Corrupted Queen - Nicole Fox Page 0,78

She watches him with a hawk-like intensity, as if expecting someone to swing through the window and snatch him away.

She looks up when I enter, and the softness in her gaze tells me that somebody has told her the news. She raises a hand toward me, beckoning me closer.

I do not expect this sympathy, nor do I expect how much I want to wrap myself in it until I can no longer see or hear the outside world. I go to her, sliding onto the sofa next to her and then burying my face in her chest. Her arms come around me. Just the touch of her skin on mine sends tendrils of calm through me.

Alexis rubs my back and presses her lips to my head. If I have never felt so much pain before, I have also never felt comfort like this either. Her warmth surrounds me. Encases me like a cocoon.

I do not deserve this woman, but I can never let her go.

25

Alexis

I roll over in bed and drape my arm over Gabriel’s warm, solid form. I snuggle closer and press my face against his muscled back, breathing in his intoxicating scent. I am still not used to waking up beside him. I don’t know whether grief or exhaustion are to account for his sudden inability to leave my bed before dawn. I suppose it’s likely a combination of both.

I don’t mind, of course. In fact, I like waking up with him. I like when he pulls me closer in the morning, half asleep, breaths fanning over the back of my neck. But I’m worried about him. He has been working himself to the bone, coming to bed even later than before. He hasn’t spoken about what happened on the boat since that day, or about what he has been working on since, but he has let me in in another way.

At night, under the cover of darkness, with sleep hanging lazily on the horizon, we talk about Vito. I didn’t know that the two of them had been friends since they were children. All I knew about Vito before he died was that he was Gabriel’s right-hand man and he didn’t suit facial hair but was determined to grow it anyway.

Now I know all sorts of things—how he and Gabriel used to eavesdrop on Mafia meetings when they were kids, and then reenact them in deep voices up in Gabriel’s bedroom. Gabriel would always play the part of Fabrizio, and Vito took on the role of whoever was pissing Fabrizio off the most that day.

When they were twelve, they got drunk in the very club that Gabriel and I first met in because the staff were too afraid not to serve them. They alternated between scotch and beer because they thought those were the manliest drinks, and after Diego dragged them out into the street, Vito vomited all over his Italian leather loafers.

Both boys went to the same private secondary school, the very one that Gabriel wants Harry to go to someday. In their senior year they would skip class at least once a week to smoke in the bathroom, where they talked almost exclusively about whatever girl trouble Vito was having that week. He always had the worst taste in women, according to Gabriel. If he entered a room full of them, he would inevitably single out the craziest one.

When Vito did find a good one, he married her, and he and Gabriel shared a cigarette in the bathroom of his wedding venue even though neither had smoked for years.

All of these stories, told in quiet whispers, paint a picture of a different Gabriel—one who was carefree and full of joy and light. I know he is still there, hidden away somewhere under the stern line of Gabriel’s brow, because I catch glimpses of him from time to time, usually when he’s playing with Harry. I wish I could bring it out of him more.

Gabriel rolls over and pulls me against his chest. “I need to get up,” he murmurs without opening his eyes.

We both do. Vito’s funeral is this morning.

He sighs and tightens his arms on my waist, and I wonder what he is thinking about but daren’t ask. He won’t tell me. Not with daylight pooling through the curtains. Still, I enjoy the feeling of his heavy arms around me, the tickle of his breath against my forehead.

The dock meet is quickly approaching and I have been vacillating between whether or not I should