1. Cielo
— ? —
Cielo
“You’re watching me instead of the road. Again.”
Giovanni doesn’t look away from the road, but I catch the edge of his smile. “I’m driving. My eyes are forward.”
“Your eyes were on me three seconds ago. I felt them.”
“Maybe I was checking your seatbelt.”
“My seatbelt is fine.”
“Then maybe I just like looking at my wife.” He reaches over and catches my hand, threading his fingers through mine without taking his attention from the winding coastal road. “Is that a crime now?”
The Sicilian coast unfolds below us in layers of gold and blue, the late afternoon sun turning the water into something that belongs in a painting.
Giovanni drives the way he does everything - like the road was built specifically for him and everyone else is just borrowing space.
His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, and there’s a looseness in his shoulders I haven’t seen in months.
Maybe longer, if I’m honest with myself.
“You’re humming,” I say.
“Am I?”
“You were. Something old. Italian.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer.
“My mother used to sing it. When I was small. Before-” He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to.
I know what came before. The violence that made him an orphan at seventeen.
The years of building what he has now from the ruins of that loss.
“I like it when you hum,” I tell him. “It makes you seem almost human.”
“Almost human.” He lifts our joined hands and presses a kiss to my knuckles. “High praise from you, piccola.”
“Don’t get used to it. I’m sure you’ll do something infuriating within the hour.”
“Within the hour? You underestimate me. I was planning to be infuriating within the next ten minutes.”
I laugh despite myself, and the sound surprises me.
When was the last time I laughed like that?
The past few months have been - hard. There’s no other word for it.
Giovanni has been gone more than he’s been home, and when he is home, he’s distracted, his mind clearly somewhere else even when his body is beside me in bed.
But he’s here now. He took the coast road instead of the faster inland route because I mentioned once, months ago, that I’d never seen this part of Sicily.
He remembered.
“There.” He points ahead, where the road curves around a cliff face. “That’s the house.”
I see it then - a white villa perched above the sea like it grew there, bougainvillea spilling down its walls in violent pink. It’s beautiful in the way old money is beautiful, quiet and certain of its own worth.
“It belongs to a local ally,” Giovanni says. “Separate from the Falcones, completely trusted. We’ll have privacy here. No one knowing we’re here except the people who absolutely need to know.”
“And how many people is that?”
His jaw tightens, just slightly. “A few. There’s a dinner tonight at Corrado Falcone’s estate - he’s the head of the rival clan, but there’s been a truce lately. An apparent one, anyway. We’re supposed to be gathering intelligence under cover of diplomacy.”
“We?”
“I. My people.” He squeezes my hand. “You don’t have to come if you’d rather not. But it would look strange if I showed up without my wife.”
“Is that what I am on this trip? A prop for your diplomacy?”
“You’re my wife,” he says, and the way he says it - low, certain - makes something flutter in my chest despite myself. “You’re never a prop. But these people need to see that I have something to protect. Something that makes me human, as you put it.”
“Almost human.”
“Almost.” He pulls into the villa’s drive, gravel crunching under the tires. “Two weeks, Cielo. Just us. I promised you a honeymoon, and I’m three years late, but I’m delivering.”
I want to believe him. God, I want to believe him so badly it aches.
The villa is everything the exterior promised - cool terra-cotta floors, white linen curtains billowing in the salt breeze, rooms that smell like lemon and sea air. Giovanni carries our bags himself, waving off my offer to help.
“Go explore,” he says, setting my suitcase at the foot of a massive bed. “Find the best sunset spot. I’ll open the wine.”
So I do. I wander through rooms that feel like they’ve been waiting for someone to fill them, and I try to remember the last time I felt this light.
The terrace faces west, and when I find it, the sun is just beginning its descent. I stand with my hands on the warm stone railing, watching the sky shift through colors I don’t have names for.
“Found it.”
I don’t turn at the sound of his voice. I just feel his arms wrap around me from behind, feel his lips press against my hair.
“Found you,” he murmurs. “Thought I lost you for a minute there.”
“I was exploring. Like you said.”
“Mm.” His hands spread across my stomach, and I cover them with my own. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s perfect.” I turn in his arms to face him. “I think this might actually be a honeymoon.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.” He’s smiling, that rare real smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes. “I do occasionally get things right.”
“Occasionally.”
He kisses me then, soft at first and then deeper, and for a few minutes there’s nothing in the world but this - his mouth, his warmth, the sunset painting us both in gold. When we finally break apart, I’m breathless.
