Chapter 18
LEILANI
“Everything’s fine,” I say, talking to Rory on the phone.
Setting my clothes on hangers, I’m taking in the amazing vistas around the property––the view of Etna is amazing.
What an emotional day yesterday was. And what a beautiful day today is.
It’s like I’ve stepped into a different life.
Last night ended on a sad note.
I don’t know what made me ask him to do that. Clearly, there was no way it could work.
There were no good feelings afterward, only pain and despair. I felt filthy for even bringing it up.
Why, to this day, do I still feel responsible for what happened to me?
He handled it maturely, recognizing it for what it was.
A futile ploy to remove something that couldn’t be removed.
And then I felt guilt again. And I was afraid that I had ruined things for us.
Midnight hours were filled with dread.
I was convinced he was mad at me, and it took such an effort to stay in my room––lying in bed and staring at the ceiling––and not to put on some clothes, run out, find him, and beg him to forgive me.
Our time together was so memorable before I ruined it––I thought.
Luckily, I fell asleep and felt better in the morning.
I put on some nice clothes, a summer dress and a cropped sweater, brushed my hair, and walked into the dining room, bracing myself for the worst.
The room was empty, yet breakfast was on the table. Brioche with granita.
Someone must’ve ordered it from me. And then my favorites: eggs, toast, fruit, and coffee.
No one came to talk to me, and I was hungry, so I sat at the table and ate.
The food was warm, and everything was fresh.
Someone had put some thought into what I wanted to eat for breakfast.
The fresh flowers in the vase were a nice touch, too.
If I didn’t know that there wasn’t a woman in the house, I would’ve thought that Nona herself had set the table. Or someone like her.
Before long, the stairs creaked, but I knew it wasn’t him, so I had mixed feelings about the person about to enter the room.
Seeing Cosimo in the doorway brought me relief. He seemed casual, even in a good mood.
That’s when he told me that he had been tasked with helping me move to a different place.
I stared at him with worry.
“No need to be concerned. He’s in town, and you’re leaving with him,” he said.
An hour later, I had my suitcases packed up and was nibbling on a pastry when the man of the house made an entrance.
Like Cosimo, he was in a good mood.
“Ready?” he asked with a smile and even left a kiss on my cheek.
In front of Cosimo?
I couldn’t believe it.
My cheeks were flushed while Cosimo pretended that he hadn’t seen his boss doing that.
He picked up my suitcase and headed out while Callum searched my eyes and ran the back of his fingers along my cheek.
“Everything all right?” he asked, and I nodded repeatedly, unable to utter a word. “Did you sleep well?” he also asked, and I nodded again.
“How about you?” I managed to ask, and he flashed a smile before inviting me out.
“It was all right,” he said.
With that, our conversation ended.
He later hinted that we were forced to move outside the town. For my safety, he added.
I thought we’d live in one of those secret houses––those dark, covered-in-mold places you hide in from your enemies, or the long arm of the law.
I never imagined he would bring me here.
This place is amazing.
What’s more amazing is that I’m with him.
It feels safer, too.
You can’t reach us unless you parachute people on top of this compound, and even then, the armed people on the ground would have more than enough time to organize their defense.
This hardly looks like a military complex, though.
It rather looks like a newlywed couple’s estate. How grandiose of me to even think about such a thing.
The truth is, it’s beautiful, and I can’t wait to spend two weeks with him here.
I give Rory a detailed description of the luxurious space, including the multiple bedrooms, the upper floor that belongs to me, the gazebos outside, the pools, and the footpaths. The vineyards.
I love the vineyards.
And then there are horses.
My love for horseback riding has come back since he mentioned it to me.
She’s happy with this turn of events and begs me to keep her in the loop and to make sure that I create beautiful memories so I can tell her about them.
Her father is on the mend, and she’ll spend more time with him.
We end the call a little later, and I drop the last few hangers on the bed and walk to the window.
Shielding my eyes from the sun, I look in the distance.
There he is.
My man.
Riding a dark horse, he looks amazing. Like no man I’ve ever seen.
What I forgot to tell Rory is that I share the upper floor with him.
This is our bedroom.
And these two weeks will be our life.
It’s up to us what will happen after that party in Taormina and how we play our cards, but so far, so good.
