“I can’t be the admiral.” Tristan stared at Giovanni in shock.

The admiral of Rome stood beside Tristan’s hospital bed, dressed in an elegant pale gray suit, his dark hair and eyes so much like his daughter’s.

Tristan shifted his gaze to James and Sophia, who were at the foot of the bed. James was staring at Giovanni with wide eyes. Sophia’s eyes were narrowed as she glared at her father. She must have felt him looking at her because she shifted her gaze, and then reached out to lay a hand on his ankle.

“You are refusing?” Giovanni asked.

“I can’t be the admiral,” Tristan repeated. Maybe this was a dream. That would make more sense—he was having some morphine-fueled, hyper-realistic dream.

“Of course you can. With my daughter as your spouse, you will make an excellent admiral.”

Tristan shook his head.

“You are refusing?” Giovanni asked again.

“Of course not.” Sophia squeezed his ankle. James came to the side of the bed, standing directly opposite Giovanni. He braced his feet shoulder-width apart and crossed his arms. He looked ready to do some serious damage.

The knight in the corner’s shoes squeaked as he shifted position in response to James’s movement.

Tristan looked around. It was like high noon in an old western, everyone strategically positioned so they could see the other players.

“You cannot do this to him,” Sophia told her father. “Not right now.”

“It has to be now.”

“He’s recovering from being shot. From…”

Sophia didn’t finish the sentence, so Tristan did it for her. “From having my arm cut off.”

The door to the room opened and Antonio slipped in. He glared at James, who only raised his brows.

Ha, he’s actually your new brother-in-law!

The knight in the corner nodded to Sophia’s brother, a sign of respect, then resumed watching the drama playing out around the bed.

Sophia looked at her sibling. “Antonio, tell him this is madness.”

“No, I will not.”

Sophia looked ready to kill her brother.

Antonio shrugged. “I heard what happened in that room. It is not madness that Tristan be made admiral. Security teams from all the territories swept that room. No one but Tristan noticed the irregularity in the ceiling. If he hadn’t acted when he did, the gunman would have been able to kill every admiral in the room before anyone could react.”

“No.” Tristan ground the word out. He wasn’t going to let them make him a hero when he wasn’t. “It was only after I stood on the table that the shooting started.” That fact was haunting him.

“Because they realized they’d been discovered,” Antonio insisted. “If they’d had more time to set the shots and program the computer, they could have killed more people.”

“Computer?” James asked.

“The gun they recovered was a programmable sniper rifle. The shooter would have used the heat sensor to help him aim, and then lock the gun’s exact position for each individual shot into a connected computer.”

Antonio paused, sweeping a look over each of them. “If the shooter had more time, he could have pinpointed the position of each admiral, programmed it, and set the rifle to fire automatically. It would have taken less than five seconds for the gun to reposition between shots. In forty-five seconds, every admiral would have been dead.”

Tristan stared at Antonio in dawning horror.

“My God,” James whispered.

Sophia squeezed his foot and bowed her head. No one spoke until Giovanni cleared his throat.

“Arthur Billings, I will ask you one final time. Do you refuse to become the admiral of England?”

This was really happening. That was the part he was having trouble believing. A lot of unbelievable things had happened recently, and this was just one more.

Tristan took a deep breath. “If I refuse, I’ll be kicked out of the Masters’ Admiralty.”

“Yes. And you know what that means?”

Members who disobeyed their admiral, or who were ejected from the society for violating any of their laws, could expect, at best, to be bankrupted, imprisoned, and cut off from everyone they ever knew, not to mention losing their trinity. Many were executed, if their offenses were serious enough. Tristan had never been forced to carry through on an execution, but he’d come close once, when a young member had used his power and connections to kidnap, rape, and torture three women. Winston had decided to let British justice take care of him, though the families of the young women—all of whom had been young legacies—had howled for the man’s head to roll.

“I am a knight. I know.”

“What is your answer?”

Tristan looked at James, then at Sophia. He meant what he’d said. He would have loved them. Protected them.

“I refuse.”

“No!” Sophia gasped.

“What are you doing?” James demanded.

Giovanni’s eyes glittered with anger. “You are weak. I had thought better of you.”

Tristan clenched his left hand into a fist. The muscles in his right upper arm also flexed, trying to move fingers that were no longer there. “I am not weak. Do not insult me to make yourself feel better.”

Giovanni frowned.

“I will give my life to protect the Masters’ Admiralty.” Tristan took a deep breath. “And to protect my trinity.”

“Protect us?” James bent over the bed. “Protect us from what? Don’t do this. They’ll kill you if you refuse!”

