Chapter 32 - Emma
The federal release facility looks nothing like I imagined.
I expected gray concrete, razor wire, armed guards with dead eyes.
Instead, Tommy walks through a simple metal door into afternoon sunlight, blinking like a mole emerging from underground.
He's thinner than I remember, shoulders hunched in a way that makes my chest ache, but he's alive. He's free. He's here.
Alessandro's hand finds the small of my back, steadying me when my knees threaten to buckle. "Go," he murmurs against my ear. "I'll wait."
I'm running before I make the conscious decision to move, my heels sinking into grass, designer dress be damned. Tommy sees me and freezes, his expression cycling through confusion, disbelief, and something that looks terrifyingly like hope.
"Em?" His voice cracks on the single syllable. "Emma, is that really—"
I crash into him hard enough to knock us both off balance, my arms wrapping around him like I can physically prevent anyone from ever taking him away again.
He smells wrong—institutional soap and stale air—but underneath it, he's still my brother.
Still the boy who taught me to find Orion from our fire escape when the world felt too big and too cruel.
"I'm sorry," I sob into his shoulder, words I've been holding for months finally spilling free. "I'm so sorry, Tommy. What I did, the lies I told, you don't know—"
"Hey." His hands find my face, tilting it up the way he used to when I was small and scared. His eyes are older now, haunted in ways I'll spend years trying to understand, but they're clear. Present. "Whatever you did, you did it for me. I know that. I've always known that."
"You don't understand." I pull back, needing him to see me clearly.
The diamonds at my throat. The wedding ring on my finger.
The black SUV idling behind us with armed guards and a mafia prince who's killed for me.
"I married someone, Tommy. I became someone else entirely.
I'm not—I'm not the person you remember. "
Tommy's gaze travels past me to where Alessandro waits, leaning against the car with that predatory stillness that used to terrify me.
His expression doesn't change, but I see him cataloging everything: the expensive suit, the barely concealed weapon, the way Alessandro watches me like I'm the only star in his sky.
"That's him?" Tommy asks quietly. "The Rosetti?"
"Yes."
"And you love him?"
The question should be complicated. It should require explanation, context, a detailed account of everything that's happened since Mrs. Hewson shoved me into that wedding dress. Instead, the answer rises simple and certain from somewhere beneath my ribs.
"Yes."
Tommy studies me for a long moment, and I watch him see what Alessandro sees—not the servant girl who scrubbed floors, not the terrified bride who trembled at the altar, but whoever I've become in the space between those versions of myself. Someone who chose darkness and found light within it.
"You look different," he finally says. "Not bad different. Just… you look like someone who isn't afraid anymore."
The observation hits harder than I expect. I think of all the nights I spent invisible, all the years I spent small, all the ways I learned to disappear so that people like the Hewsons wouldn't notice me. Tommy saw it even then—the fear that lived in my bones like a second skeleton.
"I'm not," I admit. "Not of the things that used to scare me, anyway."
Alessandro approaches then, his footsteps deliberate on the gravel. He stops at a respectful distance, hands visible, posture open in a way I've never seen him adopt with anyone outside our family. He's trying not to seem threatening. For Tommy. For me.
"Mr. Pitt." Alessandro's voice carries none of its usual edge. "I'm Alessandro Rosetti. Your sister has told me a great deal about you."
Tommy's jaw tightens, protective instincts warring with the reality of our situation. "And I've heard a great deal about you. None of it good."
"Most of it's probably accurate." Alessandro doesn't flinch from the assessment. "I won't pretend to be something I'm not. But I can tell you this: your sister is the most important person in my world. Her safety, her happiness, her freedom—I would burn Chicago to the ground for any of them."
"Freedom." Tommy's laugh holds no humor. "That's rich, coming from the man who married her under false pretenses."
"Tommy—" I start, but Alessandro holds up a hand.
"He's right to be suspicious." His eyes meet mine briefly before returning to my brother. "Which is why I gave Emma everything she needed to leave. Money, documents, protection. She could have disappeared, waited for your release somewhere I'd never find her. She chose to come back."
Tommy looks at me, question clear in his expression.
"I chose him," I confirm. "Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because whoever I am now—whoever I'm becoming—that person exists because of him."
The silence stretches, filled with birdsong and distant traffic and the weight of everything we've survived to reach this moment. Finally, Tommy exhales, tension draining from his shoulders.
