It was a long moment before she spoke. I didn’t know how Lucia would take what I told her. On the one hand, she’d seen enough evidence to suspect the truth. She’d seen it herself before I told it. On the other hand, Isabella was still her sister, and I was still the enemy’s son. I was her keeper. The man who’d signed a contract, claiming ownership of her.

“What do you want out of this, Salvatore? When all is said and done, what do you want?”

I’d been straddling the seat and now… I lay back and looked out across the pool toward the forest. It was so quiet here. So still. So peaceful.

I turned back to her. “I want to live a quiet life. I don’t want to look over my shoulder at every turn. I don’t want to see an enemy in every set of eyes I meet, every hand I shake. I want the people I love to be safe. I want them be happy.” Strange. Six months ago, I would have added ‘I want my brother to be alive’ into that list, but something had shifted. Somehow, I’d come to accept that he was gone. Not the cruelty or the unfairness of the act, but the knowledge that he was gone. And that my life lay here.

She cleared her throat and blinked her pretty, innocent eyes, casting them somewhere in the space between us. I didn’t take my eyes off her.

Lucia was all the innocence in my life.

She was my redemption.

And I wanted her. Her presence here, us together, as tumultuous as it was, as wrong as I was for keeping her, it saved me. She saved me.

And that was why I would keep my promise and release her once I could. Once I knew she would be safe and out of harm’s way.

“What do you want, Lucia?”

She met my gaze, shrugged her shoulders, and gave me a tiny but sad smile. “Same things, I guess.”

“You’ll have them. I promise.”

Another promise to her. Another one I didn’t know I could keep. But I would try. I would try every day up until my last breath to give her what she wanted. A life. Simple, peaceful, beautiful.

Like her.

It was in that moment I realized I loved her. Somewhere, somehow, I’d fallen in love with her.