Page 31 of Accidental Alliance

Sunrises spent in places where no one knows my face and no one says my last name with fear or loyalty or expectation.

I see her beside me through it all, alive and furious and so fucking beautiful, and for one moment, the fantasy is so vivid, it nearly passes for a memory.

Then reality rips through it like barbed wire catching on skin. My jaw locks so hard, pain blooms up the side of my face.

“How can you possibly ask that of me?” I say, the words bitten out between my clenched teeth.

She does not flinch, but of course she doesn’t. Isabella has never once been frightened off by the parts of me that scare everyone else. “You told me you would.”

The simple honesty of that statement almost makes me laugh. Instead, all I can do is stare at her because she is right. At the time, it had felt impossible enough to actually become true. She’d brought out a reckless side of me I never knew was there to begin with.

“You were supposed to mean it,” she says softly, and that softness cuts deeper than fury ever could. “Or at least I thought you did.”

If she had screamed at me, I could have met her there. If she had cursed at me, struck at me with the full weight of her grief, I would have known how to handle it.

Men like me are built for violence and trained to endure and return it in equal measure.

But this quiet hurt… there is no armor against it. Nothing to save me from the deep pain that pools in my gut.

“I did mean it.” I hear how raw I sound the second the words leave me.

For the first time since seeing her after stepping out of the elevator, something truly fragile crosses her face.

She looks away from me then, turning slightly back toward the window and the city below.

The skyline glitters against her reflection, pale in the glass and ghosting over the lights beyond.

“Then come with me.”

Christ, I want to.

“I can’t, Isabella.”

She turns to face me fully then. Her eyes shimmer with unshed tears she refuses to let fall. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “Was any of what you said real, or was I just a convenient distraction?”

For one suspended second, the room goes soundless around me. I drag in a breath that does nothing to loosen the pressure in my chest.

If she had only been a distraction, this would be easy. I could let her go and cut ties without ever feeling guilty over it. Telling her this was all a mistake, or a fleeting hunger finally satiated, would keep this simple where it was supposed to remain.

But the truth of the matter is that Isabella has never been a fleeting moment for me.

She was the first woman who made me think about leaving before I even realized I was trapped.

Every moment I let myself imagine a life outside my family and the responsibilities it carries had been a fantasy turned anchor that I held onto like a lifeline.

Maybe in another life, this could be real.

Maybe in another life, I would have been born a mechanic or a ranch hand or a man who fixes roofs and comes home with sawdust on his boots instead of blood under his nails.

Maybe in another life, I would have met her in a city that did not require bodyguards and coded language and men willing to kill for a surname.

Maybe in another life, I would have loved her in the daylight and asked her to stay in ways that did not sound like a threat to both our futures.

In another life, I would have burned the syndicate to the ground for her.

But this is not that life.

This is the one where my family’s name is a noose slowly tightening around my neck.