Chapter 12 Laura
Laura
On the third day of our freedom, Christmas Eve, I awake to the sound of palms applauding each other outside our villa’s pale window.
Their applause is lazy, uneven, sweet as the air on the water at dusk—and every time I hear it I have to remind myself I do not need to grab a gun.
I do not need to check the doors, or count out the best escape routes in my mind, or run through old superstitions about how long happiness can last. There is no perimeter to patrol, no hired man with a scar or a shark smile shadowing my every move.
There is only the salt-wet hush of the ocean, and the unblinking sun, and Pierce, still asleep beside me, breathing as quietly as a child.
I slip out of bed in a haze, the sheet wrapping my hips, and pad over cool tile toward the wide open doors.
The living room smells like pine, citrus, and black coffee.
It is Frida’s doing, no question—somehow she had a nine-foot fir imported to this tropical nowhere, and it stands in the far corner, confused and beautiful, its branches sagging with ornaments and garlands of dry orange peel.
Beneath it sit two presents, neat and modest, and somewhere in the branches, a string of lights tries its best against the overbearing sun.
I look up: hung carefully from a ceiling fan, all by itself, is a sprig of mistletoe. No note, no explanation. Frida understands me deeper than anyone living. I smile, thinking of her, and the smile stings as much as it soothes.
“Santa came?” Pierce’s voice, sleep-warm, finds me from the bedroom. He is stretching, back arched, black hair spiked from sleep, skin a shade paler than the bronze the island will tattoo into him in a week. He stands naked in the doorway, grinning in an unguarded way that makes my chest ache.
“Apparently, we’re on the Nice List,” I say, pointing at the tree.
He comes over, still running fingers through his hair, and I hand him the mug of coffee waiting on the counter.
The mug is red with a ridiculous cartoon reindeer, courtesy of Frida again, and he sips it without noticing anything except me.
“Did you hear from her this morning?” he asks.
“She texted at four,” I say. “Says Serpico’s lawyers are already buying up most of the block. Father’s offices, the safe houses, even the bakery on Mott. Diego’s making a show of it. Flexing.”
Pierce nods, face shadowed. “And Dominic?”
I shrug as though indifferent, but the words are a hot brand in my head. “Screaming into the phone. Threats, bribes, the usual dog tricks. Frida says he’s already on the Sicilians’ blacklist. No way out but down.”
We stand together at the window, watching the shore curve away: the sand white as the moon, the water so blue it looks computer-faked.
The entire perimeter is open, wild, impossible to secure.
I should hate it, but the longer I watch, the more the old panic becomes—something else.
A vapor that rises and is burned off by the sun.
I say, “What if this is our life? Mornings with nothing but the heat, and evenings swimming past the reef, and never having to answer to anyone but each other.”
Pierce grins, reaching into my hair to pull me close. He kisses my eyebrow, my ear, the corner of my mouth. His collarbone tastes faintly like salt and the coffee he just drank. “Then I say we’ve earned it. Nobody gets this chance twice. Nobody I know, anyway.”
His eyes hold a steady flame now, banked but unquenchable. I feel its twin burning in my chest, this patient desire that neither of us rushes to satisfy—a rare bloom unfurling slowly in the knowledge of all our tomorrows.
Against all logic, I feel safe.
We eat breakfast—fruit still warm from the sun, sweet rolls, a pair of blood oranges carved into gory, gorgeous halves.
The day is a lazy parade: reading old thrillers by the pool, a lunch of fried fish and mango eaten in messy silence, a nap that turns into hours of tangled sheets and not speaking.
Our phones remain off as long as possible.
The world, for the length of one miraculous day, has no way to find us.
At some point, I remember the mistletoe, crude and deliberate as a dare, and laugh out loud. Pierce looks up from his book—The Count of Monte Cristo—and I point overhead. “You’re supposed to kiss me, you know. Christmas rules.”
He stands and obeys, dramatic, putting both hands around my face. We are utterly alone, but the kiss is shy at first, and then slow, and then not shy at all. He tastes like the orange, and the need is sudden and electric, and I am so unused to the feeling that it makes my eyes damp.
Afterward, we lie together on the cool tile, looking up at the ceiling fan, the lazy stutter of mistletoe wobbling from its string. He says, “I think this is the first Christmas in my life I haven’t worn a suit. What a scandal.”
I say, “If you want, you can wear one to dinner.”
He pinches my thigh. “You want me to wear a suit here?”
"Just the tie.”
It becomes a game, the way all things are between us in this time outside time: he raids the closet for the single silk tie he brought, black, and nothing else, and I laugh so hard that my stomach hurts, the first real laugh I’ve known since childhood.
We eat under the open sky, the tie still knotted, and by the time dessert comes—chocolate and cream, more ridiculous than necessary—the tie is on me, not him, and he is staring at me with something close to awe.
By dark, the tree glows in the window, dim and wary.
I sit cross-legged on the floor, organizing my thoughts while Pierce steals kisses I would have given freely.
We stay there until the tree lights burn out, until the ocean breeze has cooled the tiles.
I think about the following Christmas, and the one after that, and how it will be to grow old in a place where my own name is not whispered in fear or spit in disgust.
Pierce falls asleep first, still holding my hand.
I watch the horizon, the last light bruising the water, and listen to the palms applauding themselves.
There is peace, real and thick and golden, stretching from this island all across the invisible world.
There is no perimeter, not anymore, and I realize this: the only way to feel safe is to stop needing to be.
In the early morning hours, we walk the beach until sunrise, our shadows long and joined.
The tide leaves us gifts—shells, coral, a message in a bottle with nothing inside but sand.
We walk until the sun is too hot, and then we swim, and I teach him to float, and he teaches me to let go.
I think of Frida, already plotting my next Christmas.
I think of Serpico, and of Dominic, who will burn himself hollow trying to find a way to own me again.
But most of all, I think of the two of us. Of how the story ends: not with a bullet or a bargain, or even a truce, but with a new name carved into the sand, and two hands holding on, and the world bigger than either of us could ever imagine.