I didn’t want her to even think about Luca Fausti. She told me she had dreams of him sometimes; she was always on the hunt for him.
“Get some sleep, Ballerina Girl. You need your rest. Three more hours and we’ll be home.”
“Don’t leave me, Brando. I sleep better when you’re next to me.”
“I’m not going anywhere, baby.” A minute later, I called her name.
“Yessss, Brando?”
I grinned at her tone, despite myself. “I’m a lucky bastard. I got to lift your veil.”
“There was never a chance it’d be anyone else.” She squeezed my hand. “And I love you too, Fausti.”
The book had opened almost at the end. I was about to flip to the pages closer to the middle, where we were, but her neat, elegant handwriting caught my attention.
Rarely do I dream of symbolic things.
My eyes devoured the words.
I've flipped to the end because I'm not ready for you to find it yet.
I put the journal away for a moment. You came in to see me—you had fallen asleep and said you were dreaming, but you refused to tell me what you had dreamed of.
I’m not sure what I’m more afraid of. Is it your lack of words, or the drowning sea of mine?
I couldn’t even force the hardness in my throat down. “Scar—” I moved the stone, as best as I could. It hardly budged. “Scarlett.”
“Hah?”
“Don’t leave me, baby. Please.” I could count on one hand how many times that word escaped from my lips—please. “Don’t leave me.”
She pulled me down next to her, resting her head against my heart, holding the hand that had the S carved into my palm. She breathed deeply for a few minutes, drifting in and out of sleep.
“I promise,mio angelo,” came her floating vow. “I won’t.”
Chapter Ten
Scarlett
When he wasn’t looking away from me, he studied me with eyes that carried the burden of regret. He behaved as though he put a final nail in my coffin, not realizing that I was still alive.
He was beside me no matter where I went, and I reveled in his company, in the nearness, but I still craved him. He was distant, far too distant, and nothing I said or did seemed to move him closer.
He made love to me, but never rough. It almost seemed like he studied me, memorizing every small detail that made me whole. “I never noticed how beautiful your fingernails are,” he said as I clawed at him and begged him for something different.
He seemed to turnthatfierceness toward life, fighting some internal battle that raged out of sight. Nemours was front and center, no doubt, but there was something else there, something that seemed to grow from Nemours that made me feel as though my husband challenged the power of life itself. He dared it to come closer so he could crush it with his bare hands.
Perhaps the world couldn’t see it in his eyes, but I could, as clearly as I could see war on a field. Regret was certainly etched in his reflection, and guilt, which I hated myself for, for having to give it to him at all, but going deeper, he hid something from me—the bloodiest part of the battle.
This made me consider that not only was he not looking at me because he couldn’t seem to find it in himself to look me in the eye—I was supposed to be there!—but because there was something else he refused me the right to see. It was as though he was attempting to convince me of one thing when I knew another to be true.
“Unload your burden,piccola colomba.Uncle is here to listen.”
I stopped the walk we were on, keeping my arm around Uncle Tito’s. December had been mild in comparison to January. Snow fell and stuck to the ground at the villa, the air turning thick and hard with it. The light above that tried to penetrate its walls had a hazy effect. Nothing came forth as it was, just a highlight of what could be. We were shrouded in smoke and mirrors.
Taking a deep breath, I blew it out in a cloud of mist.
In a rare turn of events, Brando had allowed me out of his sight. He was in the gym, sparring with Rocco’s men. Though I doubted “sparring” was the right word. It was truly hitting for the sheer brutality of it. Which equaled to fun for men like them.
