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So many innocent people, dead by his hand or his command.
“In the beginning, once I realized who you were, I vowed I would figure out a way to get back at your family. That’s the truth. But now, the only thing I can even think straight about is keeping you safe.”
He shakes his head and lets it fall into his hands.
After a few seconds, he rights himself and looks into my eyes again.
“Every time I saw you, I got closer to you. You were this fucking colorful slice of heaven in my chaotic world of death and destruction, and no matter how hard I tried to ignore my feelings for you, those feelings just hit me even harder.” He shrugs. “So yeah, maybe we both deceived each other in the beginning, but these feelings I have are really fucking real. I’ve been fighting them since the night I met you, and I’m done trying to ignore what I want. And that’s you.”
Everything in my body works against me in this moment. My brain goes fuzzy and my limbs weak. He’s saying all the right things, and goddammit…I believe him.
I believe him.
“I will never allow someone to hurt you again, angel. Never. I want you by my side. I need you by my side. I’ve tried ignoring it, and it doesn’t go away anyway. You are so deeply etched into my fucking mind, and I can’t quit you.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I tell him. We share a look and he stands, pulling me up and into his arms.
I wrap my legs around his core, pressing our bodies together until I have no idea where he ends and I begin. Our lips crash against each other with such vigor my head is knocked backward as he forcefully takes what’s his.
What’s been his from the night I met him.
We are a tangled mess of teeth and lips and limbs, and I’ve never felt so alive.
My heart races with the possibility that there’s so much more here—races and then stutters and then clenches in my chest before regaining its normal rhythm.
“Fuck, angel.” Dante pulls away from me and brushes my hair from my face before cupping my cheeks in his large palms. “I want you so fucking bad right now. I want to throw you down on this floor and show you exactly what you do to me. Fuck into that perfect cunt and make you mine all over again.”
He pauses, leaving me wanting and lingering on this high from his touch, from his words.
“I wasn’t supposed to want you,” he says, as if our conversation won’t let him move on yet. He sets me back down onto the love seat and then runs his hands over his face before cracking his neck from side to side. An internal war waging inside him, no doubt. “You are the daughter of my greatest enemy. The daughter of the man who killed my wife and sister.”
My breath catches, and I search his eyes for something, want to beg him to continue but stop at the same time. My father? I knew he was a horrible man. I know he’s done vile, despicable things. But he killed them? He’s the reason Dante is in this pain? A pain that can’t be cured or healed…not with time…not ever. A pain I’ll never be able to imagine. He left Dante’s son without a mother…
“I’m so sorry, Dante.”
He sits down next to me, and I pull him to my chest, wishing he would be soft again for me. I’d let him fall apart in my arms. I’d welcome it.
“I didn’t know. I had no idea…”
No wonder this man wanted to use me in some way in the beginning.
My father is responsible for killing two of the most important people in his life.
He told me of his wife and sister the night we met. Told me he had a son and was a father. I knew his wife and sister were gone. Dead. But I didn’t know it was my own father who caused it.
How can this man ever want me when I am part of the monster who killed his family?
Tears flow down my cheeks as I struggle to regain my breath, but Dante just shakes his head. “You are not taking responsibility for the actions of your father.”
I cling to him, and he wraps his arms around me, enveloping me in a safety I have never felt in all my life. And suddenly, I realize how much a man who I barely know has become like home to me. And I know how much that’s saying for my own family. For the life I’ve lived for twenty-one years. He’s shown me more in two weeks, in just a handful of interactions, than most members of my family have ever shown.
It kills me…but somehow it also relieves me of something that’s been weighing me down my entire life.
“That night I saw you for the first time,” he says, “you were like the most vibrant color I’d ever seen, Giana.” He looks at me with tears in his eyes that he’s not letting fall. “This black-and-white world of chaos and destruction… It’s all I’ve ever seen, all I’ve ever known. And then there you were. This beautiful burst of fucking color. And suddenly I could see more than just black and white. I could see every fucking color. They were all in you.”
Dante kisses me, hard, and I miss him the moment he breaks free.
“I have never, and I mean never, felt that way before. Not with anyone.” He emphasizes the words as if to assure me.
