30. Dante
Dante
The house is full of made men toasting my wife, and I stand at the edge of my own party watching her hold court in the gold light of the dining room.
I think the thought a man is not supposed to think at the summit of his own success: that none of it—the territory, the treaty, the seat, the empire—would be worth one hour of the way she looks right now, scorched palm wrapped in white, laughing at something Nico said, alive in a room that a year ago would have served her dinner and sent her upstairs.
Alec gave the toast. He is better at warmth than I will ever be; he stood and called her the first made woman in the history of the Five Families, and then, when the cheering settled, called her something better: family, the plain word, the one we don’t hand out.
The made men in my dining room drank to a woman as their blood.
Old Bianchi was not here to see it, but D’Angelo was, and he drank deepest of all.
Sofia is here, at Alec’s shoulder, laughing, free, and the two of them have the careful, unfinished look of people not touching in a room full of people who would notice.
Matteo is here, gray and pleased, a man who spent thirty years serving my father and has lived to serve something he believes in more.
Father Giuseppe stayed for one glass and blessed the house and left, the way he always leaves, before the part of the evening that would require him to choose what he’s seen.
I watch the captains with her and see the thing I have been building toward without a name for it.
They do not defer to her because she is my wife.
That deference I could have bought with a look.
They defer to her because today they watched her swear the same oath they swore and hold the same fire in her bare hands.
She is not the boss’s woman anymore but a made member of their blood, and the difference is the whole thing, the one I went to the Commission to buy her, and it is worth every enemy it made me.
Aiello, who called her a girl in a boardroom eight months ago, refills her glass before she asks.
I let myself simply watch, and want, and count down the minutes until the last of them is gone.
I let it go on as long as it should and not a minute longer, because what I want tonight isn’t the party at all, it’s the woman in the middle of it, and there is a limit to how long I can watch other men enjoy her company before the old animal in me wants the doors shut and the house empty and my wife to myself.
· · ·
When the last car has gone down the drive I find her on the terrace, the one off the bedroom, where the cold comes up off the lake and she stands in it the way she always does, daring the cold to make something of it.
“You held the fire,” I say, coming up behind her, not touching her yet. “I watched your hands. Everyone watched your hands. They were waiting for you to drop it. You didn’t.”
“I’ve been holding worse than a burning card for a year,” she says, not turning around. “A little paper Madonna was the easy part.”
“I know.” I place my hands on her shoulders, turning her, and her face illuminated by the water's light reveals the look it takes when she's too full from the day to find words, something that hardly ever happens, and I discover I want to be the reason for it more than anything else. “Bella. I need to ask you something, and I need you to let me say all of it before you answer, because I’ve never said any of it before and I don’t know that I can do it twice.”
That gets her attention. I am not a man who announces his own difficulties. She goes still and watches, the way she went still at the table today, the stillness that takes everything in.
“A year ago I married you in a courthouse twelve hours after they killed your father,” I say.
“You wore black. You signed your name like you were signing a confession. I stood next to you, and I told myself it was business, a clause, a thing the families needed done, and I told you, in this house, exactly what I thought I had bought. Do you remember?”
“I remember every word,” she says quietly. “I’ve built a year on some of them.”
“I was wrong about one thing in that sentence.” The words are harder than any order I have ever given, any trigger I have ever pulled, and I make myself say them anyway, because she taught me that the brave thing and the comfortable thing are never the same.
“I had the right idea but said it the wrong way. I told you I owned the rest of your life. You own the rest of mine. You have since before I’d let myself admit it.
Every threat I ever made about what I’d do to anyone who touched you was really a confession I was too much of a coward to say plainly, so I’ll say it plainly now, once, and you can hold it over me for the rest of our lives, which I am hoping is a long time.
” I take her burned hand, careful of the bandage, and I do the thing the boy I was at nineteen swore he would never do.
I stand in front of another person with nothing in my hands and no wall at my back and ask.
“Marry me again. Not the courthouse. The real one, the church, Father Giuseppe. The wedding they didn’t let you have.
Except this time, no one is making you. This time the Commission isn’t in the room, and your father isn’t dead on a table and there’s no treaty that needs signing.
This time it’s just me, asking. Choose me, Bella. This time, choose me.”
For a moment she doesn’t say anything, and I stand in the cold and learn what it is I’ve been making other men feel their whole lives, the terror of waiting on a word you cannot command.
I deserve every second of it, and would not trade it, because a yes I could command would be worthless and this one, if it comes, will be the only thing I have ever owned that was given instead of taken.
“You ruthless, impossible man,” she says, and her eyes are wet but her voice is steady, and that is the most Bella combination there is.
“You waited until I outranked you to propose. You waited until there was nothing left to gain, until no one could say I did it to be safe or to be free or to be anything but—” She stops.
She presses her bandaged hand flat against my chest, over the place that beats only because she fixed it.
“Yes. God help us both. Yes, I’ll marry you.
On purpose this time. With my whole stupid healed-over heart. ”
I kiss her then, on the cold terrace over the dark water, and it is not like any of the times before, none of the hunger or the fight or the proving, because nothing is left to prove and nothing left to win and no one to win it from.
It is just my mouth on my wife’s mouth, slow, a kiss you give when you finally have the whole rest of your life to do it in and no longer have to fit everything you feel into the seconds you think are all you’ll get.
