32. Dante
Dante
There is a point at every wedding, I am told, when the groom would happily set the reception on fire if it meant getting his bride upstairs faster, and I reach mine somewhere around the third toast, watching Bella laugh with her head tipped back at something one of the wives said, the candlelight on her throat, that white dress, the ring I put on her finger four hours ago catching the light every time she lifts her glass.
I have killed for less provocation than my wife laughing in a room I am not allowed to drag her out of yet.
“You’re glaring,” Matteo says at my elbow, pleased with himself, an old man enjoying the rare sight of me wanting something I can’t simply take. “At your own wedding. The guests are starting to think you regret it.”
“The guests can leave,” I say. “That would fix it.”
“The guests,” Matteo says, “are the entire criminal leadership of the upper Midwest, and they’ve been drinking your wine for five hours.
They’ll leave when they leave.” He pats my arm, a liberty he has earned over thirty years and exactly one other person alive could take.
“Patience. You married her. She’s not going anywhere.
You have, God willing, forty years of nights.
You can spare this crowd another hour of the first one. ”
He is right, which is annoying, so I take the hour, and I spend it the way I have learned to spend the unbearable ones, watching her.
My wife works the room the way she works every room, except tonight there is no work in it, nothing being gathered or weighed or filed, just Bella happy, which is a sight rare enough that half these hardened men keep sneaking looks at it like something they are not sure they are allowed to see.
Nico catches me at it and lifts his glass an inch, the old soldier’s salute, and I lift mine back.
We share the silent understanding of two men who would each, separately, lay down our lives for the woman in the middle of the room—and who have agreed, without ever saying so, never to mention it to her face, because she would only use it as leverage.
She would, too. She uses everything. It is one of the many things I love about her and one of the few I will never tell her, because a wife who knows the full inventory of what you love about her is a wife who has won every argument before it starts, and a man has to keep something for himself.
· · ·
Alec finds me by the windows where I have retreated to do my watching in peace.
He has Sofia’s hand. He is not hiding it anymore, and the room has decided, to pretend this is normal, the Salvatore underboss and the freed Vitale wife, though every man here knows it is the next problem walking toward us holding hands.
“I’m going to need to talk to you,” Alec says.
“Not tonight. Tonight you have other obligations.” His mouth quirks.
“But soon. About the Vitale seat. About Sofia. About doing this the right way, the way that doesn’t get her killed for it.
” He lifts their joined hands a fraction.
“I watched how you did it. With the Commission. With her.” He nods at Bella across the room.
“Walking straight at the wall instead of around it. I want that. I want to do the impossible thing on purpose, the way you two did. And I’m going to need my brother to help me build the case. ”
I look at my little brother, thirty-three years old, who stood in our father’s blood at sixteen and has been the warmth in this family ever since so that I could afford to be the cold, and I feel the thing I felt at the altar today watching him stand up for me, the sense of a story that does not end with me, that goes on past my chapter into his.
“We’ll build it,” I say. “Whatever it takes. The seat, the Commission, all of it.” I put my hand on the back of his neck, the way he did to me three weeks ago, the way our father never once did to either of us.
“You spent twenty years making sure I never had to be alone in the cold. It’s my turn to stand in it with you.
Go. Take her home. Be careful with her. She’s been handled carelessly by men who were good at it. ”
Sofia hears that and smiles at me, a real one, the first she has ever aimed at me without fear sitting behind it, and she says, “Thank you, Dante,” and means several things by it, and Alec takes her home.
I watch them go and think: there it is. The next one.
The empire she built has a future tense now too, and it walks out my door holding hands.
And then, finally, the last of the cars goes down the drive, and I have run out of reasons to be patient.
· · ·
I find her in the bedroom with her shoes already off, reaching for the buttons up the back of the dress, and I say, “Stop. Those are mine,” and she goes still and looks at me over her shoulder with an eyebrow up.
“Possessive of the buttons now.”
“Possessive of the unbuttoning,” I say, crossing to her. “Sofia got to do them up this morning. I get to take them down. That’s the arrangement. I didn’t make the rules.”
“You absolutely made the rules. You make all the rules. It’s exhausting.” But she is smiling, turning, giving me her back, lifting her hair off her neck, and I start on the buttons, dozens of them, slow, and I feel her breathing change before I’m a third of the way down.
I take my time. I’ve wanted exactly this much time with these buttons since I watched Sofia do them up this morning and had to leave the room to keep my composure in front of God and the caterers.
I press my mouth to each new inch of her spine as it appears, the knob of bone at the top, the long elegant line of her, the small of her back, and by the time I reach the last button she has stopped being clever entirely, both hands braced on the dresser, her head dropped forward, and the woman who faced down the Commission without blinking is breathing like she sprinted here.
“You wrote something,” she says, her voice deceptively idle. “At our wedding. In front of the entire criminal leadership of the upper Midwest. Dante Salvatore opened a vein in public.”
“I’m aware of what I did.”
“I’m going to tell people. For the rest of our lives. At every dinner. ‘Did I ever tell you about the time my husband, the most feared man in Chicago, stood up in a glass house full of murderers and recited—’”
“You’re going to tell no one,” I say, against the back of her neck, and feel her shiver, “or I’ll deny it, and they’ll believe me, because I am terrifying and you are a known romantic.”
“I am not a known romantic.”
“You married me twice,” I say. “You’re the most dangerous romantic in the five families.
” The last button gives, and the dress falls, and I stop being playful, because there is only so much a man can banter with his wife half undressed in the low light.
She turns in the circle of my arms and looks up at me, still laughing, the laugh going soft at the edges.
And that—the laugh going soft—is the thing I want to spend the rest of my life causing.
