Page 72 of Brutal Union
I drop to my knees in Liam's blood, feeling it soak through my expensive pants, still warm and thick. The specific sound of fabric meeting blood, a wet surrender. The position puts me below her, looking up at this woman who's destroyed me and remade me and destroyed me again.
My brothers finally pour through the church entrance behind me, the backup I ordered but didn't wait for. As as soon as they lay eyes on me, they stop moving. In ten years of leading this family, I've never knelt for anyone. Never shown submission, never showed weakness. But here I am, kneeling in an Irish chapel in my enemy's blood, about to beg.
"You brought me back," I tell her, the words scraping like glass. "Made me feel something beyond violence and control. Made me want more than just empire and blood."
She stares down at me, and I see something flicker in her eyes. Not forgiveness, but maybe recognition.
"After you left, I became everything you feared." My hands clench in the blood beneath me, feeling it squeeze between my fingers. "Burned Irish bars without strategy. Tortured men without purpose. I became your father, my father, became the monster he always wanted me to be."
"We're all monsters here." She gestures at the carnage surrounding us. "Look what I did. Look what I became without you."
"No, principessa. You're an angel who learned to use a gun. I'm the demon who taught you."
I reach into my jacket, pull out the ring she threw at me at the cemetery. My mother's ring. The diamonds catch the candlelight, throwing fractals across blood-stained marble. The metal is cold against my bloody fingers.
"I should have trusted you," I say, holding up the ring like an offering. "Should have been your partner, not your captor. Should have been the man you deserved instead of one like your father."
The ring trembles in my hand. Thirty-five years old, and I'm shaking like a boy with his first kill.
"Marry me." The words come out rough, desperate. "Not for alliance or strategy or tradition. Not because I stole you or trapped you or own you."
Her eyes lock on the ring, on my hands covered in blood that isn't mine, on this killer asking for something he has no right to want.
"Marry me because I love you with whatever diseased thing passes for my soul." I stay on my knees, feeling the blood poolaround me, letting her see me broken and honest for maybe the first time. "Marry me because I'd burn Chicago to ash just to see you smile. Because I'd kill every man who's ever hurt you if I could."
"Your father's already dead," she says, voice hollow. "If he wasn't, I'd kill him myself. Do you still want to marry me, knowing that?"
"If my father wasn't already dead, I'd kill him for you. I'd dig him up just to kill him again." The confession tastes sweeter then communion wine. "I'd kill God himself if He tried to take you from me."
Something shifts in her face, that dead look cracking like ice in spring. She reaches down, takes the ring from my bloody fingers. The specific sound of the ring sliding over bloody skin, metal against wet flesh, as she slides it onto her finger, right over the stains already there.
"You're insane," she whispers.
"Completely." I stay kneeling, waiting for her judgment. "But I'm yours. If you'll have me."
She looks at the ring on her finger, blood and diamonds in equal measure. When she speaks, her voice is steady as a blade. "Then yes. Yes, I'll marry you again. Properly this time."
The relief nearly drops me. She reaches down, touches my face with fingers still warm from gunfire.
I surge to my feet and kiss her among the corpses, tasting copper and cordite on her lips. She kisses me back with the same desperate hunger, her hands fisting in my blood-soaked shirt. We're both shaking now, clinging to each other in this chapel that's become a charnel house.
Her body presses against mine, and even surrounded by death, she feels like life. This is what she's made me: an animal who wants her even in a massacre. The heat of her through thatbloodied dress, the way her hips press forward seeking contact, it all drives me half-mad with need.
"Wife," I growl against her mouth. "Say it."
"Husband," she breathes, nails digging into my shoulders. "My fucking husband."
Through the broken windows, sirens approach in the distance, their wails still faint but growing. My soldiers have already started their cleanup, efficient even in this chaos. Bodies that need disposing, evidence that needs destroying.
"What happens now?" she asks against my mouth, her breath hot.
"Now?" I pull back just enough to see her face, this beautiful, terrible woman who's chosen me despite everything. "Now we build something new from these ashes. Something better than what our fathers gave us."
She laughs, and there's something wild in it. "You really think we can build anything that isn't soaked in blood?"
"No." I kiss her forehead, tasting salt and smoke. "But at least it'll be our blood. Our choices. Our empire built on honest violence instead of pretty lies."
The sirens grow closer, their distant approach marking how little time we have left in this moment. My brothers have finished their work, standing ready for orders. The priest has disappeared, probably running to forget what he's witnessed. And here we stand, two killers making promises over bodies we put there together.
