She hadn’t liked that I left her and her mamma. Another trait that she seemed to inherit from my wife. My girls didn’t like when I was too far away.
Though Scarlett had a viable reason, her father being the adulterer that he’d been, Mia didn’t. We were her parents, and even when we fought, we ended the battle by falling deeper in love.
It went deeper than that, though.
Mia could feel, and she had felt the decision I’d made when Scarlett’s immediate future had been uncertain. I was going to leave them if God had decided to take my wife from me. Then I had left them to take care of business.
Mia probably felt the reasonings—many of them.
I could hear the music from the studio in the hallway. It drifted out, soft and delicate, familiar, and I could only imagine how beautiful she danced. So much like her mamma, she could render me speechless.
Though she was different, and Scarlett had a hard time getting Mia to accept that. Where Scarlett had desperately wanted to create her own image, separate from Maja’s, Mia desperately wanted to be the spitting image of her mamma and great-grandmother.
Mia had known from a child how successful her mamma had been in that world, and outside of it, and she wanted to claim the same spotlight for her own.
Mia didn’t do it for the spotlight, though; she did it for love. Yet there was no question that it had a glittering effect on her. She wanted the world to know who her mamma was, her great-grandmother, and made no qualms about it.
True to her Italian roots, she was proud of who she was, her family—both sides—and she held her head up proudly when she was questioned about it.
The problem came when she attempted to be too much like Scarlett. A few times I had heard Scarlett get angry with Mia’s teachers for encouraging it.
Teach her how to dance like Mia, not like Scarlett,she would say.
To Mia, Scarlett would stress the importance of doing it Mia’s way, not hers.This seemed to keep happening, though. It frustrated Scarlett to no end. Mia would wear herself out trying to become someone she wasn’t. Her mamma.
Mia had her own way, a few similarities between her mamma and Maja, but mostly, she stood out on her own. Which made Scarlett swell with pride. That was what she had always strived for. I only hoped my daughter would open herself up to the fact that there was only one of each of us, and then accept herself for who she was.
Deep down, I liked the fact that Mia had her own way, too. Not that I ever wanted to see her mediocre in anything she did, but given the family history, mediocre made my heart settle.
Some.
She still had that same magical pull about her, magnetic as those green eyes, and the natural course of things was that trouble felt the pull too.
One of the guards passed me in the hall. He greeted me in Italian, and I greeted him back. He commented on the weather—rain was close. I agreed. I could smell it in the air. Then he went about his business, doing routine checks, with a cup of coffee that Eunice no doubt had made him.
Closer to the studio, the music became even louder, a different version of the song that had been playing when her mamma had danced in that studio window years ago, during snowfall in Natchitoches.
I stopped abruptly when I turned down the hall. So abruptly that I felt like I had run into one of the glass panes going a hundred miles per hour and shattered it quietly to pieces.
Quietly, because the man standing before me, watching my daughter dance, didn’t even hear me.
He stared in awe at what he saw, the world around him be damned.
A frisson of unease slithered up my back, along my spine, and I stiffened. Looking at him was like looking in a mirror that could reverse time. Same stance. Same hypnotized eyes—probably sparking with the light he thought he could never see.
A hand came to my chest, mine, and a fast-moving breath rushed out of my lungs. I couldn’t catch it if I tried.
Saverio Macchiavello.
The name cut through my thoughts. No, he wasn’t me. He was one of my daughter’s lower guards, and that look wasn’t one I wanted to see on his face—on any man’s face when it was trained on my baby.
My wife’s words, the vow she had me take before leaving our room, seemed to flood my thoughts in that moment.
How long had she known? Her intuition went unmatched, and I came close to resenting it for the first time.
A new song took the place of the other, something French and soft. Saverio moved closer to the doorway. All he needed was a leather jacket, snow sticking to his head, and there was no difference between him and me.
There was a difference, though. Scarlett wasn’t my daughter. She was my wife. This teenager who already acted like a man was eyeing my daughter with what I could only describe asclaimed.
