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“Ilias?” I asked next.
His icy blues didn’t like where I was heading, but it was necessary. He wanted Davina, and while she’d grown and hardened since I first met the skittish girl, she was still too inexperienced to this life. She still struggled to hide her emotions and fears. She didn’t understand our way of life, which was why we rarely married someone too…normal.
Davina was strong, but her own doubts enabled her to accept the underworld.
“Where else would I be?” indifferent, Ilias replied.
My eyes dropped to Davina.
“When you agreed to him, you agreed to this family. Don’t question where you should be,child.”
Her eyes narrowed at the word I’d called her the first night I met her. The night I threatened her with another target on her head.
My point wasn’t to belittle her, it was to awaken her, and I had. Because now her brown eyes darkened to the point of becoming pure black.
Anger, memories.
That was what I sought to bring out of her. Now, Davina was ready to face Katia’s family.
To face Leo, the man who’d drained her blood and left her to die on the snow.
The swinging sound of the heavy front door followed by an echoing shut alerted Katia’s return. I drowned the contents of the fiery liquid of my cup and waited for her sage green eyes to emerge into the room.
I saw Viktor first. He stepped out of the way, and Katia entered the quiet room. She looked fucking gorgeous. Confidence was high on her shoulders and eyes that searched mine to show it. Strength, power, malice. They all revolved around her like storm clouds of might.
We weren’t as different as she believed.
We weren’t as different as I believed.
Both stained by death and childhood nightmares of punishment.
Both scared and welted into adults of pain.
Meanwhile, I tried to shield the screams and absurd cruelty of the underworld from her. It was theonemoral thing I could do. It was the proper way to protect and keep at arm’s length the woman I would spend my life with.
Through all this time, I was a fool.
A blind man.
Too stubborn to see,she was just like me.
A mold of clay that kept spinning on a potter’s wheel while time carved the solitude, smoothing the scars and joining the damages until casting a fickle heart.
All created by the blood-drenched hands of those in our lives.
Too driven by tenacious cruelty.
Two descendants of Mafia royalty whose pasts kept colliding until our present caught up in rolling hatred of those who came before us but bleeding into each other.
I stood and stepped to the chair on my left and pulled out, open and offering where she belonged. Our gazes wouldn’t break apart, and my mind whispered the words she’d once uttered into deaf ears.
“I can’t leave. I can’t cry myself to sleep, and I can’t care for what I see or hear.”Followed by,“This is my world.”
Thiswasher world.
And I was a stubborn man for ignoring it.
Questions popped inside her gleaming gems, but I was learning those answers, petrified of what they meant and where they led. Therefore, I had no reply in my eyes as our distance vanished by the clicking sound of her heels.
