Chapter Eleven #2
“So what happens?” I asked, watching him closely. “If you kill me, who cares? I’m an unremarkable casualty. My father, despite his outsized sense of self-importance, matters to no one. I doubt very much anyone will notice when he’s gone.”
His eyes flared with an emotion I recognized, because I’d felt it myself moments before when he’d declared that this was all he was good for, all he was. These ghosts. This violence. This grotesque mirror of what life should have been.
“My uncle does not need your father gone just yet,” he said coolly, as if he’d never been inside me.
So deep I’d forgotten we had separate names.
So deep I’d seen forever. But I knew him better now.
I knew that the colder he got, the less he truly believed what he was saying.
I kept my gaze on his face. I watched his eyes that were no longer ice-cold, but bright.
“He needs him neutralized. Humbled. But then he prefers everyone in that position. The more bowing and scraping, the better.”
I nodded. “You would know how to do that best, of course.”
He made his way deeper into the kitchen, and his gaze was fastened on me as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to kiss me or kill me after all.
“I find humbling myself overrated,” Jovi told me, darkly.
He kept coming, and I wondered why he couldn’t hear how hard my heart was pounding. Why he couldn’t read me the way I read him. I might have asked him, but then he was right in front of me.
And he leaned forward, putting his hands on either side of me, directly beside mine. Then he was leaning onto the counter, towering over me while I was staring up at him in what I hoped looked like defiance.
But the only thing I was really defying, I thought, was my own very real urge to throw myself into his arms. Because I wanted to see what he would say. What he would do. What value he put on the trust I’d thought we had between us—until he went off to court his probable death.
“Tell me what you think is happening here,” Jovi said, and he sounded…impatient and dark. Dangerous and something like indulgent, if an indulgence could be that hard. “And make it quick. We are short on time, you and me.”
“What’s time between a killer and his victim?” I asked airily, as if I was still that girl who he’d carried out of my father’s house, bound and gagged and yet held securely and kept warm on the way out.
He muttered something beneath his breath. “Baggiana, I have told you. I am a man of vows.”
“I know that,” I fired back at him. “And yet you continue to honor your cruel, vicious uncle for some reason, even after he slaughtered your family and forced you to be a monster just like him—”
“I blocked out my memories of my family,” Jovi gritted out at me, standing so close I thought we might as well have been touching, his gaze so intense on mine.
“It was better this way. It allowed me to function. It allowed me to survive.” He shook his head, though his dark gaze never left mine.
“I was always taught that my father was a weak man. A small man, greedy and vain. But I remember now.”
I wanted, desperately, to touch him. I whispered his name instead.
Jovi swallowed. “He was neither. He wanted something better. Something clean. He wanted to save his family from this greed and horror that my uncle would tell you is in our blood. My father wanted to cut it out. He wanted to leave. But every time he thought about how he would do that, how he would convince Antonio to let us go, he could not see how it was fair for him to rid himself of the Il Serpente pollution and allow his family to continue operating normally. That’s why they killed him.
They might have let my mother and my sisters go, but my father brought the authorities in.
My uncle was forced to make an example of him.
” His mouth curved, but it was a bitter reenactment of that smile of his.
“But I was here. He enjoyed making that example. He reveled in it.”
This was where my childhood came in handy, I thought then. I could hear what he was saying. I could picture what he meant. I could want to cry again—for his life this time, instead of the death I’d imagined he’d walked into.
But I could also hold all of that inside.
“So what you’re telling me is that you’re not a monster at all,” I said, as evenly as I could, because I wanted him to hear me say it out loud.
Just in case he was ever tempted to try to sacrifice himself again.
Just in case a dark day found him and convinced him that he was nothing but the thing his uncle made him.
“You’re the son of a hero and you lost your way. ”
“I found my way,” Jovi told me, as if he was laying down law in the form of stone tablets. “I found my North Star, Rux. I found you.”
“I thought you went to sacrifice yourself,” I told him.
“You,” he said, intensely, “would be worth sacrificing myself for, Rux. But I find I would rather have you than lose you.”
I couldn’t breathe. “But your vows. Your promises.”
