Page 176 of The Enslaved Duet
“You both need to knock it off. I’m a grown woman who can make her own decisions and speak for herself. Dante…” I turned to the man who had been my saviour the past four years, the man who had taken the tattered pieces of my body and soul and given them a home to recover in. He looked at me with soft, velvet black eyes, his mouth twisted up in one corner because he already knew he wouldn’t like what I had to say. “D,amico mio, Alexander came to save me from Ashcroft at Club Bacchus tonight. He didn’t hurt me, and honestly, I don’t think he means to hurt me ever again. I think…” I darted a glance back at the man in question and let his burning eyes fill me with conviction. “I think he wants to be with me.”
“I do,” Alexander confirmed in his Dominant voice, in that tone that brooked no argument. “Not that Edward deserves to know that.”
“Hush,” I scolded him before turning to Dante, hating the way his eyes went cold and his posture changed, his muscles tightening as if repelled by my hand on his chest. “Dante, you have to trust me to know what’s best for me.”
“My trust in you has nothing to do with it,tesoro, and everything to do with the fact that I haven’t been able to trust Alexander since he sided with Noel over our mother’s murder.”
I winced slightly because that was the crux of the problem, wasn’t it?
Dante couldn’t trust Alexander, and I wasn’t sure if I should.
We both turned to him, questions in our eyes like lassos ready to capture him so we could demand answers.
“I don’t need you to trust me.” Alexander tugged down his shirtsleeves and adjusted his cuff links, insulting Dante with his every blasé move. “I don’t need you to trust me, Edward, because you never trusted me enough to come back home and tell me what you actually thought happened with Noel. You think I betrayed you? Well,brother, you abandoned me and left me with a man you knew to be a monster.”
The air in the room went flat like stale soda, sticky with tension, but void of the angrily bumping molecules. Dante seemed suspended in it, floating on shock and uncertainty.
Clearly, he’d never thought of the past in such terms.
Honestly, neither had I.
I watched as the blood caught on Dante’s upper lip from his slightly bleeding nose and warred with whether to comfort him or shame him for doing exactly what he’d always accused Xan of doing.
Abandoning his family.
“You think Noel is a monster?” Dante asked suspiciously.
I held my breath as I waited for the answer. There was no way Alexander knew about Noel and Rodger beating me, because only those two, Dante, and Salvatore knew the truth, but there were so many other ways Noel had proved his heinousness.
Alexander stepped forward, his mask slipping to reveal an expression I’d never seen hung on his features before, one of pure and lasting agony.
“Of course, Noel is a monster.” He opened his hands, clenched them around empty air, and released them with shaking fingers. “And I did monstrous things at his bidding, in his image. I am my father’s son.”
His wry twisted lips, self-depreciating and full of personal loathing, sliced my heart into ribbons. God, but this beautiful man thought he was uglier than his demons, and it broke my fucking heart.
I went to him before I could even think to curb the impulse, my arms slipping under his suit to press him so hard into my body it was as if I sought to absorb him into myself. Maybe my love would filter his self-disgust and leave him clean, reborn, and ready to adore himself as much as I did.
And fuck me, but I did.
So many years of lying and recrimination for my wavering emotions, and I was still exactly where I had been the day I left Pearl Hall in a bloodstained wedding dress.
Inevitably and eternally in love with Alexander.
The knowledge settled over me just as his arms did, warm and secure. I thought of how he’d taken twenty-five lashings for me, of how he’d married me against the Order’s rules, and how he’d watched over me like some dark guardian angel for the four years of our separation.
I thought of all the ways the man without a heart loved me back.
My face tipped up so I could look into his polished silver eyes and his perfectly symmetrical, utterly gorgeous face, and I knew I would never feel more myself or more at home than I would exactly where I was at that moment, in his arms.
“Not evil,” I whispered to him, pressing my hand to his throat so I could cup his pulse. “Just damaged.”
I watched as his face went soft, as the hardest man I’d ever met exposed the hidden, tender heart of him, and I forgot Dante was in the room. I even forgot to breathe.
He leaned down to press a kiss to my mouth and then sharply bite my lower lip. “I was born and made of monsters. Nothing can change that.”
“Nothing, but you,” I stressed, gripping him tighter. “And you want to, don’t you? You have been already.”
“I have.” He smiled slightly, but his eyes were still haunted. “Nothing will really be changed until the rest of them are taken care of.”
