Page 49 of Claimed By the Silver Fox

By the time the car pulls up, I can see his body is racked with tension. I reach out gingerly to touch his hand, and he doesn’t pull away, though I can see his shoulders hunching up slightly.

“Are you okay?” I ask softly. It seems a stupid question, even to me, given what has just happened, but he brushes it off anyway, turning the conversation on to me instead.

“Did he hurt you?” he asks gruffly, and he reaches out for me, cupping my face in his hand and looking me up and down intently.

I shake my head. “He didn’t, he just…”

I feel a sudden swell of tears threatening to rise up within me, and I have to bite them back hurriedly before they get the better of me. I gulp down a few deep breaths, and Antonio’s face darkens.

“If he laid a hand on you⁠—”

“He didn’t,” I assure him again. “He was…he found out about the pregnancy, like he told you. And he said to me that he would—that he would keep me there and raise the baby as his.”

I can see the way that shakes him, the way it shook me. Andreo, as a father? It’s enough to turn my stomach, and I rest a hand on my belly without thinking, sending a silent assurance to my little one that I will never let something like that happen to them, not a chance in hell.

“Jesus Christ,” Antonio mutters, and something in him seems to give. His shoulders slump forward, and he puts his head in his hands, the gun just a matter of inches away, a potent reminder of everything that has just happened.

“I’m…I’m sorry, Antonio,” I blurt out, and he turns to me, looking surprised.

“What are you sorry for?”

I stare at him, teeth digging in to my bottom lip. “I—I don’t know. If it hadn’t been for me, none of this would have happened…”

He reaches for me, his eyes blazing with an intensity that silences me in an instant. “Julia, none of this happened because of you,” he told me hotly. “All of this—everything—it happened because of Andreo. He made his choice, to align with Salamanca, to abandon the family, to take you away from me because he couldn’t stand the idea of someone else having what he thought was his. That’s on him. Every bit of it.”

I tilt my face into his hand slightly, and I do my best to believe what he’s saying to me. I

want to believe it, of course I do. But for so long, I’ve felt like all these problems in my life have been nothing but my fault. Every time my parents fought, if I tried to get in the middle of it, they would turn on me like I had been the problem all along. If I tried to stand up for myself, it would just make the situation worse. And even now, knowing that I couldn’t have called the shots one way or another, I still feel the need to apologize, to fawn, to plaster a balm over the situation in the hopes that I could fix it.

“Thank you,” I whisper, though I’m not sure that word even comes close to summing up what’s really going through my mind. For a moment, he just looks at me, but when he draws his hand back, I realize I have way more questions.

“Salamanca,” I say, remembering the man’s name again. “Andreo said that he’d gotten him on your side⁠—”

Antonio lets out a mirthless laugh. “That would be an impressive thing to pull off, given that he’s already dead.”

My eyes widen. “Wait, what?”

“He left town just before the attack on the mansion,” he explains. “We intercepted him on the way back, that’s how we found out where you were being held. As soon as I got to the apartment building, I gave the order to kill him. I’m not letting a fucker like that walk free, not knowing he would happily turn my family against me given the chance.”

I pause for a moment, taking it in. So much destruction, so much death, so much pain, and it feels like I’m right in the middle of it. If I had never met Andreo all those years ago, if I had never trusted in what he had told me, that he would be able to make things better for me…God, maybe I would have been able to keep all of this from happening.

And Antonio seems to sense what’s going on inside my head, watching me intently, like he can see right into my mind. “Hey,” he murmurs, taking my hand. “If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else with Andreo, you understand? He was always looking for a way out. He might never have admitted it, but it’s true. And you were just the lie he could convince himself was true, something that proved I was never going to be on his side.”

“You think he would really have kept the baby?” I ask softly. I barely dare to entertain that idea, but I can’t help it. The thought has been rotating around my head for so long, the idea of my baby in that man’s arms. It’s enough to turn my stomach, and I want nothing more than to banish the idea from my mind. But even with him dead, I can’t help but feel him sinking his fingers into me, the lingering weight of everything he said and did enough to make me feel ill.

Antonio stares at me, and then shakes his head. “I don’t think it matters, one way or another,” he tells me. “He would have said anything to you if he knew it got under your skin. I told you, that’s what I taught him, use every skill and advantage you have against the people you’re trying to bring down. You were just his target, that’s all.”

I swallow hard. I hate thinking of it like that.

And I want to believe Antonio, of course I do, but everything Andreo has done to me over the years, it feels far more personal than that. Not just a game he was playing, but a campaign of terror that was aimed at tearing me down, proving once and for all that I wasn’t worthy of anything better than him.

Antonio steps out of the car and helps me out, and I lean on him heavily as he takes me up the stairs to his new apartment. The lobby is beautiful, polished marble floors, shimmering crystal mirrors at every side of the elevator. But when I look at my reflection in them, I can’t see myself there, not yet.

I’m just some hollowed-out woman, trying to find her feet in any way she can.

“Do you know how he found out about the child?” he asks me, hand on the small of my back as the elevator sweeps us up to the top floor. He has hardly taken his hands off me since we first saw each other again, and I wonder if he’s missed me the way I’ve missed him. It felt like there was distance growing between us, with the revelation of the pregnancy, but now he has closed it, so careful in how he handles me that it’s impossible to imagine him anywhere other than at my side.

“He said…he said that they were watching the house for a while before the attack,” I reply, casting my mind back as best I can. “They saw the doctor come in, and they tracked him down—asked him what he had been doing there, and he spilled.”