Chapter 20
Dante
The eggs needed more butter. I stood at the stove with my sleeves rolled and my father's watch catching the morning light.
Everything had to be perfect.
Everything had to be perfect or she might say no.
Sunday morning. Four days since the rescue.
Seven until the sit-down. . Outside, new guards stood at their posts—different men, different system, the old architecture of protection demolished and rebuilt from the foundation up.
I didn't look at them. Didn't need to. Their presence was a hum at the edge of awareness, constant and necessary and no longer sufficient to make me feel safe.
Nothing would make me feel safe again. Except her. Except the sound of her bare feet on the kitchen tile, which arrived now. Soft, familiar, her particular rhythm.
"Morning." Her voice was still sleep-rough. Her hair was loose. She was so beautiful. Caravaggio dangled from one hand by his champagne velvet ear.
"Morning, little one."
She climbed onto the kitchen stool. Tucked her feet under her.
Set the stuffed rabbit on the counter beside the coffee pot and opened the constellation book to a blank page.
The leather pencil case appeared from somewhere—she'd started carrying it like a talisman, the forty-eight colors always within reach, always ready for the moments when her hands needed to move.
I slid the eggs onto a plate. Soft. Toast, cut into triangles.
She ate with one hand. Drew with the other.
The pencil moved in fast, confident strokes. Playful.
"Let me see."
"It's not done."
"Gemma."
She turned the book toward me.
It was me. Technically. In the same way that a fun-house mirror technically reflected the person standing before it.
The jaw—my jaw, the jaw she'd once drawn with aching precision—was approximately the width of the page.
The eyebrows were two dark caterpillars engaged in mortal combat above eyes that were somehow both too close together and too far apart.
The hair was a dark cloud. The expression was one of supreme, constipated seriousness.
Underneath, in her careful handwriting: Don Caruso contemplates his morning eggs.
"I'm offended."
"You should be."
"Those aren't eyebrows. Those are architectural features."
"They're a portrait of your inner life, Dante. Dark. Bushy. Slightly uneven."
I laughed. The real kind. She grinned around a triangle of toast. Crumbs on my t-shirt. Colored pencil smudges on her fingers.
Marco had called an hour ago. The news was good.
The Lombardi bridge loan was signed—favorable terms, quiet delivery, the kind of generosity that purchased loyalty without appearing to purchase anything.
The DeLuca debt was forgiven. Tommaso DeLuca's hundred-and-twelve-thousand-dollar poker problem had dissolved overnight, and his father had already called Marco to express the particular gratitude of a man who understood exactly what had happened and was choosing to be grateful rather than resentful.
Smart. The DeLucas were pragmatic people.
The groundwork was laid. The alliances were forming. Marco was already working on the Ferrantes—the hard one, the old-school one, the family that couldn't be bought and would have to be impressed.
Upstairs in the Bridgeport house across town, Carlo Moretti occupied the guest bedroom with the stubborn permanence of a man who had decided that proximity to his sister was non-negotiable and would remain in Chicago until the crisis was resolved or the city collapsed, whichever came first. Santo, one floor above him, was probably already ignoring Dr. Ferraro's instructions and attempting push-ups with stitches that were three days old.
The war was coming. But we would be ready. And today was Sunday.
I watched her draw another terrible portrait — this one of Marco, recognizable only by the exaggerated smile and a tiny speech bubble that read trust me—and I felt the nervousness bloom in my chest like something opening.
I'd rehearsed this. In the shower. In the dark, with her breathing against my ribs. In the car, alone, driving back from Bridgeport with the city scrolling past and the words arranging and rearranging themselves in my mouth like furniture in a room I couldn't get right.
There was no right way. That was the problem. Every version sounded like a speech. Every framing felt like strategy. And this couldn't be strategy.
"Little one."
She looked up. Pencil suspended. Toast crumbs on her lower lip.
"There's something I want to ask you."
The pencil lowered slowly. The playfulness didn't leave her face, but something else arrived alongside it—the watchfulness, the careful attention of a woman who'd spent her life reading the air pressure in rooms full of dangerous men and had learned that tone mattered more than words.
