Chapter 44
I knew he was up to something when he left.
I saw it in his eyes—the please don’t ask—and I let him go.
But the not-knowing gnaws. The house feels too big for one person, despite the guards inside and out.
I suppose I could go talk to Esther, but lately our conversations have felt heavy.
I think I got off my chest what needed to be said.
The rest… I'll have to cope with on my own time.
And it's not like I can tell her I'm worried Raf is going off to do something stupid, like kill someone…
Or share what has been really bothering me lately, the possibility of him and my brother becoming enemies in a mafia war.
Not even Roberto's cruelty tormented me as much as that thought or the way it will test my loyalties.
God help me, I love them both. I can't side with either.
Except that’s a lie, and I know it. Raffael. It will always be Raffael.
And that thought tears me in two. What kind of person am I? Maybe it's time to send Esther back home. She can't help with this monumental decision in my life. I need to talk to Raffael when he comes home…
Six o’clock slides past. Then eight. I make tea, but I don’t drink it. I sit. I stand. I pace the length of the rug until the pattern looks bruised—five more hours crawl by like molasses.
Then I hear it, the loud growl of the Ducati, a low animal roar swallowing the quiet.
The moment the sound catches my ear, I’m moving out of the living room, down the steps, into the night.
He kills the engine, tugs off his helmet, and I’m on him before the word hello exists.
My arms lock around his neck. I breathe in leather and road and him.
“Where were you?” The words crack as they leave me. “I’ve been so worried.”
His hands come to my back, and as always, they're steady and warm, chasing away all the ghosts that have been haunting me since he left. “I made good on my promise,” he says gruffly by my ear. “Your father is dead.”
I lean back, searching his face. “But… how?” The word scrapes out of me. “He’s in jail.”
“Princess,” he says, and shakes his head once. “No matter where your enemies try to hide, I will smoke them out.”
It takes a second for me to comprehend what he just said with so few words. Then it hits all at once. He went inside. He went to a place built to swallow men, killed Carlos, and walked out, and he’s standing in our driveway like it’s a Tuesday.
“My father,” I hear myself say. “Daddy Dearest.” The words feel thin in my mouth. I wait for something—grief, triumph, anything. There’s nothing. No sadness, no satisfaction. Just… relief. A door clicked shut somewhere I can’t see. The world shifts half an inch toward safe.
“Are you okay?” he asks, reading my face the way he always does.
I nod and then shake my head and then nod again. “I don’t know.” I grip his jacket, grounding myself. “Tell me.”
“Not here,” he says gently. “Inside. I’ll tell you everything.”
We walk up the steps together. My hand finds his. My pulse starts to climb down from the ledge. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel for the man who called himself my father. But I know what I feel for the man beside me: The man who said he would keep me safe.
And he did.
We don’t make it past the foyer at first. I press my palms to his chest like I’m checking he’s real, that leather and bone and heartbeat belong to the same man.
“In,” he coaxes, brushing a kiss across my hairline. “Shoes off. Tea. Then I talk.”
I nod. We move like a unit, his jacket hits the hook, my fingers find the switch by muscle memory, warm light puddles across the hardwood. In the kitchen, I set water to boil out of habit. He doesn’t sit until I do.
And he tells me everything. Without any theatrics. He tells me how Leo hacked the courthouse through a backdoor he once built for Stephano. About the man he killed to take his identity. He doesn’t linger on the moment Daddy Dearest died. He doesn’t need to.
He reaches across the table and takes my hand. “Breathe, princess.”
I do. In for four, out for four.
“So you went to jail for me,” I say. The words taste impossible. “You walked into that place and out again like it was just… part of your day.”
“For you,” he says simply. “For me. And for every girl who never had someone to come for her.”
Relief settles heavier in my chest, like a stone at the bottom of a glass—weight, then clarity above it. I search for shock, for grief, for triumph. I find only steadiness. A door locked from the inside that no one else can open.
“I don’t feel anything,” I admit. “About him. I thought I would.”
“You don’t owe him your feelings,” Raffael says. “You don’t owe him your tears.”
Something hot pricks the backs of my eyes anyway. Not for Carlos. For the years. For the girl I was. I blink, and they don’t fall. He squeezes my fingers, his thumb draws a slow circle in my palm, grounding me.
“You shouldn’t have had to do it alone,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “You did the hardest part alone for years. This… this is what I’m for.” A breath. “And I was not alone. I had names. Doors that opened. A plan to get me in and out. I don’t take coin-flip chances anymore. Not with you waiting on the other side.”
A small, crooked smile tugs at my mouth. “You sound like a man who intends to live.”
“I do,” he says, like a vow. “I meant what I told you, I’ll use the chair to choke the rot. And if the crown ever paints a target on you, I’ll put it down. But tonight? Tonight, I used their own darkness to make more light for us.”
For us. The words slide into me like warmth.
“What about Toni?” I ask. “He won’t—”
“He can’t,” he says. “He hired it out. He didn’t name the hand. He won’t ask who did him the favor he couldn’t do himself.”
I exhale, shaky and long. The kettle steam has fogged the window; the glass beads and runs like rain. I realize my shoulders have climbed to my ears. He notices too; his fingers press lightly where the tension bites. They fall.
“Esther,” I say, because it was in my head all day. “Maybe it’s time to let her go home.”
“If you want her to stay, she stays,” he says. “If you want quiet, I’ll make the house quiet. Your call, princess.”
Your call. The two words I’ve wanted my whole life and never got. I nod. “I’ll tell her tomorrow.”
I make my tea, and Raffael grabs a whiskey after pulling up his nose at my sugary concoction, and we sit quietly for a moment.
“Walk me through it again?” I ask, surprising myself. “Not the… middle. The beginning. You leaving. Tell me what you felt.”
He leans back, considering. His brows crease, and he runs a hand through his hair, "Nobody has ever asked me that." He chuckles dryly. "I don't even know what to say."
I tilt my head to the side, watching him intently as he searches for the right words.
Finally, he speaks again, "Worried you would be alone with the waiting, worried something would go sideways that wasn’t mine to control.
Calm, because the pieces were right. Angry for you.
” He lifts one shoulder. “And then—when it was done—relieved. Like I’d put a stone down, one I didn’t know I’d been carrying since the day I met you. ”
I close my eyes at that. When I open them, he’s still there, steady, patient, entirely himself.
“Come here,” I say.
He stands; I stand; we meet halfway around the table. I tuck myself under his chin and listen to his heart. It’s strong and human and not a myth. His arms come around me, and the last of the cold leaves my bones.
“Stay,” I murmur into his shirt.
“As long as you want,” he answers, as if there is any other answer now.
Later, when the house is dark and the news cycle begins to whisper about a death in a prison across the river, I sit at the new piano he ordered for me and find the soft, hopeful melody from the shelter—the Feather Waltz—and thread it with something deeper and bluer.
He lies on the couch, one arm over his eyes, not asleep, just listening.
Every few measures, I feel his attention lift and settle, lift and settle, like the tide.