She fists her good hand in my shirt and kisses me back like she has also stopped rationing.
The cold comes up off the black water and neither of us feels it; when she finally pulls away, she rests her forehead against my jaw and breathes, and I hold the back of her head in my palm and feel, in the dark, the exact moment the last wall between us comes down, hers, the one I built in a courthouse a year ago, gone for good.
· · ·
I take her to bed the way I have never taken anyone in my life, gently, which is a thing I did not know my hands could do until her.
There is no rush in it. Nothing to outrun tonight, nothing to prove and no one to prove it to, only the slow certainty of two people who have finally stopped believing this could be taken from them.
Tonight I undress her slowly on the bed in the low light, the black dress she chose for the men she conquered today coming off her shoulders, and I take the time I never let myself take, learning her again like a country I already hold but have never just looked at in daylight.
“You’re staring,” she says, half smiling
“I’m allowed,” I say. “You said yes.” I put my mouth to the pulse in her throat, and feel it jump. “I’m going to look at you all night. I’ve been rationing it for a year like a man who thought he didn’t deserve the whole meal.”
I take the bandage off her hand last, careful, and I kiss the burn there, the made-mark, the scorched proof of what she did today, and she makes a sound I have never heard her make, low and undone, because of all the places I have ever put my mouth this is the one she did not expect, the wound, the strength, the thing she was brave about, and I hold that hand against my mouth and I tell her without words that I see the cost of everything she is and I would pay it again to have her.
Then I take my time with the rest of her.
I learn the weight of her in my hands, the lines the year has written on her, and I make her wait, not the way I used to make her wait, as power, but the way you draw out the only good thing in a long day because you have finally stopped believing it will be snatched away.
I use my mouth on her until she is shaking and saying my name, until her hand fists in my hair and her hips chase and she is past the point of being the woman who held a room today, reduced to this, only this, mine and undone and unafraid, and I keep her there at that edge longer than is kind because she has spent a year being strong and tonight I want to be the one place in the world she does not have to be.
And then she does the thing that makes tonight unlike every night before it.
She pushes me onto my back. A year ago she would only have done this out of defiance, to prove that she could.
Tonight she does it because we are equals now and she knows it in her body.
She takes her time over me the way I took mine over her, her made-hand flat on my chest, her mouth following the old scars like she is reading them, learning the map of the man who belongs to her.
I let her. I, who have never in my life let anyone.
Lying still under her hands while she relearns me is the most honest surrender I have ever made, and she knows what it costs me, she goes slow on purpose to make me feel every inch of the giving.
When she has had her fill of me being undone she rises over me, and I grip her hips, and for a long moment we only look at each other in the low light, the made man and the made woman, the two most dangerous people in this city stripped down to the two people who would burn it to the foundations before they would lose this.
Then she takes me into her, slowly, watching my face the whole way down, and it is her turn to set the pace, and she sets it unhurried and merciless.
I let her wreck me by inches with my hands shaking on her, because being at her mercy is the one luxury I never once let myself want and now cannot imagine surviving without.
Later, when she has wrung herself out over me and I roll her beneath me at last, she pulls me down by the back of the neck, fierce, the steel under the softness, and says against my mouth, “Stop savoring and look at me,” which is so exactly her, even now, even undone, still running the room, that I laugh against her lips, and then I do what she says.
I look at her. I look at her the whole time, the way she ordered, when I move into her again slowly and we both go still at the rightness of it, the fit of it, the thing that has stopped being a battle and become a homecoming.
It is unhurried and it is unbearable and it is the most naked I have ever been with my clothes already long gone, because for the first time there is no part of me held back, no wall, no calculation, no exit kept in view.
There is just my body and hers and the long, slow build of it, her legs around me and her bitten-soft sounds and her eyes, open, on mine, the way she demanded, both of us watching the other one fall.
I tell her things I have never said and will deny saying if asked.
She says my name as if it is the only word she was ever taught.
And when she breaks it is with her made-hand fisted over my heart and my name in her mouth, and I follow her over a breath later with my face in her throat, undone, owned, home, a made man unmade and remade in the same hour by the one person who ever got past the wall by walking straight at it.
Afterward I hold her in the dark and feel her heart slow against my arm, and she traces the old scar on my ribs with one idle finger, the made-mark on her palm warm against my skin, and neither of us says anything for a long time, because some things are too large for the language this world gave us and we have both, at last, stopped trying to shrink them down to fit.
“You’re thinking,” she murmurs, not opening her eyes.
“I can hear it. You think loudly.” “I’m thinking I spent thirty-six years building a fortress,” I say, “and guarding an empty room the whole time. And now it isn’t empty.
” She is quiet a moment. Then her “made” hand finds mine in the dark and laces through it, careful of the burn, and she says, “Welcome home,” the way Marino said it to me today, the words they save for their own, and turns them into something the brotherhood never meant them to hold.
I have to lie very still and just breathe.
“On purpose,” she says finally, into the dark, half asleep, like she is still getting used to the taste of it.
“On purpose,” I say. “Every day after this one. The first thing I’ll ever have built instead of taken.
” And I lie there in the dark in the quiet house with the first made woman in the history of the Five Families asleep on my chest, and I, who have spent a lifetime being feared, am for the first time simply, dangerously, completely happy, and I am not even afraid of it anymore.