Chapter 8 - The Price of Sovereignty
The private medical wing in the basement of the Hawthorne estate was equipped with state-of-the-art surgical tools. Within an hour, Edmund’s wound had been cleaned, stitched with twelve surgical sutures, and bandaged by a trusted private physician who asked zero questions.
Rosalie sat on a vinyl stool in the corner, still wearing her blood-splattered blue silk dress, her hands washed clean but her knuckles white as she gripped her knees.
Edmund sat on the edge of the examination table, refusing pain medication. His chest was bare, crisscrossed with old scars—testaments to forty years of warfare in the city’s shadows.
When the doctor packed his bag and left under Michael’s escort, the room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.
Edmund turned his head to look at her.
“You should go,” he said quietly.
Rosalie flinched, as if he had struck her. “What?”
Edmund stood up slowly, putting on a clean black cotton undershirt. His movements were stiff, his face pale from blood loss, but his eyes were filled with an agonizing, self-inflicted coldness.
“They tracked my car because you were in it,” Edmund said, his voice flat. “The Corvo family knows who you are. This morning, you were an event planner with a mortgage. Tonight, you are a target in a syndicate war. I have two million dollars in an offshore bearer account in Zurich. Michael can drive you to the airport right now. You can start over in Europe. Safe. Far away from me.”
Rosalie stared at him. The shock of his words twisted into a hot, blinding fury.
She stood up from the stool, walking across the linoleum floor until she was standing toe-to-toe with the mafia kingpin.
“You arrogant, stubborn old bastard,” she hissed.
Edmund blinked, utterly stunned. In sixty-one years, no one had ever spoken to him with such raw disrespect.
“You think you get to decide when I disappear?” Rosalie said, poking her finger hard against his uninjured shoulder. “You drag me out onto that ballroom floor in front of four hundred people! You make everyone in this city look at me! You tell me I have steel in my bones, you buy my house, you bleed all over my dress, and the first time someone shoots at us, you want to buy me a plane ticket to Switzerland?”
“Rosalie, you could have died today!” Edmund roared, his composure shattering as he grabbed her arms, pulling her flush against his chest. “Do you understand that? A bullet missed your head by four inches! I have lived my entire life in blood and filth! I am a monster, Rosalie! I take lives! I crush men! You are pure, you are kind, and I will not let my sins drag you into a grave!”
“I don't care about your sins!” Rosalie screamed back, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes. “I spent thirty-two years being safe! I spent thirty-two years being invisible, being the girl nobody wanted to be seen with, being the woman men threw away when they wanted someone smaller, someone easier! You looked at me, Edmund! You saw me! And you think I’m going to run away to Zurich because some cowards in a flatbed truck tried to scare me?”
Edmund stared down at her, his chest heaving, his hands trembling against her arms.
“You are insane,” he whispered, his voice cracking with an emotion so deep, so raw, that it terrified him.
“I am not going anywhere,” Rosalie said, her voice dropping into a fierce, unwavering whisper. “You told me to stop disappearing. Now keep your goddamn word.”
Edmund let out a ragged groan, buried his fingers into her thick hair, and pulled her mouth up to his.
The kiss was explosive. It was years of loneliness, decades of cold isolation, and hours of terror colliding into a single, desperate point of contact. Edmund kissed her with the ferocious hunger of a starving king, his tongue parting her lips, tasting her tears, tasting her defiance.
Rosalie wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, uncaring of the blood, the danger, or the empire collapsing around them.
May you like
For the first time in her life, she was not an afterthought. She was the epicenter of a hurricane.
***
