Page 91 of The Captive
I squeezed his hand with what little strength I had, holding his gaze steadily. "I choose you, too," I managed, feeling the last chains of my guilt fall away.
The words were simple, quiet, but they seemed to hit him hard. His shoulders shook and raw emotion transformed his face to a more youthful, vulnerable one.
"I love you, too," I continued, my voice growing stronger with each word. "More than revenge, more than the past, more than everything I’ve been raised to uphold."
He leaned forward, pressing his lips to my forehead with desperate tenderness. "I thought I'd lost you," he whispered against my skin. "When I saw you bleeding, when they took you into surgery... I thought I'd killed the only good thing in my life through my own stupidity."
"It wasn't your fault," I said firmly, raising my free hand to cup his cheek. "Beatrice made her choice. You made yours. And so did I."
"What choice?" he asked, though I could see in his eyes that he already knew.
"To trust you. To believe in what we could build together. To stop being simply an O'Malley and start being..." I paused, swallowing, "Alexander Moore's partner."
Partner. Not lover, not ally, not convenient arrangement. Partner implied equality, mutual respect, shared power and responsibility. It implied a future neither of us had dared to imagine.
"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice rough with emotion. "Because once you make this choice, there's no going back. Ronan will expect absolute loyalty. The business we're in, the enemies we've made, the life we live—it's dangerous, violent, unforgiving."
I smiled, feeling strength returning to my body along with my resolve. "Alexander, I was raised to inherit a criminal empire. I've been shot, tortured, hunted through a forest by a madwoman. I think I can handle whatever your world throws at me."
His answering smile was fierce, possessive, full of dark promise. "Ourworld," he corrected. "If you're staying, if you're choosing this, then it's our world now."
"Our world," I agreed, liking the sound of it. "What does that make us, exactly?"
He considered the question seriously, his thumb tracing patterns on my palm. "Partners in every sense of the word. Business. Personal. Whatever comes next."
"And what comes next?"
His smile turned predatory, and for a moment I glimpsed the man who'd hunted me through moonlit woods, who'd bound me and claimed me and made me his in every way that mattered.
"Recovery first," he said practically. "Then we build something new. Something that's ours, not inherited from fathers or brothers or anyone else's vision of what we should be."
"Together."
"Together," he confirmed, leaning down to claim my lips in a kiss that had my toes curl, even dinged up as I was.
As we broke apart, I became aware of voices in the hallway—Ronan and Cressida, discussing something in hushed tones. The real world was waiting beyond this room, with all its complications and challenges and enemies who would see our alliance as either opportunity or threat.
But for now, in this moment, with Alexander's hand warm in mine and love blazing between us like a beacon, the future felt infinite. We had survived so much together.
We now made a choice that would reshape both our lives.
And that choice, I knew as Alexander's fingers intertwined with mine, was just the beginning.
The heart monitor beside my bed settled into a steady, strong rhythm—the sound of a life no longer hanging in the balance, but ready to fight for whatever came next. Together.
Twenty-Seven
FOUR MONTHS LATER…
ALEXANDER MOORE
Four months had passedsince the big incident with Beatrice, and I still couldn't let Aoife out of my sight. The doctors had cleared her weeks ago, but the memory of her blood on my hands remained carved into my soul.
"Alexander," Aoife's voice carried a stark warning as she emerged from our bedroom, green eyes flashing, "if you follow me to the loo one more time, I'm castrating you with a butter knife."
I glanced up from my perusal of the wedding seating charts, pen frozen mid-stroke. "I wasn't following you. I was checking?—"
"The security perimeter includes the ladies' toilet now?" She planted herself before me, hands on hips, auburn hair catching the afternoon light. Her jaw was set in that stubborn line I knew meant trouble.
