Twenty Two
LIANA
The past three days have all been a blur. I’ve been itching to see Apollo and Savio again, begging Dario, but he refuses to give in. Not this time. He’s sticking to his word and making me wait until tonight after we share our vows and promise ourselves to one another for eternity. But three days is a long time to be alone with my thoughts, none of them making the slightest bit of sense, and the questions lingering, left unasked.
Barging into my room as if on a time crunch, Elaina and Kat waste no time in picking me up and dragging me to the closet.
“The guys have left for the church now, it’s just us girls in the house,” Kat starts, grabbing the dress bag from its hanger in the closet. Laying it on the bed, she unzips it and pulls aside the bag to expose the shoulders. “Makeup and hair first,” she adds.
“What’s the rush?” I ask.
“Two hours might seem like a long time, but it’s not. We’ve got an hour’s drive and have to make sure everything is perfect before we leave. We won’t have time to turn back at any point.”
“It’s just a day,” I breathe out. “A day that shouldn’t be happening. It’s not going to be something to remember anyway.”
Kat and Elaina share sympathetic glances and before I can even register it, Kat drags me down the hallway to her room, sitting me down in front of her dresser.
“You get started on your makeup,” she says, lifting the lid to reveal an array of different products. “I’ll do your hair. I was thinking loose curls with a bun and some nice hair clips. What do you think?”
“Sounds good,” I answer, my eyes perusing the products in front of me.
Since getting to know Dario better, I’ve noticed how my dread has vanished, replaced with a sense of longing. It’s a strange feeling, one I’ve never felt before, but it’s been making me rethink a lot lately.
Being with him makes me feel something foreign; somewhat more alive than I did before. I see multiple sides of him that I had no idea existed. While he might seem hard and cold, he’s shown me that he does in fact have a soft side; you have to really want to see it before it shows. It’s like he tries so hard to hide it away in that black hole inside of him, but he can’t keep it locked up forever.
Because I’ve seen him in that light in such a short time frame, I want to believe that anything is possible between us. I want him to show me more—I know that’s the longing sensation I’m feeling. I want him to let me all the way in so we can show each other the true versions of ourselves. But if I know anything, it won’t be an easy feat.
He wants, more than anything, to prove my brother and Savio did something wrong. He wants to be in the right because it’ll most likely kill him to be wrong. But I know them both well enough to know they wouldn’t hurt anyone without reason—without a good reason.
Sure, they’ve changed personality-wise and their looks aren’t as I remember them to be, even considering the additional scars and the reality of growing up, but there’s just something that isn’t sitting right with me. It’s like alarm bells sounded in my head when I first saw them, making it impossible to think clearly enough to make sense of anything, and until that alarm is gone, nothing will be right.
∞∞∞
The wedding went off without a hitch. We both said our carefully worded vows that are open for interpretation if you want to paint a bigger picture in your head. We kissed each other when the time was right and exited the church together, hand-in-hand. Everyone cheered and expressed their happiness for us, but I couldn’t ignore the gnawing feeling in my gut. Something within me wanted it to be true, wanted it to be real, but knowing what I know… I know that’ll never happen.
I shouldn’t take it to heart. He is who he is and there’s no changing that. Besides, even if I were to forget the bad things I know about Dario and only see the good, maybe I’d be convinced that this was real enough to work through our differences. But it’s not that simple. Not now, anyway.
“Where are we going?” I ask as we drive down an unfamiliar street.
“We’re going home, little one.”
“You missed the turn back there,” I tell him, pointing my thumb back to show the junction he passed.
“There’s one stop we need to make along the way. I want to show you something.”
“You told me I could see Apollo again. I want to go back.”
“You will. Just give me thirty minutes, okay?” His words plead with me, his tone low and his voice as quiet as a whisper.
I say nothing, humming my response with a short nod.
After another ten minutes of driving, we stop outside a cemetery. “And I thought romance was dead,” I say with blatant sarcasm.
“Believe me, it’s long dead; buried in there somewhere, but that’s not why I brought you here,” he replies with a breathy laugh. “Come on, let’s go,” he adds, stepping out of the car.
Sighing heavily, I follow him, my mind spinning with the possibilities of why I’m here.
As he waits for me on the driver’s side of the car, I take in his attire once more.
It’s an ordinary suit—black tie, jacket, slacks and dress shoes, paired with a white shirt, something he wears on the daily—but he looks so good in it. Not a single strand of his raven hair is out of place, perfectly slicked back, which differentiates it from his usual look.
“Ready?” he asks, releasing a shaky breath.
I nod, this time offering my hand to him like he’s done to me before. There’s something about the look in his eye that makes my throat feel swollen as if I’ve been holding back my tears.
Without hesitation, he takes it, linking his fingers through mine as he leads the way into the open gates of the graveyard.
We walk along the path for a minute or so until I spot a long line of family crypts. They’re all engraved with the respective family names, each carved in a different style. One has a floral pattern, another has etchings of quotes or mottos, but the one we stop at is black; no decoration in sight.
