“Could my daughter see me here?” he asked with a playful smile, sticking his sharp nose up in mock salute to all of the old nobles regal enough to be invited in.
“Yes!” I said, laughing quietly, keeping my voice down. “If I didn’t know what year we were in, I would thinkyouwere the all-powerful Doge.”
“What was it that gave me away, daughter?” He extended his arm out to me again. “This plain shirt that my wife charmed me into wearing?” He patted my arm. “It pleases me that my son gave you my leather jacket. I gave it to his mamma.”
“It’s special to me,” I said, feeling my cheeks rush with blood.
The leather jacket was one of the most valuable things Brando had ever given to me. Not because of its price tag, but because it had been bitter out and he didn’t want to see me cold—symbolically, I’d always felt that even before he really knew me, he had vowed to take care of me. I’ve cherished it ever since that night out in the snow.
Brando sighed, heavily, from behind us, and his father grinned.
The rest of our group disbanded in search of certain areas that interested them the most. Noticing this, the four of us—me and Luca, Brando and Maggie Beautiful—headed to the Bridge of Sighs, or as we called it,Ponte dei Sospiri.
Connected to the Doge’s Palace, it was steeped in history. It was considered romantic, even though the bridge led to the prison.
Romantic legend claimed that the name Bridge of Sighs came from the prisoners, who would sigh as their last views of Venice were claimed by the prison cells. A sort of torture to know that the water rested right beyond the walls, the gorgeous sunrises bursting forth from the water’s outline, the sinking of the same star, only to be replaced by a mysterious moon.
Sunrises and sunsets that seemed to spill from the sky, blend with the water, and bleed onto the stones of Piazza San Marco.
Others said the Bridge of Sighs came from the fact that once the prisoners had been sentenced, they knew freedom was no longer theirs. The sigh was the last breath of free air.
Modern-day romantic legend had twisted it a bit, claiming that if lovers passed underneath the bridge in a gondola, their love would last forever.
On our first trip, Brando had our gondolier pass underneath the bridge twice. He’d given the gondolier the same request on this trip. Italians had a strong sense of superstitious righteousness.
Brando and Maggie Beautiful hovered by the entrance to where the actual prison cells were housed. Their voices floated, chatting about our first trip, when we visited Murano, a connecting island, to see Venetian glass being created.
Iron bars separated me and Luca from where the guilty parties had once spent their time, the cement walls cold and depressing. Even Casanova had once been imprisoned in one of the cells.
Luca asked me if I knew that the infamous scoundrel had been imprisoned, and I nodded my head.
“Yes. Quite a character, Casanova.”
“I considered this name for my youngest son, but—” He shrugged. “He became Romeo instead.”
“Either one would be correct,” I said, smiling. “You couldn’t have gone wrong either way. Romeo has a streak of both characters. Although he’s found his match now.”
Luca smiled at this, taking me in while my hands grazed against the iron, feeling its cool texture beneath my palms. The iron was imbedded into the cement, and the walls were almost frigid.
I took a shuddering breath, all the old emotions absorbed into the structure’s history almost too much to bear.
“You feel what is left in the air here, daughter,”Luca said in Italian.
“I do,” I answered in the same language. “The air is heavy, the taste of sadness on my tongue.”
“Does it taste the same as salty tears?”
“You could say that. There is also anger. Hot as a torch but somehow old enough to be cold. That point in time when ice against the skin begins to burn.”
Our eyes met and he nodded.
He knew what it felt like to be caged. For a man with a spirit such as his, I was still shocked that he hadn’t burst through the walls of the prison he’d been in.
A volcano unable to be held back. A sheer force of nature.
He stood, stretching his muscular form, before he wandered behind the bars, taking a seat, watching me from the inside.
“I respected my father,” he said in Italian. “I respected the punishment he felt I deserved. Staying locked in that place had nothing to do with the law, but the law of my own blood. My father did not condone what I had done. Killing a woman and her unborn child. In his eyes, the act was unforgivable. By his judgment alone did I find myself guilty.”
