Chapter 73
ROME
The hospital room was dark and the sound of the monitors echoed in the now empty hallways. Adria had tried to sleep, but found she couldn’t take her eyes off Seth.
Kaydon’s heavy breathing in the recliner was impossible to ignore; Adria struggled to believe that Seth could sleep through all this racket.
Eric was recovering, and the doctors thought he would be able to leave in a few more days.
Dr. Bianchi was hopeful that Seth would be discharged tomorrow.
In the cave, when he had opened his eyes, she had been relieved. Only to feel the ground slipping out from under her when he passed out in the car. Thankfully, because of Eric, they were already on their way to the hospital.
Her mind drifted from the future to the past. So many things had happened. And in such a short amount of time.
Adria had learned the truth about her mother. As a founding member of the Triune, it made Adria’s family line an Original. On top of that, she had taken her seat on the Triune. Being on the Triune was something she had always wanted, because getting a seat always meant safety for her mother.
It was a surreal feeling getting something she had worked for since she was seventeen only to have it not mean anything to her anymore.
Now new things were important to her. Like the three men she loved, carrying her color on their necks.
A tap on her shoulder, and Adria looked up to see Bryson, offering her some tea. She took it, the warmth in the Styrofoam heating her fingers.
“You should sleep,” he said softly.
She raised an eyebrow at him. “So should you.”
He seemed to consider for a second before putting his hand out, saying, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
Adria’s eyes flicked over Seth, but her hand wrapped around Bryson’s without question.
Kaydon would be there.
Bryson wound her through deserted corridors and into a side staircase.
Ascending the stairs, the two of them went up a level. And then another. Until they came to a dead end.
Bryson pulled a keycard out of his pocket, with the name Tilly Romano.
“You are terrible,” Adria said.
The door beeped as Bryson pressed the card to it, and the two of them stepped out onto the hospital’s rooftop.
The cold night breeze hit them, carrying with it the distant hum of Rome below.
Adria’s breath caught as she took in the panorama: the softly glowing dome of St. Peter’s Basilica rising above the flashing lights of traffic.
The crumbling arches of the Colosseum ghosted in the moonlight.
Adria had been to Rome many times, but she had never been treated to a view like this.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It’s nothing compared to you,” he said.
Adria wanted to roll her eyes but instead she felt that familiar desire to be near him.
As if Bryson felt it too, his hand slipped into hers, pulling her in close.
She allowed herself to melt into him, allowing him to hold her at the top of the world.
Adria said, “How do you feel about not being the family head?”
Everything had happened so quickly, she hadn’t gotten a chance to fully ask him about it.
He laughed. “Truthfully, I’m relieved. Don’t tell El I said this, but she’ll do a much better job. Plus—” His fingers brushed a stray hair out of her face. “I’ll be too preoccupied to do my job.”
Adria felt her cheeks blush.
“How does it feel, being a founding member of the Nine?” he said.
Adria sighed. She had told the three of them and Eric as soon as she had gotten back. “We are going to have a larger target on our backs.”
He shrugged. “Maybe not. You are a major player in the game now, gorgeous. You get the chance to make it into something new. Something better.”
“The Nine has a complicated history. Do I really want to be tangled up in that?”
Bryson shrugged. “Whether you want to or not, you’re tangled Dri. As far as your mother goes, can’t say I’m surprised.”
Adria gave him a soft shove. “Yeah right. I don’t think anyone could have guessed this.”
Bryson tucked his hands in his pockets. “Not all of it. But I know revenge when I see it. And once I remembered that I had seen her family symbol on the cavern wall, it was the only thing that made sense. Families kill to get a seat. It’s not too much of a leap to imagine the lengths they would go to if they lost one. ”
“Nothing she did made any sense to me,” Adria said, feeling more lost than ever. Her ancestor Isadora was betrayed by another of her ancestors. What type of people had she come from? And how would she ever be able to move out of their shadow?
To kill the mother of your children for a seat at the table.
To leave your only daughter in the hands of a pedophile, to ensure she would grow up to hate him.
She looked at Bryson, seeing the softness in his gaze. Adria hated that her mother had gotten to meet them. Speak to them. Hated that Sophia was able to share anything that was now her new life.
“I have something for you,” he said, pulling an item out of his pocket.
Adria watched his palm curl around something small before turning to show her.
