CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The cobblestone streets of the small, medieval village set high in the Sabine Hills were uneven, worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic and the relentless passage of time.
The autumn air was crisp, carrying the scent of woodsmoke, roasted chestnuts, and damp earth.
It was a normal day, a day when the narrow, winding alleyways were mostly devoid of tourists, leaving the village to the locals and the hum of ordinary life.
It was Cassia’s day off, a rare and precious anomaly in her grueling hospital schedule, and she was spending it with Dante.
There was no motorcade. There were no armed guards flanking their every step, no heavily tinted SUVs idling at the edge of the piazza. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Dante Fazzari was a man walking through a village with a woman.
His hand was wrapped firmly around hers.
It was a casual, easy connection, their fingers intertwined as they navigated the steep incline of the street.
It was not a gesture born of a sudden, dramatic confession, nor was it the result of some weighty conversation about the parameters of their relationship.
It was the natural culmination of the weeks and months they had spent slowly building something real between them. It was unforced. It was effortless.
"Watch your step," Cassia muttered, her pale blue eyes darting toward a particularly jagged paving stone just ahead of them. She gave his hand a short tug to the left, steering him around it. "Your center of gravity is compromised by your refusal to look down when you walk."
Dante let himself be pulled, a low, effortless chuckle vibrating in his chest. "I am looking at the architecture, Cassia. It is a twelfth-century village. The stones are meant to be uneven."
"The stones are meant to break the ankles of men who don't pay attention," Cassia shot back, her tone characteristically prickly.
She was wearing a thick, oversized cream-colored sweater and dark jeans, her auburn hair pulled up into a loose, messy knot.
She glanced sideways at him, her expression laced with dry exasperation.
"And given your track record, you would probably manage to trip, fall into a medieval well, and somehow impale yourself on a rusted bucket.
And then I would have to spend my only day off giving you a tetanus shot. "
"I have excellent balance," Dante argued mildly, his thumb smoothing rhythmically over the back of her knuckles.
"You have zero self-preservation," Cassia corrected without missing a beat. "You are reckless, Dante. I have seen you walk blindly into traffic twice this morning because you were looking at a bakery window instead of the road. It is a medical miracle you have survived to the age of thirty-eight."
Dante didn't defend himself. He smiled.
In fact, he realized with a stirring sense of wonder he had been smiling almost constantly since the moment he picked her up that morning.
The suffocating mantle of the Fazzari empire, the endless, grinding responsibilities of his syndicate, the ghosts that usually haunted his periphery—all of it felt distant.
With her hand in his, listening to her berate him with her surgical wit, Dante felt an overwhelming sense of peace.
They continued their aimless wandering, having no particular destination in mind, enjoying the crisp air and the luxury of unhurried time. They stopped occasionally to look at the displays in the small artisan shops, and Dante found himself perfectly content to just exist in her orbit.
By the time midday rolled around, the brisk walk had worked up an appetite. They found a small, rustic café situated on the edge of the main piazza. It was an unassuming place, boasting a handful of wrought-iron tables set outside on the cobblestones, beneath the shade of a faded canvas awning.
They took a table near the edge, ordering plates of fresh pasta, cured meats, and a carafe of the house red wine.
As they sat there, watching the handful of locals pass by the fountain in the center of the square, the conversation flowed with a casual, unstructured ease.
There was no pressure weighing on the dialogue.
They talked about nothing in particular—the terrible coffee in the doctors' lounge, the frustrating logistics of a shipping contract Dante was negotiating, the sheer absurdity of the village's archaic parking laws.
Cassia was, as always, herself. She was quick-witted, fiercely pragmatic, and unapologetic.
She did not soften her opinions to spare his ego.
When Dante made a dry observation about the mayor of Rome, Cassia immediately dissected the man's political inadequacies with the ruthless precision of a scalpel.
She possessed none of the warm, angelic, soothing bedside manner one might stereotypically expect from a healer. She was a blade.
