Page 50 of Accidental Alliance

What I should be preparing for is retaliation from our last explosive interaction and making sure every man in this house understands exactly how quickly this disagreement between our families can turn into a bloodbath if one careless move reveals our hand.

Instead, I am standing outside her door like an idiot watching her pace.

My eyes slip from the window for a single moment, tracking down the hall to the other secured room.

Under guard and under a light sedative, her son is asleep two doors down. Our medics had insisted on sedating the kid after he fought so hard, he nearly made himself sick.

He had screamed until his throat went raw, then kept fighting even after his body started to shake from pure exhaustion.

Two of my men came out of that van bleeding from scratches they had no business getting from a small seven-year-old, and a bite bad enough to leave a crescent-shaped mark on one of their hands that I have no doubt in my mind would eventually scar.

He fought like he understood, on some animal level, that he and his mother were about to be pulled into a situation neither of them signed up for.

Isabella’s son.

Those words still unsettle me to think.

It would be easier if the boy remained an abstract concept I had no face to put to. If he were just another variable sitting outside my peripheral, one more complication on a sheet of paper or in a briefing file, I would know exactly where to place him in my mind.

I would slot him where all the other collateral lives go.

Protected if possible, moved if necessary. Regrettable, maybe, to lose, but manageable if it were to happen. Distance makes almost anything digestible.

That is the ugly truth of this life.

Plenty of innocent people have gotten caught in the syndicate world since the dawn of time—children, wives, siblings who wanted nothing to do with blood money or territory disputes or legacy by sharing the wrong last name.

We do not build our empires on the backs of willing men alone. The unwilling are always there too, ground into the foundation whether anyone wants them to be or not

I know how to compartmentalize. I learned it young.

You do not rise in my world without learning how to look at disaster and sort it by priority instead of horror.

You learn how to decide what gets protected first and why, how to measure the cost of every choice in lives, money, leverage, and optics.

Guilt is a luxury best indulged in private, if at all, because hesitation kills faster than cruelty ever could. When innocent people get dragged into something they never signed up for, you assess, contain, minimize, and move on.

I suppose it is not exactly unexpected for Isabella to have moved on with her life after fleeing her family. Eight years is enough time for anyone to build a new life, to fall in love again. To marry and have a child with another man and bury old feelings until they were nothing more than abstract concepts long forgotten.

It is rational.

Healthy, even, to expect that.

Normal people do that. Surviving people do that. Women abandoned by men like me should absolutely do that.

I know all of this. But all the rationality in the world does not stop the slow, ugly twist in my gut every time I picture her having a child with some nameless, faceless man.

Jealousy is too simple a word for it. It suggests something almost petty and youthful, some sour flare of possessiveness that should have burned out years ago. What sits inside me is worse than that. Darker and much more humiliating.

A visceral revulsion at the idea of another man in a space I used to imagine was mine. Another man hearing her laughter in the kitchen of that little blue house, knowing what she sounds like when she whispers a name instead of speaks it.

Another man being there for the life I forfeited before I even knew what I had before it was gone.

I hate that even now, after all the time that has passed and the blood that has stained my hands since, some primitive part of me still bucks hard at the thought of her building a life with anyone else.

I drag a hand over my mouth and force myself to step away from the door before I do something monumentally stupid such as opening it.

It is ridiculous to be jealous over a man clearly not in the picture.