Page 11

Chapter eight

We Lost Everything

Gia

I didn’t hate being a wife. I didn’t anticipate Cillian being an attentive husband. When I was too sore and tired to do my “wifely duties”, he picked me up, and placed me in a warm bath. Sitting in the clawfoot tub, he held me up above the bubbles as he tenderly cleaned my skin, and washed my hair.

He took his role as a husband seriously, and with far more devotion than I would have guessed.

It was almost painful, how much his attention softened every part of me.

How could I keep my defenses up? How could I stick with the plan? The fate that was laid out for me the moment my father’s severed head was thrown at our feet all those years ago?

Why did the son of my enemy have to be so human? He wasn’t a reptile. He wasn’t cold blooded.

He was warm and soft. His fingers, his lips… he wielded with a lethality more damning than those iron blades they carried with them.

He kept me in a lusty trance.

I thought that I had missed Christmas until he rolled out of bed, stretched, and cracked his muscular back.

“Pick a dress, love,” he whispered over his shoulder. “We’re having Christmas in my parents’ suite. Your mum will be there.”

His naked body was something to behold. Like a Michelangelo sculpture, but far more well-endowed.

I looked at my hands and saw the dried blood beneath my fingernails. Had I done that? I must have.

My body heated at the memory of holding on to him. Of throwing my arms around his back and clawing to get closer and closer. I had marked him with my claws while he had marked me with his teeth. I was a hawk, and he was the serpent, and we clashed even when intertwined.

“Darling?” He looked at me with amusement. “Did you hear me?”

I blushed. “I’m sorry, what?”

His face was suddenly serious, as a storm brewed in his eyes. Not like the one I had grown used to. It was… something else.

“Is there someone else we should be inviting on your behalf?” he asked, leaning down, until his arms boxed me into the mattress. “Another family member, perhaps? A close friend?”

I shook my head, sure that there was definitely a right and wrong answer to his question.

“Just my mother,” I whispered. That strange uneasiness coiled around me again. One that had been absent over the last two days of what I could call a honeymoon. “She’ll probably bring her staff with her, but that’s it.”

“Her staff?”

“Yeah,” I blurted out, needing to say something— anything —that could burst the bubble of this unease. “She might bring her housekeeper, Loretta. And, of course, Marco, her main bodyguard.”

“Marco?” He narrowed his eyes. Was Marco the wrong answer? “Her… bodyguard?”

“Yes. Marco Rossini.” Why did I give his full name? I wasn’t sure. “His mother, Loretta, has stood by my mother for decades. Since before I was born. So, naturally, he was hired later. Especially since…”

Fuck. I was talking too much.

It was as though the screams of passion had opened the floodgates, and the dam was broken. I couldn’t hold back the secrets I needed to against the man who increasingly didn’t feel like my enemy.

“Since we lost everything.” I finally finished because it was too late to take back.

When they killed my grandfather, and the family lost its standing, we were abandoned.

Everyone went underground or disavowed the Durantes.

Everyone except for Loretta Rossini and her family, who stood by.

I grew up alone, without friends and family.

Alone, except for Marco,the only person my age who would look at me without that combination of fear and disdain.

Anyone with the name Durante had become the third rail.

“No one else was willing to be associated with us,” I said, feeling every bit the defeated prisoner that I really was.

“Of course.” Cillian traced his thumb against my chin and lifted my face up to meet his. “Is that all I need to know?”

My heart skipped a beat. His eyes, no matter his expression, always stole my breath.