Epilogue #2
“Good something. At least, I hope good something.” She takes a breath. “I’m pregnant.”
The world goes very still.
“You’re-”
“About eight weeks. I saw the doctor yesterday while you were with Gio at the stables.”
“Cielo-”
“I know we talked about it. About maybe trying, about whether we wanted to - but now it’s not maybe, it’s real, and I wanted to make sure you-”
I kiss her before she can finish, cutting off her nervous rambling with my mouth on hers.
She makes a surprised sound but melts into it, her hands coming up to cup my face, and I pour everything I can’t say into the kiss - the joy, the terror, the overwhelming gratitude for this life I never expected to have.
“Is that a yes?” she asks when we finally break apart. “Because I’m having trouble interpreting-”
“That’s a yes. That’s a thousand yeses. That’s every yes I have.”
“Good.” She’s crying now, but she’s smiling too. “Good. Because I already told Gio he might be getting a sibling, and he’s been insufferable about it.”
“You told him first?”
“He asked why I was being sick in the mornings. I panicked.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked if we could name the baby after a planet.”
I laugh, helpless and happy and completely undone. “Of course he did.”
* * *
Later, after Gio is asleep in his room with his constellation nightlight glowing and Beppe standing watch in the hallway (some habits die hard), I find Cielo in our bedroom.
She’s standing by the window, looking out at the garden, and when I come up behind her and wrap my arms around her waist, she leans back into me with a sigh.
“Still processing?” I ask.
“Still processing. Also still nauseous. The first trimester is brutal.”
“I remember nerves. You were so anxious before our first wedding that you couldn’t eat anything.”
“I was terrified,” she admits. “Not of marrying you. Of everything else. The life I was stepping into.”
“You hid it well.”
“I hid everything well back then. It’s a wonder you married me at all, considering how determined I was not to let you see me vulnerable.”
“I saw enough,” I tell her. “I saw what mattered.”
“Did you?” She’s smiling now, teasing. “Because I seem to recall you being fairly oblivious.”
“Maybe. But in fairness, I’ve done much more embarrassing things for you since then.”
“Like what?”
“Like learning to cook. Like commissioning a family portrait. Like doing push-ups in the corner of a room because a twenty-three-year-old looked at you too long.”
She laughs, turning in my arms to face me. “I’d forgotten about the push-ups.”
“I haven’t. It was not my finest moment.”
“It was a little bit your finest moment.” She reaches up to touch my face. “It told me something about you. About how much you cared, even when you couldn’t say it.”
“I can say it now.”
“I know. But I like the push-ups too.”
We stand there for a moment, wrapped up in each other, and I let myself feel the weight of everything - the past and the present, the fear and the joy, the two orphans who found each other in a gallery and lost each other in a war and built a family out of the wreckage.
“Come to bed,” Cielo says softly. “I’m tired, and you’re warm, and we have the rest of our lives for me to mock you about the push-ups.”
“That’s not very romantic.”
“Romance is overrated. What I want is you, in our bed, holding me while I fall asleep. That’s better than romance.”
I can’t argue with that logic.
So I take her hand, and we go to bed.
The bedroom is dark except for the low lamp on her side - the one she always leaves on until the last possible second, a leftover habit from years of listening for danger in the dark.
I turn it down further. She peels back the covers.
Outside, the Milan house settles into its night sounds: Beppe’s quiet footsteps in the hallway on his last check, the distant creak of the stables, the soft mechanical tick of Gio’s constellation nightlight bleeding the faintest blue under his door down the hall.
Our son is asleep. The house is guarded. The world, for once, is not ending.
Cielo slips out of her robe and into one of my shirts - an old habit that still undoes me, the sight of her in my clothes, bare legs, the hem hitting mid-thigh. She catches me looking and raises an eyebrow.
“You’re doing it again.”
“I’m allowed. You’re my wife. You’re carrying my child. You’re wearing my shirt. Looking is the minimum response.”
“Minimum, hmm?” She climbs onto the bed and kneels there, looking at me with that particular soft mischief I’ve spent seven years learning to read. “What’s the maximum, then?”
“Come here and find out.”
She comes. I meet her in the middle of the mattress and kiss her the way the day deserves - slow, thorough, unhurried.
No desperation. No five-year famine. Just the deep ordinary hunger of a man who gets to do this every night and still can’t believe his luck.