“I told you that you were mine and I was yours, curò,” he said, even more urgently. “I meant that. You gave me your innocence and that meant something to me. You are my heart. It did not beat until I met you and now it only beats for you.”
He was thundering all these things at me. They moved through me like a wild storm.
And I believed every word as surely as if they were written on my heart.
Because they were.
Jovi’s gaze scanned mine, and it felt like that same thunder. “We have an hour.”
“Until what?”
“I negotiated the terms of my exit from my family and from Sicily.”
I wasn’t sure I heard him properly. I wasn’t sure I could believe him. That we had to run, that we had to escape, that made sense—but that they might let him go? Impossible.
Wasn’t it?
I wanted it to be true more than I wanted my next breath. “I didn’t think that was a possibility.”
“Everything is a possibility if you have the proper tools,” he told me. “In the case of my uncle, he underestimated the attention to detail I give to everything I do. Names. Places. Dates. Recordings. As if it was my job to maintain a record of his crimes.”
“Did you always mean to leave Il Serpente, then?”
I hardly dared ask it. But he blinked, as if he’d expected the question. As if he’d asked it of himself.
“Tonight I dug up the graves inside of me,” he told me gruffly.
“I let the ghosts out, and all the memories that came with them. I tried to honor them. Yet all this time, I think that I was trying to honor my father in my own, twisted way. I told myself I was simply being thorough, and keeping myself safe. And I was. But I also think that I was gathering all the evidence my father would have. If he hadn’t been found out. If he’d lived.”
I was finding it hard to breathe. I was swaying, and my eyes were blurry again, but I couldn’t seem to care enough to wipe at my cheeks.
Jovi reached over and did it for me. First one cheek, then the next.
“But if you no longer wish to come with me, Rux—if you can’t see a life with someone who’s done the things that I have, I understand.
I will get you out. But I will stay here and let them do what they will.
” He laughed, but it was a bitter sound that I didn’t like at all.
“I will take my place with the ghosts of this villa as I should have done years ago.”
I slapped my hand in the center of his chest, shocking us both.
“We either both live or both die,” I threw at him, intense and sure.
As I had been about him from the start, hadn’t I?
As if I had recognized him the moment he’d appeared in my bedroom.
As if my heart had known him at once. “And I’m not finished living, Jovi.
I promised you right back. Yours.” I pointed to myself. Then I pointed to him. “Mine.”
And for a moment that I knew, somehow, would be etched into me forever, we stood there in the kitchen of his wreck of an old house and breathed each other in.
The vows we’d made wrapping tighter and tighter around us with every breath, just the way we liked it.
The way it had started. The way it would go on. The way it would end, he and I bound to each other like fate.
But not tonight. Not yet.
“They will be here within the hour,” Jovi told me after a small eternity passed between us.
He leaned in and cradled my face in his hands.
“You have brought me to life, my beautiful Rux. My curò, my light, my love. You showed me why the earth turns, why the birds sing, why the stars shine. I cannot be without you. I cannot bear it. I will not allow it.”
“I love you, too,” I whispered back, fiercely. “And I’m willing to fight for it. Even if the first one I have to fight is you.”
He kissed me then. And it was dark and wild, filthy and deep. It was a ruthless, glorious claiming.
I kissed him back and I loved him so much it hurt.
“I never doubted you.” I whispered my confession in a rush. “I thought you had gone to die like some noble fool and I wanted you to feel as desolate as that made me.”
For a moment, he only breathed. And I wished I could go back and do this differently.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I—”
“Make no mistake,” my love told me, his voice dark against my mouth. “I’ll make you pay for that.”
And we both smiled.
I pulled back, and it was my turn to get my hands on his face, to make sure he was looking at me with his whole beautiful soul in his eyes. “I love you, Giovanbattista. I love you, my Jovi. I will follow you anywhere.”
“I love you, too,” he told me in return, though it sounded as if the words hurt on the way out.
He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe he had said that.
“I love you,” he said again, more intensely that time.
“I love you, Rux, and I will make sure you know it every day. Every single day that we have left, you and me.”