Page 49 of Stealing Cinder

"I love you, Samuel." She whispers it into the fabric of my shirt, her lips moving against the thud of my heart.

I press my forehead to hers. My hands cradle her face. Beyond the glass, the first gray light of dawn bleeds along the horizon, pressing the darkness back from the garden. The hedges sharpen into solid green. Stone pathways emerge from the black.

It’s a new day.

"I love you, Cinder. My princess. My wife." I kiss her, soft and warm, tasting her tears. "You will never be alone again. I swear it."

Her fingers find the ring on her hand. The sapphires catch the faint morning light filtering through the glass.

Behind us, Oliver's footsteps cross the concrete. Bastian murmurs instructions to the enforcers who've arrived to assist. Valerian lights a cigar and the cherry flares orange in the corner of my vision, his scarred face unreadable as he stands guard near the door.

My men will clear the bodies before the sun clears the fence line. They'll scrub the blood from the concrete, repair the gate. By morning, this night lives only in our memories.

I hold her tighter. She holds me back.

For the first time since I built this fortress, the walls of my house carry something other than silence. They hold the energy of our love now and forever.

Stealing Cinder was the best decision of my life and I’ll kill anyone who tries to take her from me.

EPILOGUE

CINDER, ONE AND A HALF YEARS LATER

The woman in the mirror is someone I barely recognize.

Not because she looks different. The pale blonde hair is the same, loose today, brushed over bare shoulders and spilling in soft waves to my chest. Light blue eyes stare back at me, a little red around the rims because pregnancy hormones are a cruel joke, but bright. Clear. Alive.

No. The reason I barely recognize her is because she's smiling.

I lean closer and brush a coat of mascara over my lashes. Behind me, late afternoon sunlight pours through the arched windows of my bedroom and falls in warm slants across the hardwood. My bedroom. In my father's house. The house I grew up in, the house I nearly died trying to reclaim, and the house that is mine again.

The vanity I'm sitting at belonged to my mother. I found it in storage, shoved behind a wall of Francesca's gaudy furniture, covered in dust and scratched along one leg where someone had dragged it without caring. I refinished the wood myself over the course of two weekends while Samuel held our newborn son in one arm and pointed at spots I missed while sanding. The man runs a criminal empire and he spent a Saturday afternoon hunched over a vanity with fine-grit sandpaper and sawdust in his beard. After putting the baby in his cradle, of course.

I set the mascara down and pick up my blush brush. In the mirror, my six-month belly rounds beneath a cream silk dress that Lavender picked out for today. She insisted. Something soft, she told me. Something your mother would have put you in.

I couldn’t argue. I do love the finer things in life.

And Lavender is right. This dress is exactly what my mother would have chosen. And there goes the sting behind my eyes again. Right on schedule. These pregnancy hormones are no joke the second time around.

I blink it back, tilting my chin up and fanning my face with one hand. Pregnancy has turned me into a walking faucet. I cried at a dog food commercial last Tuesday and Samuel stroked my hair while I sobbed about a golden retriever who waited by the door for his owner.

I am not even slightly embarrassed about it. Fine. Maybe a little.

The blush sweeps across my cheekbones and I study the effect. Warm. Alive. I look like a woman who sleeps through the night and wakes up next to a man whose heartbeat is the best lullaby in existence.

It’s a drastic change from how I used to live. Wake up and think about nothing except how I would end Edgar and my stepmother. Those were dark days and I am so glad they are fully behind me.

Eighteen months ago, I buried my father. I swiped right on a stranger and ended up pregnant in the arms of the most dangerous man in Chicago.

And now I'm married to him.

I twist the sapphire ring on my finger. The blue stones catch the afternoon light and scatter tiny shards of color across the vanity. Samuel slipped the second band—solid gold—on my finger three months after we buried Edgar and Francesca in unmarked graves. We skipped the church and huge guest lists, opting to keep it simple. We stood in the garden behind his home at sunset with Oliver, Bastian, Valerian, and their wives as witnesses, and a judge Samuel bribed into making a house call. I wore white. He wore black. Our vows were short, direct, and his voice cracked on the word forever.

But the lovemaking that came after still puts a blush on my cheeks.

And now, we own my father’s mansion. We moved in six weeks after the wedding. Bianca and Gianna received a forty-eight-hour notice to vacate. Samuel's enforcers delivered it and man, I wish I could have seen the shocked looks on their faces in person. The pictures his men took for me will have to do, but I’m just saying. In person would have put a new bounce in my step.

The next best thing was standing at the foot of the stairs and watching them drag their designer luggage down the limestone steps while Valerian leaned against the iron gate with a grin that could curdle milk.