I think fate is on our side.
Leaning against the window frame, I wait for him to reach the house and look up.
Grinning, he peers at me.
Everything fits him perfectly, from his open-at-the-neckline shirt to his fitted vest, riding pants, and shiny boots.
The sun has already darkened his skin a little, making his devilish eyes pop.
He winks at me, and my knees turn to butter, before I give him a small wave.
“Let me know when you’re ready to join me for a ride. I want to show you the property,” he says loudly.
“I’m ready,” I say just as loudly. “Wait for me.”
Without waiting for him to say another word, I spin around and sprint to the closet, giddy, excited. I’ve never been happier in my life.
I have to improvise since I don’t have riding clothes.
I get some fitted pants, a flowing blouse I tie at the waist, one of the scarves he bought for me, and regular sports shoes.
I fly down the stairs where Cosimo waits for me, holding the reins of a brown horse.
“How good are you at riding?” Callum asks, and I realize he’s never seen me riding in New York, since my mother made every effort to keep him away from me.
“Very good. I’ll show you.”
I take the reins from Cosimo, hop on the horse, and free my hair from the ponytail before nudging the beast under me to lurch forward.
“Catch me if you can,” I say, laughing, and Cosimo and he chuckle before I hear the hooves of Callum’s horse behind me.
CALLUM
She is a good rider, and I don’t catch up with her so I can see her arched body over her horse’s neck, her spine tense, her hair moving in the wind, mirroring the horse’s mane.
The sun kisses her skin as she moves forward at speed, so full of life that I’d never forgive myself if I ever allowed anything bad to happen to her again.
Eventually, she looks at me over her shoulder, smiling, her eyes flooded with the kind of joy only complete freedom can give you.
I finally erase the distance between us, and for a few good minutes, we’re riding next to each other before we slow our horses down so I can actually show her the property.
She’s catching her breath as we slowly move past the vineyard.
“How do you like it?” I ask, the breeze moving through her hair.
Her cheeks are ruby from the effort, her hair looking like it would probably look had she spent the night with me.
“You know I love the other house,” she says pensively, straight in the saddle.
She looks so fine, so gracious.
Her eyes come to mine.
“Despite belonging to my mother.”
“About that,” I murmur, looking down briefly. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Is it something bad?”
Her instant worry makes me smile.
“No, it’s not.”
I look at her.
“It’s just that I never fully understood your relationship with Bianca.”
“There was no relationship with Bianca.”
“That much I figured out.”
“Same goes for the rest of my family.”
“I got that, too.”
Our eyes connect when I speak next.
“It was her idea for you to be sent here.”
Her expression shifts.
“It happened way before her death. Right after she and I got married. I couldn’t comprehend why she’d want you to live away from us.”
“It was because of you.”
“Yes, it was,” I admit, although it didn’t make much sense to me back then.
“And yet you did it,” she says. I read her eyes. She continues. “You asked me to leave my home and move here.”
“Yes, I did. And I regret that. Although we probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that.
Knowing what I know now about your grandparents, I think it was a good move.
It kept you away from that life. They would’ve probably married you to someone else, possibly sooner.
Maybe not Varela. But someone just as bad. And I might not have been around.”
She studies me in silence.
“You felt something for me even back then,” she says.
“Your mother’s obstinacy with this whole idea made me curious about this story. About you.”
“I’m talking about when you walked into our house to ask her hand in marriage.”
We both pull our horses to a stop.
“It wasn’t exactly a typical asking of someone’s hand in marriage.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You didn’t look at me.”
“I didn’t look at anyone.”
“Yet you knew exactly what was happening in the room.”
I nod in agreement.
“I liked you from that first moment,” she says.
Her raw sincerity makes something tighten in my chest.
“What could you possibly like about me?”
“The way you carried yourself. You were different than them. That’s what I liked the most. I knew where you came from.
Who you were, and all that. I suspected you weren’t there because you had feelings for Bianca.
Honestly? No one had feelings for her. And she was just like them––like her men.
She also couldn’t feel a thing like her mother and her father.
All the feeling stuff had been left to me. ”
Her joke is dipped in sadness.
“That aside, you looked real. Like a real man, with good and bad, all in full view. Not like them. I’d studied them my entire life, trying to understand their dynamics and logic.