A gold ring with an emerald green gem glinted in the evening light.
“My mother’s ring,” Adria said.
She looked up at him, surprised. “You’re the one who took it?”
Adria almost laughed.
“You know the truth now, Dri. About all of it.” Bryson flattened her palm and pressed the now warm object into her, curling her fingers around it. Bryson continued, “It’s your past, but it’s also your future. And only you get to decide what to do with it.”
Adria stared at her hand, following the lines of her father’s ring on her finger, and feeling the weight of her mother’s in her palm.
“I didn’t want any of this,” she said, moving to take her father’s ring off. She would throw them both over the side of the building. Bury them forever.
But Bryson stopped her.
“Maybe stop thinking about it as your father and mother’s ring. And start thinking about them as yours.”
Adria blinked rapidly, trying to stop the tears that were coming.
Bryson pushed the ring back on her finger. “They’re yours, Adria. You earned them. And now you get to speak for every family member that was silenced or stamped out, because the wrong person was in charge.”
Adria’s hands shook. “I’m not in charge.”
“Yet,” he winked, and then more seriously he added, “there was a reason Alessandro had to start working with my father. He tried to stop you on his own, and he couldn’t.
You didn’t even know he was coming for you and you still managed to rise in the ranks.
Alessandro was so scared that you would ascend to the Triune, so scared that you would figure out the truth, that he was willing to put his life on the line to stop you.
Sure, you had help, but it was you that had him running scared. ”
“Me?”
“He was scared of you, Dri. Scared of what you built, about what you can build.”
Adria moved to the edge of the roof. Watching the lights dance all around them. The weight of everything Bryson said pressing into her.
He was right.
Knowing her past, her family’s past, was as freeing as it was painful.
She wasn’t them, but at the same time they were tied together, irrevocably linked. She didn’t need to erase her past to have a future.
Bryson’s hands wrapped around her middle. His lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Ask me, Dri.”
Adria drew back, looking at him. “Ask you what?”
He planted a kiss on her temple. “Just ask me.”
She pressed her lips together, not wanting to ruin the moment.
At first, she argued she was waiting for Seth to wake up.
But he had. And still she found that she didn’t want to.
She took a deep breath and whispered on the surrounding wind.
Hoping the air would take it far away and they wouldn’t need to deal with it.
“Why did you leave? Why did you let my mother manipulate you like that?”
She buried her face in his shoulder. Bryson knew people. He was smarter than that. Adria just couldn’t understand what it was that motivated him.
His fingers curled around her face, and he pulled her chin to look at him.
“Is that what you think? That she tricked me?” he said, sincerity written all over his face.
“It’s not your fault,” Adria said. “I brought us there. I didn’t know.”
How could she have guessed the depraved lengths her mother would go to get a seat at the Nine?
“Your mother didn’t trick me. I could see her plan to get rid of me from a mile away,” Bryson said.
“Then why leave? Why play into her hands?”
Bryson stared out at the city skyline. “When I was talking to her—the night before we left—I saw it more clearly than I ever had.”
He turned to her. “She only cares about herself. And I tried, Dri, I really tried, to find some shred that showed me that she was doing something, anything, for you. But there wasn’t anything to find.”
Adria’s heart squeezed. “Some family we both have, huh?”
Bryson put his hands on her waist, pulling her into him, resting his forehead against hers. “I wanted to tell you. But I couldn’t. Right or wrong, I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to break that bubble you had created. But I knew that there was one thing I could do.”
“What?” Adria said, taking in his jawline. Following the contours until she found the tattoo on his neck. The one he had put there, marking him as hers.
“I—we—could show you what a real family was. The opposite of our parents. I could show you that a real family sacrifices for each other. Protects one another. And makes space.”
Adria could feel her body tremble. “You could have died.”
His lip twitched. “I’m not going to lie, I hoped you would save me. But I knew Seth and Kaydon were in good hands. And if I had to die to keep you three safe, I would—still would.”
“So would I,” she said.
“I love you, Adria,” Bryson said.
Adria found his lips and pressed into them with her own. Feeling his hands wrap firmly around her, she knew that everything was going to change.
The world they had known. The world their parents had shaped was about to be different.
They were going to be different.
And it all started and ended with them. Because their past was just that.
The past.
It shaped them, but it didn’t define them.
And from this point on, they made their own futures.