Page 252 of The Enslaved Duet

“Tesoro,” Dante murmured with a small smile as the guards slotted him between the railing and the table he would sit at and then pushed him down hard into his chair.

My heart twisted up in my chest, turning my reassuring smile into a wince.

“Fratello,” I offered softly, leaning forward to place my hand on the railing where he could see it and know I wished it was on his arm or around his back in a fierce embrace.

The hard cast of his face softened for a moment as he stared at me, his love shining out from every pore. He had sacrificed so much for me over the years, and I refused to believe he would be punished for it by spending the next twenty-five years in prison.

“We will win.” Alexander cut into my thoughts with his strong, sure words. “I won’t let them do this to you.”

Dante’s grin turned wry as he looked over at his brother, his twin in form if not colouring. Gold and black, bad wrapped up in a pretty package and good trapped in bad boy form.

They were a yin and yang pairing I didn’t want to ever again think about living without.

“You think you can do anything.” Dante shook his head fondly. “You know the entire world does not bow down to your grace,si?”

Xan raised one cool brow in silent rebuttal.

Dante laughed, and the visual was captured by the court reporters many flashing cameras.

I had no doubt it would grace the headlines of all the popular newspapers tomorrow.

Mafia capo laughs in the face of his crimes.

“Shut up and face forward, Edward,” Elena snapped, pinching his leg hard as she took the seat between him and her co-counsel. “For once in your life, do as you’re told.”

“Make me,” he taunted her before shooting me an inveterate wink.

I smiled at him as he wanted me to, but I didn’t feel light-hearted.

Elena locked eyes with me, and her prim, professional mask shifted for a moment to show me her quiet worry. She had made me a promise to fight for Dante as she would fight forme, but I could see at the moment how much of a long shot it was that Dante would be found not guilty.

He wasn’t guilty, of course.

I’d been the one to kill Giuseppe di Carlo.

But after years of living under the influence of the Order, I knew how powerful manipulation could be, and right now? The public wanted Dante to go down for these crimes.

“I won’t let it happen, my beauty,” Alexander swore, leaning down into my ear to whisper the words there like a prayer. “I will go to the ends of the earth to make sure he does not suffer any more for us.”

I smiled thinly at him but took his hands in mine for comfort and rubbed the golden band on his ring finger. “You once told me that not everyone deserves a happy ending. Can you honestly say we do? That the brother you hated for the last two decades does?”

He tipped my chin with his knuckle and fused his gaze to mine. “If anyone deserves a happy ending, it is the people who suffer while finding it. I promise you, wife, this too will pass, and one day soon, we’ll all be drinking together and reminiscing about this exact moment. Do you believe your husband?”

I looked into the eyes I’d memorized the first time I’d seen them in a back alley in Milano, the ones that had been waiting for me when I woke up for the first time in Pearl Hall’s ballroom, and I thought about how he had promised me both times that he would be there waiting for me.

He was not a man who gave up, no matter the circumstances, and I knew this was just one more obstacle for him to cut his teeth on.

He was the hero of my story, but as any good reader knows, the hero would always become a villain if his loved ones were threatened.

And Alexander was all too willing to go to war for his brother and his wife.

“I believe you,” I told him.

And even though it took years and twisted turns we never could have predicted, in the end, I was right to.

Two years later.

I had never been in so much pain before. Not in my entire life.