I can’t stop thinking about what’s happening in my late father’s offices, which has just become Dante’s, while I’m pacing the floor of my husband’s bedroom. I haven’t told Jazz about our meeting with Leander because I don’t want to involve her in Dante’s crimes more than I already have. Thankfully, she didn’t ask me about last night. I just said Dante wanted to give us a moment alone after the wedding and left it at that.
Noah is still worn out after all the excitement of yesterday, so I’ve put him down for a nap after lunch. I prepared a light meal for us, which I couldn’t eat. He didn’t stop asking me when we were going to the shelter to adopt a dog. I told him he had to wait for Dante because we had to do it together as a family.
Jazz is preparing dinner for us and Dante’s men. Knowing how much she hates cooking, I appreciate her effort all the more. The men don’t expect meals when they’re working shifts at the house. They either eat before or after but never while they’re on duty. I have a suspicion Jazz is as nervous as I am and just needs to keep busy. After the wedding, there’s a sense of impending doom in the air that seems to be contagious.
When Dante arrives shortly after, he’s freshly showered. His hair is still damp, and he’s changed his clothes.
My heart thuds in my chest at what that signifies.
He closes the door and takes off his jacket on his way to the walk-in closet, barely sparing me a glance.
I go after him. “Where did you shower?”
“At the condo.”
Right. Because he couldn’t come home covered in blood where Noah or Jazz could see him.
“Dante.”
He takes his time to fold the jacket over the back of a chair before he faces me.
My throat is so dry it’s difficult to speak. “What did you do?”
He watches me with that expressionless mask that makes it impossible to read him. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Swallowing, I nod.
He continues in an emotionless tone. “I cut out his tongue, and then I stabbed out his eyes.”
A shudder runs through me. I can’t think about the acts of violence for fear of emptying my stomach. I know who Dante is and what he does. I always did, and I never shied away from the facts. Having been born into this life, I know better than anyone there’s no escaping it. I’ve embraced the kind of man he is from the word go, but it’s never easy to think of him in those terrible situations. As for Leander, I understand why Dante wants to make him suffer, but I don’t wish the slow torture upon anyone.
Dante unbuttons his shirt. “The idiot thought I was bluffing.”
I go closer, my heart trembling as much as my hands. “Did you have to go that far?”
He pulls the shirt tails out of his pants. “For what he said and how he looked at you?” His reply is sure and definitive, as if there’s no doubt about it in his mind. “Yes.”
“Yet you were after the same thing.”
Raising a brow, he pulls his arms from the sleeves and drops the shirt on a chair. “Were we?”
“You both wanted my shares.”
He stares down at me with that piercing, amber stare. “For different reasons.”
“Does that make it right?”
He only continues to look at me.
I take in the hard ridges of his muscles and the wide expanse of his chest… the ink that covers his skin. He told me the story once, what those pictures mean. They pay homage to his heritage and his history. Because family is everything. Those were his words.
Will he add Noah to that history now? Will he make space for me on his skin? Do I deserve a place in his future if I never had a place in his heart? Or am I simply the chess piece he needed, the queen he could use for his checkmate move? Am I just the baggage he has to deal with now that I’ve served my purpose just as my mom was the baggage my father had to tag along?
My father never cared about my mom’s feelings. He only cared about his own because he was selfish that way. In public, he treated her like a stranger. But she was tied to him by law, a price her father had paid for an alliance, and my father considered her his in every way. In that regard, Dante and my father are the same. When it comes to using me to achieve their goals, Dante and Leander aren’t that much different either.
I’m so damn tired of being their pawn. I’m still bruised inside about the fact that Dante intentionally made me pregnant. In the greater scheme of things, I was just a tiny part of the bigger plan. I gave him everything, and he threw it all away without giving me or my feelings a second thought. I only want to be free to live my life like I deserve to do. I don’t want to be someone’s baggage or someone’s property. I want to be someone’s everything. He gave me a taste of how it is to be the center of someone’s world, to be adored and respected, and even though that was just a lie he fed me, he showed me how good an equal relationship could be, and now I want that. But that’s the problem. We’ve always wanted different things.
Dante takes a sweater from the shelf and pulls it on.