Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty: Matteo
Antonia wants to go for a walk.
"There's a garden," she says over coffee in the kitchen. "Sav told me about it. A botanical garden, twenty minutes from here. Full of flowers and old women and absolutely zero men with guns."
"You want to go look at flowers."
"I want to go look at something that isn't boring. I've been inside this compound for three weeks and the only time I left, you smacked around a guy for touching my leg."
I look at her across the kitchen table. She's in jeans and a black tank top, Vita and Morte on her belt because the karambits go everywhere, and her hair is down. Goddamn, she’s so beautiful like this.
She looks hopeful. The word doesn't fit easily on her face, but it's there, sitting underneath the surface. There’s no way I can say no to a face like that.
"Torres can drive us," I say.
"No Torres. No escort. No security detail. Just us."
"Leone won't approve that."
"Leone approved it last night. I asked him after the bar closed. He said, and I quote, if Antonia wants to look at flowers, let her look at flowers, that woman has earned a day without a gun in her peripheral vision."
"Leone said that?"
"Well, technically Savannah said that. Leone agreed because Savannah told him she wouldn’t serve him for a week if he didn’t."
So here we are, off to the gardens. We take the car.
Not the armored SUV, a regular vehicle from the compound's civilian fleet, a black sedan that doesn't scream mafia and doesn't draw attention.
I drive because she doesn't drive, which I learned three days ago when she told me Marco never let her get a license because she’d never need to.
I'm teaching her next week. She'll be terrible at it and I'm looking forward to every second. Maybe she will even leave me some nice new scars for my efforts.
The garden is twenty minutes south. The road takes us through suburbs that don't know what lives in the compound beyond their tree line. Past schools, grocery stores and parks where kids play on slides. The normalcy of it is jarring.
Antonia is quiet during the drive, watching everything with an almost wistful look on her face.
Her hand is on her thigh, resting over Vita's handle, but the grip is loose. No spin. No rotation. The blades are present but idle. That idleness has become norm over the last few weeks and I realized that her anxiety has decreased and therefore, she doesn’t need to ground herself nearly as much as she once did.
We get to the gates and drive up a long path to a gravel parking lot. I pull in and help her out of her seat before locking the door and grabbing her hand.
The garden is bigger than I expected. Stone paths winding through beds of flowers that I can't name. The entrance is flanked by trellises covered in climbing roses, white and pink, and the smell hits us as we walk through and Antonia stops.
She just stops. In the middle of the path, with people moving around us, families and couples and old women with gardening hats, and she stands there and looks at the roses and breathes.
"My mother grew roses," she says. "At the estate.
Before she died. There was a garden on the south side of the building, and she spent every morning in it.
I used to spend hours looking at her scrapbooks filled with pictures of her flowers…
and me. Marco had it paved over after the funeral.
He turned it into a parking area for the security vehicles. "
"He paved over your mother's garden."
"He paved over everything that reminded him of her. The photographs, the clothes, the garden. He erased her from the building.” She reaches out and touches a rose petal.
The touch is light, careful, the same fingers that grip Vita and Morte handling a flower with a gentleness that I've never seen from her. “I wish I could remember.”
She sighs and keeps going. The paths wind through sections, roses giving way to lavender, lavender to beds of wildflowers, wildflowers to a section of ornamental grasses that sway in the breeze.
Every few meters Antonia stops and looks at something, a flower she doesn't know the name of, a butterfly landing on a bush, the way light filters through the canopy of a magnolia tree, and every time she stops I watch her face open up another fraction of an inch.
This is the real woman underneath the weapon.
The one who keeps a dead mother's Polaroid in a blade case.
The one who didn't cry for eleven years and then cried during sex because the safety of being held was the permission her body needed.
The one who told me she didn't know she was allowed to want a person, and meant it.
She's walking through a garden touching flowers with hands that have killed six men, and the contradiction isn't a contradiction. It's just her. All of it. The blade and the petal. Death and life.
"Come here," she says with a mischievous giggle.
We've reached a section of the garden where the path narrows between walls of climbing vine, dense and green, the foliage thick enough that the path beyond is hidden. A pergola covered in wisteria, the purple flowers hanging in clusters, the air heavy with the scent.
She grabs my wrist with the grip she used the first night in my room when she tested my pulse, except this time the grip pulls, and I follow because I have been following this woman since the corridor whether I admit it or not.
She pulls me off the path. Through a gap in the vines, behind the pergola, into a space between the wisteria wall and a stone border that's hidden from the main walkway. Secluded. Green on all sides. The purple flowers hanging above us and the sound of the garden muted by the foliage.
"Antonia, what are you—"
She pushes me against the stone wall and drops to her knees.
My brain does three things simultaneously.
The first is register that my wife just pulled me behind a wall of wisteria in a public garden and is kneeling in front of me with her hands on my belt.
The second is scan the immediate area for witnesses, a reflex I've developed from three weeks in a compound where missing something has a consequence.
The third is stop functioning entirely because her fingers are undoing my belt buckle.
"We're in public," I say, which is the dumbest sentence I've ever spoken because my beautiful bride has never once in her life cared about the location of her decisions.
"We're behind a vine wall. Nobody can see us… and even if they could, I don't care." She pulls the belt free and unbuttons my pants and tugs the zipper down. "I've been thinking about this since we left the compound."
"About blowing me in a garden?"
"About having something that's fun and risky and new.
" She looks up at me from her knees, and the expression on her face is the one she wears when she's about to do something she's already decided on, and the decision is final.
"This is outside of all of it. This is just us.
