Page 29 of The Prizes We Win
Slowly, Dante looks back at me and removes his arm from my throat. “I’m sorry.”
Rubbing at my neck, I shake my head. “Don’t apologize. I don’t blame you.”
Dante turns to look at Joe and points in her direction. “You. Here. Now.”
As expected, she rolls her eyes. “Look, Sebastian already—”
“Josephine, I swear to fucking god,” he snarls.
Joe huffs out a breath and stomps over to the two of us. She’s about to speak again when Dante gently takes her face in his hands. “Why did you go down there by yourself?”
“I just wanted to see if I could get him to talk without the four of you around.”
“Talk about what?” he asks.
Honestly, there really isn’t much we need him for at this point. I would bet any amount of money on the fact that he knows nothing about the inner workings of the Novikov empire or their plans for revenge. He was just a pawn. And a shitty one at that. But it’s clear Joe wants something more out of him. So until she says otherwise, here is where he will stay. Despite how much the four of us want to go down there and put a bullet in his brain every minute of the day.
“I just…” she hesitates.
“You what? You can tell us.”
“I just want to understand. I want to understand why after all these years, he can’t just let mebe.” I step up next to Dante and reach for her hand. She doesn’t waste a second interlocking her fingers with mine. “He can’t even give that to me. After everything he’s already done, he still tries to haunt me.”
“Did he give you any answers?” Dante asks.
She shakes her head in his hands. “No. He just sits there with this smug-ass expression on his face, because he knows. He knows that I’ll keep him down there. He knows that as soon as I don’t need anything from him anymore it’s him against the four of you or him against the Bratva.”
“Do you want us to talk to him?”
“Ha,” she says humorlessly. “Like you would actuallytalkto him.”
“None of us are going to do anything with him until you say so. I think we’ve proven that by now, haven’t we?” Dante tips her head up slightly.
“Yes.”
“But, one thing I can promise you with absolute certainty is that man will never lay another hand on you again,” Dante assures her. “If he so much as causes you one more second of pain, I will walk down there and rip his head clean off his shoulders.”
Josephine huffs a half-hearted laugh. “We know you can protect yourself, Love, but you shouldn’t have to. Let us keep you safe. Let us take care of you. You don’t have to do everything on your own.”
The corners of her lips turn up ever so slightly as she looks over at me. “I know.”
“We promise to do everything we can to protect you, and we will never break that promise.”
“But, you have to keep your promises to us, Amore Mia,” Dante finishes for me.
“I know,” she repeats. And it’s then that I know sheunderstands.
The three of us crashed in Dante’s room after he carried her upstairs. I thought for sure he was going to not-so-subtly suggest I go back into my own room, but he quickly went into my room, grabbed a pillow off my bed, and put it beside the two he already had. The three of us fell asleep with Joe in the middle, her head resting on Dante’s chest, and with me pressed against her back.
Considering he’s usually up before the sun is, Dante doesn’t have much in the way of window treatments, and the sun is just starting to peek through his window. Somehow though, he’s stillasleep. Could have something to do with the fact that he tried to get in a fistfight with me in the middle of the night.
It isn’t lost on me the lengths he was about to go to protect her. And I don’t blame him. Had I heard what was going on and walked in on the scene he did, I probably would have assumed the worst too. But I would never do anything to hurt her, and I know he knows that too. But his instincts kicked in and he acted on them. His ability to protect the ones he loves most is one of the things I love most about Dante. Even if protecting that person comes at a great cost.
He would die for any of us today if he had to.
And while he and I don’t have a romantic relationship with one another, I do share something special with him.
Them.
