“You can let me go now,” she whispered.
“No I can’t.” He’d never been able to let her go. Siena was woven so deeply inside him that she’d become a part of him.
“If you’re not here to kill me, then let go of me and get out.”
“You must know by now that I could never kill you,” he said hoarsely.
Her voice hitched. “You’d let your sister do it.”
“I’d never let anyone do it. I’d sooner die myself.” A truth he’d realised as his fists had been smashing into the face of the man who’d caused such pain and damage to the woman he loved beyond measure.
“I’d still kill you in a heartbeat,” she choked.
He kissed the top of her head. “No you wouldn’t.”
He felt rather than heard the strangled sob. The hand pinned at his side suddenly gripped his shirt. The tense body curled on his lap tightened to a point, and then he had the sensation of a shaken bottle being unscrewed as all the tension left her body and she collapsed into him with a wail he felt right in the soul she’d brought back to life.
“How could you do that to me?” she wept, her hot tears soaking through his shirt. “Oh, God, Elio,why? You knew all along that our marriage would last only until you’d completed your vengeance, and still you made me…”
He pressed his mouth tight into the top of her head.
“You told me to never trust you in life, and I didn’t, but in the bed we shared every night…” Her body trembled with the force of her tears. “It would have been better if you’d spent the whole of our marriage treating me like shit and degrading me. How could you make me fall in love with you when you knew you would never stop hating me? Why did it have to be so personal? You say I had a choice, but Ididn’t. I was born into this world just as you were. I had no more choice about my parents than you did.”
“I know,” he whispered. He kissed the top of her head again. “I know.”
“You threw me away,” she whimpered, her sobs dulling. “After everything we shared, you threw me away.”
He breathed deeply. Barely two months ago, he’d have relished the pain he was witnessing from the woman who’d played such an intrinsic part of his life for all her life. Now, her pain was his. She was his.
And he was hers. He always had been.
His chest rose, and he took another long breath. “I told you once that my feelings for you have always been complicated. Who you are and how you make me feel have always beenat war.” Gently, he ran his fingers through her hair before capturing her chin and lifting her head so he could gaze into her eyes. “You were born in the midst of the worst bloodshed our city has lived through, but you were born innocent. I wasn’t old enough to think that at the time, but I was old enough to feel it. I wanted to hate your existence, but I couldn’t.”
Emotions rising inside him, he stroked her cheekbone. “I have never been able to hate you, Siena. You were this beautiful, innocent child, and all I wanted was to protect you. I wanted to take you from your family and keep you safe.” He smiled, remembering her as a teenager. In the aftermath of her confession about Stefano, he’d blocked those memories out, and now he knew why.
Siena had been every bit as innocent and knowing as Elvira had been, a beautiful butterfly shaking its brand-new wings and trying to find the courage to spread them and take flight. To have remembered her as she’d been at that age would have been to inflict pain on himself and confront the true depth of his feelings for her.
There was no denying them anymore.
“I could forgive myself for my complicated, protective feelings for you as a child, but then you blossomed into the beautiful, sexy woman you are today and voluntarily threw away your innocence and demanded entry into the shadowed world.”
“But I was already living in it,” she argued softly. “Until I forced my way into my father’s circle, I was subjected to all the rules of our world but with no say in the making of them. The only reason I had to force my way in is because I’m female. My mother was powerful, but she let my father be the public face of their partnership. I was expected to be his princess and behave in the same way. If I’d been born with a penis, my place and my voice would never have been in question.”
“I think I always knew that, but I needed to find a reason to hate you to stop myself from falling in love with you.”
Her red, tear-stained eyes widened.
He smiled ruefully. “In one way or another, I’ve loved you all your life, but it was when you put that gun to your heart that the depth of it hit me.” His smile dropped. “I’ve never been so frightened. Not in all my life. And it was that fear that made me push you away, because I didn’t want to feel it. I didn’t want to feel any of it, because to admit the truth of my feelings for you would have meant admitting to myself that I can’t live without you. You’re the last person in the world I should have fallen in love with, but you’re the only woman I could have fallen in love with. It’s always been you, Siena, and I’m more sorry than words could ever say for everything I’ve done to you and everything I’ve put you through.”
Siena gazed into the vampiric silver eyes as Elio’s words and the truth laced in them soaked into her swelling heart.
“I didn’t want to fall in love with you either,” she whispered, palming his bristly cheek. “I tried so hard to keep the hate alive in my heart, but it was impossible.”
“Then what do you say we stop fighting something neither of us can win?”
Her heart thumped, but she didn’t dare assume. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I want you to trust me in life and give our marriage another chance. A real chance.”
