Chapter Eleven #3
“I don’t care how we live or where,” I said, kissing him again. “As long as it’s with you. And as long as we live for as long as we can, as brightly as we can, together.”
“I vow to you, we will.” He intoned that as if he was standing at the front of a cathedral.
And I knew this man. I knew his heart, which meant I knew him better than anyone else on this earth, including him.
I knew if he vowed it, it was as good as done.
“Let’s go,” he said then. He took my hand and brought it to his mouth. “There is no forever here, and we’ve earned one. But there is one thing we have to do first.”
Jovi pulled out the gasoline after taking the bag he’d kept packed for Rux to his car, and throwing his own in beside it. They both splashed it where they could, working fast and determinedly, because the clock was ticking.
“Are you sure?” Rux asked him when they were done, and all that was left was the lighting of a match. She was staring up at the villa, a curious look on her face. Not sad, not exactly. Aware, perhaps, of the finality of what they were doing here.
But he was looking only at her. “I have never been more certain of anything.”
Still, it took a deeper breath than usual to do what needed to be done. To strike the match and let it arc through the dark to the ground. Then flare as it found the gasoline.
Then burn.
He watched the flames for a moment, remembering. Letting himself remember.
And letting himself let go. Of ghosts and memories, lives lost and lives half lived, vows and promises, family and loss. So much loss.
Then he led Rux to the car, made sure she was safely inside, and left the old villa behind him, flames climbing high.
By the time his uncle and his cousin and their men made it halfway up the hillside—Jovi was certain he’d just missed running into them on the narrow road—the place was engulfed in fire.
A long-overdue funeral pyre in honor of his family, Jovi thought.
A fitting end to the long, sad story of Donatello D’Amato, who had longed for a better life than the one he’d been mired in on this island.
Leaving Sicily felt much the same. Too much darkness, too many ghosts.
And nothing ahead of them but possibility and the deep blue sea.
They boarded the boat he had waiting for them and set off, leaving the lights of Palermo behind them. And high on the hill in the distance, he could see the fire he’d set.
“They will think you’re dead,” Rux murmured, tucked up against his side.
“It is better, I think, that they do,” he replied. But what he thought was, They will wish that I am dead. And then, in the night, they will wake from their nightmares of me and know better.
A satisfying end, to his way of thinking.
It took him about a week into their new life—a lazy tour of whatever beaches took their fancy, easy enough to do when he’d laid out a trail involving flights to Perth, Australia, and a cabin in his name in the far-flung Solomon Islands, about as far away as a person could get from Sicily—for him to realize that his lovely Rux was under the impression that they were on the run.
Living hand to fist and forever looking over their shoulder.
“You misunderstand,” he told her as they lounged on the deck of the small yacht, having their dinner beneath the stars somewhere off the coast of Perpignan, France, near the border of Spain. “I’m a very wealthy man.”
“Your uncle was,” Rux said, nodding. “I understand that.”
“I lived in an empty house,” he reminded her. He stared at her until she blushed, one of his favorite new pastimes. “I spent my money on nothing. How do you think I got your passport in a couple of days? How do you think we’ve managed to effect our escape by means of a tranquil yachting holiday?”
“I…”
“I think,” Jovi said, with a mock disapproval, “that we are going to have to decide on the appropriate punishment for such offensive behavior, mia vita.”
My life.
Because that was exactly what she was. And would always be.
He watched her sigh happily as she came to him and arranged herself over his lap, so he could make sure they both enjoyed her punishment to the fullest.
In the life they were making together, all of the punishments were about love. They were made in love and they led to love. And really, they were just a way of playing their favorite games with each other as they wished.
Jovi intended to make certain that they could do this forever, because Rux deserved nothing less.
He had been very clear with his uncle. Should anything happen to him—or, God forbid, to Rux—or should he so much as feel the faintest tickle on the back of his neck to suggest that someone was following him, it would trigger an avalanche.
