Ashes to ashes…dust to dust…a gust of wind blew into my mind and scattered my entire life.
29
Aniello
My wife had done this before.
After the accident, while she was in the hospital. The doctors knew she had head trauma, but they would not know the extent of it until she woke up—ifshe survived—and they could examine her more closely.
If she had refused to wake up, to survive, then I would have refused this life without her. There was nomewithouther. End of fucking story.
Our daughter had been safe and with people who loved her. As much as I hated to admit it, Paul and Ginevra treated her as their own, and loved her just as much.
Everything else would work out as it should.
I wasn’t feeding her hyperbole when I told her she was the life in my veins. If her body wasn’t with me to carry around what existed beyond my skin, the marks that would forever claim her as mine, then I didn’t exist.
We were entwined beyond physical description.
She’d woken up, though, and still, part of my life had died with the part of her that had died.
Memories.
She could remember parts of her life, but nothing about me, except for who I was at Club Desolation. My title in that life.
She didn’t remember the fucking grin on my face whenever she walked into a room.
She didn’t remember how much I craved her, how much I needed her—she was life,mia vita, in an otherwise dead world.
She didn’t remember us falling in love.
She didn’t remember the times we fucked until neither of us could breathe, or the first time I ever made love to a woman—her.
She didn’t remember the way my eyes couldn’t get enough of her as she made vows to me on a sultry night in Miami. After we’d sealed the covenant, as final as any kiss I’d ever received, as strong as any blood vow I’d ever taken, I’d whispered in her ear, “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.”
She was my blazing fire in a darkness not many could survive. I burned in her palm like the vow I’d once made to an organization that valued power over life. And then I was absorbed into her skin and found shelter in her heart.
She didn’t remember our daughter. Angelia Assanti. She didn’t remember giving her that name because she told me she was pregnant at the concert where the song of the same name played. She wanted our daughter to have my initials.
Her mind had been reset to a time that didn’t include us and the life we swore to fight for.
To die for.
I was still fighting.
I’d fight until my last breath.
The look in her eyes was empty after the accident, until she started to look for me again, to see me, and only then did everything in my world come to life again.
I’d repeat the steps, the ones I put into place to help her remember, every day, all day, for the rest of my life if it meant she looked at me with eyes that saw.
Not a monster in a suit.
Not a monster who belonged to an organization.
Not a monster who killed for a living.
But a man.
