Page 74 of Fierce Monarch

“Good, you start the coffee, I’ll make the dough.”

Grey choked as he exited the room behind me. “Batter. It’s pancake batter.”

Fuck. “Whatever.”

I could feel the boys exchanging glances behind me, but I didn’t care. Just having us all in the same room made me feel more level, and I realized that even if I was mad, I couldn’t kick Dominic out anymore. Everything felt wrong when he wasn’t here.

I blamed the engagement for the sappiness.

As if he knew I was thinking about him, Grey pressed a kiss to the back of my neck. “Why don’t I make breakfast, and you two can talk this through? I’ll have coffee out in a second, too.”

Nodding, I motioned Dominic toward the living room. It would’ve been easier to go into the bedroom, but it felt wrong to invite turmoil into that space right now when it was so full of joy. We settled on the couch next to each other but not quite touching, and we waited until Grey brought us our cups and disappeared again before we got into it.

“Explain.”

Dominic set down his cup, his hand shaky, and turned fully toward me. “What my mom said was true. We’ve been engaged since you were sixteen.”

“You knew the whole time?”

He grimaced. “Yes. It’s why I kept the name, despite the divorce.”

And why the capos had been gunning for him to usurp me. Joaquin knew about the marriage pact. “Mario wanted you to take over.”

Dominic shook his head, scratching the scruff on his cheeks as he thought. “Mario’s intentions were always his own, but I think he truly intended for Antoni to run Seattle and for us to take Chicago.”

“Then he wanted us both dead.” Dominic’s brows furrowed, and I smoothed them out with my thumb instinctively, unsure why it felt so good to touch him today, when yesterday I hated it.

“You told me a long time ago that you were only allowed to stay in Chicago because you promised not to take over. If my father really wanted us to seize the city again, he was ready to watch us die.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Dominic snatched my hand off his face, cradling it between his. “Mario probably had a few different paths for us to take to get to the top again, and who even knows if that really was the plan. Maybe he just wanted to connect the bloodlines.”

I thought about it, letting Dominic’s finger rubbing over my knuckles relax me. “Maybe it wasn’t about us, but our legacy. You couldn’t go back without risking your life, but did your amnesty deal with the Lords mention heirs?”

Dominic startled. “No. You think he was going to put our kids in charge?”

“I think it’s easier to usurp a throne when you have twenty years to do it without damaging the entire infrastructure of a city than to try to get it done in just a few and rule over a broken kingdom.”

It was exactly what Cash was doing, though he was too impatient to avoid breaking Seattle.

“So you knew about the pact the whole time, yet you didn’t come home. Why?” I had to know, even if I wasn’t sure I’d like the answer.

“I wasn’t intending to follow the pact,” he admitted. The sting in my chest made no sense. I knew he hadn’t been planning to come for me. All I had to do was look at what he’d done since he left Seattle to know that. For fuck’s sake, his extracurriculars rivaled mine, and I certainly hadn’t been celibate.

“You were going to stay.” And never come home. Then again, had Seattle ever been his home?

He ran his hands through his hair again, cringing at the feeling of them there. “I’m not sure. I was looking for something I couldn’t find and searching in all the wrong places.”

There were so many places, too. Though I’d tried to avoid it, Dominic’s exploits in Chicago always made their way to me over the years. I knew all about the women who passed through his bed, but one of them had always stuck out.

“How does Rose play into this?”

Her name dropped like a boulder between us, and I realized that even though we hadn’t talked about her—hell, maybe because of it—she’d been a sticking point in our relationship. He said he wanted me, but he’d wanted her once too. What the hell was to say he wouldn’t change his mind with me like he had with her?

Dominic swallowed, tightening his grip on my fingers before he spoke. “Rose and I met in college. We were together for three years, engaged for one, before I eventually ended not just our engagement, but our relationship as a whole.”

I knew that. Had heard all about the scandal through the grapevine. What I didn’t know was, “Why?”

He looked at me then. Held my eyes like he needed me to know what he was saying was the truth. “Because I was never meant to marry anyone else.”

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