Page 12 of Accidental Alliance

Men like me only know how to hunger for power. For the cold satisfaction of watching rivals choke on their own arrogance. Those wants are simple, clean in their brutality. They fit the world I was born into.

Peace simply does not.

It is softer, stranger, even. It asks a man to imagine surviving without the armor that made him.

To picture a life built around waking up and not immediately reaching for the part of himself shaped to kill at a moment’s notice.

She watches me for a long while. Her fingers move up to my chest, her palm splaying over my heart.

The contact is warm, more intimate than anything else we have done tonight. “You do know, Elio.”

My jaw tightens again.

The simple certainty in her voice hits harder than if she had demanded an answer outright.

She is not guessing with this. She is telling me she knows the truth with the quiet confidence of someone who has already seen it written all over my face.

I should take it back, pretend I only meant the obvious hunger between us that is the physical want, the easier vice.

But I cannot seem to force the lie out.

Not with her hand still resting over my heart and her eyes silently daring me to confess what is already on the tip of my tongue.

I lift a hand, brushing my fingers along the side of her face.

My knuckles skim her cheek, my thumb drifting down to her lower lip, still swollen from my kisses, still carrying some visible evidence of my lack of restraint.

The sight of that mouth should drag me back toward hunger. Instead, it drags something deeper out of me.

“A future where I’m not just an underboss,” I say quietly, swallowing thickly. The words feel heavy the moment they leave me, each one a stone dropping into dark water, disappearing quickly beneath the rippling surface. “But… a husband. A father.”

The confession hangs between us for one terrifying moment.

No gun has ever made me feel this exposed before. This is the most honest I have ever been in my whole life.

Not just with her but with myself, too.

I have thought about pieces of it before this, passing fantasies I crushed under the heel of reason the second they appeared.

The image of a woman beside me at a table that belongs only to us and a child asleep in her arms, my name spoken not in fear but with love, have all been nothing more than impossible desires that I have always dismissed for what they were, weakness dressed up as longing.

Except hearing it out loud, stripped of all excuses, I realize it has never been that.

It has been grief in advance for a life I assumed I would never be allowed to have.

She smiles then, the expression so soft, it almost hurts to look at.

She rises from where she has been resting against me and leans over, her hair brushing over my chest, her mouth finding mine in a kiss that is nothing like the desperate hunger from earlier.

This one is slower and more tender. When she pulls back, her forehead lingers on mine.

Her voice is barely above a murmur when she says, “Then take it, Elio. We could build a future together without all of this. We don’t have to be stuck being tied to what our families want forever.”

I stare at her.

For a second, I do not speak because I… can’t.

Nothing has ever hit me the way these few simple words do. Not because they are naive.