Page 133 of Vicious Little Princess

“It makes sense,” I said, walking to him and stroking his arm. “That happened during the last war and your mom was an innocent.”

“But Caterina’s not,” Nico told him. “She’s one of us. She’s a warrior. Santino is terrified of her, for fuck’s sake. That’s how much of a force to be reckoned with that she truly is.”

I nodded, brushing my fingers over Milo’s cheek. “It’s not the same as what happened to your mom.”

His eyes met mine and my gut twisted at the stark emotion swimming in his striking espresso pools.

“It’snotthe same,” he murmured. “I just…”

“You love her,” I spoke.

“Yeah,” he admitted, his eyes brightening as he put that out there.

“I love you too.”

We all spun to see Cat standing there, leaning against the doorframe, and beaming at Milo.

She was wearing one of my white tees, and she looked sexy as fuck in it. Cute too at the same time somehow.

“I can’t wait until you start showing,” Nico randomly blurted out in completely uncharacteristic fashion.

The surprise of it had all of us bursting out laughing.

He wassointo this pregnancy, even more than I’d already predicted him being.

Milo burst from us, strode across the room, and wrapped her up in his arms. “Ido, you know? I love yousomuch.”

“I know,” she murmured happily into his chest. “I feel it from you.”

When he pulled back enough where she could actually breathe properly from his overwhelming bear hug, he told her, “I don’t know how much you heard of that, but I need you to know that I just want you and the baby safe. I’m sorry that I—”

“It’s all right. I understand the impulse. And it’s coming from a good place.”

“But we also can’t let fear control us,” Nico spoke. “Especially not when it comes to this.”

Cat nodded. “If we’d allowed that to be the case beforehand, we never would have gotten to this point of challenging the families. Of fighting for our freedom from all of this insanity. We need to focus on seeing this through.” She eyed Milo intensely. “Andthat’show we protect our child.”

“Absolutely,” Nico agreed.

“Okay,” Milo said, easing back from her, but not before planting a soft and sweet kiss on her cheek. “Okay, yeah, I hear you. All of you.”

Nico sighed with a whole lot of relief.

I wasn’t surprised.

We all needed to be on the same page more than ever with what was about to go down later tonight.

It was bad enough that I’d strained that by acting alone—going rogue,as Nico called it—in my desperate bid to take down Angelo myself.

But I’d fucking failed, and I wasn’t gonna let that be the case again. And I wasn’t gonna hurt our foursome by going off half-cocked again either. We’d do it together. Nico had promised me justice and I would trust in that. I had to. For the good of us all.

Once these strikes were done, the time for that would come.

“Did our voices carry all the way to the living room and wake you up?” Nico asked Cat.

“No. One of my alerts woke me up.”

Nico frowned. “I would’ve seen it as I was going over the tactical plans for the strikes,” he said, gesturing at his open laptop on his desk.

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