I refused to let sickness take me from my family. But if Boris, or that old man, took my husband from me?
There would not be enough air in the world to keep me breathing.
Epilogue
Matteo
My wife took a heavy breath at the same time I did. We were always in sync like that. And I knew that, as we spent years together, we’d only become more entangled.
We were already sharing dreams, or wherever we were, and I remembered.
After I’d been shot, after Stella’s movie premiere, and after they told her I was in critical condition, she passed out. And maybe I was hallucinating, or just dreaming, but she was there with me in the darkness. I felt her but couldn’t see her. It hurt me deep in my heart that she wasn’t lighting up for me.
She was keeping herself from me.
And it pissed me off.
Pissed me off enough to make me fight harder to see her again.
My son. Part of my wife’s light.
He was too fucking far from me, too, stuck in an impenetrable darkness that my wife refused to brighten.
My son was a part of my wife, and he had my blood, and the thought of never getting to hold him again was another fighting factor.
Before I knew it, I was awake, giving my wife a narrowed-eye stare because I had no fucking clue why she wouldn’t share her light with me in that darkness.
Share our son with me. Our heart in physical form.
When I told her about it, she narrowed her eyes against mine and said, “That’s because my light will go out if you try to leaveme.” Then she burst into tears, flinging her body over mine, soaking my chest with what felt like her blood. She was crying tears of blood.
Not literally, but she could have been. Her tears mixed with the crusted blood on her face.
“You love me,” I’d breathed. “You really love me, Estella Fausti.”
She sat up, letting her tears fall without trying to wipe them. That was my job, and she fucking knew it. “What?” Her red-rimmed eyes searched mine, the red making her gray eyes seem even moodier.
I repeated myself, and she flung herself on me again, kissing me nonstop. “I do, you…you…hardheaded man! I do.I do.” She put her hands against her chest, over her heart, her fingers curling in, like she was about to rip her heart out and hand it to me. “So much I fucking do! I don’t know what to do with it. Or how to handle it. I can’t contain it! And it scares me so much that I can’t...I can’t control it. Oh, Teo.” She laid her head over my chest. “Please. Don’t ever leave me.”
I kissed her over and over, and after she fell asleep on my chest, holding me tight, I realized how much I stood to lose that night.
Everything.
The old man who had shot me was the father of a woman, Santina, who had married one of our men, a cousin, his name Livio, years ago.
If the night made me realize what I could have lost—my entire life, meaning, I had no fucking clue what had happened to my wife after I’d hit the ground and didn’t know until after Saverio told me right before I left the hospital—it changed my wife too.
Her eyes were sharper and harder when she looked at Luca and me, like she too was preparing for a war that might never come or could be on our doorstep the next day. The scene in front of the Spanish Steps made her realize that being a Fausti came with a high price. It wasn’t all night skies and brilliant stars. And the realization of it caused a crippling fear.
I was in this life, for bad or worse. Her son would be in this life, for bad or worse. And he would be our only.
Two months after that night, I should have been hunting Boris and the Russians,mywife’s ear, but my old man once told me something before I found Stella that I never forgot.
“Wars keep fine even when they’re cold. But your wife, she’ll be warm-blooded, and she doesn’t do well in the cold for too long. If that metaphor doesn’t make fucking sense, I’ll put it simply: your wife comes first, even over bloodshed.”
He was fucking right.
My wife was stuck in the cold blood of that night, and she couldn’t seem to release herself from the images, the terror and helplessness, even though Nonno had told me how brave she’d been. She was directly in the middle of a war, and she kept her heels on the ground and a gun in her hand.
