Epilogue #2
One of her legs hooked over my hip. I reached down, hooked the other higher, opened her wider, and drove in until the sound of skin and the wet slide of it filled the room.
Her nails found my back through the shirt.
I kissed her, tasting her own slick on my tongue, and she kissed me back like she was starving for it.
When I felt her start to tighten again I slipped a hand between us and rubbed her clit in tight circles, matching the thrust of my hips.
I didn’t last much longer.
I buried myself to the hilt, held her there, and came with a low sound against her throat, pulsing deep.
Hours later, he bedroom was dark. The boys had been down for hours. Camilla’s door was closed. The penthouse held that particular quiet that only arrived after midnight.
Morena was tucked against my chest, one leg thrown over mine, my shirt rucked up around her hips from how long we had been talking. My hand was in her hair.
We had started with Salvatore’s rattles and ended somewhere neither of us had planned to go. I felt her breathing change before I spoke. She already knew I was about to say something I did not say in daylight. “My mother’s name was Elena.”
Her head lifted. In the dark her blue eyes found mine.
“She was murdered by my father. Lorenzo. He made my sisters and me watch his abuse. When it was over we were orphans in every way that mattered.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“I’m telling you this, because…” I swallowed. “Leonardo Moretti killed my father years later. I never forgave him for it. Even though my father was a monster. I fear I’m just like him.”
The words sat between us like something that had been waiting years for a room this quiet.
“Leonardo Moretti,” she said, very softly, like the name itself might crack. “The man who married your oldest sister.”
I nodded once. “Chiara.”
Her hand left my chest. “You’re not your father.”
I looked at her mouth when she said it. The same mouth that had been under mine earlier. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” Her thumb moved once over my knuckles. “Lorenzo made children watch. You put them to bed and then you stay awake with me in the dark. That is not the same caliber of man.”
I wanted to believe her. Part of me did. The other part kept seeing the rust-colored smear I had wiped off the cufflink before I kissed the twins.
Then her gaze dropped to the hollow of my throat.
“Leonardo Moretti, the man you hate so much, killed my father,” she said quietly.
“And my brothers. I was ten. White tablecloths. Crystal. Waiter’s gloves so he would not leave prints.
He made us stay until it was finished. Then he told my mother that letting us live was the only mercy we would ever get. ”
I went still the way she had. The same name. The same man. Two ruined childhoods laid out on the same sheets.
I saw it then, too clearly: crystal. Red wine blooming across linen. A child’s view of a table that was supposed to mean celebration and instead meant the end of a family. White gloves. A girl of ten who was told mercy looked like being allowed to keep breathing.
“Your father and mine,” I said.
“I still can’t stand the smell of red wine,” she said. “Or the sound of crystal.”
“I still can’t stand the man,” I admitted. “But the cane is… nice.”
We stared at each other in the dark. Leonardo Moretti had poisoned my father and had emptied her family’s table when she was ten.
He had made orphans of both of us in different years, with different weapons, and somehow those two wreckages had bent toward each other until she was standing on an auction stage and I was the one who bought her out of it.
In a warped, ugly way, he had made us meet. I said it out loud because the thought would not stay inside. “He took your family. He took mine.”
Morena’s fingers tightened on my wrist. “I keep trying to hate that part. That the same man who made me watch is also the reason I ever sat across from you. It feels wrong to let him have even that.”
“He doesn’t get to have it.” I pulled her back down against my chest. She came easily, one of my hands sliding under the shirt to the warm skin of her back. “He does not get the boys. He does not get the way you look at me when you say I’m not .. like him.”
Morena’s fingers tightened. I covered her hand with mine and held it there.
“You’re not your father. You’re not The Serpent.
You came home with blood on your cuffs and you wiped it off before you touched them.
You frame a six-year-old’s drawings. That is the man I married. That is the man who gets to keep us.”
I breathed out. Slow. My phone lit the nightstand. Chiara’s name flashed across the screen. I let it ring once. Twice. Morena lifted her head. She saw the screen. She did not flinch. “Take it.”
“It’s three in the morning, baby.”
“Which is why you take it.” Her fingers brushed my jaw, then the phone. “She’s your sister. Answer.”
I sat up against the headboard. Morena stayed against my side, sheet at her hip, my shirt slipping off one shoulder, listening without pretending she wasn’t. I answered. “Chiara?”
“Matteo.” Her voice was careful. “I wouldn’t call if it could wait.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Sienna.”
Morena’s hand found my forearm. “What about Sienna?”
“She’s in trouble.” Chiara’s breath caught, just once, before she put the polish back on it. “Our little sister is in trouble, Matteo. And I don’t know how much time she has left.”