Page 225 of The Enslaved Duet

Dante smiled at me and trailed his big fingers in the marks I’d left there.

“I love you,” I shouted so loudly I could feel the vibration of it in my fingers on the glass.

“Ti amo,” Dante mouthed.

And then the car was moving slow, then faster, too fast for my churning legs to keep up with, and I was falling to the ground as my fingers lost their connection to the glass. I landed hard on my hip but didn’t feel it through the pain radiating from my heart, eviscerating my body like a nuclear weapon.

“Oh God,Dio mio,” I chanted into my knees as I brought them to my chest and watered them with my tears. “He’s going to jail because of me.”

Alexander and Tore were on me the next moment. My father sat behind me, cradling me between his legs, his hands tenderly moving the hair off my face to lay my head against his chest. My husband moved in front of me, sliding my legs over his so only a small diamond of space was between our pelvises, and his face was in mine, his hands rubbing over my cold, shivering arms.

“Hush, my beauty, hush,” he encouraged me gently, his eyes on me, inside me, sealing up my gaping wounds with careful stitches and soothing caresses. “Hush, and trust me now, wife. If it’s the last thing I do, we will end Noel for orchestrating this, and we will get Dante out of jail and home where he belongs.”

“With us,” I declared.

He hesitated, but only to blink slowly and flash his eyes at me, showing how they turned from sorrowful smoke to absolute stone. “Yes. Home with us.”

I sank deep into the bracketed embrace of my father and my husband and allowed myself to believe their strength was enough to bring Dante back to me.

I went alone to Metropolitan Correction Center two days later. Alexander, Tore, and even Sebastian, when he found out, had wanted to accompany me, but I couldn’t let them. This was about Dante and me. I owed it to him to face his reality without the shield of the men in my life who loved me. I wanted to be exposed as a raw nerve when I went to him, as if my vulnerability would make the sacrifice that much more beautiful.

I didn’t know about that, but when I saw him behind the glass in the prison they were keeping him in until further notice, I felt every single atom in my body keen with pain like the sorrowful howl of a wolf. He was so large, so beautiful and trapped like a magnificent wild animal in an enclosure too small and ill-equipped to handle him. Grief and rage burned in my hollow chest as I locked eyes on him through the plexiglass and picked up the plastic phone to speak with him, but I had vowed before I arrived that I wouldn’t cry in front of him.

Dante hated to see me cry.

I pressed my fingertips to the glass, needing to feel at least the heat of him through the blockade to reassure myself the only way I knew how, through some kind of physical connection.

His hand was over mine through the partition in less time than it took for my heart to turn over in my chest.

“Dante,” I said through the crackling phone line. “Mio bello Dante.”

There was a wealth of sorrow and regret in those few words, but I didn’t know how to transcribe them in any other way than by saying his chosen name. In some ways, this was the life Dante had chosen for himself when he turned his back on Edward Davenport to be Dante Salvatore, from a lord of the realm to acapoin an Italian crime outfit. In other ways, it was grossly unfair.

I’d been the one to kill Giuseppe.

The memory of pulling the trigger lingered in my finger like scar tissue, heavy and misshapen under my skin.

I remembered the way my heartbeat had slowed, so contrary to the way I would have imagined it churning hot, panicked blood through my veins. It slowed and my vision stung, then went clear as if wiped with Windex. Nothing existed in my body, no thought save one, one golden impulse that overwrote everything else.

Di Carlo was threatening the two men who had been the centers of my universe for the last five years.

Killing him wasn’t even a question.

Yet now, so many weeks after the fact, I found myself doubting my decision. If I hadn’t killed di Carlo, what might have happened?

Would Dante be free?

“Don’t do that.” His rumbling voice cut through my thoughts, and when I looked up at him, it was to see an expression on his face I’d never seen before. He was angry with me. Some small part of me was appeased by his anger. I wanted to be punished for my actions, and previously, I’d had no one who wanted to castigate me for them. “Don’t you dare think that way, Cosima Lombardi Davenport. You did what you had to do in order to get out of an impossible situation. You soiled your hands, your very fuckingsoul, to save me. If you self-flagellate yourself for that the rest of your life, what was the point of your sacrifice in the first place?”

My lips twisted to echo the wry grin I’d often seen on Xan’s face when someone dared to reprimand him, and he couldn’t argue their point. “While I see your point, it’s only because I was going to say the same thing about you taking the fall for something you didn’t do.”

He shrugged cavalierly, in the way of all Davenport men. “You did it,tesoro. Not only did I put you in that position in the first place, but anything you’ve had to do or will ever have to do…I’d take your place. No questions asked, no regret felt afterward.”

“Dante,” I said again in that heavy voice, an entire encyclopedia of words and thoughts inside that one word. My fingers sweat against the glass and smeared over the murky plane as I pushed my hand harder over his. “How can you feel that way about me?”

“How can I not? Ask any man who knows you well—and isn’t evil—if he would do the same for you, and honestly, Cosi, I doubt you would find a different response. Personally, though, my love for you is only a faded offshoot of my respect for you. I’ve never met a man or woman more willing to martyr themselves for their loved ones. A woman who has been through an almost endless onslaught of nightmarish events, yet still retains her warmth, her integrity, and a smile that could melt the heart of a psychopath. I envied you when I first learned about you from Tore, and then I hated you when I thought you were only ever going to be Xan’s pawn, but as you always do, you proved me flagrantly wrong. I love you, and I’d die for you. I’d be in this place for you—happily—because there is no doubt in my mind that you would do the same for me.”

“You make me sound too good to be true,” I tried to sass through my broken voice. My chest was compressed with the force of tears, my nose plugged up to stop their flow. “I’m horribly flawed.”