33. Bella #2
“Dante.” I put my hand over his hand. “I have to tell you something. And I need you to let me say all of it before you say anything, because you taught me that, the year you learned to say the hard things out loud.”
He goes still. He knows my voice in all its registers now, and he hears that this is not a small thing.
“I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby, who is never going to be made small for anyone’s comfort as long as either of us is breathing.”
For a moment the most dangerous man in Chicago cannot speak, and I watch a year of careful construction, a whole rebuilt human being, come apart and reassemble itself around a single new fact.
When he finally moves it is to press his forehead to my stomach, both arms wrapped around me, and he says something into my skin that I will never repeat to anyone, because some things are mine.
His shoulders are not quite steady under my hands, and I hold the back of his head and look up through the windows at the actual sky and think: there it is.
The future tense. The one he gave me back.
When he lifts his head his eyes are wet and his voice is wrecked and he says, “Tell me what you want. Anything. The whole world. Say it and it’s done,” which is the most Dante way there has ever been to say I love you, the offer of empires, and I pull him up over me and I say, “I have what I want. I’m holding all of it.
Now stop offering me things and make love to your wife. ”
So he does. He moves over me in the moonlight under the open sky, a year to the day from the morning I chose him, and he takes me apart the way only he knows how—his mouth at my breasts, his fingers between my thighs until I’m slick and open and saying his name—and then the thick, perfect stretch of him as he slides home.
It is tender and it is fierce and at the end it is laughing, all the registers we have learned, the whole vocabulary of us.
He moves in me deep, one of my legs hooked over his arm to open me wider, and I take all of him, again and again, until the coil low in my belly pulls too tight to hold.
When I come apart it is with his hand laced through my made-hand, and his other hand spread wide and reverent over the future we decided on together.
He follows me over a breath later, buried deep, saying my name like a prayer he has finally let himself believe in.
Afterward, in the silver light, we do not say anything for a long time, because we have stopped trying to shrink the large things down to fit.
· · ·
Later, when he has finally slept, I lie awake, because I do not want to miss it, this, the ordinary impossible peace of it.
I think about the girl in the white coat who walked into the Drake a year and a half ago with nothing but a stolen ledger and a spine, sure she was walking in to die.
I think about the bride in black who signed her name like a confession.
I think about the woman who held a burning saint in her two hands and did not let go.
They were all me, and I would not give back a single one of them—not the fear, not the grief, not the cold courthouse.
Because every one of them was a button on the long dress of becoming this: the woman in the moonlight with an empire on one side of her and a future on the other, and the most dangerous man in the country asleep and unafraid against her heart.
They called me Little Miss Mafia once, the men at that table, when they thought it was an insult, a girl playing at a man’s game.
I have decided to keep it. I’ll have it engraved on something, the way Roman wants the motto, because they were right, in the end, just not the way they meant.
I am the little Moretti girl. I walked into their hundred-year-old room and I did not play their game.
I changed the rules of it, and then I won it anyway, and then I built something better on the other side, and I did the whole thing in heels with my chin up and my hand held out for full price.
And tomorrow Alec will come about the spring wedding, and there will be a new made woman to put up by summer.
And somewhere a girl is sitting in a hallway outside a room she has been raised to believe is not for her, counting the exits out of habit, but the door is open now, and I am the one who burned it open, and I am not nearly done.
My name is Bella Salvatore. I chose it. On purpose.
And this, all of this, is only the beginning.
Their story isn't quite over.
Bella and Dante fought a war, a Commission, and a hundred years of men who swore a woman would never sit at that table. They won all of it.
But there's one night I didn't let you see — the night everything they built finally arrives, and the most dangerous man in Chicago learns there's a kind of undoing no wall was ever going to stop.