LUCA MORETTI
She fell asleep first.
I rolled onto my side, head propped on one elbow, watching her sleep.
Her wet hair spread across the pillow, her mother's emerald earring still in one ear—the other had fallen out somewhere in the room. Her mouth half-open, one hand on my chest, right over the Mors potius macula tattoo.
I thought of all the women who'd slept in that bed over twenty years. And I thought how not one of them had laid her hand on that exact spot of my skin.
Not the way she had.
Pericolosa.
And yet, this time, no word of warning. This time, with the quiet certainty of a man who knows, at last, after forty years of not knowing, what he'd come looking for in this life. And knows that if he loses it, it's lost.
I touched her wet hair, very slowly.
"Bella mia," I said softly, to her as she slept. "I'll bring your father back to you alive before the wedding. And you'll decide what we do with him."
She drew a deep breath in her sleep, and her hand tightened a little on my chest.
I turned off the lamp, and for the first time in fifteen years, I slept with a woman's arm around me.