“So, you really are going to leave?” Elena asked softly from behind me.
I reached back and found her hand unerringly to pull her to my side. Her familiar Chanel number 5 scent wafted over me, and the feel of her against me was so right that it felt like two puzzle pieces clicking together. I leaned my head against her shoulder, the ends of her curls soft as cotton beneath my cheek.
“I will, but I’ll come back to visit often.”
There was a silence between the three of us that said not often enough. It won’t be the same.
It wouldn’t. I wasn’t naïve enough to doubt it. I had lived apart from my siblings for long enough to know how distance could erode a bond. I also knew that the secrets we had all harboured between us were almost at an end, that it would be easier to love across a thousand miles without those obstacles to hurdle over.
“You’ll take care of each other for me, right?”
I watched as my question prompted Dante and Elena to lock eyes, flaring to life an electric almost nuclear frisson between them that made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end.
“No promises,” Elena broke the heavy silence to say, her chin at its haughty angle, her voice as English as a true American born.
“I don’t think I like her enough to look out for her,” Dante admitted, half-joking, half-somber as if even he couldn’t tell where his true feelings about my abrasive sister fell.
I didn’t blame him. The woman in my arms was more complicated than most by half, and her experiences had only hardened her farther, made her incompatible with the ordinary people of the world.
It was a good thing, I thought as Dante’s sidelong gaze roved over Elena’s prim but oddly sexy black tuxedo-style dress that Dante was one of the least ordinary men I knew.
“You’ll be fine,” I surmised with more than a little smugness in my voice.
“I still think you should consider a long-distance marriage,” Elena suggested. At my narrowed look, she gave an insolent shrug that could have rivaled one of Alexander’s. “What? You did it before.”
I laughed, but Alexander did not as he turned into the conversation with a heavy frown at my sister. He banded his arm around my hip and tugged me free from her so that I was wrapped around his side like a vine, exactly the way he preferred me.
“You’ll be grateful that I will allow my wife to visit at all,” he told her imperiously.
They locked eyes, one alpha to another, both so utterly indignant and so completely assured of their own superiority that I couldn’t help the giggle that burst through my lips.
I hadn’t giggled like that since I was a girl, since before Xan and Seamus’s downturn, since before puberty when beauty had sliced into me like a double-edged sword, both a blessing and a curse.
I giggled even harder. When I recovered, they were all staring at me with soft looks on their hard faces that proved just how much they loved me in ways so incredibly tender. It made their affection all the more precious for how elementally it went against their natures.
I leaned into Xan to press a kiss to the hinge of his jaw and excused myself to the ladies’ room. It was hard not to laugh when, the moment I walked away, the three of them descended into bickering again.
As I passed Sinclair, his hand reached out to gently ensnare mine. Our eyes met, and I saw all the happiness I’d ever wanted for him shining from his eyes. It made my throat throb with tears.
“Happy?” he asked, simply.
“Almost as much as you,” I told him, squeezing his hand back. “It seems you have a knack for saving Lombardi girls.”
He didn’t laugh with me. Instead, his electric eyes went dark as they looked at his new wife and then back at me. “No, Cosi, the Lombardi girls have a knack for saving lost men.”
I swallowed his blessing like communion wine with closed eyes and a soft smile of thanks before I moved again through the jovial crowd. Something dark moved too low and quick through the edge of my vision, prompting me to look at the shadows in the hallway leading back to the bathrooms.
A boy stood there, his shoulders pressed to the wood, his hands in the pockets of his impeccably pressed trousers. He was oddly familiar even in the low light, the burnish of his flaxen hair, the way it pushed back from his forehead in a ridged crown of gold that contrasted deeply with the dark pits of his shadowed eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, on the knife’s edge of puberty, but not quite there, still slim in a way that looked gangly and round faced with baby fat that had yet to melt off.