Chapter Ten #3
“I have nothing to complain about,” he threw at her, and he didn’t like the fact that his heart seemed to be working overtime in his chest. He didn’t like that he was entertaining this discussion in the first place when she was the one who was crying, for no reason.
He was certain that it was her fault that he had this great mess of unwieldy nonsense inside of him in the first place.
“If I do find that I have something to complain about, I fix it. Immediately. Or I have someone else do it for me. I have no issues, with anything, at all.”
But Hannah was not the least bit cowed by this unassailable bit of knowledge. On the contrary, she leaned in closer—and the high heels she was wearing allowed her to put her face almost directly into his.
“You live in an empty castle,” she told him, enunciating each word so that it felt like a slap. “It’s like you’re already a ghost.”
When he only stared back at her, somehow as shocked by that as if she had hauled off and slapped him, she kept going.
He could see the glitter of temper in her gaze—or maybe it wasn’t temper at all.
Maybe it was some other passion that he couldn’t understand, that the gigantic weight inside him was still sitting on.
“You have nothing personal in this entire pile of old stone,” she said. “Not one thing.”
He scoffed at that. “Says the woman without a single personal item in the office where she spends most of her days.”
“That is an office,” Hannah replied, shaking her head a little. “It’s also a job that I started while pregnant. It was necessary for me to make it clear that my being a mother in no way inhibits the work that I do. You’ve been in my cottage. You saw exactly how it was decorated.”
He made a noncommittal sort of noise, and even told himself that he could not possibly remember the decor of a cottage he had rushed to get her out of—
But she laughed at whatever expression she saw on his face.
“I know you saw all those pictures on the wall. Baby pictures of Dominic. Dominic and me. Dominic and Cinzia. Happy moments from a happy life, Antonluca. But you don’t have any of that, do you?
Not a single indication that you have ever been alive at all, anywhere, with anyone. ”
“I apologize,” he said, moving in closer to her, “if I have somehow made you feel less than alive, Hannah.”
And he reached out for her, a half-formed thought chasing through him. That he would crush his mouth to hers, set them both on fire, and see how they burned. Maybe that would prove…whatever needed proving here.
But instead, when he pulled her close, she melted against him.
As if there was no anger here. As if he was the only one fighting, shadowboxing his own apparition.
It seemed to take his knees out from under him, so when he fit his mouth to hers, it was something else.
It was a kiss, but it ached.
It was sweet and sacred. It was impossible—
And, suddenly, he understood far more than he wanted to about that weight inside him, and his own foolish heart, and the sheer magic of this.
Of her.
He kissed her again and again, never getting any deeper, never pushing, because this already felt like too much.
This felt like home, in all the ways he least wanted it to.
It felt… He felt…
He couldn’t let himself get there.
But she was the one who pulled away, and stood there a moment, her fingertips pressed to his hard jaw. Her breath still heavy and tangled with his.
“Don’t you see?” she whispered. “You live like you’re in prison, Antonluca.
Like you’re serving time for some hideous crime and I don’t think you know what that crime is any more than I do.
But I do know this. Dominic and I are now serving time with you.
Right here in this prison you’re so proud of, with its bare walls and its cold, harsh stone. ”
“Hannah—” he began, trying to find some way to explain all of that mess inside of him. All of that unbearable weight. “Hannah, I—”
“And I can’t bear it,” she told him, her voice solemn and this time, her gaze, too. “Because I love you.”
“You can’t,” he growled at her even as everything inside of him seemed to take a seismic hit. “That’s not possible.”
But as he watched, Hannah shifted back. She wiped at her eyes, and she even offered something like a smile when all he could see was the resolve behind it. Her spine straightened and he remembered when he’d first seen her in his restaurant in New York. She’d held her shoulders just like this.
As if warding off a terrible blow.
“I’m afraid that it’s more than possible,” she said, in that calm way of hers that made everything inside him seem to freeze.
Then turn into a sharp pain that made him want to double over.
Yet she showed no signs of stopping. “I love you, Antonluca. I suspect I always have. And I don’t have the slightest idea what will become of any of us, because no matter how pretty you make the prison, it will always be this at heart.
” She looked around, managing to take in the whole of the castle, and then she slammed that green gaze at him.
“It doesn’t matter how big it is. It’s still a cell.
It will always be a cell, Antonluca, until you figure out a way to open it up, and set yourself free. ”
“I don’t have any such need or desire,” he began, because that was always his knee-jerk reaction to…anything.
“And if you can’t do it for yourself,” she said quietly, cutting him off that easily.
And in such a dignified way that he thought she might as well pull one of those stones from the wall behind her and smash it straight through his chest, where his heart ought to be.
“Do it for your child’s sake. Do you really want him to grow up and be like you? ”
Maybe, he thought in a daze, she really had crushed him with a rock.
But apparently not, because while he stood there—not sure how it was he wasn’t staggering back and crashing to the hard floor beneath them—she simply turned away. Then dashed up the stairs, leaving him to pick up the pieces on his own.
Assuming there was anything left of him but ash.
Yet all he could do was stand there, staring around him as if he’d gone blind. As if he had suddenly found himself in a place he didn’t know, unable to figure out how he’d gotten himself there.
Part of him wanted simply to chase her upstairs because he knew there was nothing they couldn’t work out in bed together.
But he couldn’t seem to move.
It was as if his feet had turned to stone, too.
And despite himself, despite everything, he felt the truth bear down upon him like another impossible weight.
He had to let go and he didn’t know how.
That was the prison she was talking about.
He’d been born in it and he’d never left it.
He had never, ever let go of the place he’d come from.
He had never forgotten, no matter how high he’d flown, how hard he’d fought to get away from those dirty streets, far more cruel than anyone liked to imagine.
But she wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t been near those streets—or any streets—in longer than he’d ever been on them. He had done everything he’d vowed to himself that he would do when he was young and angry and scared—and then some.
He had saved every damned person he could on his way out, except himself.
He took a step and found himself sagging so badly that he had to hold himself up against the nearest wall. It was as if every single illusion he’d ever held on to had crumbled, just like that.
And once again, the truth was so bright and so obvious that it was painful.
It was also simple.
He’d been fighting against it all this time because fighting was what he knew how to do. But there was one way to give his son the life he truly deserved. And while he was at it, treat his wife the way she deserved, too.
And maybe, just maybe, he would find a way to treat himself the same way.
No bare stone walls. No haunted castles.
Imagine, he asked himself, the way he hadn’t in so very long now, how much flavor your life could have if you allowed it?
If he wanted her heart, he had to locate his own.
If he wanted to live, to truly live and to be alive in every way that mattered, he could not keep himself apart the way he’d been doing for years now.
Life, like a perfect dish, was texture and flavor in an endless conversation with one another, and he didn’t know why it was he’d locked himself away for this long.
But he did know this. Hannah had given him an opportunity to resurrect himself.
And it seemed to him a stark and unmistakable truth that if he did not do it now, he never would.
If he did not do it now, he would be little more than the stone walls that surrounded him. He was already more than halfway there. For all intents and purposes, he was a ghost right now.
He straightened on the wall. He looked around his castle, and his life, and his own messy heart, with new eyes.
Eyes Hannah had opened, painful as that was.
Eyes he could not close again. Not now that he could finally see.
And not that he had the slightest idea how to fix what he hadn’t even realized he’d broken.
But he stood a little straighter and he reminded himself that he was Antonluca Aniello, who had made an empire out of thin air when he’d been little more than a child. He’d made it look easy.
So there was no telling what he could do now.