What would it have been like to have a man like James as a husband? He would never know. But he could do this one last thing for them.

“I am doing it to protect you from me,” Tristan told him quietly.

Antonio stepped closer to the bed. “You think the Domino will come after you?”

Now it was Tristan’s turn to frown. This conversation was not going the way he’d expected. “I didn’t mean that.”

“What did you mean?” Antonio asked.

“I’m protecting them from this.” Tristan used his left hand to gesture at his right side. “I can’t be what they deserve.”

In a way, this was a relief. Tristan had always felt a bit like a fraud. Some part of him had always been waiting for someone to point at him and ask who he was, or what he was doing in a society as powerful and well connected as the Masters’ Admiralty.

“Tristan—”

He cut James off. “I’m not Tristan anymore.”

“Fine, Arthur, whatever you want to be called. You’re committing suicide because you lost your hand?”

“I’m not committing suicide. I’m taking care of you. I’m making sure you two will be safe and happy. With me gone, you can move to Rome with Sophia. Find a third who’s worthy of you.”

Sophia’s face was a white mask, save for two spots of color high on her cheeks. She started to round the foot of the bed.

Antonio lunged, yanking her off her feet and pulling her back.

“Release her,” Tristan barked, starting to rise off the pillow.

Sophia was pounding on her brother’s forearm with both fists.

“She was going to slap you,” Antonio protested.

James started toward Antonio, every inch of his body radiating threat. “Take your hands off our wife. She wasn’t going to slap him. For God’s sake, he’s in a hospital bed.”

Antonio released his sister, holding his hands up, but his expression was anything but contrite.

Sophia blew past James. “Oh, yes. I am going to slap his stupid face!”

Tristan dropped his head back onto the pillow and manfully suppressed a yelp. There was something uniquely terrifying about an enraged woman coming at him.

“I told you so.” Antonio was smirking.

James grabbed her. “Calm down, Sophia.”

“Did you hear him?” Her voice vibrated with rage as James hauled her back against his chest. “He is going to kill himself—to what? To protect us?” She glared at Tristan. “You arrogant, conceited fool. If I want you dead, I will kill you. You don’t kill you. I kill you.” By the end of the tirade, Sophia’s English grammar was failing, and her voice was thick with tears.

Tristan could only blink in shock at her response. He’d expected maybe a few tears, a hug or a kiss, and then for his noble falling-on-his-proverbial-sword to be honored, and for his husband and wife to remember him fondly as they went on to live rich, happy lives with some other man as their third. A man with an impeccable pedigree and two hands.

His gaze met Sophia’s and it was like a physical blow. Though her lips were twisted in anger, her face set in a snarl, there was pain in her eyes. Pain and fear and desperation.

He’d caused that.

He was a bloody fucking wanker.

He’d been in the hospital for two days, and every time he’d opened his eyes, they’d been there. If not for the fact that they were wearing different shirts, he would have sworn they hadn’t even left the room. Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they’d changed and showered in the tiny bathroom while he slept.

They hadn’t been married a full week, and as the doctor he’d been talking to had pointed out before Giovanni made his entrance, he’d gone through a lot in the past week. It was as if he were a boat lost at sea, with no stars to guide him home. He was so lost that he was willing and ready to just let the waves take him, to fall down into the deep, cold darkness.

But he wasn’t alone in the sea. Sophia and James were there with him. They could guide him home.

Right now, Tristan didn’t feel certain about much of anything, up to and including what his name actually was, but there was one thing he was certain of.

He could love them. Given time and a chance, he would love them more than any man had ever loved his trinity.

And there, in the pain and fear hiding in Sophia’s eyes, was that same certainty—that if he gave her the chance, she would love him.

Sophia looked away, and then stopped fighting James’s hold. She turned in his arms, pressing her face into the other man’s chest. Tristan looked up at James. The other man’s eyes were shadowed by fatigue, and there was anger and hurt in the lines on his face.

They were his.

“Sophia, James.” Tristan struggled to sit up. His whole right side was a dull throb.

“No. I won’t listen to this anymore.” Sophia’s back was to him, but he saw her swipe at her face, brushing away tears.

James glared down at him and then opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something, but he merely shook his head.

“I want to leave,” Sophia whispered to James.

“Sure.” He rubbed her arm, and then he too turned away from Tristan.

Tristan grabbed for the bed control and pushed the button to raise the head. It wasn’t as dignified as he’d wanted, but crippled beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Sophia, James, stop. Wait.”

Sophia whirled, clinging to James’s arm as she glared at him. “You have no right to speak to us.”

Tristan exhaled, then drew in a clean, calm breath.

“I have every right. I’m your admiral.”