"I want to marry you," I said.
She blinked. Then laughed — bright, startled, the kind of laugh that escaped before the mind could catch it.
"Dante. We're already married, silly."
"No. We were married." The distinction lived in every syllable.
"Two families made a deal. A priest said words that neither of us chose.
You wore a dress someone else picked out.
I stood at an altar and waited for a woman I'd met once when she was twelve, and the whole thing was a transaction dressed in flowers and a reception I don't remember because I spent it watching you pretend to be happy. "
Her laughter faded. Her eyes were wet. The pencil lay forgotten on the open book, a line of burnt sienna trailing across the page like a path that had lost its destination.
"That wasn't a marriage, Gemma. That was a business relationship.
And I want —" My voice caught. The don's voice didn't catch.
The daddy's voice didn't catch. But the man's voice did.
"I want to choose you. And I want you to choose me.
Not because our fathers decided. Not because a document requires it. Because we want to."
The kitchen was quiet. The coffee maker ticked.
"Yes," she said.
Simple. Clean. The word filled the room the way sunlight filled it — completely, without effort, without fanfare, without the elaborate performance that I'd feared and she'd outgrown.
"Yes, Dante. I choose you."
I reached across the counter. Took her hand. Brought it to my mouth. Kissed the knuckles.
She squeezed my fingers. Held on.
"Tonight," I said against her hand. "I have something planned."
"Should I be worried?"
"With a mafia Don? Always."
She smiled.
*
She came down the stairs in the black dress and the world stopped doing whatever it had been doing.
The same dress from Gibson's. The one that fit her like an argument she'd won against her own body—the silk falling to her knees, the cut precise and simple, the kind of garment that didn't announce itself but made everything around it seem louder by comparison.
The emerald earrings caught the hallway light and threw small green fires against her neck, against the dark curtain of her hair, against the pale architecture of her collarbones.
She'd done something with her eyes. Liner, maybe. Something that made the brown deeper, more deliberate. And her mouth was stained a shade of rose that I was going to spend the rest of the evening trying not to stare at.
I was staring at it now.
"You look —" I started.
"You said dress up." She smoothed the fabric at her hip. A nervous gesture, automatic, the residual programming of a woman who'd spent her life being assessed. "Is this okay?"
"Gemma."
"What?"
"You're perfect."
The blush arrived like dawn. Pink spreading from her chest to her throat to the apples of her cheeks, and the emeralds looked even greener against the flush, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs in a tux I hadn't worn since a charity gala two years ago and felt like a teenager picking up his date for prom.
I offered my arm. She took it. Her fingers settled into the crook of my elbow with the particular trust of a hand that had learned where it fit.
We walked through the house. Past the kitchen where the breakfast dishes were still drying in the rack.
Past the study where the corded phone sat on its cradle like a relic from the morning she'd called Carlo.
Past the guards at the front entrance who looked straight ahead with the professional discipline of men who understood that tonight was not their business.
The library door was closed.
I'd spent three hours in here while she was upstairs getting ready. Three hours of placement and adjustment and the particular obsessiveness of a man who understood that environment was language — that the space you created for a moment determined the shape of the moment itself.
I stopped. Turned to face her.
"Close your eyes."
She studied my face. The watchfulness—always the watchfulness, the reflexive scanning for threat or deception that she'd carried since childhood and might carry forever, regardless of how many baths I drew and stories I read. But underneath it, trust.
She closed her eyes.
I opened the door. Guided her through. One hand on the small of her back — that spot, our spot, the geography of a body I'd memorized and would spend my life re-memorizing.
"Open."
She opened her eyes.
Candles covered every surface. The reading table, the window seat, the shelves where Caravaggio and Bernini and three centuries of art history stood spine-out in their careful rows.
Pillar candles in glass hurricanes. Votives in clear cups.
Tapers in brass holders I'd borrowed from the dining room.
The light they produced was warm and unsteady, painting the room in gold and amber and the particular intimacy of illumination that moved, that breathed, that cast shadows which shifted like living things across the spines of books and the worn leather of the window seat cushion.
On the reading table, beside a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two crystal flutes, two documents lay side by side.