Maybe he was just manipulating me, maybe he needed to use me again for some nefarious purpose.
Of maybe, just maybe, this was real.
His goodness since his return to my life was not a ruse, but a promise of only more goodness to come.
I held my breath as the dreams I’d dreamed in vapor began to solidify in front of me.
Alexander’s expression was one I had never seen before, his hard features softened like melting butter under the heat of burning passion in his molten metal eyes. The fingers of one hand whispered across my jaw and then cupped my throat.
“It appears I did all along. It was just locked away from me, and the only person who could access it was you.”
Tears sprang to my eyes and spilled over, a waterfall breaking through a yearlong dam. I wanted to speak, but my emotions were too big, swelling in my throat and robbing me of a voice.
Instead, I mouthed, “I love you.”
He didn’t smile as I thought he would. If anything, his expression grew tighter, filled with a tension I couldn’t understand. “I know I’m not worthy of you. You deserve so much more than I’ve given you, that I ever could give, but I promise to try to earn your love and devotion every day for the rest of our lives if you’ll let me.”
“I’m your slave,” I told him on a wet laugh. “Where else would I rather be than at your side?”
“My slave, my topolina, my countess, my wife.” He said each epitaph like a butler announcing royalty to the room, as if each title was priceless.
I realized, to him, to me, they were.
“You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said because it hurt me to know he didn’t believe himself worthy of my love when he was the only person I could ever dream of giving my heart to.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was the harbinger of your doom.”
“No. I know our story might seem black and white, you the villain and me the victim, but it isn’t so simple. Before you, I had no prospects. I had a meager career as a model that provided just enough for my family to get us through with the bare minimum of provisions. I was a tool and a martyr. I had no thoughts or feelings for myself. I was, as you said, a queen who was made to think she was only a pawn. Then you came in your black chariot and pulled me into the shadows of the underworld, and I came alive.”
“You almost died,” he said, his voice cracked through with devastation. “So many bloody times, because of me.”
“I might have died otherwise. You aren’t the only bad guy in my life,” I teased.
He didn’t smile.
I traced a finger along the brutal cut of his square jaw up to his ear and around the perfectly formed shell of it. He was so exquisitely designed that he took my breath away.
Leaning forward, I pressed a kiss to his pulse, keeping my lips there for a moment to feel the beat quicken against me.
“You still make me come alive,” I whispered in his ear. “Sometimes, it feels as if I don’t exist unless you are in a room with me.”
He paused for a moment, breathing deeply through his emotions as he absorbed my words. Then he pulled back only to place his forehead against mine.
“Well then, my beauty, I’ll have to make sure you are never in a room without me.”
He kissed the giggle off my lips and shared his own joy with me using his tongue, then later, his entire body.
Alexander
Every day my wife recovered from the shooting was one I relished like a chest full of treasure. Each time she laughed, her husky chuckle was a diamond collected in my palm, and every minute she spent walking around growing physically stronger again was a gemstone brighter than any occurring in nature. I watched, and I coveted, and when I felt there were no more gains to be had in her recovery, I decided it was time to give back some of the treasure Cosima had given me.
I leaned in the doorway of our bedroom at Salvatore’s and watched my wife as she lay across the bed on her back, legs up in the air, one hand twirling a lock of her hair like some teenage advertisement for a woman’s magazine. She was beautiful even in one of my old Cambridge T-shirts and a pair of her father’s chunky wool knit socks, so beautiful I was happy to watch her while she finished her phone call.
“Honestly, Sin, I’m having a terrible time believing you,” she said in a tone filled with the music of her laughter. “I just…you’re really getting married?”
I’d only had the occasion to meet my wife’s friend once in the two weeks we spent in New York after Cosima left the hospital before we hid her away in upstate New York. He was a stern man, but not the cold, implacable one Cosima had spoken of in the past. No, now happily shacked up with Giselle in a palatial Brooklyn penthouse with a baby on the way, Daniel Sinclair seemed like the happiest bloke in America. Even when Elena had crashed the evening when we painted the nursery to throw what I was beginning to understand was a classically Elena-style fit about the pregnancy, Sinclair had been unmoved in his resolve and his contentedness.