“The wine,” I remind him.
“The wine can wait.”
“Giovanni.”
“Fine.” He releases me with exaggerated reluctance. “But we’re continuing this later.”
“We have two weeks.”
“Two weeks isn’t nearly long enough for everything I have planned.”
The dinner at Corrado Falcone’s estate is exactly what I expected - opulent, strategic, every smile calculated. Giovanni keeps his hand on the small of my back the entire time, steering me through introductions.
And then there’s Ludovica.
I notice her before Giovanni introduces us, because it’s impossible not to.
She’s the kind of beautiful that makes other women feel like they got dressed in the dark - tall, dark-haired, cheekbones like cut glass, a red dress that fits like it was painted on.
When her eyes land on Giovanni, something in her expression sharpens.
“Giovanni.” She says his name like she’s tasting it. “It’s been too long.”
“Ludovica.” He nods, cordial but not warm. “May I introduce my wife, Cielo.”
The pause before “wife” is infinitesimal. I wouldn’t have caught it if I weren’t watching for it.
“Your wife.” Ludovica turns to me, her smile perfectly pleasant, perfectly polished, perfectly empty. “How lovely. Giovanni speaks of you so rarely, I almost forgot he was married.”
It’s a knife disguised as small talk. I feel it land, but I keep my own smile in place - the one I learned at a hundred charity galas before I ever met Giovanni.
“He’s a private man,” I say. “One of the many things I love about him.”
“Mm.” Her eyes flick between us, calculating. “Well, you must come to more of these dinners while you’re here. Giovanni and I have business to discuss, and I’d hate for you to be lonely in that big house.”
“Ludovica is an associate,” Giovanni says. His tone is flat, professional. “She has connections in the Falcone organization. We’ll be working together while I’m here.”
I notice the elaborate embroidered monogram on the napkin beside Ludovica’s plate - an ornate L, worked in expensive thread. The same initial appears on the stationery near her wine glass. Personal touches. The kind of details that speak to old money and older vanity.
“How fortunate,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll accomplish great things.”
Ludovica’s smile widens, and I catch something in her eyes that I don’t like - something proprietary, something that looks at my husband like she’s already planning the furniture arrangement.
I tell myself I’m imagining it. I tell myself I’m being paranoid.
But I watch her for the rest of the evening, and I watch how she watches him, and the lightness I felt on the terrace starts to curdle.
We get back to the villa late. Giovanni is quiet in a way that means his mind is elsewhere.
“You’re thinking about the meeting tomorrow,” I say as we undress for bed.
“I’m thinking about several things.” He pulls off his shirt and tosses it onto a chair. “The Falcones, the intelligence we need, how to keep Ludovica useful without-”
“Without what?”
He sighs, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. “She believes my marriage is a practical arrangement. A cold one. It’s useful to let her think that, because she keeps talking. She gives me information she wouldn’t share if she thought I was actually in love with my wife.”
“Are you? Actually in love with your wife?”
“Cielo.” He reaches for me, pulling me down beside him. “You know the answer to that.”
“I know what you tell me. I know what I want to believe.”
“Then believe this.” He cups my face in his hands. “I feel nothing for her. I never have. You’re my wife. You’re the only thing that matters to me.”
“Then why does she look at you like she owns you?”
“Because I’ve let her believe she might. Eventually. Someday.” His jaw tightens. “It’s a manipulation, Cielo. A necessary one. The moment I have the intelligence I need, she becomes irrelevant.”
I want to argue. I want to tell him that this isn’t fair, that he promised me a honeymoon and delivered me into the middle of another operation.
But I look at his face - tired, earnest, trying so hard to make me understand - and I can’t say any of that.
“Two weeks,” I say instead. “And then we go home. And you never work with her again.”
“Done.” The relief in his voice is almost painful. “I promise.”
He kisses my forehead, then my cheek, then my lips. And I let him, because I love him, because I want to believe him.
Because what other choice do I have?
I wake to an empty bed.
The sheets beside me are cold, which means he’s been gone for a while. When I check the clock, it’s barely past dawn. I find a coffee cup on the terrace railing, still warm, and I stand there in the early morning light, looking out at the gray sea.
Somewhere in the house, or maybe somewhere in the city, or maybe somewhere with her, my husband is starting his day without me.
And I don’t even know where he’s gone.