Chapter 32
AURORA
The hallway is empty except for him.
He's standing at the far end near the window, arms crossed, still in his coat like he came straight here and never thought to take it off.
He looks older. That's the first thing I notice, and it punches through me in a way I wasn't prepared for — the deeper lines around his mouth, the grey at his temples that wasn't there before.
He was always so large in my memory, so immovable, and he still is, with broad shoulders and the particular stillness of a man trained never to show weakness.
But he looks older.
When did that happen? Was it always there, and I just never let myself see it?
I stop walking.
Twenty feet between us and I just — stop.
My legs make the decision without consulting me, and suddenly I'm standing in the middle of this empty corridor with my heart doing something violent in my chest and my hands gone cold and all the things I've rehearsed saying to him in the dark over the last several weeks evaporating completely.
He sees me.
He yanks to his feet from where he'd been leaning against the wall, one fast movement, and takes a step forward, and then he stops too.
We just look at each other.
Papa.
The word forms in my head and stays there, stuck, because my throat has closed entirely.
His face is doing things I've never seen it do — this man who sat through funerals without flinching, who negotiated with killers over dinner without raising his pulse — his face is completely open.
Raw in a way that frightens me a little because I don't know what to do with a version of my father that looks like he might come apart.
His jaw works.
My eyes are burning.
Say something, I tell myself. Walk toward him. Do something. You've been missing him for months, you've been missing him every single day, stop standing here—
He takes another step.
That's all it takes.
Something in my chest just gives way, a dam wall deciding it's done, and I'm moving without deciding to move, crossing the distance between us in something that probably looks ridiculous and I don't care at all, and his arms come open and I run into them like I'm twelve years old and I did something frightening at school and he's the only person in the world who makes things smaller.
He catches me so hard it lifts me slightly off the ground.
His arms lock around me, crushing tight, and he buries his face in my hair, and the sound he makes is one I've never heard from him in my entire life, a broken thing from somewhere deep in his chest.
"My little princess." His voice is wrecked. Barely holding together. "Are you okay? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay." I'm crying already, both arms wrapped around his neck, face pressed into his shoulder. "I'm okay, Papa."
"Are you okay?" He pulls back to look at my face, both hands cupping my jaw, his eyes moving over me frantically like he's checking for damage. "You're sure? They didn't—"
"I'm okay." I cover his hands with mine. "I promise. I'm okay."
His eyes are wet. I've seen my father cry exactly once in my life, at my mother's funeral, and he turned away so I wouldn't see it. He's not turning away now. He looks at me, tears fall, and he doesn't do a single thing to stop them, and somehow that undoes me more completely than anything else.
I start crying properly. The ugly kind, the kind I've been holding in since the moment that third shot hit Axel and everything became unthinkable.
"I missed you," I manage. "I missed you so much."
"I know." He pulls me back in, one hand pressing my head to his shoulder. "I know, bambina. I know. I missed you every day."
We stay like that for a long time. This hallway with its antiseptic smell and its fluorescent light, and neither of us caring even slightly.
He came. The thought keeps hitting me, surprising me anew each time. He came. He drove here, brought men, and stayed.
I pull back eventually, wiping my face with the back of my hand.
He watches me do it, and something in his expression is so achingly familiar — that particular look, attentive and a little helpless, that my father always got when I cried as a child.
Like he wanted very badly to fix the thing and wasn't sure where it was.
"Why are you here?" I ask. "How did you even know where—"
"Since the first attack, I've always known something like this would happen." His voice goes quiet. "Since the first attack on his estate. I've known where you were every day." He looks at his hands briefly, then back at me. "I wanted to come then. I almost did, a hundred times."
"But you didn't."
"No." He says it without excuse. "I was proud and stubborn, but I was wrong.
" Each word is deliberate, and it costs him something.
My father does not say those words easily.
"Sending you away was wrong. What I said to you was wrong.
I was afraid, and I took it out on you instead of the problem, and I have thought about that every single morning since you left that house. "
My chin is wobbling again. I press my lips together.
"I'm sorry, Aurora." He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the same way he did when I was small. "I'm asking you to forgive me. I know —"
"Stop." I catch his hand and squeeze his fingers. "You're my father. You always will be." A breath. "I'm sorry too. I never wanted any of this to touch you. I never wanted to make things complicated or dangerous or—"
"Nothing happening is your fault. You hear me?"
I nod, not trusting my voice.
He looks at me for a long moment, his thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles the way he's done since I was a little girl.
He pauses, choosing words carefully. "Are you happy?"
Here it is.
My heart rate picks up. I hold his eyes.
"Yes," I say. "Papa, I love him."
His face goes very still.
"I know that's not what you want to hear," I continue before he can speak.
"I know this is complicated and it's messy, and none of it makes sense on paper.
But I love him. Genuinely. He—" I stop, thinking about how to make him understand, how to compress everything the last few months have been into something my father can hold.
"He sees me. He actually sees me. Not Don Luca's daughter. Not a problem to be managed. Just me."
My father is quiet, watching my face.
"I'm begging you," I say softly. "Please be okay with this. I need you in my life, and I need him in my life, and I can't keep them in separate rooms, I can't do that, I don't have enough of myself left to—"
"I want to be sure you're happy," he says gruffly. "Before I put a bullet in his brain."
"Papa—"
"He fucking deserves to die."
"Not while I'm alive." My voice comes out steady. Surprising both of us slightly. "That will not happen while I'm alive, do you understand me? You will not touch him, or you will go through me first."
My father stares at me.
"He is the father of your grandchild," I say quietly. "He is the man I love. And whatever history is between the two of you, whatever you feel, you do not get to make that decision."
Silence stretches between us.
Then, slowly, something shifts in my father's face. The jaw unclenches by a fraction. His eyes move over mine like he's reading something written there, and whatever he finds seems to change the calculation he's been running.
"You really love him?”
"With everything I have."
He exhales. Long and slow, like he's been holding it for months.
"I was there," he says finally. "During the attack.
I saw him—" He stops, jaw tightening. "He took three bullets, Aurora.
Three. And he was still on his feet. Still fighting.
" Something complicated moves across his face.
"The second shot took him to one knee, and he got back up.
I've seen men in this life for forty years.
Men who are supposed to be hard." He shakes his head slowly. "I've never seen anything like that."
My throat closes.
I know, I think. I was there. I watched every second of it.
"He wasn't protecting his empire," my father says quietly. "He wasn't protecting his territory or his men or his pride." He looks at me. "Every single thing that man did on that ground, he did facing you. Keeping himself between you and every gun pointed in your direction."
I press my hand flat against my sternum and breathe.
"He needs to talk to me," my father says. "Axel and I need to sit down. There are things between us that have to be said before I can give you what you're asking for." His eyes meet mine, direct and serious. "But I'm not making any decisions until after that conversation."
It's not yes. But it's not no.
It's the most I'm going to get right now, and I know it.
I step forward and wrap my arms around him again, less desperate this time, just steady. His arms come around me, and he presses a kiss to the top of my head, the way he's done since before I could remember.
"My little princess," he murmurs into my hair.
"Hi Papa," I whisper back.
Outside the narrow window at the end of the corridor, the sky is beginning to lighten. Pale grey at the edges, the particular colorless quiet that comes just before dawn decides to commit.
I stand in my father's arms, watch it happen, think about the man in the room behind me, the man holding me now, and everything that has to happen before this can look anything like peace.
It's going to be a long road.
But my father is here. He came.
That's enough for right now.
That's everything.