We locked eyes for a moment over Cosima’s prone, broken body, bonding over our dual protectiveness, and our combined rage and need for vengeance.
“Where were you when this happened?” he asked, and it wasn’t a reprimand, just curiosity.
“I confronted Noel,” I admitted. “Once again, I think he planned this exactly right so that I would be gone, and she would be vulnerable. Though,” I added in a voice like dry ice, “Dante was meant to be watching out for her.”
Tore winced as he drew Cosima’s hand to his face, pressing it to his cheek and closing his eyes. “This is my fault. I called Dante to a different project, something that needed doing for our organization. I didn’t realize…”
I wanted to keep the wrath I felt toward Dante locked up in a pin, wild and rabid, but I knew in the same way I knew Cosima was my reason for living that Dante would never let any harm come to her if he could help it. He must have had a reason for leaving her, one I would be sure to find out quickly.
“The Order is done,” I told Salvatore, needing him on my side, our side, more than ever. “But Noel is still locked up at Pearl Hall, free to make his maneuvers. I don’t want Cosima alone for one moment until he is locked up in prison where he bloody well belongs.”
Our eyes clashed, a deal struck in the lines of our vision.
“Bene,” he agreed. “Whatever you need. In fact, may I suggest you let her convalesce with me in my home upstate? It is very private, very secure. You will not have to worry.”
“I am not leaving her.” It was so out of the question that I would have laughed if my wife hadn’t just woken from a coma and my heart wasn’t still recovering.
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.
It was tragic, and I hoped one day, she would find a way to soften, but I knew looking into her condemnatory eyes that day would not be today.
“There is a lot you don’t know, and I won’t tell you, Lena,” I tried to explain gently even though my head pounded so fiercely it was a struggle to think at all. “The only thing you really need to know is that Alexander is my husband, and…well, I love him.”
It was the first time I had said it out loud, and it felt good to feel the words perfume the air.
“Dante told me some things,” she said forebodingly. “He told me that your husband bought out Dad’s debt, so essentially, he bought you.”
A bitter little laugh escaped my lips before I could help it. “Alexander helped me pay for your education, Lena, for Giselle’s schooling, and Sebastian’s plane ticket to London. How is that a bad thing?”
“He made you into a whore,” she exclaimed, her low-lidded eyes flashing like lightning through storm clouds. “I never would have thought you’d stoop so low to get us out of Naples.”
A snarl built in my chest and escaped with my next words. “Careful, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and I love you, I do, but there are some things that cannot be forgiven. You’ve already ostracized Giselle and Sinclair. Do not do the same to me.”
My stern words deflated some of her indignation, her shoulders slumping slightly as she planted her forearms in the bed to lean over me.
“I just worry about you, my Cosi,” she said in a soft, sad voice that rubbed against my skin like wet velvet. “I don’t understand your life, and it worries me. You showed up at Thanksgiving dinner with welts on your wrists fr
om this man, and now you’ve been shot three times because of some mess he’s embroiled you in.”
“You judge me because you don’t understand,” I told her calmly.
She scoffed. “It’s not a difficult situation to grasp, Cosima. The man bought you, beat you, brutalized you, and embroiled you in an international mess that got you shot in the fucking head.”
I turned my head, my gaze searching for anything that wasn’t her and wasn’t white, latching onto a sliver of cerulean blue sky barely visible between skyscrapers. The cheap pillowcase was rough against my cheek and smelled like antiseptic.
Unbidden, I thought of the silk sheets on my bed at Pearl Hall, the pearlescent wallpaper that glowed in the filtered British light like the inside of an oyster shell, and the rich gold antique furniture. It was opulent and rich, a vivid setting for the riotous love I’d found within those walls.
I blinked and the memory dissipated, leaving in its place that stark room and the pinched face of my horrified sister.
I sighed gustily. “If you aren’t going to try to empathise or understand, I won’t bother explaining myself to you, Elena.”
“How can I understand something like this? The man only caused you pain, Cosima. What could there possibly be to love about that?”
“Maybe I like the pain. Maybe I’m the type of woman who responds to calculated cruelty and animal savagery more than pretty romance and sweet platitudes. Maybe I like the kind of man most people think is a villain, and maybe I’m the kind of woman who is more dark than light.” I glared at her as I spoke, my words more Italian than English, spiced with the heat of my homeland and my lifelong heartache.
I was tired of clarifying my kinks and predilections to myself. There was no way I was going to sit idly by while my sister, who knew next to nothing about the circumstances of my life, cast judgment against me.
Elena’s face was twisted tight at the lips, a bulging cap on the emotions clogging her pores.
“Am I the only one in this family not screwed up with perversion?” she asked, her words pointed, but her delivery soft as if she couldn’t find the conviction to truly condemn us anymore.
My rage allayed into tender pity. I snaked my hand across the abrasive white sheets and opened my palm for her. Tentatively, biting her lip as if she was about to surrender to her moral enemy, Elena wrapped her fingers in mine.
She had soft hands, perfectly manicured and painted in the deep, almost purple red of Italian chianti. There were two rings, one on each hand, the first a simple gold and amethyst band Sinclair had given her for their first anniversary and the second, an onyx and pearl combination I’d given her last year at her birthday.
I thumbed the gold band and looked up at her, my face suffused with a love so great it made my eyes tear. “Lena, cara, I know you’ve been through so much in the past few months. I know how heartbroken you are over Sinclair and Giselle’s relationship. I know because I’ve been heartbroken for four years while I lived apart from Alexander. I know because in some ways, even though we’re back together, the scars of that heartbreak will never fade. But please, cara mia, do not let this hurt consume your life. Let in the light. Discover someone new to love. You deserve happiness, but you need to find it because goodness rarely just falls in someone’s lap.”
“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.
Maybe he was just manipulating me, maybe he needed to use me again for some nefarious purpose.
Of maybe, just maybe, this was real.
His g
oodness since his return to my life was not a ruse, but a promise of only more goodness to come.
I held my breath as the dreams I’d dreamed in vapor began to solidify in front of me.
Alexander’s expression was one I had never seen before, his hard features softened like melting butter under the heat of burning passion in his molten metal eyes. The fingers of one hand whispered across my jaw and then cupped my throat.
“It appears I did all along. It was just locked away from me, and the only person who could access it was you.”
Tears sprang to my eyes and spilled over, a waterfall breaking through a yearlong dam. I wanted to speak, but my emotions were too big, swelling in my throat and robbing me of a voice.
Instead, I mouthed, “I love you.”
He didn’t smile as I thought he would. If anything, his expression grew tighter, filled with a tension I couldn’t understand. “I know I’m not worthy of you. You deserve so much more than I’ve given you, that I ever could give, but I promise to try to earn your love and devotion every day for the rest of our lives if you’ll let me.”
“I’m your slave,” I told him on a wet laugh. “Where else would I rather be than at your side?”
“My slave, my topolina, my countess, my wife.” He said each epitaph like a butler announcing royalty to the room, as if each title was priceless.
I realized, to him, to me, they were.
“You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said because it hurt me to know he didn’t believe himself worthy of my love when he was the only person I could ever dream of giving my heart to.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was the harbinger of your doom.”
“No. I know our story might seem black and white, you the villain and me the victim, but it isn’t so simple. Before you, I had no prospects. I had a meager career as a model that provided just enough for my family to get us through with the bare minimum of provisions. I was a tool and a martyr. I had no thoughts or feelings for myself. I was, as you said, a queen who was made to think she was only a pawn. Then you came in your black chariot and pulled me into the shadows of the underworld, and I came alive.”
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