Three guards came out of our house and helped with our bags. They were quiet, curt, but willing to do whatever task presented itself.
In the past, Scarlett and I’d grown close to the men who vowed to protect us. These were not my men, though. These men belonged to my father. The difference made all the difference.
Long gone were the days of Donato, Guido, Nino, and all the men we created relationships with over the years. Even to a certain degree Vincenzo, though I couldn’t with an honest conscience admit that his absence ever crossed my mind. An ocean apart sometimes felt too close.
The men we’d claimed as family had earned their stripes and had made vows to keep close to the heir of the Fausti throne.
Rocco.
“All clear, Signor Fausti,” one of the guards nodded at me.
I nodded back, and the kids, given the signal, hopped out of the car. Mia ran for the door, singing something about a magic carpet ride and it beinga wholenew world!as she danced on the front porch. Matteo, Mariano, and Marciano hovered outside for a bit, throwing a ball for the dogs. Scarlett stared at the house. Her eyes seemed to absorb the lights, making them even brighter.
It’s true what people say. About time. After a certain age, it goes by in a blink.
I’d blinked and our beautiful years seemed to fly by, as though our story had been written on the pages of a book that had been caught up in a windstorm.
Before the blink, my feet were in this exact spot. My old truck replaced this SUV, and the woman next to me stared at this same scene but from a girl’s perspective—without a clue of what life had in store for us.
Carrying that girl inside, my intentions had been as clear as fresh water. I had meant to claim her, to make her mine forever—through blood, sweat, tears, until I’d forever be in her bloodstream, tattooing her bones, staining her marrow with my own.
She had my rib, the missing link to my fate. Her life existed within mine; mine existed within hers.
Then the blink came, and there we stood, years from that day, countless seconds, hours, and moments, irrevocably changed by life and circumstance, but deeper in love than ever. Our love back then seemed young, inexperienced, naïve compared to our love in that moment.
One constant still stood with us, though, a shield, an impenetrable armor—theit, as she called it, that kept us hungry for each other.
Looking over at me, my wife blinked, and then our eyes met in real time. Words were not needed. We both remembered.
This place had become safe ground among battlefields.
After a few minutes, though, her arms tucked into her sides and her teeth started to chatter. Smoke billowed out of her mouth from the cold. Some winters in Louisiana felt more like autumn, sometimes even closer to summer, but this one felt arctic. The humidity didn’t disappear with the chill. It somehow clung to it, making it feel like someone had thrown a wet blanket over bare skin during the night. It shriveled skin and gnawed at bone.
“Go inside, baby,” I said. “Take a warm bath before bed.”
It took a moment for her to answer. “I’m not cold.”
“That night still lives,” I whispered in Italian; still my breath came out in a cloud of smoke. “I’ll remind you.”
“How soon?” Her cheeks were rosy, her lips red, and her eyes so dark that they almost seemed black without the relief of the lights. Without giving me a chance to respond, she called our daughter and sons in, the dogs following, leaving the temptation floating in the air between us.
While I waited for our children to get to sleep, I figured the coolness would do me some good until I could remind her of that night—the night I’d made her mine. Her first time.
I was her first; I’d be her last.
Reminiscing about that time seemed to warm me as I fiddled with a strand of lights that had gone out. One light, one fucking light, and the entire row went dead. After a few minutes of alternately cursing at the fucking issue and thinking of what was in store for me inside, after the house fell silent, I decided to hunt down a spare light somewhere in our new garage.
All the lights were on inside of the house, except for the lights in our living room, where the tree shrouded in darkness came alive with its decorations. A little head bobbed up and down—Marciano. He was the equivalent of a cat to a tree. Not watched, he’d take it apart. Giving antique Santa a solid punch to the jaw had nothing on what he could do to an ornament. It seemed to fascinate him, all the bulbs and figures dangling, but he didn’t have the most tender of touches.
I laughed, smoke billowing out of my mouth like a freight train. One of the dogs—Max, he was more vocal—had started barking, ratting him out. I could hear Marciano’s franticshhhs!to keep him quiet. His mamma ran into the room, swooping him up, giving him a lecture. Her voice wasn’t clear from my spot, but the buzzing of it reached me easily enough.
So enthralled in my family’s life through our windows, reality took its slow time making it into consciousness. It was more of a sense—something lurked in the patch of woods that separated our house from the neighbors. Our neighborhood was built up, but to keep a sense of privacy, the woodlot shielded us from view.
A smallcracklehere, a quickpopthere. It wasn’t the noises that caught my attention. It was the deliberateness of them.
Could it be Scarlett? The doe I’d named after my own. She had started coming around not long after we purchased the house. I was pretty sure her offspring stayed in the area.
Again, the sound was too hushed. A deer would creep for the sake of not being seen, but if it saw me, it would freeze. Hesitate before it ran through the woods to get out of the potential hunter’s sight.
