He let out a sardonic breath.
“I planned on killing her myself, but then you showed up.” My mouth parted into a silent O as I processed his words. He continued. “It’s probably something I should have done a long time ago. It would have been a more merciful end to her life than…” He swallowed, his eyes darting to the room at the end of the hallway. “Dimitros has seen too much of his mother’s madness, and Aria thinks she will be mad like her.” He huffed out a frustrated breath. “She’s not even her daughter!”
She’s mine, my heart screamed, but I knew that would take time to tell Aria, and tonight definitely wasn’t the right time.
“Dimitros doesn’t know?” I asked quietly.
“No.”
He would have been six when Aria was born, old enough to realize something was off, but rather than point that out, I decided to change topics.
“Thank God you have this place. Checking into a hotel at this time of night without personal identification would have been a nightmare.”
His dark eyes flickered and the corner of his lips tipped up into a smile. “I got it ten years ago. For you.”
“Huh?”
He let out a heavy breath.
“Right before I asked you to be my mistress.”
My cheeks flushed while my chest twisted at the reminder. It seemed like a different lifetime—hell, a differentme. If I’d taken him up on the offer, I would have seen Aria grow up. Maybe even Dimitros. But that was neither here nor there. There was no turning back time, and the idea of being the other woman still didn’t sit well with me, even with the circumstances.
“I’m sorry,” I rasped.
He bent his head, resting his forehead against mine. “Don’t be. You deserve so much more than being my—anyone’s—mistress. I see now how stupid it was to ask something like that of you.”
“Maybe,” I muttered.
“There’s no maybe about it,” he grumbled. “I finally understood what my father was talking about all along when he claimed he fell for my mother the moment he met her. It made me selfish because it finally made sense what he was saying. The moment your eyes locked with mine… I just knew.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “That fast?”
He shrugged. “When you know, you know.”
I thought back to that first night. Yes, I found him handsome, and yes, something about him resonated with me, but I was too much of a realist to believe in love at first sight. Today… Now, I loved him because he took care of our child. Because he protected her. Because I knew he’d protect me too.
“Maybe this is our second chance,” I whispered. “I feel like I don’t deserve it, but?—”
“We deserve it,” he cut me off. “And we’re going to snatch it and make the best of it. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We stared at each other, the past ten years of loneliness slowly fading away.
“You were the only one, you know,” he murmured, breaking the silence. “I told you this before, but maybe you didn’t believe me. Please trust me on this: you’re the only one I broke my vow with. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t regret it either. It gave us Aria, and if even for just a few hours, it gave me you.”
I let out a shuddering breath, the sound breaking loose from somewhere deep in my chest, and then I wrapped my arms around him. We clung to each other.
Our pajamas were still smeared with gravel and dirt, carrying the faint, acrid scent of smoke and fire, but none of it mattered.
All that mattered was this.
His heartbeat against mine. The solid warmth of his body anchored me. We both needed this moment of stillness and reassurance as a reminder that we were here, alive, together. We needed this comfort. We needed each other.
“I don’t regret it either,” I admitted in a whisper.
THIRTY-TWO
