Page 226 of The Enslaved Duet

“Aren’t we all?” Dante said with his trademark grin, his lips red as split cherries, his mouth so wide it punctured creases in each cheek like sharp dimples.

“I don’t want you in here,” I told him desperately, feeling my eyes drown in a hot flood of tears as despair filled me to the brim. “I don’t want you here at all. I don’t want any of this for you.”

“We all make our beds,tesoro. I knew there was a likelihood I would end up in a place like this one day, and I thanked God I look good in orange.”

“Don’t joke,” I snapped at him even as I smiled. “Only you would joke right now.”

The amusement in his face bleached out, the ruddiness in his cheeks gone, his lips a single pale line. “Listen to me now, and really hear me. Of all the things that have happened in our lives, of all the awful outcomes that could have manifested from the greed and the hate at the core of those atrocities, my incarceration is almost pathetically mundane. I can survive this,cara. I can survive anything, and I think you know this now, but this? This I can survive well.”

He was right. Dante was a large man, a built man, so packed with muscle I could see the striations under the exposed olive skin of his forearms, bulging like rocks wrapped in orange canvas under his regulation jumper. He could kill a man with his bare hands, and he would if they tried to fuck with him in prison. He was also smart enough not to let it come to that.

Xan was not the only one Noel had taught to play chess.

“I know,” I conceded, not sad but darkly proud of my beast behind the glass. “I know, but still, I won’t have it. Not for long. Xan’s secured the best fucking lawyers in the country, and Elena is on the team taking the case. I made her promise to doanythingshe must to get you free of this.”

Dante raised an eyebrow, ignoring the clank and groan of the door opening and slamming shut behind him as another prisoner, this one with Nazi tattoos on his neck, entered the phone bay to make a call.

“Your Elena may be a smart woman, but I doubt she is a ruthless one. Getting me ‘free of this’ will take more than excellent legalese.”

I thought of the way my sister had beaten up Christopher at Giselle’s art gallery opening, of the times she had been shrewd enough even as a child to hide the rest of us kids in our designated spots so that the local Camorra wouldn’t find us and use us against Seamus and Mama. I thought of the edge in her eyes like a honed blade and her restless discontent despite her perfectly ordered, socially respectable life. I thought of her instantaneous agreement to join Dante’s team of lawyers even though she hated everything that spoke of my life without her. I thought of the fissure in her habitually cold face as she’d held me while I cried for the man I’d unwittingly sent to prison for me.

“She’s a Lombardi woman,” I told him solemnly. “I wouldn’t underestimate what she can do if you put her in a corner.”

“And why would she fight from this corner for a man she does not know, let alone a man like me?”

I tipped my chin just as she would have with pride radiating through my voice. “Because I asked her to, and there is nothing she wouldn’t do for me.”

Dante stilled at my words, impacted by the way they echoed his own. He respected nothing as much as loyalty, and Elena was the most loyal soul I knew.

She would go to bat for him. Hell, I truly believed she would go beyond that to get him out of trouble because he was a man I loved, and my sister loved me enough to never want to see me without, not if she could help it.

Cosima

If my relationship with Alexander was like something from a dark Greek myth, Sinclair and Giselle’s romance was like a fairy tale; and not one of the Grimm brothers’ nightmarish fables. No, this was something even Disney couldn’t produce.

It seemed the light filtering through the palm trees in trapezoids and sparkling off the calm, clear waters like fistfuls of glitter was actuallypink, as if the very air was aware of the romance of the moment.

Sinclair, the cold Frenchman who had dated but not committed to my eldest sister Elena for years, had planned and executed not only a surprise proposal but the perfect elopement for my other sister, Giselle. It was so beautiful, the way she walked out of the waves in a wedding dress like froth over her curves, escorted by Sebastian who felt no shame in the tears that lined his eyes. It was so shocking to see Sinclair of the implacable expression and incredible calm watch her walk up to him to be his bride with a face as open and bright as a newly formed star pulled down from the sky.

We had missed so much, but there was no way in heaven or hell I would have missed Giselle and Sinclair’s wedding. Alexander was in fine spirits after taking down the Order, even though his father was still free to rein over his realm of terror at Pearl Hall, so he actually capitulated to my demands. In fact, he went so far as to fly Mama, Sebastian, and Dante down to Cabo San Lucas with us on his private plane. Dante wasn’t allowed out the country when he was on bail, but Alexander was rich enough to grease the right palms to make it so. Neither Alexander nor I were comfortable with him out of our sight since he’d been released the week before, and I knew Dante felt the same.

Elena, of course, didn’t join us.

When I heard about Christopher’s reappearance in their lives at Giselle’s art show, I’d wanted to hop on a plane and take both my sisters in my arms just to feel for myself that they were safe from harm. It pained me to know that I wouldn’t be seeing Elena at the wedding, which was exactly why I had pressured Xan into going back to New York to attend the newlywed’s party at Osteria Lombardi.

Elena, I knew, would be there.

Something indefinable had happened when she interfered in Christopher’s assault on Giselle, some transition between my sisters from archrivals to hospitable foes. It wasn’t that they would ever be close. Like ink and oil, they belonged too much to different things, but it was the dénouement we had never thought they would achieve.

So Elena was there in the bustling restaurant that night along with everyone else my family loved; Dante, Cage Tracey, Willa Percy, Giselle’s friends Brenna and Candy, Sinclair’s business associates who had witnessed their affair in Mexico, and even some of my sister’s friends from France had made the journey. It was an Italian party, so it was loud, filled with boisterous laughter that gleamed brightly under the strung fairy lights, and too much wine was poured and imbued.

We hadn’t had a party like it since the restaurant opened two years before, when Sebastian and I had finally been able to hand our mother her dream in the form of brick and mortar.

I’d missed it, the comradery between us all, the way we orbited around each other, coming together and breaking apart in duos and trios of combinations every so often because we couldn’t stand to be apart.

Not anymore. Not after so many years of fractured family life.

Even Salvatore was folded into the bosom of our family. Sebastian unwittingly charmed his father with tales from Hollywood, unaware that the older man laughed not only because they were funny, but because he was learning about his son’s life from his own lips in a way he never believed he would. Mama lingered nearby, talking to Giselle and Sinclair, but her eyes were on her men, a small smile placed like a fading indentation in her doughy cheek.