He huffed a quiet laugh. “A few months ago you were carrying martinis.”
“And now?”
He took her hand. “Now you’re the woman who walked into a lion’s den and taught all the lions table manners.”
Casey laughed, real and full. It surprised her every time, how easily joy came now when she was with him, as if happiness had been waiting just outside the door for years and finally been invited in.
He lifted her hand to his lips.
“I meant what I said,” he murmured.
“Which terrifying thing?”
“That you’re mine.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Possessive.”
“Hopelessly.”
Casey stepped closer, close enough to feel his heartbeat under his shirt. “Then let me clarify something, Dante Valenti. I am yours in exactly the same way you are mine.”
His eyes darkened, then softened. “Fair.”
“And one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“I’m still not wearing heels to any future wedding.”
For a moment he just stared at her. Then he laughed, low and rich, the sound of a man who had spent too much of life in darkness and was startled to find himself wanting sunlight.
“Boots,” he said. “I wouldn’t dare argue with the boots.”
In the house behind them, Sienna’s laughter rang out unexpectedly from the dining room, and Salvatore’s deeper voice answered. It was not peace, not the clean kind other families chased, but it was something rarer in their world: healing with its sleeves rolled up, doing the work.
Casey looked at the house, then back at the man in front of her, and understood at last that blood did not make a family worthy of the name. Loyalty did. Truth did. Staying did.
Once, she had been a waitress with empty pockets, a false name, and a talent for vanishing.
Now she was the woman who had stood between a mafia princess and the abyss and refused to move.
And in a city built on fear, that had turned out to be the most powerful thing of all.
Leave a Comment