38. Chapter Forty-Eight Jade
Chapter Forty-Eight: Jade
I stood frozen, my gaze transfixed on the man who had just altered the course of my life in the most horrific way.
A man who lay lifeless because I existed, because Dante chose to protect me at all costs.
“Jade,” Dante’s voice was a low rumble next to me, his words slicing through the charged silence that filled the room.
My breath hitched as I finally tore my gaze away from the blank space on the floor, where I imagined the man was, to study Dante. His hands, those beautiful yet deadly instruments, were stained red—evidence of his violent loyalty. Blood speckled his jeans, a macabre spatter pattern that no designer had envisioned. He was a walking contradiction: a harbinger of death draped in the skin of an angel.
“Look at me,” he urged gently.
I did, and what I saw shook me to the core. There was a tenderness in his eyes, a silent plea for understanding. How could a man capable of such brutality also be the one to stir something deep within me? My heart raced with a cocktail of fear and fascination.
“Jade,” he said again, his voice steady but strained, “talk to me.”
I swallowed hard, the lump in my throat nearly choking me. “How can you stand there so calmly?” The question came out more accusatory than I intended. It wasn’t his composure that unnerved me—it was my own unsettling calm in the aftermath of violence.
“Because if I don’t,” he began, his voice laced with a darkness that sent a chill down my spine despite myself, “I’ll think about what that man was trying to do to you, to our baby, and lose my mind.”
I observed him then, really looked at him—the man who had stepped into my life like a storm, upending everything I thought I knew about the world and myself. Dante Moretti was a force to be reckoned with, a man who held life and death in his hands and chose which to grant.
“Blood is tricky,” I muttered, almost to myself, thinking back to my hours spent in the lab, dealing with far less sinister stains under the microscope. But this was not the time for scientific musings. This was raw, this was real, and it clung to Dante like a second skin.
“Jade,” he whispered, stepping closer, his heat enveloping me, “I did this for you. Remember that. For us.”
“Us?” The word felt foreign on my lips, a concept too complex to decipher while standing in the shadow of mortality. Yet, despite the revulsion swirling in the pit of my stomach, the undeniable pull towards Dante remained—a magnetic force rooted in something beyond reason or logic.
He had protected me. He had protected his baby.
Maybe he had been right all along.
The silence stretched between us, heavy and expectant. Dante’s breaths were even, but I could see the tension in the set of his jaw, the subtle clench of his fists at his sides. The morning light filtering through the blinds cast long shadows across the floor, turning crimson into a dark abyss that seemed to reach out toward us.
I swallowed hard, feeling the weight of the world pressing down on my shoulders. Dante’s presence was a double-edged sword—both a threat and a strange comfort. He was the eye of the storm, calm yet capable of devastating destruction.
“Your jeans will be ruined.”
“What?”
“Simple chemistry,” I said, my voice quieter than I intended, but I needed to break the silence, to distract from the nagging thought that with every passing second, we were sinking deeper into a quagmire of blood and oaths from which there might be no return. “Hydrogen peroxide, cold water, maybe some enzymatic cleaner...you can get rid of blood.”
A dark chuckle escaped Dante’s lips, and he looked at me, a glint of something unrecognizable flickering in his eyes. “You think it’s that easy, huh? Just erase what’s been done?”
“Not erase,” I corrected him, a scientist to the core, clinging to facts like a lifeline. “But clean. Remove the evidence from the surface. Well, from denim. I don’t know about anything else.”
“Ah, beautiful,” he murmured, the affectionate term rolling off his tongue like a caress. “If only our souls could be as easily cleansed.”
“Speak for yourself. My soul is squeaky clean.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”
His words hung in the air, as tangible and unnerving as the body sprawled across the room. Love. A simple word, heavy with unspoken promises and inherent dangers—especially for a woman like me, caught in Dante Moretti’s magnetic pull.
For a long moment, I could do nothing more than stare at him—this tall, dark, gorgeous, killer standing before me, his expression inscrutable.
And then he smiled.
I reached out then, compelled by a force I couldn’t name, and touched the stain on his jeans. My fingers brushed against the rough fabric, against the remnants of violence that had become an all-too-familiar part of our lives. It wasn’t just Dante’s life; it was mine now too. This mess, this chaos—we were in it together, whether I liked it or not.
“Jade,” Dante breathed, his voice a low rumble that resonated within the caverns of my heart. “What are you doing?”
“Facing reality,” I replied, my touch lingering, tracing the outline of the stain as if I could map out the path we’d taken to get here, to this moment of truth and consequence.
“Does that include cleaning this stain?” he asked, a smile in his voice.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, take off your jeans.”
Dante laughed, the sound echoing off the stained marble walls and trickling down my spine like a cold bead of sweat. It was a darkly amused laugh, as if he had never heard anything so absurd and yet so endearing. “You’re serious,” he stated rather than asked, his expression borderline incredulous.
I nodded, feeling the corners of my mouth twitch into an involuntary smile. “Yes, Dante. I am serious.”
His eyes, those merciless stormy orbs that held the capability of striking fear and inciting desire simultaneously, softened at my determined insistence. He removed his belt with one swift tug and unbuttoned his jeans, sliding them down his muscular legs before stepping out of them.
“Thank you,” I murmured, picking up the discarded clothing with more care than necessary. The blood had dried into a crusty discoloration against the dark denim—an ugly blight that seemed to sully everything it came into contact with.
“You’re welcome,” Dante replied, his tone as casual as if we were discussing mundane household chores. He followed me as I moved towards the lavish bathroom attached to the penthouse suite —the bathroom that seemed grotesquely pristine in comparison to the blood-soaked reality on the other side of the mahogany door.