To me, they never made much sense. How could they?
They were cardboard characters with no hearts.
Everything was a game to them, an act. Their lives were long strings of lies.
That’s why they ignored me and tried to use me and put me in a box. ”
She’s so serious now that her eyes look like a rainy day.
“You looked different to me, too,” I admit, and her eyes become alight with curiosity.
“Seriously. How?”
“I know fake people when I see them. You were right about them. I hadn’t come to your place expecting real conversations.
I was set up, remember? So everything looked like I expected it.
You, on the other hand, couldn’t hide your fascination with me and didn’t know how to conceal it.
So I knew even back then that you weren’t a puppet.
A soulless player. That you somehow got lost in the mix of self-serving interests and ugly stuff I didn’t want to have anything to do with.
It wasn’t my place to straighten things out in your family, though. ”
“And look at you now,” she says with a smile that brings back the gleeful Leilani.
Her sparkling eyes put a grin on my face.
“Yeah… Look at me now. Let’s take a walk to the other side. We can leave our horses here,” I suggest, already dismounting.
LEILANI
The afternoon light hugs us like an old friend.
We’re both heated, thoughtful, looking for words to say.
We’ve entered that phase where we’re careful about what we say for fear of messing up, at the same time brimming with anticipation.
We know that a lot is about to happen to us.
Good and bad stuff.
And after last night's events, we want to pace ourselves and make this good feeling last as long as we can.
Having the prospect of this kind of danger in our minds makes us think more deeply about what we want and don’t want in life and arms us with the persistence and courage we need to pursue it.
Dirt crumbles beneath our feet as we look for a patch of grass, and eventually find one.
We stop, and he gives me the story of the property.
He tells me that he was tempted to buy it at some point, and now he weighs that option again, his words echoing in the air.
I’ve never seen happily married people.
Most of the married couples I had in my life lived a lie, so my point of reference is nonexistent.
But I imagine they would look like us.
Bullets flew through the house last night, and now we’re here talking about aromatic grapes, delicious wine, and Sicily’s perfect weather.
In a different life, he’d fit perfectly in this picture. I can see him running an estate like this, making money with it, and raising a family.
I can see him do it in this life as well, although under different circumstances, without his most ferocious enemies on the prowl––which sadly now includes my family––and outside the circle of crime, which will probably never happen.
The odds are stacked against us once we’re born into this world.
Ask me how I know.
But hope dies last, and we, as people, have this unique ability to make the impossible possible.
It’s just that our failure rate is high.
That has never stopped us.
His hand holds mine, and I get cradled by his voice, enchanted by his eyes, and fascinated by the serious matters we discuss.
For the first time, someone talks to me like I’m an adult, instead of dismissing me and sending me to my room.
My mother got many things wrong and made a ton of mistakes, but she surely did one thing right when she started talking about sending me overseas.
What she had hoped, though, never happened.
Her sending me overseas helped my dreams come true. What she was afraid of ended up happening.
It goes without saying that you can’t fight fate, not even when you’re Bianca Gallo.
The sun moves slowly toward the horizon when he drapes his arm over my shoulders, and I have that feeling that he trusts me, a gift I’m infinitely grateful for.
“What would you like to do tonight?” he asks as we stroll back, still locked together.
His arm is still draped over my shoulders.
Mine still looped around his waist.
“What about we’re having dinner here?” I say.
He tilts his eyes to me, smiling.
“Here? At night?”
“Yes. Why not. I’m sure it will be beautiful. A night picnic.”
He looks at me, amused.
“Away from your people,” I go on.
“You don’t like my people?”
“I love your people. They saved my life. I just want to imagine a different life for you and me. One in which we're allowed to do crazy things like this. Have dinner in the vineyard at night. Lie down, look at the stars, and talk about life.”
He studies me with a thoughtful look on his face.
“It sounds good to me,” he eventually says, and I press my head against his shoulder while he kisses my hair.
“Thank you,” I say, happy.
“You make my life so easy,” he tosses back at me, with humor.
“You make my life possible, so I win.”
My words carry the burden of truth, brimming with honesty, but we laugh instead of delving into a serious conversation, and soon, we reach our horses and head back.