Her mouth opens under mine. Her hands find the hem of my shirt and lift.
I raise my arms and let her undress me, and then we’re skin to skin in the dark, her soft belly against mine, the secret of our second child pressed between us.
I put my palm there. Flat. Reverent. She covers my hand with hers.
“Still processing?” she asks, echoing my earlier question.
“Still processing.” I rub a slow circle over the place where our child is just beginning. “Also still hard. The two are not mutually exclusive.”
She laughs against my mouth - quiet, delighted - and reaches down between us to wrap her fingers around my cock.
The touch is familiar and devastating. She strokes me with the lazy confidence of a woman who knows exactly what she owns, thumb sweeping over the head, and I drop my forehead to her shoulder and just breathe through it.
“Filthy soft,” she murmurs, amused. “That’s what you are tonight. I can tell. You’re going to take your time and say terrible things in a gentle voice and make me come so slowly I forget what year it is.”
“You know me well.”
“I married you twice. I’d better.”
I ease her onto her back and stretch out beside her, propped on one elbow, and undress her the rest of the way with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be.
The shirt first - button by button, kissing each inch of skin as it’s revealed.
Her collarbone. The upper curve of her breast. The nipple I take into my mouth and suck gently until she sighs.
Her stomach, where I linger, talking to the almost-invisible life there in a voice too low for anyone but her to hear.
“Ciao, piccolo. Be kind to your mamma’s stomach. She’s already magnificent and she doesn’t need you making her miserable before breakfast.”
“You’re talking to the baby during sex.”
“I’m multitasking. I’m an excellent father.”
“You’re ridiculous.” But she’s smiling so hard her eyes are wet, and when I hook my fingers in her underwear and slide them down her legs she lifts her hips to help. “Ridiculous and mine.”
“Yours,” I agree, and settle between her thighs.
I take my time. That is the point of tonight - time.
I kiss the inside of her knee. The soft of her thigh.
The crease where her leg meets her body.
I breathe against her cunt without touching until she’s shifting restlessly, fingers tightening in my hair, and only then do I lick a long, slow stripe through her that makes her gasp.
“Giovanni-”
“Hmm?” I do it again. Deeper. “Something you need?”
“Your mouth. Properly. Don’t tease - I’ve been nauseous all day and horny since you kissed me in the field and I am out of patience for-”
I shut her up by sucking on her clit. Soft.
Rhythmic. The way she likes when she wants to be taken apart gently rather than wrecked.
She melts into the mattress with a broken sound, and I work her with the unhurried focus of a man who has mapped this body across a marriage and a war and a second chance.
Flat strokes. Pointed tip. Two fingers sliding into her wet heat and curling, slow, while my tongue keeps its steady rhythm.
“That’s it,” I murmur against her. “Let me feel you. No rush. We’ve got all night and the rest of our fucking lives.”
“The rest of our lives,” she echoes, breathless, “and you’re spending it with your face in my-”
“Cunt. Yes. Happily. Say the word, Cielo. I love when you say filthy things in that soft voice.”
“My cunt,” she whispers, and the combination of the word and the shyness still left in it after all these years makes my cock twitch against the sheets. “Your mouth on my cunt. Your fingers in me. Don’t stop.”
“Not stopping.”
I bring her to the edge slowly and hold her there - easing off when her thighs start to shake, kissing her hipbone, murmuring praise against her skin, then returning to her clit with soft suction until she’s trembling again.
She curses me. She blesses me. She laughs and then moans and then laughs again because her body can’t decide which feeling is strongest.
“You’re evil,” she pants.
“I’m thorough.” I slide a third finger into her carefully, stretching, watching her face for any shadow of discomfort.
There is none - only heat, only the flush spreading down her chest, only her free hand fisting in the sheets.
“You can take it. You’ve always been able to take everything I give you. ”
“Then give me your cock already-”
“After you come on my tongue. I’m greedy tonight. Indulge me.”
She indulges me. Or I indulge her. The distinction dissolves when I seal my mouth over her clit and curl my fingers just right, and she breaks with a long, rolling shudder, her hand fisted in my hair, my name sighed into the dark like a prayer she’s said a thousand times and means more every time.
I work her through it until she’s twitching and pushing at my shoulder, oversensitive, laughing breathlessly.
“Enough - fuck - come up here before I pass out.”