Page 177 of The Enslaved Duet

“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 forme.”

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.