Page 149 of Forsaking All Others

I didn’t correct him.

I didn’t say anything.

For once, I wanted to be Dario’s doll, his to do with as he pleased.

He was broken, had nearly been killed, and we both needed this connection, however wrong it was.

As he slid inside me to the hilt, I gasped, my head thudding back against the tile as I closed my eyes. He curled over me, a shield and a lance, fucking me and protecting me.

“I could have loved you,” he whispered in my ear.

“I wish you would have,” I said honestly, because it would have been easier for both of us and it could have been good, probably.

But even as I rocked back against Dario’s cock, held him close to me, I could feel Luca in my chest as if he’d carved his name there. Tears pooled in my eyes and slid down my cheeks as I pressed my face into Dario’s shoulder. They mingled with the shower water and washed down the drain.

When we came together in perfect synchronicity that had us crying out softly into the other’s mouth, it felt like the closing of a door, and it made me cry harder.

Happily, Dario’s face was damp, too, his eyes red, and as he peered back to press kisses to my face even as he softened inside me, I knew I wasn’t alone in the yearning loneliness I’d felt for so much of our marriage. We were just two souls lost in the same woods, too scared to find each other in the dark.

It had taken my mad, fearless Luca to guide me out of the trees into the light, and I hoped fiercely that one day Dario would have the courage and opportunity to find that for himself again.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Luca

When Dario came into the mansion I’d secured for us in Lake Forest, limping badly with the ends of his hair curling damply, I knew what had happened.

That he’d slept with his wife.

It burned in me, the rage that was as consistent as a banked fire in my chest.

For one glaringly bright moment, I imagined stalking up to my twin and ripping him apart with my bare hands. If he’d been healthy, it would have been a challenge, but he wasn’t, and I was the one who had been raised and molded into a killer by other killers.

He wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Just then, he looked up at me, locking his crystal gaze against mine.

And I read the utter exhaustion in those eyes like mine, the bone-crushing weariness.

This was not a man who was making a play for the wife we’d been forced to share.

This was a man who realized he’d lost something—someone—he’d been too oblivious and afraid to love for himself.

“Maybe in another life,” I found myself saying ruefully.

And I meant more than just winning Fia’s heart.

I meant maybe he would have been the man in the shadows, the specter haunting the night and hunting criminals worse than himself. Maybe there was a future where he wasn’t a Mafia capo and he’d fallen in love with Ksenia and been allowed to stay with her forever.

“Maybe in this one,” he said with false levity, opening the door to more futures than the ones we’d been set toward. “Maybe this changes everything even though we don’t want it to.”

“Maybe we do,” I rejoined. “Maybe I want things to change.”

He waved my words away tiredly before leaning heavily on a mahogany side table. “One thing at a time, brother.”

“Come sit down and meet our host,” I suggested, moving into the open archway to the den, knowing well enough not to offer him a hand or watch him struggle to make his way into the room.

Instead, I sat down in the red leather chair across from the man I’d known for years. One of the mentors who had taught me some of what I knew about death and dealing it.