Page 227 of The Enslaved Duet

“Theirs is a love story without an end,” Dante said softly from behind me.

I turned in the circle of Alexander’s arm, content to stay there while my husband spoke to Sinclair’s business associate, Richard Denman, about a potential joint venture in London.

“Maybe one day,” I hoped. “Maybe one day, they’ll get their heads out of their asses.”

Dante rewarded my coarseness with one of his loud, gravely laughs, his head thrown back so his black hair framed him like a dark crown. “What will I do without you when you are gone,tesoro?”

“You mean ifyouare gone,” I corrected gently with a hand on his iron forearm. “We won’t let that happen, though, D.”

His grin was wry, and he looked so very much like Alexander in his rare moment of self-deprecation. “I wonder if it is a Davenport curse that we always believe we have the ability to control things. Sometimes, I’m afraid,cara, it is the things that control us.”

“No, not anymore. We’ve come out on the other side of battle victorious and now to the victor go the spoils,” I teased, knocking my wine glass against his rocks glass. “If we can take down the Order, we can certainly take down the New York City police force and district attorney’s office.”

Another twisted grin that ate up his full, too-red mouth. “And if that happens? If I am free, I’ll still be here in the city, and where will my Cosi be? I doubt it will be here with me.”

“No,” I said again, this time with a genuine smile that branched off from the roots of homesickness dug deeply into my heart. “We’ll go back to Pearl Hall.”

“Noel is still there,” he reminded me pointlessly, just because he wanted to change the topic from his own trials.

I shrugged. “Alexander thinks it will only be a matter of time now that the Order has fallen for the MI-5 to have enough on Noel to incarcerate him for good. Apparently, they’ve found records of transactions between a shell company potentially operated by Noel and di Carlo, so they could even pin my attempted murder on him.”

“So, you really are going to leave?” Elena asked softly from behind me.

I reached back and found her hand unerringly to pull her to my side. Her familiar Chanel number 5 scent wafted over me, and the feel of her against me was so right that it felt like two puzzle pieces clicking together. I leaned my head against her shoulder, the ends of her curls soft as cotton beneath my cheek.

“I will, but I’ll come back to visit often.”

There was a silence between the three of us that saidnot often enough. It won’t be the same.

It wouldn’t. I wasn’t naïve enough to doubt it. I had lived apart from my siblings for long enough to know how distance could erode a bond. I also knew that the secrets we had all harboured between us were almost at an end, that it would be easier to love across a thousand miles without those obstacles to hurdle over.

“You’ll take care of each other for me, right?”

I watched as my question prompted Dante and Elena to lock eyes, flaring to life an electric almost nuclear frisson between them that made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end.

“No promises,” Elena broke the heavy silence to say, her chin at its haughty angle, her voice as English as a true American born.

“I don’t think I like her enough to look out for her,” Dante admitted, half-joking, half-somber as if even he couldn’t tell where his true feelings about my abrasive sister fell.

I didn’t blame him. The woman in my arms was more complicated than most by half, and her experiences had only hardened her further, made her incompatible with the ordinary people of the world.

It was a good thing, I thought as Dante’s sidelong gaze roved over Elena’s prim but oddly sexy black tuxedo-style dress that Dante was one of the least ordinary men I knew.

“You’ll be fine,” I surmised with more than a little smugness in my voice.

“I still think you should consider a long-distance marriage,” Elena suggested. At my narrowed look, she gave an insolent shrug that could have rivaled one of Alexander’s. “What? You did it before.”

I laughed, but Alexander did not as he turned into the conversation with a heavy frown at my sister. He banded his arm around my hip and tugged me free from her so that I was wrapped around his side like a vine, exactly the way he preferred me.

“You’ll be grateful that I will allow my wife to visit at all,” he told her imperiously.

They locked eyes, one alpha to another, both so utterly indignant and so completely assured of their own superiority that I couldn’t help the giggle that burst through my lips.

I hadn’t giggled like that since I was a girl, since before Xan and Seamus’s downturn, since before puberty when beauty had sliced into me like a double-edged sword, both a blessing and a curse.

I giggled even harder. When I recovered, they were all staring at me with soft looks on their hard faces that proved just how much they loved me in ways so incredibly tender. It made their affection all the more precious for how elementally it went against their natures.

I leaned into Xan to press a kiss to the hinge of his jaw and excused myself to the ladies’ room. It was hard not to laugh when, the moment I walked away, the three of them descended into bickering again.