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My heart plummets, ice filling my veins.
“What?” I whisper, my gaze jerking to the front. “I thought…”
My throat closes up.
Maddoc twists around, meeting my eyes. “Dante’s not dying,” he says with a smirk. “He’s tough as shit, and he’s been through worse than this. Shane will meet us at the house and patch him up, but he’s fine. Trust me.”
I do. With my body, heart, and life.
“Asshole,” I mutter, scowling at Dante and gently shoving him in the chest.
“Love you too,” he says with an unrepentant grin, capturing my hand and keeping it there. Then he grows serious. “Holding you would definitely be my last wish if I were actually dying, princess. Not gonna lie, I thought it might happen a few times while McKenna worked me over, and it was this right here that I was thinking of. You glaring at me. The feel of you in my arms. Loving you. Holding you.”
He reaches up, brushing a tear off my cheek.
He captures it on the tip of his finger, turning it this way and that, so it glints like a diamond. He stares at it as if he’s mesmerized, and when he finally looks up at me, I can see his entire heart in his eyes.
“But since I ain’t dying, I’ve got another wish.”
“What is it?” I whisper.
“I want to live to a hundred fucking years old, so I can hold you every day until then.”
“Dante...”
I stop thinking about trying to climb off his lap and cling to him, holding him just as tightly as he’s holding me. Breathing him in. Feeling his heart beat against mine. I close my eyes, letting the rhythm soothe the part of me that wasn’t complete without him.
“I missed you,” I murmur.
And I want the same thing he does. I want to give him those hundred years, and then take a hundred more.
He tips my chin up, smiling down at me. “Me too, princess.”
He doesn’t comment on the tears that keep sliding down my face, and I don’t comment on the tight lines of pain next to his eyes. We just exist together for a while, and even though we’ve just opened up a shitcan of worms by taking out a major player in Halston’s underground in such a visible way, it feels like the first moment of true peace I’ve felt since all of this started.
It’s perfect.
But of course it doesn’t last.
As soon as we arrive back at the house, time speeds back up. Maddoc made promises to some dangerous people today, and after a quiet word with Dante and a hard kiss that takes my breath away, he heads straight back to his office to deal with the fallout as leader of the Reapers.
“What’s going to happen now?” I ask, torn between worrying about what exactly that fallout is going to look like and my concern for Dante.
I believe Maddoc when he says Dante’s been through worse—I hate it, but I believe it—but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need medical attention, and the Reaper who usually handles the things too serious for Logan to patch up, Shane, isn’t here yet.
I wring out a soft cloth in the sink. “Sit.”
He snorts, but doesn’t argue when Logan eases him down onto one of our kitchen stools.
“Maddoc has to get the word out that the offer he made to the mercenaries is legitimate,” Logan answers me.. “He needs to make sure we don’t get any who try to retaliate against us for McKenna’s death.”
“Who, the mercs?” I frown, then glare at Dante when he tries to wave me off, keeping it up until he finally lets me start to clean up some of the blood on his… everything.
Logan makes a distracted sound of affirmation, his attention obviously divided between this conversation and the constant barrage of incoming notifications he’s been getting ever since we left West Point’s territory. I know that as one of Maddoc’s seconds, he has a ton of stuff he needs to deal with right now too, but everything feels like it’s happening in a blur, and I can’t let it go.
“Why would any of the mercs give a shit that we killed McKenna? They were only in it for the paycheck, right?” Then another thought occurs to me. “Send word to whom? Who does Maddoc need to notify? The Six?”
“The mercs got their own code, princess,” Dante rasps, his face too pale and the damage that fucking sadist did to him more and more obvious as I clean him up. “They’ll only care about Maddoc offing that piece of shit if their deal falls through with us. If they think they were suckered into backing off a contract, then they’ll retaliate.”
