Chapter 15
CECILIA
The week before the attack had a quality to it that I had no name for.
Not quite fear, though fear was present underneath everything like a ground current you learned to walk on top of.
Not quite waiting, though we were all waiting.
It was the particular atmosphere of a house that knew something was coming and had decided to meet it standing up.
The non-essential staff had gone home with full pay and warm food and instructions not to return until they were called, and without them the house had taken on a different character, quieter in some ways and louder in others, full of the specific sounds of men preparing for something that didn't have a clean name.
I cooked for everyone. Three meals a day, sometimes four, because feeding people was the thing I could do and I needed something to do or I would come apart at the seams. The men received it with a gratitude that was genuine and unperformed, and there was something clarifying about standing in a kitchen making food for people who were preparing to protect something I cared about.
I understood it differently than I would have a month ago, before this house had become mine.
At night Constantine took me to bed with an urgency that was connected to everything happening around us.
It was as if when the tension got too high he needed to think of something else, and that something else was him and me locked in our room, tangled in one another's arms. I wanted him the same way and for the same reasons, and we held onto each other in the dark while the house held its breath around us, and I thought about how strange it was that I had not known it was possible to want to survive something this much until I had something worth surviving for.
On the seventh morning I woke before dawn with a feeling in my chest I recognized from childhood, from every morning my father had come home angrier than he'd left. The feeling of something about to break open.
I lay still and listened to Constantine's breathing beside me and watched the ceiling and waited.
Emilio came before breakfast. I was in the kitchen when he passed the doorway and his face told me everything before he opened his mouth. I set down my cup and went to find my husband.
And that's where we'd been when the knock sounded, letting him know we needed to be ready.
"I'm not hiding away in a safe room." I stomped my foot and crossed my arms, my eyes following Constantine as he paced the room. Yes, I understood I was starting to sound like a petulant child. I didn't care.
"You have to go with them, Cecelia. Please. I can't do this if I know you're not there." He threw his hands in the air and stopped in front of me, and I could see what it was costing him to keep his voice level. "You promised me you would do what I say."
"I had my fingers crossed when I said it. Constantine, I brought this trouble. Please let me help make it right." I reached out and grasped his arms and held on. "Let me do something."
"I didn't have to bring the trouble to my door. I chose to do that. So it's on me, not you." His voice dropped to something quieter and more urgent. "Now please go be safe."
He leaned down and hungrily kissed me, and I kissed him back with everything I had because if it was the last kiss I ever had from him it would have to tide me over for the rest of my life.
I would never have enough of this man and it would be cruel of the universe to take him from me so soon.
When we finally parted, foreheads together, both of us breathing unevenly, I knew he wouldn't be happy. But I also knew what I was going to do.
"Who's with your father?"
"He said he would take his chances." Constantine ran his hand through his dark hair, and the exhaustion and the love and the fear were all visible at once in a way he usually wouldn't have allowed.
He didn't need the added stress of me not listening and his father staying.
I knew that. I was going to add it anyway.
"I'm going to him." I stepped back and turned toward the table. "If you won't let me stand beside you, I will stand in front of him." I grabbed two guns off the table and ran for the stairs.
"CeCe, no." His voice was sharp behind me, a sound I felt more than heard.
"When this is over, I will accept whatever punishment you decide is appropriate, husband.
" I called it down over the railing without stopping, taking the stairs two at a time, and I heard the silence from below that meant he was doing the thing he did when he was choosing between two options that were both impossible.
All the soldiers in the room looked from me to him. They had smirks on their faces as they checked over their weapons one last time.
"I'm holding you to that!" he yelled back up.
I smiled. A week with that man and I was a goner. I couldn't imagine my life any differently. Turning, I looked over the railing and blew him a kiss. One last glimpse, one last smile from the man that I wanted for the rest of my life.
Then I turned and went to Dante.
The hallway to his room felt longer than usual, the way distances stretched when your heart was beating too fast and your mind was trying to stay ahead of your fear. I passed the photograph room without looking in and pushed open his door.
"Dante, you're stuck with me. We'll ride this thing out together," I said as I barged into the room, already moving, already assessing what needed to change.
I positioned the large chairs a few feet from the door to slow anyone coming through, moved the table closer to put the guns and ammunition on, shifted the heavy dresser at an angle to give him something solid to shelter behind.
It might be all for naught. I was going to do it anyway.
"Why aren't you in the safe room, or better yet, the safe house away from here?" He wheezed slightly as he looked over at me, watching my preparations with eyes that were sharper than his body suggested.
"Oh, not you too. I just had it out with Constantine.
" I turned and put my hands on my hips and looked down at the man who, when healthy, would have been a carbon copy of my husband.
The same dark eyes, the same jaw, the same quality of attention that missed nothing and gave away only what it chose to.
I watched Dante smile, and his chuckle made me grin despite everything.
"He's going to have a fun life with you.
" His expression grew more serious, more specific.
"Cecilia, please make him enjoy life. He can't let what we do consume him.
If he does, he will turn out like your father, and so many men who came before him. " He held my gaze. "Promise me."
I went to him and kneeled down by his bed and took his thin hand in mine. "I promise."
I didn't get any more words out before gunfire erupted outside.
It started at the perimeter, distant enough that it might have been mistaken for something else, and then it wasn't distant at all and there was no mistaking it for anything.
The particular percussion of it moved closer with a speed that made my stomach drop.
"Whatever happens tonight, I will never be able to repay you for the kindness you didn't have to show me.
" I reached for a gun with my free hand and clung to his thin withering hand with the other.
"My girl, you've given me more than you will ever know. I got to see my son happy and in love. That's all a father wants." He clasped my hand tighter, and outside the shooting was getting closer and the shouting with it, and I breathed through my nose and stayed where I was.
"Whatever you do, nobody gets up those stairs. Am I understood?" Constantine's voice, muffled but unmistakable, rose from somewhere below.
Dante's hand tightened around mine and we waited.
Seconds ticked by like hours. The shooting was close enough now that I could hear individual shots rather than a general chaos, close enough that I could hear voices I didn't recognize shouting things in Italian that I chose not to translate.
The room was very still around us, the lamp throwing warm steady light across the walls, and I thought about how strange it was that a room could look so normal while something catastrophic was happening just below it.
"They're getting closer, daughter," Dante said quietly, his head resting back on the pillow. His voice was calm in the way of someone who had made their peace. "Let them take me if there's an option."
"Never." The word came out hard and immediate.
"You know as well as I do once they find out I'm married to Constantine, they won't let me live.
And if they do, I'll wish for death." I held his hand tighter.
My family would take me home and give me to Hector just to spite the Venosas.
"So no. I'll go down proudly fighting for this family. "
Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.
The particular quality of them was wrong from the first step.
Whoever was coming up was trying to be quiet and failing miserably, moving with the clumsy carefulness of someone who had never learned how a house gave you away, every footfall too deliberate, the rhythm of someone concentrating on silence rather than achieving it.
The wall rather than the center of the step, clothes brushing the plaster.
If it was my father's men they wouldn't be quiet. They would come through whatever they came through with the flat confidence of people who believed they'd already won.
This was someone more careful than that.
Gripping the handgun tighter, I clicked off the safety and fixed my eyes on the door. The knob turned slightly. A cold, clarifying calm settled over me, the same calm that had gotten me out of Sicily and through every impossible thing since.
Fuck, why didn't I lock it? It would have given me a few more seconds to think. Don't think about what you can't change.
Focus, CeCe.