Chapter 24 #2
Two words, said so easily. He’d looked up at me with those amber eyes, the eyes of every Montoni man going back God knows how far, and he’d said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Like he’s been saying it his whole life, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time he called me anything else.
For one perfect moment, I was the happiest I’ve ever been.
Then a nasty voice intruded on my mind.
Your son is on his good behavior now. I could smell the whisky on his breath. See the nasty golden glint in his eyes. Boys are easy to handle at this age. Eager to please. But just wait until he’s older and he disobeys you. Until he breaks your rules, the way boys do. You’ll know what to do.
I’d been smoothing the covers over Leon’s shoulders when the voice came, and my hands stilled. In the space between one breath and the next, an image flashed across my mind so vivid and wrong that the bottom dropped out of my stomach.
Me in a temper as ferocious as my father’s, striking my son across the face. Hearing his cry of pain. Seeing him stumble and fall to the floor. Then me, standing over him, breathing hard, and feeling victorious.
A bitter taste spreads through my mouth, and my stomach clenches nauseatingly.
I’ve killed men with my bare hands and felt less than I felt in that single second, staring down at my sleeping son while my own mind showed me what I was capable of. What I was made for. What my father built so carefully, over so many years, with such methodical cruelty.
I stepped back from the bed so fast that I tripped over my own feet and had to catch myself on the chest of drawers.
I’ve been standing here ever since, watching Leon sleep, my body tight with agony in a way that has nothing to do with the surgery.
My palms are damp. I am Don Cristiano Montoni, feared across this city, and I am terrified of a four-year-old boy sleeping peacefully in front of me because I don’t trust myself to be near him.
You’ll know what to do.
“Cristiano.”
Mina’s voice, soft from the doorway.
I don’t turn around. “Mina.”
A pause. Then her footsteps, quiet on the carpet, until she’s standing beside me. I feel her eyes move over my face in the dark, reading me the way she always does, finding the things I’ve learned to hide from everyone else.
“What happened?” Her voice is careful. Not alarmed yet.
“He said good night, Papa.” The words come out strange. “Not Cristiano. He hasn’t called me Cristiano in days.”
I hear her breath catch, the small involuntary sound of delight. Then silence as she registers that I am not delighted. That my shoulders are rigid, and my hands, pressed flat against my thighs, are still not entirely steady.
“Cristiano.” She steps in front of me, tilting her face up to mine. “Look at me.”
I look at her. Her eyes are dark and searching, and what she finds in mine makes her expression shift. “Tell me.”
I keep my voice low because Leon is just three feet away.
“I was tucking Leon in, and I heard my father’s voice giving me advice.
About what to do when Leon misbehaves.” I stop.
“And then I had a thought. An image. Something I would never do, but it was there. For a second it was there, and I couldn’t—”
Mina reaches up and takes my face in both her hands.
The touch makes me unclench. I exhale, a long unsteady breath, and her thumbs trace slow lines across my jaw.
“Look at Leon,” she says quietly.
I turn my head and look. His chest rises and falls. The T-rex is tucked against his ribs. After knowing him for such a short time, I already love him so much it frightens me.
“You stepped away from the bed.”
“Yes.”
“The moment the thought came, you stepped away.”
“Yes.” My voice is rough.
“Your father never stepped away from his impulses in his life.” Her hands are still cupping my face, warm and steady.
“He never stood over you shaking because a terrible thought frightened him. He never felt horror at himself. He felt nothing, Cristiano. Not when he hit you. Not when he made you do terrible things.” Her voice is soft, but her eyes are fierce.
“The thought isn’t who you are. What you do with it is who you are. And you stepped away from your son.”
My throat is tight.
“Your father might always have a voice in your head,” she continues. “But you get to decide whether you listen to him.” She strokes her thumbs across my cheekbones. “And you’re not going to listen. Because you are working so hard, every single day, to be something different than what he made you.”
I close my eyes, hoping she’s right.
“You know what I noticed?” Her voice is quieter now, almost a murmur. “When Leon has a bad dream and cries out in the night, you’re always there before me. Always.” A pause. “Your father never once came to you in the night, did he?”
I don’t answer. She already knows. No one ever came for me.
“Sit down,” she says. “Come here. Sit.”
She draws me toward the armchair in the corner of the room, the one she’d installed when Leon came home from the hospital so she could watch him sleep through the worst of the recovery. I sink into it, and she settles onto the arm of the chair, and then her fingers are in my hair.
The touch is so familiar it lives in my bones.
Her fingers threading through my curls, slow and unhurried, the way she’s been doing since we were children sitting in the garden while my father raged somewhere in the house above us.
The only thing that ever made the noise inside my head go quiet.
I feel my shoulders drop. Feel the tight thing in my chest begin to unknot.
We stay like that for a long moment. Leon breathing. Her fingers moving. The old house settling around us.
“Mom and I have nearly finished redecorating the kitchen,” she says eventually, conversationally, like we’re discussing nothing in particular.
“I noticed. I like it. Sofia’s kitchen inspired you?”
Mina laughs. “It did.”
“Rosa still watches me like she’s cataloging evidence,” I tell her. “Did you see how she stood between me and Mason at dinner on Sunday? Physically stepped in front of him so I couldn’t say hello to the boy.”
Mina exhales, long and gusty. “Yes. It hurt you. I’m sorry. You’re trying so hard.” She’s quiet for a moment, her fingers still moving. “Rosa will come around. She’s just—she’s protective of those she loves. And she doesn’t know you the way I do.”
“She knows me fine,” I say. “She’s not wrong to watch me.”
“She is wrong about who you’re becoming. Who you already are.”
Leon stirs, murmurs something, settles again.
We both hold still until his breathing evens out.
Mina leans down and presses her lips to my temple. I can feel the warmth of her, the slight swell of her belly as she leans over me, our second child quiet and growing, and there’s a sensation in my chest that feels almost like peace.
“You’re not going to hurt our children,” she says against my hair.
“You can’t know that.”
“I know you.” She pulls back just enough to look at me, and there’s a gleam in her dark eyes that’s dry and certain and entirely hers. “And I know this. If you ever lay a hand on Leon or this baby in anger, Sofia has already taught me five of the seven ways to kill a man with a kitchen knife.”
A grateful smile tilts my lips. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She smooths my hair back from my forehead, satisfied.
Knowing that she loves me, knowing that she trusts me, makes me hope I’m becoming the man I need to be. I reach up and take her hand, pressing it against my lips. Her palm is warm, and her fingers curl slightly against my jaw.
I love her so much it’s a physical ache in my chest. A glow behind my sternum that I’ve been carrying since I was eight years old and couldn’t name it, taking up so much room that sometimes I can barely breathe when I look at her. I love the ache.
I love her.
She’s watching me with those dark eyes, steady and warm, the woman I have loved my whole life, carrying my child, in the house that is finally a home because she decided to make it one.
In the bed across the room, our son sighs in his sleep and pulls the T-rex a little closer.
I’m still my father’s son, and I always will be. His voice lives in the architecture of my mind. The scars don’t disappear completely.
But Mina is here.
And I stepped away from the bed.
Maybe that’s enough to start with.
Maybe that’s everything.