DOM: Alliance Series Book Three (82)

“You didn’t tell him when you told him about the funeral?”

“Well.” She dips her chin so she’s back to looking at my chest. “I left a message.”

“Say that again,” I growl.

“I only had his office number. I left a message with his assistant.”

“And he never called you back.” I don’t ask it. She, at nineteen, left a message for her brother telling him her final living parent had died, and he never even called her back.

He’s going to pay for that.

“Don’t be mad at him.” She tries to defend her piece-of-shit brother.

“None of that is okay, Valentine.” I don’t care if he has the power of the free world at his back. I’m going to hurt him.

“It’s in the past. We’re okay now.”

“If you were okay, tonight wouldn’t have been your first birthday party.” I stroke a hand up her back. “What happened after the funeral?”

“I came home and went back to school. And that next summer, King invited me over to have dinner with him and Aspen.”

“And you went?”

“I went.”

“Why?” I can’t imagine letting all that go.

“Because I wanted a family.”

My eyes close.

I fucking hate them all.

Valentine deserves a life full of gold, and all she got was ashes.

“Ask me about the third funeral I went to,” she whispers.

“I don’t want to,” I say truthfully.

Val moves her arm from between us so she can wrap it around my waist, hugging me back. “The third funeral I ever went to was for your cousin.”

I breathe through the ache behind my eyes.

And I hate myself the same way I hate King.

That funeral was the day she woke up with a tattooed finger.

It was the day after I revealed my plan to join The Alliance and destroyed her heart.

It was one more horrible fucking experience for her to go through alone.

And I was the one who did it to her.

I remember the way she paled when I told her we were going to a funeral. And the urge to apologize, for the first time in twenty years, grips at my throat.

But then Val continues. “It was everything I’ve always dreamed a family could be. Could mean.” She presses her forehead against my sternum, and I slide my hand up to grip the back of her neck. “I was terrified to go.”

“Val—”

She cuts me off. “I want to thank you for letting me be a part of that. It doesn’t change the other funerals I’ve been to, but it proved to me that it doesn’t always have to be like it was.”

This fucking woman.

“It will never be like it was. Not for you,” I promise her. “We grieve together.”

“I know.” Her lips press against my skin. “I like your family.”

Her muscles loosen under my hold. “They’re your family now, too,” I say quietly because I think she’s falling asleep as we talk.

“Only if you keep me.”

I barely hear her.

“I’ll keep you forever.”

Her tired fingers grip my sides. “But now you know.”

“Know what?” We’re both whispering now.

“That I’m not valuable.”

I’m not valuable.

Her words hit me with such force I can’t breathe.

I hate the people who made her feel this way.

I curl around her, trying to protect her from her own past, her own awful emotions.

She’s so fucking valuable.

She thinks because King is a shitty-ass brother to her that I’ll just… what? Return her? That I suddenly wouldn’t want her anymore?

I press my nose into her hair and inhale her scent.

Of course that’s what she thinks. Every member of her family has either betrayed her, ignored her, or left her.

I inhale again.

Not me.

Never again.

“You’re worth more than everything I have,” I tell her a moment too late, as her body relaxes fully into sleep.

I stay that way, holding my wife, for the next hour as I stare into the distance.

I fill my lungs with her.

I don’t shy away from the story she told; I replay it. I do my best to understand how she’s felt all these years. I listen to what she said she wanted.

And then I contemplate if there’s anything that’s too far when it comes to making sure I can keep her.

There isn’t.

So if my wife wants a family, I’m going to give her one.

Carefully, I extricate myself from the bed and silently move into the bathroom. I shut the door to block the light, then go into the closet and open the safe I have hidden in the back wall.

I don’t hesitate. I just reach in and take out the three rectangular sheets of pills.

This is how I keep her.

And how I give her everything she craves.

I open the drawer where I know she keeps hers and replace the two backup sheets with two from my hand, and then I pick up the one she’s currently using and pop out a matching number of pills on the last sheet from my safe.

I let the water run, washing away the evidence, while I make sure to put the last packet down exactly how I found it.