Chapter 16 - Surrender to the Dark
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It was nearly midnight when Dante finally walked back up the grand marble staircase of the manor house.
He didn't wear his bloodied christening suit into the bedroom wing. He had stripped it off in the downstairs mudroom for Nico’s men to burn in the incinerator, showered for thirty minutes under scalding water until every trace of the boathouse cellar was washed from his skin, and pulled on a clean pair of soft black sweatpants.
Yet as he quietly opened the door to the nursery first to check on Leo—who was sleeping peacefully on his back in the oak crib beneath the watchful eyes of two heavily armed guards stationed inside the hallway—Dante’s hands still felt stained to the bone.
He stepped through the connecting door into the master bedroom.
He expected the room to be empty, or for Tessa to have locked herself inside the guest suite across the hall after the horror of firing a gun to save their child’s life that afternoon.
Instead, a single amber lamp was glowing on the nightstand.
And sitting on the edge of his king-sized bed, wearing a simple white silk slip with her honey-brown hair tumbling in soft waves over her bare shoulders, was Tessa.
The moment he stepped into the room, she stood up and walked straight across the carpet to meet him.
"Don't touch me yet, tesoro," Dante rasped, stopping two steps away from her, his dark eyes haunted and raw beneath his damp black hair. "You know what I just did down by the lake. I promised I would never lie to you about what my hands do in the dark."
Tessa didn't stop.
She closed the final two feet between them, reached out with both hands, and took his large, warm palms into hers. Turning his hands palms-up in the soft amber light, she lowered her head and pressed a gentle, lingering kiss right into the center of each scarred palm.
A violent shudder ripped through Dante’s six-foot-four frame. A ragged groan tore from deep in his throat as his fingers curled around hers.
"Yesterday in that nursery," Tessa whispered, lifting her hazel eyes to meet his burning gaze, "when that woman tried to take our son, I pulled a trigger without blinking an eye. I finally understood what you felt that night in November when you found out Julian was coming after me. You didn't become a monster tonight, Dante. You killed the monsters who tried to murder our baby in his crib."
She stepped closer until her silk-clad breasts brushed against the bare skin of his chest, rising up on her tiptoes to slide her arms around his neck.
"For eight months in Virginia, I tried to hate you," she breathed against his lips, tears shimmering on her lashes. "And every single night, I was starving for you. I’m done running, Dante. All of you belongs to me—the light and the dark."
The iron leash Dante had held around his chest for eight months snapped in half.
With a low, guttural growl, his mouth crashed down onto hers, and he lifted her effortlessly off the floor, carrying her backward onto the wide black silk sheets of the master bed.
There was nothing hesitant or restrained between them anymore.
Eight months of terror, separation, grief, and fierce survival poured into every ragged breath and every feverish touch. Dante worshiped her body as if he were memorizing every inch of skin that had carried and given life to his son—kissing the soft, healing curve of her stomach, the racing pulse at the hollow of her throat, and the inside of her wrists while whispering broken Italian vows against her lips.
And Tessa held onto his broad, scarred shoulders with everything she had, arching into the consuming heat of his body as they finally came together in the dark—not as a schoolteacher hiding from a shadow, or a mafia boss keeping a secret, but as two halves of the same fierce soul fused back together by fire.
When dawn finally painted the sky above Chestnut Hill in streaks of pale rose and gold, Tessa lay tangled in the black silk sheets with her head resting on Dante’s chest, his warm fingers tracing lazy circles down her bare spine.
On the nightstand, the secure house intercom buzzed softly.
May you like
Dante reached over and pressed the button. "What is it, Nico?"
"Sorry to disturb you, Boss," Nico’s tense voice came through the speaker. "Before Corrado died last night, we cracked the encrypted hard drive in his downtown office. Corrado wasn't just working with Don Rossi in Brooklyn... he already handed the duplicate shipping ledgers for the Boston docks to a corrupt Special Agent in the FBI’s Organized Crime Task Force. A federal convoy just left the courthouse with a subpoena to seize the downtown bank vault at nine o'clock."
