Page 90 of Silent Schemes

But the words won't come.

Not yet. Not until I have a plan that doesn't end in blood.

"I love you," I say instead, the first time I've said it out loud. "That's what I'm not telling you. I love you, and it's going to get us both killed."

He goes still, then his hands are in my hair, his mouth on mine, and we're falling apart and coming together all at once.

When he finally pulls back, his eyes are dark with something that might be hope or might be resignation.

"I love you too," he says. "God help us both."

That night, lying in his bed, I feel it again—that phantom pressure in my stomach.

Not movement, not yet, but promise.

In a few weeks, I'll start showing.

The secret will become visible, undeniable.

Another complication in an already impossible situation.

Varrick sleeps beside me, one arm possessively around my waist, hand splayed over my stomach like he knows. But he doesn't. Can't. Not yet.

Damn this, damn this fucked up world we live in.

Will Romano is alive but hunted.

The Rosetti family are decimated but not destroyed.

And I'm carrying the future Bane king while planning for an ending that gets darker every day.

I watch Varrick sleep, memorizing the peace on his face that only comes in these unconscious moments.

My fingers trace the scar on his chest, the one from someone who claimed to love him.

I understand that person now.

Sometimes love means leaving.

Sometimes it means betraying everything to keep someone safe.

"I'm sorry," I whisper to the darkness, to him, to the baby who doesn't know its mother is a killer and its father is marked for death. "I'm sorry for what I'll have to do."

Because I will have to do something.

My father won't accept failure.

He'll come for me, for Maya, for everyone I care about.

And when he does, I'll have to make a choice that saves the most lives, even if it damns my soul.

The baby doesn't move—can't yet—but I pretend I feel it anyway.

A flutter of hope in all this darkness.

A reason to find a solution that doesn't end in blood.

But I'm Sienna Cross and everything I touch ends in blood.