In a garden. Where nobody knows our names and nobody is watching and the only thing that matters is your cock and my mouth and the pretty flowers. "
She pulls my cock free. I'm already hard because the combination of her beautiful eyes staring at me from below, the word cock in her mouth, and the wisteria overhead has apparently bypassed every circuit in my brain that handles restraint and decorum.
Her hand wraps around the base of me, fingers firm, and she looks at me one more time with those dark eyes framed by beautifully thick lashes. I just about bust on the spot.
She takes me into her mouth.
The warmth and the wetness hit at the same time.
My hand goes to the stone wall behind me to steady me.
Her tongue runs the length of me, base to tip, and then she takes me deep, deeper than I expected, her throat relaxing around me as she swallows and the sound I make is loud enough that a bird startles and flies away.
"Fuck," I breathe. "Antonia."
She hums against my cock, and the vibration runs through my entire body. Her hand works the shaft in rhythm with her mouth, twisting on the upstroke, and her other hand is on my thigh, nails digging in through the fabric of my pants, anchoring herself.
I put my hand in her hair. My fingers twisting into the dark strands, feeling her head move, feeling the rhythm she's building, and this moment is one I want to remember for the rest of my life.
She pulls back until just the tip is between her lips, tongue circling the head, pressing into the spot underneath that makes my vision blur.
Then she sinks back down, slow, taking me to the back of her throat, and the groan that comes out of me is strangled.
It's the sound of a man being taken apart by a woman who knows exactly what she's doing and is enjoying every second of it.
"You're going to make me come if you don’t slow down," I tell her because the build is happening fast, faster than I want, as my balls rise and my cock twitches.
She pulls off long enough to say, "That's the point," and then takes me deep again, her pace increasing, her hand gripping harder, her mouth working me.
My hand tightens in her hair. My hips push forward, and she takes it, all of it, her throat opening and her eyes closed as I fuck her mouth.
"Ohhhh fuck, baby girl… I'm coming," I say, and she doesn't pull away. She takes me deeper, her hand moving faster and I come, pulsing into her throat. She swallows all of it, and she moans as she does.
She pulls off, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and then looks up at me from her knees with dark eyes and swollen lips and a flower petal stuck in her hair from the vine.
"What was that for?" I ask when I can form words.
She giggles and stands, brushing the dirt from her knees, reaching up to pluck the petal from her hair before looking at it and then at me.
"Do you remember the corridor?" she says. "The first time. When I called you a puppet and you called me a dowry and we stood fifteen feet apart and every cell in both of our bodies wanted to close the distance and neither of us would admit it."
"I remember."
"I wanted to do that." She puts the petal in my shirt pocket and pats it twice.
"Not the fighting. Not the insults. The other thing. The wanting. I wanted to close the distance and put my mouth on you and find out what happens when two people who were supposed to hate each just take what they want.”
"We stopped pretending we hated each other on the gym floor."
"We stopped fighting on the gym floor. This wasn't about anger or grief or the fucking Silent or the war or any of it. This was just me wanting her husband to bust down her throat. A basic human need."
She zips my pants and buttons them before she threads the belt back through the loops and buckles it, and the act of dressing me is somehow more intimate than the act of undressing me was.
"Come on," she says. "I want to see the rest of the garden."
Dear God this woman is going to give me whiplash. My cock is still half hard and I want to sit and relax, but no, she needs to keep exploring knowing full well she just took my load like the good girl she is.
She takes my hand and leads me back through the gap in the vines, onto the main path, into the sunlight and the families and the old women with gardening hats. We walk through the garden, her hand in mine, and everything just feels like peace.
She stops at every bed. She reads the little signs that name the flowers. She touches petals and leans in to smell things and asks me if I know the difference between a perennial and an annual, and I tell her I don't, and she says good, neither do I, we'll learn together.
We'll learn together.
I don’t bother to hide the beaming smile that crosses my face at the thought of us getting dirty in the garden together.
The drive back to the compound is quiet.
Her head against the window, her hand in mine on the console between us.
We pull through the gate. The soldiers nod as we pass.
The courtyard opens up, and I notice a spot where we can build our garden, if she wants to stay here.
If not, we can buy a place and make it our own.
With that thought on my mind, I park and we head inside.
Giada is in the kitchen, phone in hand, researching something that is definitely Bratva-related based on the Cyrillic text on her screen. She looks up when we walk in and reads both our faces in two seconds.
"You guys fucked," she says.
"We went to a garden," Antonia says.
"You fucked in a garden."
"We looked at flowers, Giada."
"Toni, you have dirt on your knees, and he has smears of dirt on his shirt and both of you look like you just saw God.
You fucked in a garden." She goes back to her phone.
"I'm happy for you. Also, I've found the regular club the Russian goes to on Saturdays and I need Torres to drive me there this weekend. "
"Absolutely not," Antonia says.
"Already cleared it with Leone."
"Leone said yes?"
"Okay, no he didn’t, but he will if he knows you guys are coming."
Antonia sighs and rolls her eyes. “Fine, whatever, but if you die, don’t expect me to die, too.”
Gia huffs. “Once upon a time you were walking into an enemy compound because your father was going to send me away, now you’ve replaced me with dick.”
“Woahhhhh, not true, but also kinda. Love you, turd. You know I’ll always have your back.” Antonia hugs her friend and then wanders off to make herself a coffee.
I just smile. All of this… this is family. What started as hate, turned into a love I couldn’t have imagined if I tried.
Because it is just love. The kind that started with hatred and survived a war and was forged in blood and sealed in a garden, and the kind that doesn't need to make sense.
She was the point. She was always the point.
***
Go straight onto Carmelo and Grace's story here