He kept circling back to that because he could have really sunk in deep on the betrayal aspect. But he didn’t stay there—much as he might have wished he could, and even tried—because the real truth was that he had betrayed himself.
First that night in New York itself. He hadn’t been nearly as militant about birth control as he had been for the whole of his life before then. A lot like the way he’d betrayed himself again this very same night, less than twenty minutes after he’d looked at the sleeping consequences of precisely that same behavior.
It was as if he’d wanted this all along.
But he knew that he had not.
He never had.
None of his siblings had partners or children, either. They were all proud of this, after the circumstances of their birth and early years. They had all watched their mother make a mess of every relationship she encountered, especially the one she’d had with them.
What they’d always had was each other. That and the empire that Antonluca had built. That was surely all the family anyone should need.
But now Antonluca had a son.
A son, he kept repeating to himself.My son.
The astonishingly perfect Dominic, who had looked nothing short of angelic lying there in that crib. There in that soft, sweet little cottage that was warm and bright and smelled like roses.
Nothing like anyplace Antonluca had ever lived as a child.
It made his chest hurt.
He paced around and around his castle, happy that Rocco and that awful Raffaele were nowhere to be found. And at the first hint of morning light he found himself driving once again, following the winding roads into the village and then down to the base of the farthest hill, where a cluster of cottages were tucked into what must be a slope of glorious green come spring.
Even on a frigid, foggy December morning, it looked idyllic.
Antonluca had the strangest notion that his son was already living a life far better than the one he’d had when he was Dominic’s age.
That made his chest hurt, too. If differently than before.
And this time, when he pounded on her door, Hannah opened it with a wariness in her gaze and the little boy on her hip.
The wide-awake little boy, now, with grave gray eyes that Antonluca recognized all too well. He saw them in his own mirror every day.
“Good morning.” He thought Hannah sounded unreasonably calm and measured for a woman he’d had up against the wall in a sheer, blinding rush of temper—he told himself it had to have been temper, because he didn’t like to think what else it could have been—only a few scant hours before.
He had the distinct and nearly ungovernable urge to do it again, but there was a child to consider.
Not just any child. This washischild. This washisson.
It took some getting used to.
And in the light of day, he could see that the little boy not only had his eyes, but was fixing those eyes directly on Antonluca. While sucking his two middle fingers in his mouth, the way almost all of Antonluca’s siblings always had.
“Saybuongiorno, Dominic,” Hannah coached the toddler. She glanced at Antonluca—only a quick brush of her green eyes that he felt everywhere, in ways that suggestedtemperhad nothing to do with this—and then she returned her gaze to the child. “Say ‘Buongiorno, Papa.’”
Antonluca felt everything in him go still. This wasn’t what he wanted. Surely, this couldn’t be real life, not when—
But the toddler lifted his dark head from his mother’s shoulder, his gaze still disconcertingly direct. He removed those fingers from his mouth.
“Buongiorno, Papa,” he said in a bright and happy little boy’s voice.
And something deep inside of Antonluca seemed to…break in half. As if everything he had ever been or ever would be simply…
Changed.
In that simple, indelible moment, he was made new. Like it or not.
