Chapter 24 – Siena
SIENA
T he city lights blur through my tears as Giovanni drives. Neither of us says much, but the silence doesn’t feel empty. It feels heavy, like it’s holding everything we just unearthed. My father’s betrayal. Giovanni’s truth. The weight of what could have been and the relief of what never will.
When he pulls into the garage beneath the penthouse, my heart pounds like it’s the first time I’ve been here. He cuts the engine and just sits there, his hands gripping the steering wheel. Finally, he looks at me, eyes raw, voice low.
“Come home with me, Siena. Please.”
I nod, because there’s nothing else to say.
We ride the elevator up, and when the doors slide open, I’m met with the sight of everything we’ve built together.
My throw blankets draped over his leather couch.
The pictures I insisted we hang on the walls.
The little candles I bought on a whim lined along the counter.
It doesn’t look like his place anymore. It looks like ours.
He closes the door behind us and I suddenly feel his presence at my back, warm and steady. When I turn, he’s there, his hands hovering like he’s afraid to touch me without permission.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life proving you’re the most important thing in my world,” he says, voice breaking. “I can’t erase what I’ve done. But I’ll never lie to you again. I’ll never let you doubt where you stand with me. Not for one second.”
I step into him, pressing my palms to his chest, feeling the frantic rhythm of his heart. “I don’t need perfection, Giovanni. I just need you.”
His forehead drops to mine and he lets out a shuddering breath, like I just gave him air for the first time in weeks. He kisses me soft, reverent, almost trembling, and it’s not about passion this time. It’s about healing. About holding on.
We make it to the bedroom, and when we fall onto the bed, it’s not frantic, not desperate. It’s slow. Gentle. Every touch a promise. Every kiss an apology. Every breath a vow. He holds me like I’m the last piece of salvation he’ll ever have, and I cling to him knowing he’s mine to keep.
Afterward, we lie tangled together, the city humming faintly outside the window. His arm is heavy across my waist, his lips brushing my hair. For the first time since everything shattered, I feel whole again.
“Home,” he whispers against my skin.
I smile through the tears still drying on my cheeks. “Home.”
And I know, as I close my eyes in the safety of his arms, that staying, that choosing him was never a mistake.
A few weeks later, the sunlight pours through the front windows of my design studio, catching on the glass vases I arranged just that morning. The space smells faintly of fresh paint and the lavender candle Giovanni insisted I burn to “make it feel like home.”
Home.
I smile as I look around. The office is everything I dreamed it could be. It’s bright, open, and filled with possibilities. Swatches of fabric cover one table, sketches of future projects pinned neatly on the wall. It’s mine. All mine.
Well, mine and Giovanni’s.
Because even though he promised to be just a silent investor, he still stops in every week with coffee and bagels, or calls to ask if I need new office furniture. He grins when I roll my eyes and insists, “Sweetheart, I’m not buying you things. I’m buying us memories.”
And maybe he’s right. Because every piece in here feels like more than a purchase. It feels like proof. Proof that I asked him to show me love, loyalty, and honesty, and he did. Proof that he chose me, and keeps choosing me, even when the world we live in tries to pull us apart.
The door chimes and I glance up, my heart already knowing who it is before I even see him. Giovanni strides in with his dark suit and that commanding presence that still makes everyone else nervous. But when his eyes find me, the hardness melts away.
“Beautiful,” he says simply, kissing me in the middle of the room.
This man owns my heart.
It wasn’t easy getting here. Finding out the truth about my father, about what he’d done and what he’d planned to do, was devastating.
I sat on cold floors and let the tears come until I didn’t know the shape of my face anymore.
I screamed until my throat went raw. I threw plates and I yelled at the sky and at anyone who tried to make sense of it for me.
I felt betrayed by blood and by law and by the small, private ways people let themselves off the hook.
When I discovered it wasn’t Giovanni who pulled the trigger, when I learned Michael did it, there was a dark, awful relief.
It’s ugly to admit, but part of me felt some twisted justice.
Eye for eye. In that moment, in that ugly, raw corner of my heart, I was glad someone had stopped Robbie’s spiral so that it couldn’t claim anything more.
It’s not noble. It’s not clean. It’s only human.
Forgiving Giovanni was a different valley to climb. He’d made a decision that took my father from me. He’d kept me in the dark. He’d lied by omission and half-truth until the whole truth landed like a brick. But the man he became after, it was a sight to see.
“Hey, sweetheart, you alright?” he asks, the note of worry in his voice soft as moss.
“I’m great,” I say, and I mean it in a way I didn’t think I ever could again.
He grins like I just gave him the world. “Good, because I want to take you somewhere.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
He lifts one arm from my back, and the brown bag rustles. “Lunch date. Come on.”
We walk to Central Park, and he finds a spot under a tree that’s been here longer than either of us, the kind that doesn’t care about promises or lies, just about shade and seasons.
It’s early afternoon. The city hums in the distance, but here the world is a green hush and the smell of cut grass and hot asphalt.
Giovanni spreads out a blanket and sets the bag between us.
We sit down and I look from him to the bag and back again. “What’s in the bag?”
He opens it and pulls out two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, cut diagonally. Peanut butter and jelly.
“You remembered,” I whisper, the memory blooming in me like light through fog.
He shrugs, ever casual. “You told me once this was your favorite childhood memory. I figured I’d give you a favorite adult memory too.”
“I love you, Giovanni.”
“I love you more, Siena.”
There’s a hush between bites, not empty but full. The afternoon stretches warm and forgiving. I let the memory of my father slide into the background where it belongs. Not erased, not forgiven, but seen. Seen, and replaced by something steadier.
“This is perfect,” I tell him, and he leans in and rests his forehead to mine.
“It’s just a sandwich,” he says, but his voice is solemn enough to make me believe him.
“In every way that matters, it’s more than a sandwich.” I tuck my hand into his, and the fit is easy, like two halves of something that found each other without a plan.
He squeezes my hand, then looks at me, the gravity of him settling into his features.
“I don’t get to rewrite the past. I can’t give you back what you lost. But I can promise you my life.
I promise to keep doing the hard, small work, and to be honest, to show you everything you need to see.
To be the kind of man who proves himself every day. ”
He leans forward and kisses me. It’s gentle, real, not a claim but an offering.
Around us, life keeps moving. Deals happen, lights blink, problems manifest and are solved in ways I try not to think about too often.
But here, stretched on a blanket with someone who has proven, again and again, that I am not a thing to barter, I am a person to cherish, I feel the slow, steady stitch of a life rebuilding.
I don’t pretend the scars don’t show. They do. We show them to each other, and sometimes we flinch. But beneath the flinches are hands that refuse to let go.
“Worth it?” he asks, when we’re folding up the blanket.
I look at him, the man who has been messy and terrible and also unrelentingly true, and I laugh a little, the sound warm and without apology.
“Yes,” I say. “Worth every damn thing.”
He swears softly, grins that crooked grin that still makes me dizzy, and pulls me to him so we can walk home.
Two people who’ve been broken, fixed, and are still learning.
I press my head to his shoulder as we step back into the city’s pulse, and for the first time in a long while, the future looks less like a threat and more like a place we’ll arrive at together.