I Died As His Wife. I Returned As His Enemy’s Wife

Chapter 26

Dominic’s Pov

I woke to sunlight spilling across the sheets and the quiet, steady sound of Dominic’s breathing beside me. For a moment I simply lay there, taking in the strange, unfamiliar comfort of waking up next to him, my body still warm from the night before, my mind quiet in a way it hadn’t been in longer than I could remember.

He was already awake, watching me with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before. Soft. Unguarded. None of the careful control he usually wore like armor.

“Good morning,” he said quietly.

“Good morning,” I echoed, feeling suddenly shy in a way that surprised me, considering everything that had happened between us hours earlier.

He reached over, brushing his thumb gently along my knuckles, and neither of us said anything else for a long moment. There didn’t seem to be anything that needed saying. The quiet itself felt like enough.

We ate breakfast together in the small kitchen of his hidden house, and it felt different from every other meal we had shared since this arrangement began. Slower. Softer. Dominic reached for my hand at one point, just to hold it, no explanation needed, no audience to perform for. When my necklace had twisted slightly out of place, he leaned over without a word and fixed the clasp himself, his fingers brushing the back of my neck with a gentleness that made my breath catch.

I didn’t ask him what any of it meant. I didn’t need promises wrapped in careful words. Something had shifted between us, something real, and for once I let myself simply exist inside it instead of picking it apart, searching for the trap I had spent weeks convinced was hiding somewhere underneath.

Before he left for the city, he kissed my forehead, lingering there a moment longer than necessary, his hand resting warm against my cheek.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said quietly.

“I’ll be here,” I said, and I meant it in a way that felt heavier than the words themselves.

We returned to the mansion separately that afternoon, and I was still smiling faintly to myself when I passed by his study and heard Adrian’s voice, low and tense, carrying through the partly open door.

“You’re not thinking clearly anymore,” Adrian was saying. “I’ve watched you build walls around yourself for years, Dominic, and I understand why. But this, whatever this has become with her, it’s dangerous. Emotions like this become weaknesses. Victor will find it, and he will use it against you the second he realizes how much she actually means to you.”

I stopped just outside the door, my heart suddenly pounding, unsure whether to walk away or listen.

“She’s not my weakness,” Dominic said, his voice firm, controlled in the way I recognized from every business conversation I had overheard between them before.

“Isn’t she?” Adrian pressed. “You kissed her forehead this morning like she was something precious. I’ve never seen you do that with anyone, not even—”

“Don’t,” Dominic cut him off sharply, his voice suddenly dropping into something colder, warning Adrian away from whatever he had been about to say.

Silence stretched between them for a long moment.

“I’m only telling you what I see,” Adrian said finally, quieter now. “Be careful. That’s all I’m asking.”

I stepped back from the door before either of them noticed me standing there, my mind spinning with everything I had just overheard. Part of me wanted to feel comforted by the firmness in Dominic’s voice when he denied it, by the certainty with which he had told Adrian I wasn’t his weakness.

But another part of me, the part that had learned to read every flicker of emotion behind Dominic’s carefully guarded eyes, wondered if his denial had been meant more for himself than for Adrian.

When Dominic found me later that evening in the sitting room, he seemed lighter than usual, some of the tension from earlier conversations nowhere visible on his face. He sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and for a while neither of us spoke, simply enjoying the quiet comfort of being near each other.

“You seem distracted,” he said eventually, studying my face carefully.

“Just thinking,” I said, deciding not to mention what I had overheard, not yet, not when the evening felt this peaceful.

“About what?” he asked, his hand finding mine, fingers lacing together naturally now, like we had been doing this for years instead of weeks.

“About how strange it is,” I said honestly, “that something that started as strategy could turn into this.”

Something flickered behind his eyes, something soft and vulnerable he usually kept carefully hidden. “It is strange,” he admitted quietly. “I didn’t expect any of this, Sophia. I built my entire life around control, around making sure nothing and no one could ever be used against me again. And then you happened, and everything I thought I understood about myself started falling apart.”

My chest tightened at the honesty in his voice, at how rare it was for him to admit something so openly, without calculation, without careful strategy hiding underneath the words.

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked softly.

He was quiet for a long moment, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles against the back of my hand. “I used to think so,” he said finally. “Now I’m not entirely sure anymore.”

I leaned into him then, resting my head against his shoulder the way I had grown so used to doing, and he wrapped his arm around me, holding me close without hesitation.

Whatever Adrian’s warning had meant, whatever danger might come from Victor discovering exactly how much I had come to mean to Dominic, I understood in that quiet moment that neither of us was fully willing to fight against what was growing between us anymore.

We had both spent so long protecting ourselves from exactly this kind of vulnerability. But sitting there together, wrapped in the comfortable silence of the evening, I realized that whatever risk came with loving Dominic DeLuca, I was no longer interested in avoiding it.