Page 187 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“I learned from your teachings not to hide in the darkness.” Each word comes out measured, deliberate like a man building something careful and new, brick by brick, in unfamiliar territory. “I'm learning to excel because I've come to realize there's more than just the Cosa Nostra in the world.” I pause. “I'm trying to thrive. I'll figure out how over time.” My thumb brushes over her stomach. “I know how to live because you showed me how.”

She doesn't say anything for a moment.

Then she turns her face into my chest, and I feel her exhale, slow and relieved like she'd been holding her breath for weeks, waiting to hear exactly that.

I wrap my arm around her and hold on.

For once in my life, I don't plan the exit.

EPILOGUE

TOREN

The apartment Xaden found in October is nothing like the one I rented in September.

Mine had ambitions.

His has a statement.

Top floor of a building six blocks from campus with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the mountains, a kitchen that has never once been used to its full potential because neither of us can cook, and a master bathroom with a rainfall shower that I have developed an almost religious relationship with now that everything below my waist has decided to stage a permanent protest.

The first time I walked through the front door, I stopped in the middle of the living room and said, “Xaden, this is a penthouse.”

He set my bag down and said, “I know.”

“We're students.”

“I'm aware.”

“Normal students don't live in—” I gestured at the exposed brick and the designer furniture and the view that looked like a painting, “—whatever this is.”

He looked at me with that look. The one that says he finds me mildly entertaining and isn't going to apologize for a single thing. “Do you want to go back to the shoebox?”

I looked at the rainfall shower visible through the open bathroom door.

“No, thank you,” I said.

That was four months ago. Now I'm thirty-four weeks pregnant and the shoebox is a distant memory and I have claimed the large corner of the living room with the best light for my books and my restoration projects, and Xaden has somehow incorporated this into his idea of what our life looks like with so little fuss that I suspect he planned for it all along. There are bookshelves where there wasn't furniture before. A worktable that appeared one Tuesday without comment.

I did not ask. I never ask about the things he does that are quiet and deliberate and entirely for me, because asking would mean acknowledging them and acknowledging them would mean I have to deal with what it does to my chest when I think about it too long.

We have a life here. A real one. Built from scratch, in a city that belongs to neither of us, which means it belongs to both of us equally, which is more than I ever thought I'd have.

My phone buzzes on the worktable. I don't look at it for a long moment because I already know who it is and what they'll say and the whole thing still makes me feel a specific complicated thing I haven't fully sorted out yet.

I pick it up.

Alex - Andrade dealt with it. All quiet.

I set the phone back down and press my free hand flat over my stomach and breathe.

All quiet. Two words that encompass an entire world I used to live inside, the Kellar Cartel and the Devlin Cosa Nostra, merged now into something new under the steady, ruthless hand of Alexander Denver, with Andrade running the day-to-day operations and keeping the peace between the territories the way only someone who has been doing it for years and never once slipped up can.

It was Xaden's decision.

That's the thing people don't understand. They assume he was pushed out, that stepping back from the Cosa Nostra was some kind of defeat. It wasn't. He sat across from Alex at a table in November and laid out terms and Alex accepted them, because Alex is many things but he isn't stupid and having Xaden Devlin as an ally is infinitely preferable to having him as an enemy. Xaden still makes calls. Still has reach. Andrade keeps him informed daily. The structure holds.

And then there's Carnage.