10. Cielo
— ? —
Cielo
Giorgio has his father’s eyes.
I’ve known this since the moment he was born, red-faced and screaming in a hospital room in a city I’d never planned to live in, with Delphine holding my hand because there was no one else.
The nurses cooed over how alert he was, how dark and serious those eyes were for a newborn, and I looked at my son and saw my husband staring back at me, and I cried until I couldn’t breathe.
Four years and five months later, it’s not just the eyes.
It’s the way he tilts his head when he’s thinking, the stubborn set of his jaw when he doesn’t want to do something, the rare and devastating smile that transforms his whole face.
He’s Giovanni in miniature, and some days that’s a comfort and some days it’s a knife, and most days it’s both at once.
“Mamma, look.” Gio tugs at my sleeve, pressing his face against the airplane window. “We’re going through the clouds. Do you think this is what astronauts see?”
“I think astronauts see much higher clouds than this, piccolo.”
“But someday I’ll see those clouds too. When I’m big enough to go to space.”
“Someday,” I agree, and I smooth his dark hair back from his forehead and try not to think about all the somedays I’ve promised him that might never come true.
The plane begins its descent into Milan, and my stomach drops with it - not from the altitude change but from the weight of what I’m doing.
Five years of hiding. Five years of building a careful, quiet life in a country where no one knew my real name or my real history.
Five years of watching every shadow, jumping at every unexpected knock, teaching my son emergency drills disguised as games.
And now I’m bringing him home.
* * *
The news came three weeks ago, through the network of contacts that Delphine has maintained on my behalf since the night I showed up at her door, pregnant and bleeding and half-wild with terror.
Giovanni remarried. The Falcone feud is officially ended. The search for you has been discontinued.
Delphine showed me the message herself, sitting across from me at her kitchen table while Gio played in the next room.
“My contact says it’s solid,” she said, watching my face.
“Three separate sources, all confirming the same thing. He got married last spring. Some society woman - old money, no connection to the families. The Falcone situation resolved itself about six months ago. And the search…” She paused. “The search ended when he remarried.”
“He stopped looking.”
“He stopped looking.”
I should have felt relieved. I’d been running for five years - five years of false names and rented apartments and teaching my son emergency drills disguised as games.
Five years of watching every shadow, jumping at every unexpected knock, building a life on the assumption that Giovanni would never stop hunting for what he’d lost.
And now he had.
“Are you okay?” Delphine asked.
“I don’t know.” I stared at the message, at the words that should have set me free. “I thought this was what I wanted.”
“But?”
“But I didn’t expect it to hurt.”
She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. “You loved him. You probably still love him. That doesn’t disappear just because he moved on.”
“It should.”
“Since when has love ever done what it should?”
I read the message four more times that night, after Gio went to sleep. Looking for the trap, the catch, the invisible hook that would drag me back into the nightmare.
There wasn’t one. Or at least, I couldn’t find one.
Giovanni remarried. He moved on. The man who swore he’d never stop searching finally stopped, and I cried for two hours in the bathroom with the water running so my son wouldn’t hear.
* * *
“Mamma, are we really going to live in Italy?”
Gio’s voice pulls me back to the present, to the plane that’s now taxiing toward the gate, to the life I’m trying to rebuild.
“We’re going to stay with Zia Delphine for a while,” I tell him. “Remember I told you? She has a house near Milan, and we’re going to visit.”
“But we might stay forever?”
“We might stay for a long time.” I can’t bring myself to say forever. Forever is a promise I’ve learned not to make. “Would you like that?”
He considers this with the gravity that only small children can muster. “Will there be stars to look at? Better stars than at home?”
“I think the stars will be very good here.”
“Then I would like it.” He nods, decision made, and turns back to the window to watch the airport buildings slide past.
I’ve always been honest with Gio about his father. Not about the danger - he’s too young for that, too young to understand why we’ve been hiding or what we’ve been hiding from. But about Giovanni himself, I’ve tried to tell him the truth in words a child can hold.
Your father is a good man who lives in a dangerous place. Someday, when it’s safe, you’ll meet him.
I thought someday would be never. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life explaining why his father couldn’t come, crafting more and more elaborate stories to cover the simple, terrible truth that I ran and I never looked back and I didn’t tell Giovanni about the baby growing inside me because I was terrified of what his world would do to our child.
But now Giovanni has a new wife. A new life. The danger I was running from has apparently resolved itself without me, and for the first time in five years, I’m allowing myself to imagine a future that isn’t defined by fear.
It’s probably a mistake. Hope usually is.
* * *
Malpensa is crowded with afternoon travelers, and I keep Gio close as we navigate the arrivals hall, his small hand warm and trusting in mine.
My bag is heavy on my shoulder - everything we own that matters fits in two suitcases and a backpack covered in rocket ship patches - and I’m scanning the crowd for Delphine’s familiar face when the wrongness hits me.
It’s not something I can explain rationally. It’s instinct, the same instinct that made me move away from the windows in that villa in Sicily, the same voice in my head that warned me something was wrong before the first window shattered.
Something in the way the crowd is moving. Something in the placement of certain bodies, certain figures who aren’t walking toward the exits like everyone else.
Men standing where men shouldn’t be.
I stop so abruptly that Gio stumbles against my legs.
“Mamma?”
“It’s okay, piccolo.” My voice comes out steady, which is a miracle. “We’re going to play a game.”
His face lights up the way it always does when I say those words, because our games are fun, he thinks, counting stars and hiding in quiet places.
He doesn’t know they’re survival drills.
He doesn’t know I’ve been training him for exactly this moment since he was old enough to understand instructions.
“The hiding game?” he whispers, because he knows that one is special, quiet-voice only.
“The hiding game.” I crouch down to his level, keeping my body between him and the figures I’ve spotted near the exit. Three of them. Maybe four. “Remember the rules?”
“Find a small, dark place. Count the stars until you get to one hundred. Stay silent like a mouse.”
“That’s my brave boy.” I press a kiss to his forehead, breathing in the little-boy smell of him, airplane snacks and that terrible shampoo he insists on because it has rockets on the bottle. “Zia Delphine is going to come find you, okay? She knows our secret signal.”
“Two knocks, then three, then one.”
“Perfect. Now go.” I turn him toward a service corridor I spotted earlier, partly hidden behind a coffee kiosk. “Go, Gio. Fast and quiet.”
He goes. He’s so good at this, my little boy who doesn’t know that the games we play are life and death. I watch him disappear into the shadows, and then I turn the opposite direction and start walking straight toward the men who are watching me.
If they’re here for me - and they must be, who else would they be watching for - then I need to pull them away from my son. I need to buy time for Delphine to arrive, for Gio to stay hidden, for whatever is about to happen to happen as far from him as possible.
My phone is already in my hand, typing out a message to Delphine: Trouble at arrivals. Gio hidden service corridor behind coffee kiosk. Come now. Our signal.
Send.
The first man moves to intercept me.