Chapter 43
The mad energy of the Alesci house hit Dario the moment Frederica opened the door. It was a wave of warmth, noise, and the organized chaos of too many people who loved each other trying to occupy the same space at Christmas.
Dario had been looking forward to coming back to Rhodes for weeks. He was particularly interested in seeing Frederica's collection of knights.
Rodrigo and Giana had claimed the dining table, a tablet between them, because Rodrigo didn't know how to be entirely off duty on a holiday, but Giana was rubbing her temple with two fingers in a way that suggested this particular negotiation would end in her favor before dinner.
She looked up when they came in, grinned, and held up her wine glass. Rodrigo acknowledged them with a nod, barely looking away from the screen. Typical. Dario would make sure that the tablet mysteriously disappeared in the next twenty minutes.
Leo and Dante had taken the long couch in the sitting room, Leo's head on Dante's shoulder. His little brother used to carry himself with a kind of coiled readiness even at rest, always moving, always running a calculation somewhere behind his eyes. Now, he looked almost like a normal person.
In the corner, Athena was arm-wrestling Silas across the low table with focused aggression.
Kon stood behind her, offering commentary because he had learned long ago that participation was optional and observation was safer.
Iz was watching from the armchair, with an amused grin as her man and his daughter fought it out.
Altun and Julian had the window seat, heads bent close over a leather-bound text. Serapis… Lucius, Dario reminded himself, the name still requiring conscious effort after months of the other one, sat across from them.
The three of them were deep in whatever they had been working through for weeks, tracing Agrippa's acquisitions backward through paper trails, rumors, and scrying. The work suited all of them. It kept Zio Lucius busy, and it was what he needed while he tried to find a new life's purpose.
He caught Dario's eye across the room. There was something in the old man's face that Dario had been watching develop over the past weeks. It was a tentative hopefulness like he wanted to belong in the family again, but he didn't quite trust that he was allowed to.
Dario nodded at him and gave him a smile that said, You're here. You're welcome. Don't ruin it.
His uncle winked at him and turned his attention back to Altun.
"Don't get comfortable and start talking," Frederica said in his ear. "Despina is going to want you in the kitchen."
"Gladly." He turned to hang his jacket. "Maybe this is finally my chance to get the kourabiedes recipe."
Frederica gave him a look of genuine pity. "Tore has been trying to steal that recipe for thirty years. He is a world-class thief, and he has failed every single time."
"He lacks my charm."
"You're going up against Despina." She patted his arm. "Good luck."
Despina didn't give him the recipe. She did, however, let him cut the honey cakes while she and Tore worked on either side of him, and the interrogation that ran alongside the cooking was thorough enough that by the time the first dishes went to the table, Dario had been questioned on his finances, his long-term plans, his feelings about children, and his medical history.
Tore contributed occasional observations from the stove and twice caught his eye with a pitying look. He had survived a lifetime of his wife's questioning and wanted Dario to understand that it did get easier. Dario didn't mind any of it.
Dinner was loud with more people at the table than it was designed for, and nobody cared.
Despina had cooked enough to feed twice their number, and at some point, Lucius ended up in a quiet argument with Altun and Tore about the provenance of a bronze lamp he had stolen in 2019, an argument so contentious that it stopped three other conversations around the table.
After dinner, gifts were tossed back and forth between them in the lounge room.
Dario had spent longer on Frederica's than on anything else.
The silversmith in Florence had taken three weeks to make the pendant, and the description he had given her of a lady knight, fully armored, kneeling and holding a long sniper rifle upright in a traditional sword pose, had produced something that was both slightly absurd and entirely perfect.
When Frederica opened the box and looked at the necklace, she laughed, then grew quiet, as if she were feeling something she didn't want to show the others. Dario clipped it on for her and placed a sneaky kiss on the back of her neck.
She gave him two things. The first was a small gold pendant, shaped like a casing, open at the top, and sized to hold the love heart bullet casing. The second was a locket. He opened it and found the velvet interior shaped for the Thriae Bee, which he hadn't taken off since Venice.
"So you don't have to worry that the velvet bag is going to fall off the chain all the time," she explained and fitted them on his father's chain.
"I love you so much," he said.
Frederica pinched his chin. "I know."
More drinks and sweets came out, the house got louder, and Dario took the moment to slip away before the second round of cake was handed out.
Outside, the garden was cold and still after the overheated rooms inside. Rhodes in December was nothing like Prague had been. It was warmer, at least while the wind was down.
The herb beds along the far wall were cut back, but present. The small olive tree in the corner held its shape against the sky. The jasmine on the stone wall had lost its flowers but kept the vine, twisting over the old stones as it had for as long as the house had stood.
Dario walked the garden's length without hurry, listening to the noise of people laughing, something that sounded like Athena winning an argument, and the particular timbre of Leo's voice when he was telling a story.
Dario stopped at the Hermes statue. According to Frederica, the herm had originally come from Delphi.
Tore had liberated it from a private London collection back in the early 80s.
The old pillar with Hermes's face was worn by centuries of weather and hands.
A crossroads god for a family that had always lived at crossroads: the intersection of law and crime, of violence and love, of the world that most people saw and the one that moved underneath it.
Tore had left fresh flowers and a small cup of wine at the base. Any trace of his blood from the night Despina had been taken was long gone.
Dario reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small San Expedito statue. It wasn't the one from his room in Venice. That one lived in his bag and went everywhere with him.