· · ·
It is different tonight, and I have stopped being surprised that it is different every time, that there is no bottom to the ways it can be different with her.
Tonight it is light. Tonight there is laughing in it, which I did not know sex could survive and which it turns out sex is improved by beyond measure, because when she gasps and then laughs at herself for gasping and pulls me down by the ears to muffle the sound against my shoulder, something in my chest that spent thirty-six years clenched comes the rest of the way open.
We are not proving anything. We are not grieving anything.
No one is going to break down the door. There is nowhere either of us has to be tomorrow except, gloriously, here, and the safety of that, the sheer unguarded abundance of it, makes us both a little drunk and a little silly and entirely shameless.
She pushes me onto the bed and straddles me and announces that since I made all the rules everywhere else, she is making them here, and I tell her that is the single best idea she has ever had, and I have watched her run an empire.
She kisses me to shut me up. I let her, for a while.
Then I roll us, because I am still me, and she lets me, for a while, because she is still her, and we negotiate it the way we negotiate everything now, with a great deal of opinion and no real loser, until the laughing burns down into something lower and slower and the teasing turns into her saying my name like it is the only thing holding her to the earth.
Somewhere in the middle of it she gets the giggles, helpless real ones, because I say something against her hip that I intend to be devastating and it comes out muffled and absurd instead, and she laughs so hard she has to push me off for a second, hand clapped over her mouth, eyes streaming, and I prop up on an elbow and watch my wife come apart laughing in our bed on our wedding night, undone for an entirely different reason than the one I was working toward.
And I think: this. Not the empire. Not the seat.
Not the city learning to say her name with respect.
This. A woman laughing so hard she cannot breathe, in a bed in a safe house, because she has finally let herself believe she gets to keep it.
Then she hauls me back down by the shoulders, and we find our way back to serious, slower this time, the laugh still living just under her skin where I can feel it jump every time I make her gasp.
Tonight she won’t let me draw it out. She’s greedy and laughing and sure of herself, telling me exactly what she wants in plain, filthy words because we are long past pretending either of us is shy.
She wraps her hand around my cock and guides me to her and tells me now.
I push into her slow and deep and watch her eyes go dark, watch her mouth fall open on the stretch of it, and the plainness of her, my elegant, ruthless wife telling me harder, telling me just like that, undoes me as much as anything my hands are doing to her.
I set a rhythm and she meets it, hips rising to take every inch, her heels hooked behind my thighs to drag me deeper, and we are both still half laughing until the laugh goes out of us at once on a shared breath, replaced by something that has no words because it predates them—the oldest thing, two people who chose each other making the choice again with their whole bodies.
It is unhurried because for the first time in our lives we have nothing but time.
I draw it out, and she lets me, and then she does not let me, and takes the pace back, and we trade it back and forth, building and easing and building, until plenty becomes too much, and she breaks first with my name in her mouth and her nails down my back and a look on her face of pure astonished happiness that I will carry to my grave, and I follow her a moment later, holding her face in both hands, watching her watch me come apart, neither of us hiding a single thing.
After, we lie breathing and laughing again, helplessly, the giddy laughter of people who have gotten away with something enormous.
She props herself on my chest and looks down at me with her hair wild and her mouth swollen and her eyes shining and says, “We’re very good at that,” with the satisfaction of a woman reviewing a successful operation, and I say, “We should keep practicing,” and she says, “Constantly. It’s the only way to maintain proficiency,” and I laugh so hard the bed shakes, I, Dante Salvatore, who three weeks of my life ago would have told you with total certainty that he did not know how.
She settles back down with her ear over my heart, and I feel her smile against my skin, and she says, drowsy now, “Husband,” trying the word out the way she tried “on purpose” three weeks ago, like a coat she has decided to keep.
“Wife,” I say back, and mean the whole of what I am by it, every crime and every vow at once, and she hums, pleased, and goes quiet, and I lie there in the wreck of our wedding night cataloguing the sounds of her breathing and understand that I have become, against every prediction anyone who ever feared me would have made, a permanently and dangerously happy man.
· · ·
Later, much later, she is asleep on my chest, and I lie awake in the dark not because anything is wrong but because I do not want to miss it, this, the ordinary miracle of my wife breathing slow against my heart in a house no one is going to come for tonight.
I think about the day. The light in the conservatory. Nico’s wet eyes. Alec walking out my door with the next impossible thing held carefully in his hand. Bianchi in the back row, scowling, present. The wives weeping. My wife in white choosing me on purpose in front of God and the families both.
I think about the man who stood in a courthouse a year ago and called a grieving girl a debt to be managed, and I do not recognize him, and I do not miss him.
But I forgive him, a little, because he did not know what was about to happen to him.
None of us did. They handed me a problem to solve and I married it and it turned out to be the only solution I would ever need, to a question I had been refusing to ask my whole armored life, which was whether a man like me was allowed to be happy.
I think about the years in front of us, which I can see now, which I let myself look straight at, a thing the man in the courthouse could not have done.
The two of us running the strongest house in the city, her empire and mine grown into one thing with no seam left in it.
Alec and Sofia’s impossible fight, which we will win, because we have gotten good at the impossible.
The made women who will come after her, walking through the door she burned open with her bare hands.
And maybe, someday, if she wants it, and only if she wants it, a child raised in a house with sky in it instead of walls, who will never once be made small for someone else’s comfort.
A future. Mine. Ours. The first thing I have ever wanted that I will not have to take from anyone to keep.
The answer, it turns out, was always yes.
I just had to be brave enough, and lucky enough, and to marry the one woman alive who was never afraid of me, twice, the second time on purpose.
She stirs against me and murmurs something that is not a word, and I tighten my arm around her, and I close my eyes in the quiet house, and for the first time since I was nineteen years old I sleep all the way through the night.