Page 54 of Claimed By the Silver Fox

He reaches for my hand, the one with the ring, turning it over so it catches the light. He brushes his thumb over it pointedly.

“You see this?” he asks. “This is proof that I chose you, Julia. And I still choose you. Whatever has happened before, whatever brought us here—I choose you now. And I’m not going to stop choosing you.”

My heart swells at the sound of those words. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone speak to me with such certainty, as if they know for certain what they want from me, that they won’t settle for anything less. My heart flutters, and I gaze down at the ring, trying to permanently connect those words with the sight of it—so that I’ll remember them every time I look down at the band on my finger.

“Thank you,” I whisper. It doesn’t feel enough to express how I’m really feeling, but at least it’s something.

“Besides, we have the baby to think of too,” he points out. “I was never going to choose Andreo over the child. Never.”

I nod, and he moves his hand to my belly, as if he can already feel our child inside of me. I smile slightly. His touch is so comforting, even after everything that has happened. How could a hand that pulled the trigger on his own son make me feel like everything was going to be okay? It doesn’t make sense, but I feel like I should have long ago given up trying to fit all of this together.

“That was one of the things I was most scared of,” I confess, the words coming more easily now that I’ve started talking. “That—that Andreo was going to raise the child, and he was going to give them the same upbringing that I’d had.”

Antonio lifts his chin, indicating for me to go on.

“I know it’s ridiculous,” I assure him. “And I know my parents’ problem wasn’t that they were—like Andreo, exactly. But I just kept thinking, what if I ended up resenting this child the same way they resented me? What if I left them feeling the same way I had, like they were unwanted? Like they were a problem? I would never have been able to forgive myself, I know what that does to a person, how it—” I stop in my tracks.

I feel like an open wound, a part of me laid out in front of Antonio that I would never be able to tuck away once more. But I’m not sure he needs to hear all this from me, given what has just happened with Andreo. God knows he’s probably going through enough of his own shit as it is.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m just rambling⁠—”

“No, I want to hear it,” Antonio assures me, though there seems to be something in his gaze that disagrees with him. I stare at him for a long moment, wondering what’s going through his head, wishing I could reach in and figure it all out one way or another so that I could put this all to rest—but I know it’s not that easy. There’s still so much we have to learn about each other, about the way we approach our lives, the history that wove us into the people we are today, and I’m not going to push him to lay it all out on the line right here and now, when there’s clearly so much more going on inside his head.

“How are you…feeling?” I ask him, a little impotent in the face of everything he has gone through. His gaze flashes, briefly, with a dense storm of emotion—grief, guilt, maybe even something close to doubt—but he swiftly wipes it away, as though intent on me not having to lay eyes on it.

“Tired,” he replies, and he gestures for me to come closer, pulling me into his arms with ease.

I lean against his chest, listening to the thud of his heartbeat under his skin again, reminding myself that, despite everything, I am alive. I am here with him. And that it might be all I have to focus on right now.

I rub my thumb along my ring, reminding myself once more of what he just said to me. That he chose me. That he will always choose me. That there’s nothing else that matters other than him choosing me, as hard as it might be to believe, as much as there’s a part of me that will always want to deny it. I have never had someone like him in my life before, and I intend to cling to him with everything I have, every bit of strength in my body.

And to give this child inside me a chance at life that I never did.

And it’s with that in mind that I slowly drift off to sleep, the weight lifting long enough for me to rest.

28

ANTONIO

“So the last of Salamanca’s men are gone?”

Cesc nods as he tosses back the last of his whiskey, sipping from the generous glass I poured him when he came to my office. Hard to believe, in some ways, that it’s all over—but I know it should come as a relief.

So why the fuck doesn’t it feel like one?

“The last of them has defected to whoever would take them,” he explains. “The ones who survived, at least. With Salamanca and Andreo dead, there’s no point in any of them sticking around. No doubt they’re glad to be out of it, knowing what happened to both of them.”

I grimace. He’s right, of course. But I’ve been doing my best not to think too hard about what happened this last week—or the fact that I murdered my own son in cold blood to make it happen.

Cesc looks at me across the table for a moment, as if he can sense something of what’s going on inside my head. I don’t want him to. I can only imagine the judgment he has for me, knowing that I killed Andreo, took him out in what must look like a callous, cruel attack. But Cesc doesn’t know the ways I’ve been torturing myself over it ever since, and the last thing I want is to lay that all out on the line for him when I haven’t even contended with it in the confines of my own head.

“Thanks, Cesc,” I tell him pointedly, and I nod to the door.

He rises to his feet, but makes no immediate move to leave, as if there’s more he wants to say—but he thinks better of it, planting the glass down on the desk and then stepping out, to leave me alone with the thoughts that have been tormenting me for days now.

I know I should be with Julia right now. She needs me more than ever, trying to ground herself after she was stolen away by Andreo and watched him die in front of her. No matter how much she seemed to have hated him by the time of his death, it still must have come as a shock, and I don’t want her to be left to contend with it all alone.

We’ve been living together in this apartment ever since she returned, and I have grown used to the casual intimacy of her presence, far more than I ever did in the mansion. The sound of her wandering around the kitchen, humming to herself as she makes herself something to eat. The way she knocks on the door to see if there’s anything I want. The running shower to announce she has woken up in the morning, usually long after I’ve gotten out of bed.