This one he had found at a market stall near the Ponte Vecchio. The saint was in his Roman armor, with one foot flat on the crow, the same flag in his hand, reading HODIE. The vendor had said it was an antique from Rome, and Dario had chosen to believe him.
He set it down beside Tore's offering. He lit the spare tea candle he had also been carrying and cupped his hands around the flame until it steadied. He looked at the god's carved face.
"Thank you," he said, quietly. "For the luck. For getting me into trouble and out of it again. Especially thank you for her."
Dario thought about his father. Niccolò would have been in the kitchen with Tore or deep in conversation with Julian, and he would have been genuinely interested in every single person at that table.
Not as contacts or assets or pieces on a board, but as people, and they would have told him stories and secrets for hours.
Dario had that same quality, and he had spent his whole life trying to understand it. It wasn't only charm, as he had always been told. It was attention. It was caring about the answer when you asked how someone was doing.
Rodrigo had grown into his ruthlessness, but also into his capacity for love, the two finally finding a balance that let him be both. He may have been talking business on Christmas before dinner, but he had his hand wrapped in Giana's the entire time.
Leo had burned hard and nearly consumed himself, the way Niccolò had feared, but in the end, he had found Dante and himself, and the fire in him now illuminated rather than destroyed.
And Zio Lucius was in there somewhere, the old monster who had loved their family and made terrible choices and carried the consequences across five centuries.
He was now sitting at a table with the people who had the most reason to hate him and learning, cautiously, that forgiveness was a thing that existed.
Every single person in that house was a mess. They had been raised by violence or created from it or shaped by loss and cruelty and the damage that came from being loved badly or not at all. They had all found their way to this house and this table and this chaotic, loud, overfull Christmas.
Niccolò had wanted this for them. To have people, some kind of family, and normality around them. A full table. Lots of noise. The comfort of being somewhere you didn't have to perform anything for anyone.
"You would have loved it, Papa," he said to the darkness around him.
"And every single person in there. You would have been in the middle of it all night, making terrible jokes at dinner and charming Despina into giving you that damn recipe, probably.
" He watched the candle flicker. "I think you would have liked Frederica especially. "
There was a familiar footstep on the gravel behind him, and Frederica's arms came around him from behind, her chin finding his shoulder. She was warm from the house, wine-flushed and smelling good enough to eat.
"Talking to the god of thieves?" she asked and kissed his cheek.
"Thanking him, actually." Dario stood, turned in her arms, and pulled her in close. She came without resistance, which was something he was still getting used to.
"What for?" she asked.
"Luck and trouble." He looked down at her. "Mostly, for you."
Frederica rose up on her toes and kissed him."You are so sappy," she said against his mouth.
"You love it."
"I love you," she corrected.
"Same thing."
"Thank you for my knight," she said, her hand rising to touch it. "I'm actually kind of glad it wasn't something to embarrass me in front of my parents like a butt plug to tick off your sex list."
Dario chuckled and nibbled on her lips. "That is more of a New Year's present."
"Is that so? You're making plans already, are you, Colleoni?" she asked, putting her arms around his neck.
"I sure am," he teased. "And we won't be having New Year's with any family, that's for sure."
"In that case, I'll pick out a strap-on to bring with me wherever we go," she replied, licking the curve of his jaw. "Fair play, lover. If you get to play with my butt, I get to play with yours and make you into my good boy."
"Don't tell me things like that, or I am going to fuck you in your childhood bedroom in front of all your knights."
Frederica laughed softly and purposely rubbed herself up against him, just to make him harder. "Maybe I would like that."
"Okay, okay, enough, I don't want to be sporting an erection in front of your mother if I can help it," Dario said and smacked her on the ass in warning.
Frederica's giggles died down, and she looked over at the Herm. Her expression went serious as she spotted the little saint statue beside it.
"You want to marry me?" she asked, not looking at him.
Dario blinked, wondering if he had heard right.
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "What are you doing next week?"
She considered this with apparent seriousness and shrugged. "I don't think we have a job booked."
"Then next week?"
"Sounds good."
They kissed for a long time, and Dario's hands were starting to slip under her shirt when, from inside the house, came a loud crash of something ceramic meeting a stone floor, followed immediately by a stream of Greek that could only be Despina, followed by laughter from multiple directions.
Frederica pulled back. "Athena is in trouble."
"Definitely Athena."
"We should probably go back in."
Neither of them moved for another moment. The garden was quiet around them, the lights of the house warm in the windows, and the sound of their family dealing with whatever had happened.
Behind them, the candle burned at the feet of the old marble Hermes, steady and small against the dark, a light left for the trickster god who stood at crossroads and moved between worlds, who helped the magicians, the troublemakers, the thieves, and who had, in one way or another, been watching over their interconnected family for a very long time.
Dario pressed a kiss to Frederica's temple, and with her hand in his, they moved through the garden, opened the back door of the house, and stepped into the warm chaos that was their future.
Thank you so much for reading Dario and Frederica’s story! As many of you know, this is the final book in the “Mercenaries and Magic” world, and I got big, smooshy feelings right now.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who came on this journey with me.
It really has been a passion project from start to finish and a safe place to add all the weirdness and cross-genre smashing that I wanted.
You took the chance on it, and came for the ride, and I’m never going to stop being grateful to all of you, my very own chaotic found family.
Love
Alessa xx