Page 67 of Ruthless Claim

She looks up and she gives me a huge smile before saying softly, “Come see your goddaughter.”

Oh.

Oh, she didn’t tell me that. She never told me that.

My eyes burn and my throat tightens. “Emma⁠—”

“We wanted it to be a surprise,” Emma says, looking over at Leo, who nods. She tilts the bundle slightly toward me. “Come meet Seraphina Brennan Santoro.”

I move forward and stare down at the most beautiful creature in the world.

She is very small and pink with tiny lips and eyelashes a mile long. She has Leo’s dark hair already thick on her head, spilling out under her hat. Her tiny nose is entirely her own.

When her eyes flick open for a moment, they’re the dark unfocused blue of all new babies.

She has Emma’s ears but has Leo’s mouth, pressed into a small, determined line.

She is the most serious infant I have ever seen and she is perfect.

“Hi,” I whisper to her. She makes a small noise and I have to press my hand to my mouth again.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Emma asks softly, gazing at her daughter with love.

“The most beautiful baby I’ve ever laid eyes on,” I tell her in a choked voice. But then I make the mistake of looking at my brother.

Leo is standing at the foot of the bed with his hands at his sides and he is crying.

He is looking at Emma and Seraphina with an expression I have never seen on him but I know I am going to see every time I look at him for the rest of his life.

Every wall is down, every piece of armor is gone.

It’s just him standing there being exactly as wrecked and grateful as he is.

He catches me looking and he doesn’t look away this time.

“She has Emma’s ears,” is all I can manage.

“She’s perfect,” he says, and it comes out cracked. He looks back at them, and I look at them too.

This.

This is what it looks like.

Not an arrangement.

Not a set of rules to manage proximity.

Not two people trying to hold each other at arm’s length while their bodies say something else entirely.

This is what it looks like when you’ve chosen someone, when you keep choosing them, when you’d burn the world down for them and they know it and they’d do the same.

This is Leo, who I watched be incapable of softness, standing at the foot of a hospital bed crying because everything he loves most in the world is in that room.

I want that.

The thought arrives with a clarity that almost hurts.

I want the real thing, but I don’t know if I’m going to get it. I don’t know what I have, to be honest, but I want the real thing, and I haven’t wanted it like this before.