As Dante sat across from her, a glass of wine resting loosely in his hand, he watched her. He watched the way her pale blue eyes lit up with fierce intelligence when she debated a point, the way she gestured with her fork to emphasize her logic.
And as he watched her, unprompted, Dante found himself struck by a sudden realization.
His mind, usually so fiercely anchored to the present when he was with her, drifted backward, slipping into the memories of his history with Flora.
Flora Angelini. His childhood sweetheart. The woman he had once loved so deeply so desperately, that her death had effectively ended his own life for eight years.
Flora had been innocent. She had been sweet, radiating a warm, gentle light that put everyone around her at ease.
There had been something close to angelic in the way she moved through the world, humming old folk songs, tending to her gardens, seeing only the good in people.
Dante had adored her without a single reservation. She had been his sanctuary.
But sitting here now, staring at the formidable, lethal woman across the table, Dante confronted a truth he had never allowed himself to examine before.
Even in the height of his love for Flora, there had always been a massive, fundamental part of himself that he had kept deliberately hidden away from her.
He had guarded his darkness fiercely. He had washed the blood from his hands before he touched her, carefully filtering his words, shielding her from the brutal, ugly realities of his empire.
He had never wanted the violence of his world to touch someone so pure.
In the end, of course, that violence had touched her anyway, tearing her away from him in a tragedy so senseless and brutal that it still didn't feel real, even a decade later.
But as Dante looked at Cassia, he found himself wondering about the alternate timeline. What would have happened if Flora had survived the ambush? What if she hadn't taken that bullet? What if they had gone through with the marriage, standing at the altar, pledging their lives to one another?
Would he have spent his entire life keeping that essential, violent part of himself hidden from his own wife?
Would he have been condemned to live two separate existences at once—the gentle, sanitized man he was in Flora's presence, and the ruthless, blood-soaked monster he actually was in the world he ruled?
The sheer exhausting weight of maintaining that facade for fifty years suddenly felt suffocating.
With Cassia, there was nothing left to hide.
Cassia already knew his world intimately.
She had seen the danger firsthand. She had stepped into a knife fight in an alleyway and collapsed a man's windpipe without blinking.
She had likely faced her own share of dangerous, life-threatening situations in the foster system long before she ever crossed paths with him.
There was no need to soften himself for Cassia.
There was no need to construct a separate, palatable version of Dante Fazzari to protect her from the truth.
She looked at the Don of the mafia, and she saw him —the blood, the arrogance, the power—and she told him to take his boots off so he wouldn't ruin her floors.
He could exist as himself around her, fully, and without a single ounce of pretense.
And the strange, irony of it all was that the softness Dante had always believed he needed to offer a partner—the gentleness, the delicate warmth he had poured into Flora—none of that existed in Cassia.
Cassia wasn't soft. She wasn't warm, not in any conventional, comforting sense. It was almost absurd, given her profession as a doctor, that she carried none of the traditional tenderness one might expect from someone who saved lives. She was pragmatic. She was clinical. She was unromantic.
And yet, despite all of that—or perhaps because of it—being with her felt like home in a way that nothing else ever had.
It was a strange, staggering feeling for Dante, especially given the hardened, calcified man he had become over the past eight years.
He found himself wondering, staring at the rim of his wine glass, whether Flora would have actually survived contact with his world in the long run had she lived.
Would the violence surrounding him have eventually found its way to her regardless, slowly breaking her spirit, no matter how hard he tried to shield her from it?
If it hadn't been that bullet in the restaurant, what then?
Would he have lost her anyway? Just later?
Just differently? Just watching her light slowly suffocate in the darkness of his reality?
"Dante."
The clear sound of his name pulled him instantly from the deep, labyrinthine depths of his own thoughts.
He blinked, refocusing his vision on the present.
Cassia was looking at him. She had set her fork down on the edge of her plate, her head tilted slightly to the side. Her pale blue eyes, always so incredibly perceptive, were studying the distant expression that had settled over his features.