Chapter Twenty-Eight What the Cold Leaves Behind
She dreamed about Marchetti's face that night, and the night after — not the threat of him, but the stillness of Dante's voice as he'd delivered it, the terrible, patient calm of a man who had genuinely, without hesitation, been prepared to end a life in front of her.
She woke twice before dawn, heart pounding, and both times found Dante already awake beside her, watching her with quiet, unguarded worry.
"Talk to me," he said, the second time, drawing her against his chest. "Don't just lie there pretending you weren't dreaming about it."
"I keep seeing your face," she admitted, voice small in the dark. "Not angry. Just — certain. Like killing him would have cost you nothing at all."
Dante was quiet for a long moment. "It would have cost me something," he said finally.
"It would have cost me the version of myself I'm trying to become, for you.
But I won't lie to you and say I hesitated in the moment, Elena.
I didn't. That part of me is real, and it isn't going away because I love you.
I need you to be able to hold both of those truths, or I'm not sure this works long-term — you, learning to live with what I am, and me, learning not to let it be all that I am. "
"I don't want you to be gentle all the way through," she said slowly, working the thought out as she spoke it.
"I think I was afraid, that night, that I'd married a stranger.
But I don't think I'm afraid of you, exactly.
I think I'm afraid of what it means about the world we live in now, that it required that version of you to keep me safe. "
"That's a fair thing to be afraid of." His hand traced slow, grounding circles against her back.
"I wish I could promise you a life where you never have to see that side of me again.
I can't. This world doesn't allow for that promise, and I'd rather be honest with you than comfort you with something false.
" He pressed his lips to her hair. "What I can promise is that I will never let it become carelessness.
I will never let violence become the easy answer instead of the last one.
That's the only vow I know how to make about it. "
"Okay," she whispered, and found, slowly, that it actually was.
Not because the fear disappeared entirely, but because she understood, lying there in the dark with his heartbeat steady beneath her ear, that a man who worried this much about frightening her was not a man who had stopped seeing her as a person worth protecting from himself, too.
She slept without dreaming, the rest of that night, for the first time since the restaurant.