You think I’m afraid of an avalanche? Antonio had scoffed, malignant and furious in his little throne that day. You ungrateful cazzo.
It will come at you from all directions, Jovi had promised him, and it was not quite that he took pleasure in it, because too much was at stake.
But all told, he would admit that it was probably the very best day he’d ever spent in that cursed house.
All your secrets, Ziu. Have you forgotten?
I know exactly where all the bodies are buried.
All this time you thought you owned me. That you made me.
That I was your creature. All this time, the creature has owned you.
I should have known that you would turn traitor, the old man had sneered. It’s in the blood.
Your blood is a rotting carcass, Jovi had told him, the way the old women muttered their curses. And soon enough, the crows will come.
Much as Antonio had tried to hide it, Jovi had seen a flicker in his gaze. An acknowledgment all of his relatives liked to make when they were deep in their amari at the end of a long meal—but did not much care to make at other times, when the inevitable felt closer.
That they would all die the way they lived, hard and mean. That the choices they made assured it. That they were signing their own death warrants in blood and misery.
Antonio had no sweet old age to look forward to and it had been clear he knew it.
He’d never taken care of his body, and it had shown.
The same way his evil deeds had shown in his eyes and all over his face.
If he was lucky, his body would give out.
Otherwise, it was as likely to be prison as it was to be an assassination—possibly at the hand of his own son.
They had stared at each other, Jovi and the man who had tried to make him in his twisted image. And he thought they had both seen the same grim future awaiting his uncle.
You know as well as I do that your blood and mine have nothing in common, except what you spilled of it, Jovi had told him quietly.
Intently. My father was an honorable man.
He wanted better things than this. So do I.
The difference is, I will walk away from Il Serpente the way he couldn’t, and you will let me.
Antonio had snarled at him. Carlo will never stop looking for you.
Carlo is a cowardly imbecile, Jovi had retorted.
He will never get close to me. If I were you, I would convince him that he’s better off keeping his distance from even the thought of coming after me.
Unless, that is, you don’t want your disappointing successor around.
Just let me know. I’d be happy to dispose of him, too.
His uncle had growled at him, but he had said nothing.
Damning Carlo with something that hadn’t even risen to the level of faint praise.
Jovi had taken the time to outline all the many ways he could destroy his uncle with a phone call. Not that a phone call was necessary. If certain protocols weren’t followed, by him and by Rux, it would trigger a cascade of consequences that he knew his uncle didn’t want.
The old man listened, a sour look on his face, as Jovi spelled it all out for him. The investigators that would receive charts and dissertations. The journalists who would receive similar packages. The entire web he’d created to expose every single secret he knew about his family.
This is the cost of treating a nephew the way you treated me, Jovi had told him. I learned to stay quiet. You forgot I was there. You have no one to blame but yourself, Uncle. You betrayed yourself. Over and over again.
All of this, the old man had said, shaking his head. All of this for some nameless girl.
I know her name, Jovi had retorted. But if I were you, I’d make certain never, ever to learn it.
And he’d walked out the front door of that house they’d dragged him into, battered and bloody and wracked with grief, so many years before.
He took his Rux around the world. He showed her everything she’d ever dreamed of or read about, everything she thought she’d never see.
When she woke from dreams that brought her back to old cages, he soothed her.
And when his memories came to haunt him, she taught him how to make them stories that she laughed at and cried through, until he learned how to do the same.
They packed these travels into the first six months of their freedom, because afterward, she was too pregnant to travel that easily.
“I didn’t give birth control a second thought,” she said, laughing, the rounder she got.
“I told you I wanted you,” he replied every time. “And I do. I want everything that comes with wanting you. Babies. Old age. All of it.”
And when she smiled at him, he felt certain that he could hang the stars if she asked.
Five years after they left Sicily, they had a toddler named Bella and a baby named Alessandra, and, he suspected, another one on the way.
They lived on a remote beach in New Zealand where they kept to themselves, loved each other deeply and totally, and marinated in the fact that they could do these things.
That they could be anything they liked.