"Okay," he says quietly. "Okay. If you chose this, Em, then I trust you." His gaze sharpens on Alessandro. "But if you ever hurt her—"
"Then you'll have to get in line," Alessandro interrupts, something almost like respect in his voice. "Behind Sofia, Marco, Dante, Nico, Luca, and approximately forty armed guards who've adopted her as their favorite Rosetti. Your sister inspires loyalty."
Tommy blinks, clearly thrown by the response. Then, impossibly, he laughs. A real laugh, rusty from disuse but genuine. "Jesus, Em. Only you could fall into a mafia marriage and end up running the place."
"I don't run anything," I protest, but Alessandro's hand finds mine, his thumb tracing the wedding band that no longer feels like a shackle.
"Give her time," he says, and the promise in his voice makes my pulse quicken.
We drive Tommy to his new apartment—a place Alessandro arranged weeks ago, in a building with excellent security and no connection to either the Rosettis or the Hewsons. He'll have space to recover, to rebuild, to figure out who he wants to become now that survival isn't his only option.
At the door, Tommy hugs me again, gentler this time.
"The stars are different inside," he murmurs against my hair. "Couldn't see them at all most nights. I used to close my eyes and try to remember where Orion was, where the Pleiades would be. Kept me sane."
Tears burn my eyes. "I'll buy you a telescope. A real one. We can watch the Perseids together next summer."
"I'd like that." He pulls back, studies my face one more time. "You really are different, Em. Stronger. Scarier, maybe." A ghost of his old grin surfaces. "But still my sister. Still the girl who showed me the Hunter when I couldn't sleep."
"Always," I promise.
He disappears inside, and I let myself cry properly for the first time in months. Alessandro doesn't speak, just pulls me against his chest and holds me while I shake apart and slowly, painfully, put myself back together.
That night, we marry again.
Not in a church filled with strangers and political alliances, but on our rooftop, under stars I can finally name without flinching.
Marco officiates—apparently, he's licensed, which seems like an odd detail for a mafia don until I remember that crime families often need documents processed quickly and quietly.
Dante serves as witness, his scarred throat hidden by a formal collar, his eyes warm in a way I've never seen directed at me before.
I wear white again, but this time it's a simple silk slip dress that Alessandro chose himself. No corset, no layers, no armor. Just fabric that whispers against my skin when the wind shifts.
"Emma Pitt," Alessandro says, sliding a new ring onto my finger—not the emerald from before, but a band of tiny diamonds that catch starlight like captured constellations.
"I take you as my wife. Not because of contracts or alliances or revenge.
But because you showed me that the stars are more interesting than anything I could own, and that some things are better when you choose them freely. "
His vows are awkward, unpracticed in a way that makes them perfect.
This man who commands armies and orchestrates violence across the city stumbles over words about love like a teenager at prom.
It cracks something open in my chest, something that's been waiting to bloom since the night he held me through a nightmare and called me cara like it meant something.
"Alessandro Rosetti," I reply, my voice steady despite the tears on my cheeks.
"I take you as my husband. Not because I have to survive, but because I want to live.
Not because you're safe—you'll never be safe—but because the danger feels like home when you're beside me.
You saw me when I was invisible and made me queen of your world. I choose that. I choose you."
Marco pronounces us husband and wife with something that might be emotion roughening his voice, and when Alessandro kisses me, it tastes like champagne and starlight and the beginning of something we're building together, brick by blood-stained brick.
Later, wrapped in blankets on our rooftop, Alessandro's arms tighten around me as we survey the sky.
In the distance, Chicago sprawls and glitters, a kingdom of shadows and light that we'll rule together—not as the servant and the playboy who started this story, but as Emma and Alessandro Rosetti, bound by choice and darkness and something that looks remarkably like love.
Above us, a meteor streaks across the sky. I close my eyes and make a wish I know will come true.
Let us build something worth dying for.
When I open them, Alessandro is watching me with that expression I've come to recognize: hunger and tenderness and something fierce enough to level cities.
"What did you wish for?" he asks.
I turn in his arms, pressing my lips to the hollow of his throat where his pulse races against my mouth. "I didn't need to wish," I tell him. "I already have it."
The stars wheel on above us, indifferent and eternal, as we write our own mythology across the Chicago sky.