Chapter 15 #2
The words came in a voice I knew better than any voice in the world, quiet and specific and right at my ear, and I didn't question it. I breathed and steadied and kept my eyes on the door.
It opened inch by painful inch and then I saw him and felt something cold move through me that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition.
Santino.
Of course it was Santino. It would always be Santino, my brother who had watched me his entire life the way predators watched things they intended to have eventually.
He moved into the room with a gun up and his eyes scanning, and I kept still and kept the gun at my side and thought about his weakness, the one I had watched him fail to overcome since we were children.
He hesitated before he completed a job. A beat, sometimes two, and he always closed his eyes when he finally committed.
Every single time, his whole life, never once different.
Dante let go of my hand and placed it on my shoulder instead. The touch was steadying in a way I hadn't expected, solid and warm and deliberate, and I felt the red at the edges of my vision retreat.
"Nice try hiding in here. Where are you?" His voice dripped with venom, prowling the room with his eyes before they found what he was looking for. "I know you're in here, old man. Cowering in your bedroom."
Taking a deep breath, I shifted and stood.
"How nice of you to find me, Santino."
He went completely still. Then his face moved through several things before settling into the expression I had seen directed at me my entire life, contempt sharpened by something more personal, the particular hatred of someone who had always resented me for surviving.
"Cecilia, you're safe. We've been so worried." The mockery was thin enough to see through from across the room.
He moved further in and saw Dante behind me. "What is this? Are they making you protect this sick old man? That would be like a fucking Venosa. Using you as a shield," he spat.
"I will thank you for not talking about my family in that tone." I kept my voice level and watched his face go through the word family with a satisfying confusion.
"Your what?" The hate seemed to swell.
"I didn't stutter, Santino. You heard exactly what I said."
"You married him?" He used his gun to gesture toward Dante, and there was something almost funny in the misunderstanding if the circumstances hadn't been what they were.
"No, I didn't. I married Constantine." I smiled and watched him take a step back, watched his eyes drop to the rose at my throat and then to the ring on my finger, watched him do the mathematics of what that meant and not like the answer at all.
"Well, then I suppose you're just another name on my list." He raised his gun and I raised mine and the room went very still around us, the lamp throwing both our shadows up the wall behind us, two siblings at the end of something that had been building since long before tonight.
"And you're a name on mine." The hand holding the gun was steady. My free hand shook like a leaf. Dante reached for it and held it tightly, a movement that didn't go unnoticed and sent anger flashing across Santino's face.
"I made a vow to honor this family," I said, "and if I have to die to prove it, then so be it, but I will take you with me." I held his gaze. "Where's father? I want him to know a Venosa has taken me."
Something moved across his face. His eyes went slightly glassy.
"He's dead on the floor in your great room." No emotion in his words, but it showed on his face regardless. He was terrible at hiding his feelings, always had been. He was shit at hiding them.
I let it sit for a moment. "Oh, so you're the head of the family now. Not a good look being gunned down by your sister." I watched his jaw tighten. "When I go home, they will hail me as a king for removing the plague you brought on our house when I show them your dead body."
His gun wavered. Just slightly. Just enough.
His eyes moved to the doorway behind me. Lighter footsteps on the stairs, moving along the wall, barely audible, clothes brushing the plaster the same way his had.
He glanced away from me.
I heard Nicola's voice say focus and I took the shot at the same moment another rang out from the doorway.
The sound of it was enormous in the small room.
Santino looked at me and for one suspended moment his expression was almost surprise, as if after everything he genuinely hadn't believed I would do it, and then he wasn't looking at anything at all. He slumped to the floor, his eyes open and empty, staring up at the ceiling.
The room was absolutely silent.
My weapon was still raised. My whole body was vibrating and I realized it was because I was shaking, had been shaking without noticing, and I stood over my brother's body and waited to feel something definitive and felt too many things at once to separate them.
"Wife." Constantine's voice came through the open doorway, low and steady. "Lower your gun."
