Page 11 of Accidental Alliance

Then the newer ones, the harsher, meaner marks left by bullets, are the ones her fingers pause over.

The marks are evidence that violence does not come from those proving themselves in alleyways after a night out drinking and a few impulsive exchanges, but from grown men waging war under family names with the desire for power grabs.

Her touch over them is feather-light, almost reverent. That softness does something unbearable to my heart.

I stare up into the dark at my ceiling, trying to understand how I have ended up here flat on my back in my private apartment with a woman curled up against me, letting her fingers drift across every piece of my brutal personal history that has been carved into my skin over and over as if she has all the time in the world to learn it.

What is it about Isabella that has always unraveled me so easily?

It has only been a year and a half since she came into my orbit. Eighteen months, to be exact.

A blink by the standards of men like me who measure life in wars, shifting alliances, and funerals.

And yet it feels longer than that by miles… as though she has been lodged beneath my skin for years, irritating and intoxicating in equal measure and impossible to remove.

I remember the exact second I saw her and she stopped being a background figure and became an actual fucking problem.

She had been standing near one of the back terraces at a dinner between our families, shrouded in shadow and listening to a conversation she was clearly not meant to be included in.

Most girls her age would have looked bored or intimidated by the things being discussed. Isabella, instead, looked thoughtful, picking apart every little detail.

Approaching her had been a mistake, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me. Amos Russo’s only daughter had only ever been another pretty girl draped in expensive fabric and jewels, trailing behind the powerful men in her family, in my mind.

I had absolutely no idea what I’d be getting myself into when she first turned those honey-gold eyes on me.

No woman should have that kind of power over me.

And yet… she does.

The irrationality of it makes me feel weak in ways bullets never could. I know how to handle threats and men who come at me with blades and bravado. I know how to solve problems in permanent, efficient ways.

But this? This gnawing pull toward a woman I should have kept far from myself the second I understood what she was becoming to me? There is no clear solution for it.

Distance has only made it worse. Restraint turned it obsessive.

Every attempt to starve myself has somehow only deepened the hunger.

I exhale slowly.

“You make me want things I shouldn’t,” I admit into the darkness, the words slipping out before I can cage them.

The second the words are out, I almost regret them. Not because they are untrue but because they are the most honest thing I have said in a very long time.

She lifts her head up to rest her chin on my chest, eyes searching mine. “Like what?”

My jaw tightens.

I am rapidly realizing this is not just sex.

Maybe it never was with her.

She makes me want what I was raised to believe would get me killed, a life outside of my family’s syndicate where mornings belong to no one but us.

Where locks on doors are not for strategy, but for privacy between us. She makes me want to keep her, protect her, to choose tenderness when violence has always come more naturally to me.

She makes me want… peace, and I do not know what to do with that.

“I don’t know,” is what I find myself saying.