He takes a second to compose himself before unlocking the floor-length door with metal bars and leads the way down the steep, narrow steps inside.
Before following him, I glance at the engraved name above the doorway, a slight hitch in my breath. It’s his family’s crypt.
“Why are we here?” I ask as I carefully follow him.
“We’re married now, which makes you family. I thought I’d introduce you to the people you didn’t have the chance to meet.” His words are soft and filled with something I can’t quite place. “There are a lot of good people buried in here,” he adds, flicking a lighter to illuminate the lanterns around us. It reveals a few urns with plaques beneath them, engraved with names, dates of birth and death, and different symbols.
“Some of them died long before their time ,” he continues. “My cousin, Jules, for instance,”—he points to the first urn—“she was twenty-six and pregnant with her second child. She never got to find out the gender, but her husband had two names engraved alongside hers.”
He turns around to face two gravestones sitting at the far end of the crypt. “We usually only do urns to save space, but we never got the bodies. So, gravestones seemed fitting rather than having empty metal containers placed in their rightful places among the family.”
“Who are they?” I ask as I approach them.
“My sisters.” His words catch me by surprise as my eyes trace their names. “They were only sixteen.”
“So young,” I whisper, bunching my dress up to crouch down in front of the stones. I stop, looking back up at him. “You said that their bodies were never found?” I ask, grief for the young lives lost filling my voice.
“Yeah,” his answer is soft and sorrowful. “That’s the thing with deranged people in our world, they like to take things from you—take people from you. They do it to get under your skin. My sisters were young, had their whole lives ahead of them… They were taken too soon.”
“I–I didn’t know.”
“Because I didn’t tell you, I don’t like to relive bad memories.”
“Understandable,” I say, watching as he sits down beside me from my peripheral vision.
“Sometimes I come here to talk to them,” he admits, his words almost inaudible, like he doesn’t want me to hear. “I know it’s stupid because they can’t hear me—hell, they’re not even in here, but it helps me cope sometimes. Back when they were alive, they would listen to anything I had to say, and I thought it would be a good gesture to keep their memory alive.”
“It’s a sweet thing to do,” I reassure him, my hand finding his on his lap. “It’s a great way to keep them alive in your mind.” My mind reels, trying to find the right words to phrase what’s going on in my head.
It’s impossible to relate to what he’s feeling right now, so I have to be careful with my exact words.
“How are you so certain they’re dead?” I finally settle on, glancing up at him.
His face scrunches. “The man that took them was more cruel and twisted than we initially thought. At first, he sent videos of them, announcing that he had them and instructing us on what he wanted us to do to get them back home in one piece. We refused to let this man dictate our lives and, after months of doing things our own way, he sent us photos of them. They looked… numb, like whatever he did to them forced them to become shells of themselves. I knew then that when we did get them back, they wouldn’t be the same people they were before.”
He straightens his posture as he leans forward, his fingers lingering on their names. “He gave us several warnings, but we were so fucking close to finding them and we couldn’t—we wouldn’t let them win by playing along.” His jaw clenches and his eyes close before he releases a shaky exhale. “A couple of days later it all ended. He sent photos of them tied up and videos of them being used in ways no person should be. It wasn’t long before we realised they were already dead by that point. I thought it was sick watching those bastards use them, but after that piece of information, I—”
I hush him, watching as silent tears roll down his cheeks. “You don’t need to relive it, Dario. I don’t want you to experience it again by telling me.”
“I do it daily, Liana; it helps me stay sane. It helps me see things clearer on a day-to-day basis. I don’t like telling outsiders about it because it’s something I haven’t been able to resolve yet. But I will.”
“So—”
“We know who he is; but we can’t find him,” he continues. “How is it fair that he gets to live in the shadows when the girls don’t even get to live at all? How does he get away with something like that and just… vanish?”
“You’ll find him, Dario.”
“I know we will, but it’s been seven years. It’s impossible for men like him to only do something like that once. He is, no doubt, a repeat offender—we just haven’t found any similar crimes yet.”
“And you probably won’t,” I tell him, shaking my head. “If he has done this more than once, it’s possible that Scarlett and Serra weren’t his firsts, and if that’s the case, then he definitely knows how to hide his crimes. It’s more than likely you’ll never get to the bottom of this.”
He exhales a shaky breath. “Then I’ll die trying.” His words are soft and quiet again. “I want you to know that I understand the feeling of loss, and if I were to keep you from your brother, I’d hate myself for it. I’d hate myself if I kept you from seeing your brother because I want, more than anything, to see my sisters again, but that’s impossible. You have the chance to make up for your lost time and I don’t. I won’t take that from you.”
“Thank you.”
He hums. “I-I want to sit in silence now.”
I nod, leaning my head into him, placing it on his shoulder.
In all the softness I’ve seen in him, this really does take the cake. He’s grieving them, staring at their gravestones with the knowledge that their bodies are somewhere where they don’t belong. I’m in awe that he's even able to carry on the way that he does. I would never come back from this the way he has.