everything shifted profoundly, but infinitesimally from night to day. Finally, when Alexander moved toward me, I let out a heavy breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.
He reached me in three long, brutal strides and hoisted me up against his body so that my toes dangled off the floor. His mouth was on mine in the next second, his eyes open on mine as he took my mouth in a firm but searching kiss. Only when I opened the seam of my mouth for his sweeping tongue did he close his eyes and relax into the embrace, groaning into me like a man finding sweet relief.
When he pulled away, he pushed his forehead against mine, his eyes still closed as if he couldn’t bear to look at me while he confessed. “I’m a great jealous cad, so I hate the very thought of him being anything at all to you. I’ll admit it. Still, I know it’s my own fault you had to turn to him, and so, I know I must and I will live with it. Forgive me for being a brute with my anger.”
“You’re a brute in more than just your anger, Xan,” I said softly, forgiving him with my gentle tease.
His eyes flashed open, sparkling like diamonds in a velvet box. “Ah, but I won’t apologize for brutalizing you with my body. You enjoy it too much.”
The shiver that wracked my frame agreed with him before my words could.
His laughter was smoke against my face, heady and strong enough to drug me. I wanted to hear his merriment every day until I died, and I didn’t care that I knew I would have to work for it.
“What now?” I asked because I was so overwhelmed by the changes the last three days had wrought on my life that I didn’t know up from down or left from right.
I wanted to stay in this dizzying new reality forever, but I knew my life would never be as simple as that. There were still too many things in the way of our peace to relax for long.
Alexander smoothed one of his big, beautiful hands over my forehead and down the cloak of inky hair at my back. “Let me bathe you and wash away the greasy-eyed stares of the men at Club Bacchus while I explain some things to you.”
“That sounds good,” I breathed but didn’t move because I was in his arms and some panicked part of me worried what would happen if I let him go for even one moment.
His smile was slight and gentle as if he knew, and he probably did, exactly what I feared. He turned me around to face the bathroom, somehow knowing where my bedroom and en suite were in the apartment and slapped me on my bottom like a rider to his horse’s flank.
“Get going and start the bath have. I have a phone call to make before I join you.”
“Ashcroft?” I asked even as I obeyed him and walked down the short hall to my room.
“Later,” he reminded me firmly before giving me his back and walking down into the living room to take the call.
I left the lights off in my room, not eager to have Alexander’s discerning eyes on the red dressed bed that looked remarkably like my own from Pearl Hall or the overlapping pink and red carpets beneath it.
I flicked them on in my big bathroom so that I could find my St. Aubyn d’Oro oil and added it to the bathwater as it poured into the wide Jacuzzi tub. While I waited for it to fill, I stepped up to my gold mirror as I unbuttoned the top half of my shirt and looked at my tired but elated expression, trying to discern what was different in my face that made me feel truly beautiful for the first time in years.
My exposed chest was segmented by lingering rope marks, the striation pink and white like candy cane stripes against my golden skin. They looked just as edible, and for one tantalizing second, I imagined Alexander whispering his mouth across them, tracing the marks with his tongue as if they had a taste and that taste was pure, distilled submission.
And I realized what it was that made me seem so different in my reflection.
For the first time in years, my body had been satiated and my heart held hope. The winning combination set my skin to glowing gold beneath the rope marks and made my eyes as radiant as twin burning stars.
Alexander appeared in the reflection behind me, his black suited frame filling the entire doorway. Languidly, his eyes trailed down my body, taking in the ill-fit of his belted shirt on my frame and the way my hair curled in smooth loops like calligraphy against the white fabric.
“Do you know,” he asked in that muted, deep voice that could move me like none other, “that you are the most exquisite woman I have ever had the privilege of laying eyes on?”
My voice was somewhere in my belly, burning on the hot coals of my banked but growing lust. I shook my head as he walked toward me, stopping just behind my back.
His fingers reached around my shoulder to trail gently down my cheek and then wrap one by one around the long column of my throat. Only then did he step flush against me, pulling me tightly by that hand until I could feel his erection hard and dangerous as a loaded gun against my spine.
“So golden, those money eyes,” he murmured as he dipped his head to press his lips and then his teeth to my neck over my fluttering, stuttering pulse point. “Yet you are something more precious than gold. At least to me.”
I moaned softly, tilting my ass into his hard cock, my tender throat into his teeth. “Xan.”
“Mmm,” he agreed with my unspoken plea, dipping his other hand in the open material gaping at my chest so that he could run one rough fingertip over the rope marks framing my tits. “I love seeing evidence of me on your skin.”
My hips gyrated roughly back at his, my nipples beading obviously through the thin shirt as he continued to meticulously stoke my arousal. I’d just come harder than ever at Club Bacchus, and I was still ravenously greedy for more of him, from him.
His teeth closed almost painfully hard over my neck, and then he was gone; the cold air where his body used to be like knife points against my sensitised skin.
I stared at him with a frown of unsettled confusion as he moved away to test the bathwater as if we hadn’t just been about to fuck again.
“Undress and get in, my beauty. The water is ready.”
I shed the
dress shirt, holding still as it floated to the ground around me because I felt more than naked under the hot gaze of Alexander. I felt stripped down the wires, dissected and inspected like a bomb maker faced with his greatest challenge. Xan’s eyes swept over every inch of my flesh, hot and thorough as hot water, pinking my skin and heating my groin.
Only when he finished his visual inspection did he sit on the edge of the tub and offer his hand to me, silently ordering me to take it and step into the bath.
“You aren’t joining me?” I asked as my foot sank into the sting of heated water.
I’d wanted a repeat of the only other time I bathed with him, after the miscarriage when he had held me in his arms and made me feel as if I was the most precious of all his possessions. When Alexander smiled a small, knowing grin, I ducked behind the curtain of my hair to hide my embarrassment and slid into the water, dunking my head under the bubbles so that my stuttering heartbeat was all I could hear.
When I breached the surface, he was waiting for me. His fingers pinched my wet chin so that he could tip my gaze to his stone somber eyes.
“I’m going to tend to you while I explain some necessary things to you. If I were to get into the tub with you, I fear I wouldn’t have the strength to focus on the words instead of our bodies.”
A hot stone of desire wedged itself in my throat. I swallowed thickly before asking, “Is that a bad thing? I’ve missed the way you touch me.”
“I’m touching you now,” he said, emphasizing his point by sliding his fingers from my chin up my sloping jawline and into the hair over my ear. His other hand moved between my breasts, up the sharp jut of my collarbones to lightly collar my throat. “I don’t have to hurt you to show you how much I own you, my beauty. I own you with every touch of my hand and press of my lips. I own you with every word we exchange and every breath we take, even when you aren’t near.” His fingers tightened possessively. “How does it feel when I do this?”
“Like I’m yours.” I gasped lightly through the obstruction around my neck.
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