Page 84 of Ivory Crown

“You know I’ll always protect you, right?”

She nodded, her eyes wide and brimming with unshed tears. The vulnerability in them was a gut punch to my carefully constructed defenses. I had seen that look before—the one that screamed of fear mingled with a desperate need for reassurance. She opened her mouth to speak, but our arrival cut her off.

The elevator dinged, cutting her off abruptly as the doors slid open to reveal the opulent penthouse floor. The ivory marble underfoot gleamed and crystal chandeliers hung overhead like stars in a night sky, casting refracted light all around. It was a world away from the violence we’d just escaped. But this paradise came with its own set of dangers.

“Jade,” I said, my voice suddenly rough around the edges, “I swear on my life, I’ll keep you safe.”

That’s when she looked up at me, those damn tears finally escaping their confines and tracing paths down her cheeks. It was more than I could take. My arms went around her, pulling her tight against me. Her body melded to mine, fitting as though she was made just for this—to be held by me, protected by me.

“Thank you,” she whispered against my chest, her breath warm through the fabric of my shirt.

“Always,” I replied, because in that moment, with her in my arms, it felt like the only truth I knew. I was Dante Moretti, a name that commanded respect and fear in equal measure. But here, now, I was just a man vowing to shield a woman from the kind of darkness that had been my shadow for too long.

For now, I’d be her fortress against the world, and I’d fight with all the ferocity I possessed to keep her safe. Because in a life of broken promises and shifting loyalties, this—I realized—was the one vow I intended to keep, no matter the cost.

Even if that cost was my fucking life.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Jade

Istood frozen, my gaze transfixed on the man who had just altered the course of my life in the most horrific way.

A man who lay lifeless because I existed, because Dante chose to protect me at all costs.

“Jade,” Dante’s voice was a low rumble next to me, his words slicing through the charged silence that filled the room.

My breath hitched as I finally tore my gaze away from the blank space on the floor, where I imagined the man was, to study Dante. His hands, those beautiful yet deadly instruments, were stained red—evidence of his violent loyalty. Blood speckled his jeans, a macabre spatter pattern that no designer had envisioned. He was a walking contradiction: a harbinger of death draped in the skin of an angel.

“Look at me,” he urged gently.

I did, and what I saw shook me to the core. There was a tenderness in his eyes, a silent plea for understanding. How could a man capable of such brutality also be the one to stir something deep within me? My heart raced with a cocktail of fear and fascination.

“Jade,” he said again, his voice steady but strained, “talk to me.”

I swallowed hard, the lump in my throat nearly choking me. “How can you stand there so calmly?” The question came out more accusatory than I intended. It wasn’t his composure that unnerved me—it was my own unsettling calm in the aftermath of violence.

“Because if I don’t,” he began, his voice laced with a darkness that sent a chill down my spine despite myself, “I’ll think about what that man was trying to do to you, to our baby, and lose my mind.”

I observed him then, really looked at him—the man who had stepped into my life like a storm, upending everything I thought I knew about the world and myself. Dante Moretti was a force to be reckoned with, a man who held life and death in his hands and chose which to grant.

“Blood is tricky,” I muttered, almost to myself, thinking back to my hours spent in the lab, dealing with far less sinister stains under the microscope. But this was not the time for scientific musings. This was raw, this was real, and it clung to Dante like a second skin.

“Jade,” he whispered, stepping closer, his heat enveloping me, “I did this for you. Remember that. For us.”

“Us?” The word felt foreign on my lips, a concept too complex to decipher while standing in the shadow of mortality. Yet, despite the revulsion swirling in the pit of my stomach, the undeniable pull towards Dante remained—a magnetic force rooted in something beyond reason or logic.

He had protected me. He had protected his baby.

Maybe he had been right all along.

The silence stretched between us, heavy and expectant. Dante’s breaths were even, but I could see the tension in the set of his jaw, the subtle clench of his fists at his sides. The morning light filtering through the blinds cast long shadows across the floor, turning crimson into a dark abyss that seemed to reach out toward us.

I swallowed hard, feeling the weight of the world pressing down on my shoulders. Dante’s presence was a double-edged sword—both a threat and a strange comfort. He was the eye of the storm, calm yet capable of devastating destruction.

“Your jeans will be ruined.”

“What?”

“Simple chemistry,” I said, my voice quieter than I intended, but I needed to break the silence, to distract from the nagging thought that with every passing second, we were sinking deeper into a quagmire of blood and oaths from which there might be no return. “Hydrogen peroxide, cold water, maybe some enzymatic cleaner...you can get rid of blood.”

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