Page 113 of Accidental Alliance

What answer will I give him then?

That I was afraid?

That I was right to be?

That both things can be true and still leave a child aching with hurt?

I don’t know anymore.

“I want to stop wanting you,” I whisper.

I look away first, furious with myself for admitting it, and stare past the terrace toward the patrolling guards below. One of them pauses near the far wall, turns, then continues his route with his rifle angled across his chest. The world below remains controlled. Inside me, nothing is.

“It is destroying me too,” Elio admits quietly.

The words pull my gaze back despite myself.

More tears spill down my cheeks before I can stop them. “He is yours, Elio. He has always been.”

For a long moment he doesn’t speak, remaining completely frozen in place while his eyes move between mine. His eyes close briefly as he pulls in a slow breath, and when they open again, they shine with a devastation that has nothing to do with anger.

His voice shakes, just slightly. “In the back of my mind, I had hoped… I think I knew before my mind allowed me to understand.”

Elio pulls me closer, wrapping me in his arms as if he can shield me from the eight years we lost. His body is warm around mine, solid and familiar in a way that makes pain flash inside my chest. My forehead presses against his chest before I can stop myself, and I hate the sob that tries to claw up my throat.

“I knew,” he whispers against my hair. “Christ, Isabella. I knew. But hearing you say it…”

I wrap my arms around him tightly.

He continues, his voice wrecked. “I never touched another woman after you left. No one could compare. No one ever came close. I thought distance would cure me of you, but it didn’t. It only turned wanting you into another form of punishment.”

I close my eyes against him. The words satisfy some wounded, jealous part of me even if it’s useless to feel that way. Fidelity after abandonment is not a gift that gives back the years we’ve lost. It does not place Elio beside me in the hospital room, or at birthdays and other major life events he’s missed since. It does not undo mornings when I looked at our son and wondered whether the man who made him would have loved him or not.

But it softens the hurt I’ve been holding onto all this time.

He cups my face again, drawing me back just enough to look at me.

His thumbs brush the tears from my cheeks with a gentleness so at odds with the violence I know he’s capable of that my breath catches in my throat.

“I’m so sorry for walking away and leaving you to raise our son alone, for every second you carried that fear by yourself. I will spend the rest of my life making it right if you let me.”

I pull back just enough to see there is war waging inside him—the parts of him still shackled to the family that raised him and the oaths he has been molded to honor, clashing with the selfish wants and desires he is choosing to cultivate with me.

It’s within that blood-soaked education that he has always been taught that love is weakness and seen firsthand what happens when empires discover it.

His hesitation lasts only a breath, but it is enough for me to see exactly where he still stands.

Elio has everything to lose now and yet he’s choosing this, anyway.

I don’t know who moves first.

Maybe both of us.

One moment, we are standing inches apart and the next, his mouth is on mine.

He kisses me like he has spent the last eight years starving for the taste of me, pushing every apology, regret, and unsaid prayer into this one point of contact.

His lips are fierce against mine, but his hands remain careful at my face, trembling slightly with the effort not to take more than I offer.