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Who had a vested interest in both the Orsinis and the Callahans. In destroying them.
If they found out about the baby…
I walked up to the bedroom to find a sleeping Adriana with her hand on her eyes. Creeping silently into the room, I glanced at Adriana’s sleeping form, a pang of emotion clutching at my heart. Her face was peaceful, but even in her sleep she looked drained. How had things gotten so out of hand so quickly? Here we were, on the run from people who would stop at nothing to get what they want. And all because of a life that wasn’t yet born.
No. I could blame the baby all I wanted, but this was on me. If I had just gone through with the wedding, no one would’ve seen a weakness in our families.
Her lashes fluttered open, just a crack. “You need to sleep too, Tristan,” she murmured.
“I’ll sleep later. Who else knows?” I asked her.
She rolled over to look at me. “About…”
“About the baby, Ade. Who else knows?”
Her hazel eyes flickered with a momentary panic before she blinked it away and gave me a tired, half-hearted shrug. “Just you,” she murmured, her voice barely audible. “I haven’t told anyone else yet.”
The relief in my chest was palpable. “Good.” I replied, my voice equally hushed. “Let’s keep it that way until…until we figure things out.”
She sighed with relief before her eyes shot open. “Wait,” she said. “You think they’re targeting me because of the pregnancy?”
I shook my head. “No. I think they’re targeting you because they know you’re an Orsini, and they know you were supposed to marry the Callahan heir. I think they see a power vacuum, and now that Rico’s son or whoever was next in line stepped up, there’s a power vacuum in Boston. People respect our fathers, no one’s gonna fuck with Mallachy Callahan or Silvio Orsini, right? But I…I really fucked up by not marrying you, Ade.”
“But it wasn’t your fault,” she said, her voice so soft that I almost didn’t hear it. “You didn’t know about the baby.”
“I knew about you,” I said, my voice filled with regret. “And that should’ve been enough.”
I didn’t want to tell her that the reason I didn’t want to marry her was because I hated the idea of making her unhappy, because I didn’t want her to have to fulfill an obligation with someone she hated in the first place.
Because I was the son of a man who had killed not one, but three of his baby’s mothers…and because I’d always feared I’d grow up to be just like him.
She fell silent for a moment, her gaze fixed on some distant point beyond the window. When she finally spoke, her words were laced with uncertainty.
“Do you…do you regret not marrying me?”
I paused for a moment, weighing my words carefully, not wanting to stir up some festering wound that lay hidden beneath our current problems. “I don’t regret the decision at the time because I didn’t think it was fair to either of us,” I said. Because half-truths at least weren’t outright lies. “But now…”
“Now?” she prompted.
“All that matters to me now is keeping you and the baby safe,” I confessed, searching her face for any sign of rejection. “Anything else, anyone else…it’s all secondary.”
A moment passed, where Adriana’s eyes flicked to mine, a flicker of something I couldn’t quite place in their depths. Doubt? Hope? Fear? It wasn’t clear. But there was a lingering silence between us, a silence that felt as heavy as the reality pressing on our shoulders.
“That sounds…” she began, her voice trailing off as she turned to me fully. “That sounds like you’re telling me not to worry about us.”
I nodded slowly, taking in the seriousness of her words. “I am,” I confirmed, my gaze steady, meeting hers. “We have more urgent matters to deal with right now.”
But it wasn’t just that. It was also because I knew that if I allowed myself to think about us, about what we could be together, it would only distract me from protecting her and the baby.
There was no us. I got that. I had made that happen.
Thinking about us would blur the lines and make me reckless, and that was a risk I couldn’t afford to take.
“We need to move, Ade,” I said. “I’m sorry to keep driving you around like this, but…”
“I know, I know. We stay here, we die.”
“Right,” I nodded. “We stay here, we die.”
