Maybe, he thought in a daze, she really had crushed him with a rock.
But apparently not, because while he stood there—not sure how it was he wasn’t staggering back and crashing to the hard floor beneath them—she simply turned away. Then dashed up the stairs, leaving him to pick up the pieces on his own.
Assuming there was anything left of him but ash.
Yet all he could do was stand there, staring around him as if he’d gone blind. As if he had suddenly found himself in a place he didn’t know, unable to figure out how he’d gotten himself there.
Part of him wanted simply to chase her upstairs because he knew there was nothing they couldn’t work out in bed together.
But he couldn’t seem to move.
It was as if his feet had turned to stone, too.
And despite himself, despite everything, he felt the truth bear down upon him like another impossible weight.
He had to let go and he didn’t know how.
That was the prison she was talking about. He’d been born in it and he’d never left it. He had never, ever let go of the place he’d come from. He had never forgotten, no matter how high he’d flown, how hard he’d fought to get away from those dirty streets, far more cruel than anyone liked to imagine.
But she wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t been near those streets—or any streets—in longer than he’d ever been on them. He had done everything he’d vowed to himself that he would do when he was young and angry and scared—and then some.
He had saved every damned person he could on his way out, except himself.
He took a step and found himself sagging so badly that he had to hold himself up against the nearest wall. It was as if every single illusion he’d ever held on to had crumbled, just like that.
And once again, the truth was so bright and so obvious that it was painful.
It was also simple.
He’d been fighting against it all this time because fighting was what he knew how to do. But there was one way to give his son the life he truly deserved. And while he was at it, treat his wife the way she deserved, too.
And maybe, just maybe, he would find a way to treat himself the same way.
No bare stone walls. No haunted castles.
Imagine, he asked himself, the way he hadn’t in so very long now,how much flavor your life could have if you allowed it?
If he wanted her heart, he had to locate his own.
If he wanted to live, to trulyliveand tobe alivein every way that mattered, he could not keep himself apart the way he’d been doing for years now. Life, like a perfect dish, was texture and flavor in an endless conversation with one another, and he didn’t know why it was he’d locked himself away for this long.
But he did know this. Hannah had given him an opportunity to resurrect himself.
And it seemed to him a stark and unmistakable truth that if he did not do it now, he never would.
If he did not do it now, he would be little more than the stone walls that surrounded him. He was already more than halfway there. For all intents and purposes, he was a ghost right now.
He straightened on the wall. He looked around his castle, and his life, and his own messy heart, with new eyes.
Eyes Hannah had opened, painful as that was.
Eyes he could not close again. Not now that he could finally see.
And not that he had the slightest idea how to fix what he hadn’t even realized he’d broken.
But he stood a little straighter and he reminded himself that he was Antonluca Aniello, who had made an empire out of thin air when he’d been little more than a child. He’d made it lookeasy.
So there was no telling what he could do now.
