CHAPTER NINETEEN
When the doors sealed us inside, Santos slammed the emergency stop with enough force to make the metal panel shudder. The elevator lurched to a halt, its mechanical hum fading to silence.
I stared down at my hands. Coraline’s hair twisted between my fingers. My knuckles were split open, blood seeping from wounds I couldn’t remember receiving. The second my breath caught, Santos pulled me against his chest.
“How could he do this to me?” My voice sounded foreign in my own ears—high, reedy, trembling at the edges.
Heat flooded my face as I recognized the pathetic cliché I’d become: the betrayed wife, shattered and small, asking the same question every woman before me had choked out through tears and rage.
I could barely form the words. “She braided my hair. She brought me birthday gifts. She—“ My throat closed around the memory of Coraline’s perfume, the way she’d squeeze my shoulder when I was upset.
Santos’s arms became a fortress around me. “I know, El.”
“For how long has she—“ The question died, too painful to finish.
His cheek pressed against my crown, his silence an answer in itself. No platitudes, no empty comfort.
“This rage you feel?” His voice rumbled against my ear. “You’ve earned every drop of it.”
My fingertips dug into my temples until I felt bone beneath skin. As if pressure alone could keep my skull from fracturing. “I remade myself for him. I gave everything. I loved him completely.”
The center of my chest collapsed inward.
“What more could I have possibly given?”
A sound tore from my chest—half-sob, half-scream.
Santos didn’t flinch. “You were more than enough,” he said fiercely. “You are enough, El. This wasn’t because of anything you did. It was her. And it was him being a fucking fool.”
“He ruin us.”
“And he’ll pay for it,” Santos promised, each word a vow.
My body quaked, lungs struggling to remember their purpose. Alaric had taken me apart piece by piece. I’d spent my entire life armoring myself—spine straight, eyes dry, heart guarded, only for it to dissolve under his persistent warmth, his relentless insistence that I could be vulnerable with him.
I’d embraced being a Kostas. I’d turned my back on being a Darzi. I’d become someone new in his hands, believing I was finally safe enough to discover who I truly was.
Now I knew it wasn’t him who was the fool, but me.
“Let me take you home,” Santos implored quietly, his voice a rough whisper against the sterile hum of the elevator. “To Nikolai.”
I managed a nod, feeling my neck muscles strain with even this small movement.
His hand reached for the emergency button. The elevator lurched back to life with a mechanical groan, but his grip remained around my waist. The quiet between us felt like another betrayal, heavy and suffocating as a wool blanket in summer.
“Did you know?”
Santos froze, his broad shoulders tensing beneath the charcoal wool of his suit jacket, the fabric straining across his back. His hands found my shoulders, calloused thumbs pressing into the hollows above my collarbone.
“Look at me, El.”
The whites of his eyes had gone bloodshot, that telltale crimson rim I’d seen only when rage burned beneath his careful control. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried, pinned by the intensity of his gaze.
“I knew about meetings to handle Citadel threats. But this? With her?” His jaw clenched, a muscle twitching beneath the salt-and-pepper stubble. “Never.”
My bottom lip quivered like a child’s. I sank my teeth into it until I tasted copper, warm and metallic.
“I tried to keep you away tonight because the men he’s dealing with make Darius seem like a goddamn choirboy,” he confessed, telling me more than Alaric would have allowed.
"You believe I'd stand by while you walked into this? Selene, you might as well be my own daughter. I would have burned this city down brick by brick, watching it all turn to ash before letting you face this blind.”
He cupped my face between calloused palms.
"I knew nothing. If I had I would have dragged her through these halls by her throat and put her in the ground before she ever laid hands on what's yours."
Something between a laugh and a cry escaped me, raw and broken. He wiped another tear with the edge of his thumb, the gesture incongruously gentle from hands I’d seen break bones.
“You deserved better than this,” he swore.
The elevator announced our arrival with a soft chime that echoed in the confined space, and Santos guided me through the club’ s private exit, his six-foot-three frame angled like a shield to make sure no one saw me break.