I lowered it. My legs made a decision I hadn't authorized and I sat down hard on the edge of the bed and pressed my hand over my mouth and stared at the floor and breathed, shallow and fast and completely insufficient.
"Cecilia, child, you did it." Dante's hand was on my back, slow circles, the unhurried comfort of a man who had seen the aftermath of violence before and understood what it required. "You saved our lives. Breathe, daughter. Long slow breaths."
His voice was the anchor. I breathed. Long and slow, the way he said, and gradually the shaking became something I could feel the edges of rather than something I was entirely inside.
Constantine pushed through my barricade like it was toy furniture, the chairs scraping and the table catching and none of it slowing him for a single second. He was across the room in three strides and he grabbed me and pulled me up to him with a force that lifted me half off the floor.
"Cecilia, don't you ever do that to me again.
" His voice was rough in a way I had never heard from him, stripped of everything except what it actually was.
He crushed me against him and I didn't care.
Breathing was optional at this point. "God, I love you more than words can say.
I love you." He kissed the top of my head and then his hands were on my face and he was looking at me and pressing his lips to mine with a possessiveness and a desperation and a relief that I kissed back with everything I had, needing the contact to confirm that we were both here, both real, both on the right side of this.
I pushed him back from me. Panted. Stared at him.
I was completely aware that this was totally inappropriate behavior in front of his father, and I looked over his shoulder and Dante's face was lit up with a smile that made him look years younger than the man who had been lying in that bed an hour ago.
I turned back to Constantine and looked up at him and felt my heart do something it had been doing for eight days and intended to keep doing.
"I love you." My eyes filled.
Dante clapped behind me.
"You do?" Constantine asked.
"I do." He kissed me again, and Dante clapped again, and somewhere in the middle of it I started laughing, the slightly unhinged laugh of someone on the other side of something terrible, and Constantine was laughing too, and the room held all of it.
"Well, you two make an amazing team." I turned in Constantine's arms and looked at his father.
Dante's eyes were bright and his color was better than it had been in weeks and he looked like a man who had just witnessed exactly what he needed to witness.
"This family is in good hands with you both at the helm.
But I've decided I might not be ready to let this life go quite yet.
" He shifted on the bed and laughed. "Where's my wife? "
"I'm here, my love." Lucia stepped over my brother's body as if it wasn't there, with the particular composure of a woman who had spent forty years in this life and had decided long ago what she was and wasn't going to let affect her entrance.
She came around the bed to the empty side and sat down facing her husband and took his face in her hands.
"I'm very glad to hear you aren't leaving me soon. "
"I want you to move back into this room." His voice was quiet and entirely certain. "For the rest of my days, you will sleep next to me. My deepest regret is sending you out of here."
Lucia looked at him with forty-one years of love and the specific exasperation of someone who had been right about something for a long time.
"Who knew it would take almost dying for you to realize it?
" She pressed her hand to his cheek and kissed him gently, and I looked away because some moments belonged only to the people inside them.
Constantine took my hand. He looked at me and looked at his parents and said nothing because nothing needed to be said. He motioned me toward the door.
"Close your eyes, amore. You don't need to see him."
I closed my eyes. Strong arms came under me and lifted me without effort and I buried my face in his chest and felt him step, felt the slight deliberateness of it, felt him lift his leg and walk over Santino rather than around him.
He could have walked around. We walked over him instead.
No respect was given to my lifeless brother's body.
I didn't mind it one bit.
He carried me out into the hallway and I kept my face in his chest and listened to his heartbeat, steady and real, and thought about Nicola's voice at exactly the right moment and thought that maybe she was here in whatever way the people we loved stayed with us after they were gone.
The house was quieter now. The shooting had stopped.
The sounds that replaced it were the particular sounds of aftermath, men moving with purpose through rooms, voices low and efficient.
I kept my eyes closed and let Constantine carry me and thought that this was what it felt like to be on the other side of something and not yet know what the other side looked like.