I filled the sink with cold water and poured in a generous amount of hydrogen peroxide, watching as the clear liquid fizzed upon contact with the stained fabric. Dante stood silently at the doorway, his lean form outlined against the bright corridor light, watching me with an unreadable expression.
His shirt was untucked now, billowing slightly around his waist, and it hung open at his chest, revealing finely-toned muscles beneath. There was a raw, primal beauty to him that was impossible to ignore. It was as if he held an inherent power—an intensity—that demanded attention.
I scrubbed at the stain silently, focusing on the repetitive motion, on the feel of denim against my skin. Each stroke seemed to scrub away a bit of the turmoil churning inside me. A strange calmness washed over me—a reprieve from the chaos of Dante’s world—that lasted until I felt his hand close gently around my wrist.
“Enough,” he said softly. “I don’t care about the jeans.”
“But I care,” I retorted, meeting his gaze head-on. The steely hardness in his eyes wavered as he looked at me, and for a fleeting moment, I thought I saw something else—pain perhaps, or regret. It was gone before I could identify it, replaced again by the impenetrable facade he wore like a suit of armor.
“Jade…” His voice trailed off, uncertain and hesitant. The grip on my wrist loosened, then tightened again, like he was torn between letting go and holding on. His other hand came up to palm my cheek, his thumb tracing the curve of my lip before he took a deep breath.
“I’ve dragged you into this mess,” he admitted in a hushed whisper, as if saying it louder would make it more real. “And for that, I’m sorry.”
I stilled at his words, my heart pounding against my ribcage. Dante Moretti was many things—dangerous, unpredictable, captivating—but apologetic wasn’t one of them. This was new territory for both of us.
“You never pushed back,” he said. “It’s no excuse, but I thought you wanted this.”
“You were never supposed to be anything other than someone I was fucking for fun,” I replied, surprised at the words coming out of my mouth. I had been holding it back for so long, trying to stay safe and alive for so long…but with everything that had happened, it was time to tell him the truth. “I didn’t push back because I never thought I would get dragged into this. I was never supposed to get pregnant. You were meant to be a fuckbuddy, Dante.”
His hand fell away from my face as if my words had struck him physically. He stepped back, a glance of pure shock crossing his features before it was quickly replaced with his usual controlled mask.
“A fuckbuddy…” he echoed flatly, the word sounding foreign and harsh coming from his mouth. “And now? What am I to you now, Jade?”
“Don’t act like you’re hurt,” I said. “You used me. I wasn’t supposed to be anything but that either. You made it clear we were going to keep things casual from the get-go. I asked when I was going to meet your family and you freaked the fuck out and said that we’d talked about keeping things casual. We hadn’t, by the way.”
“Because I was trying to protect you!” he said, his voice rising, the storm in his eyes matching the intensity of his declarations. “I didn’t want you to get involved with my family, with their dirty secrets and bloody pasts. I didn’t want you caught in the crossfire.”
“And yet, here I am,” I said, motioning around us, to the penthouse suite that oozed luxury and violence in equal measures. “Giving you a Moretti heir. If he’s a boy, do you think he’ll be shot at like your brother? Do you think he’ll survive?”
“Don’t fucking do that,” he hissed, a dangerous edge creeping into his voice. “Don’t you dare bring that up.”
“Why the hell not?” I shot back, my anger flaring at his audacity. “This is our reality now, Dante! You and me, and this baby…” I placed a protective hand over my stomach.
His gaze fell to where my hand rested, his jaw tightening noticeably. For a moment, I thought he would say something—snap back with some retort or brush off my concerns—but instead he let out a heavy sigh, running a hand through his dark hair in frustration.
“You’re right,” he murmured after what felt like an eternity of silence. “This is our reality now. And I...I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you both safe.” His gaze lifted and met mine, the honesty in his eyes as clear as day.
“Even if that means leaving your family?”
The question hung between us like smoke, dense and suffocating. Dante gazed at me for an extended beat of silence before he finally spoke.
“Yes.” His voice was low but firm, carrying the weight of the promise held within that single word. “I don’t care about any of this, Jade. All I care about is the two of you. I’ll fucking live on a farm and work at a gas station for the rest of my life if it means you and our baby will both be happy and safe. This? Fuck this. Fuck the city. Fuck this penthouse. Fuck my family,” he finished roughly, his eyes burning into mine. He took a step forward, bridging the gap between us that seemed to have widened in the last few minutes. “You and this baby...You’re my family now.”
“You mean that?” I whispered, searching his face for any sign of deceit. But all I saw was Dante, bare and stripped of his usual defenses.
“I swear on my life,” he said solemnly, reaching out to wrap his fingers around mine. His palms were rough, calloused from years of handling weapons and carrying the weight of a criminal empire. But his grip was gentle, almost delicate, as if he was afraid I’d shatter beneath his touch.
For a moment, we stood there in the glaring bathroom light and the biting silence, our hands intertwined in a lifeline of connection. The echo of his promise replayed in my mind, mingling with the steady rhythm of my heartbeat.
A strange kind of peace washed over me then. It wasn’t idealistic or naive. It was raw and ragged around the edges, born from hardship and mutual understanding. But it was ours—a shared commitment in this chaotic world Dante had unintentionally dragged me into.
Pulling me closer, Dante rested his forehead against mine. His voice was barely audible as he whispered, “I will do whatever it takes to keep you and our baby safe, Jade. I promise.”
And maybe it was crazy, but I believed him.