All the men roared with laughter while I pulled my pants back up, guarding my sausage from naughty nibblers. My woman was a naughty nibbler, and the thought made me grin. I swam far enough away from thecastelloto see the glass walls shimmering in reflection to the bright sun. Suddenly, a dark head broke the surface next to me, and I met the eyes of my older brother. We’d swum further out at the same time, both of us having the same thought on our minds.
Our women.
Amora and Scarlett were standing together, one arm around each other, waving to us. Amora still had the master fisherwoman hat on her head.
It seemed as if Amora and Scarlett set their hands against thewindow at the same time. Brando and I raised our hands at the same time.
Brando hit my chest. “Let’s fish,” he said.
We swam together to the boat, leaving the other men in charge of guarding thecastello. We did not take the boat too far from the dock, just far enough away to catch our dinner. Fishing is a quiet sport, and in the quiet, memories and the feelings attached to them started to attack me in a silent battle that I did not anticipate. I was fighting them off until Romeo’s music took a turn toward a different genre of music altogether, and one of Rosaria’s arias reached as far out as our boat. Mariano quickly jumped out of the water and changed it.
Romeo lifted his hand out of the water in triumph after the aria disappeared. “The Chair,” he announced, then started to sing it. His shoulders moved in tempo to the beat, and he looked up at the back of thecastello, making acome to memotion with both of his hands as if his wife was watching. Perhaps she was, or she had felt his want of her. She appeared in the window and blew him a kiss.
My mood darkened as the light of the sun started to come down. The world was a fluorescent pink, all in its path glowing from the unreal color.
My brother’s dark eyes were on me. “Rocco,” he called.
My eyes rose to meet his.
“As tremulous as our first meeting was, there was no doubt when we finally saw each other that we shared the same blood. It took time to earn the title of brother from each other. But I look at you and see a reflection of myself. You look at me and see a reflection of yourself. I recognize the look on your face—in your eyes. It was the same look I wore when I made the mistake of thinking too much before my wedding. Don’t repeat the same mistake. Claim what’s rightfully yours.”
I said nothing as we grew quiet, reeling in our dinner. By the time we turned the boat in the direction of the dock, we had caught enough to feed the entirety of our men. My brother and Ihad caught the same number of fish. Before, perhaps, it would have mattered to me if he had caught one more than me, but it did not.
My chest was no longer incomplete—my entire life was full.
Except.
The sound of Rosaria’s voice kept echoing in my ear, reminding me of her absence in this life, how a part of me had seemed to go off the cliff with her, and how my Amora’s life would be tangled in the wreckage of the life I had chosen to live. Even when my father had given me permission to annul my marriage to her, I did not.
Rosaria Caffi had been the only person alive who had understood why.
We had been tangled in an understanding of each other, a python with its body wrapped around ours, squeezing.
Brando and I cleaned, prepared, then grilled the fish in silence, and all the men ate in the same silence. The temperature had come down with the sun, and the Mediterranean was turning the same color as the sky, sapphire blue. Dinner done, Mac lit the fire pit, and we all took seats around it, quiet from the sun and water, nursing our drinks. Mariano handed Romeo his guitar and he started to strum the strings, his voice and Mariano’s meeting to sing, “A Pirate Looks At Forty.”
The men would lift a bottle ofbirrain the air when a lyric hit the right chord of spirit.
Looking at this world from where I was sitting, I did not recognize it as my own. My life was ruled by the laws of our family. This scene was what Rosaria Caffi feared the most: the ancient ribbons of the Fausti family unraveling with the lax mood of all these men made of rich Fausti blood. Rosaria had even complained of it in my father after he had annulled his marriage and married Margherita.
Rosaria had said the daughter of a whore had bewitched him—and that the entire time Lothario had been trying to warn us, the other daughter of a whore, the spinning ballerina, hadbewitchedus, and look what happened to Lothario—Luca cut his legs off to silence his truth. That was fair, Rosaria had said—it proved how ruthless the son of Marzio could be—but the daughter of a whore, this ridiculouswildflower, was turning a deadly animal into the soil in which these common seeds grew from.
Brando and Mac’s eyes were on me as I stood, going to the end of the dock, looking out over the dark water, which only an hour or so ago was as clear as my thoughts.
The truth, as the song echoed it from behind me.
I was hundreds of years too late arriving for my own party, and I had missed it. I was not the man I once was. I was not this man who was allowed to be free. Setting a ridiculous hat on my head, even a mask over my face, was not going to change my status. I was created to rule. To be the ruthless leader of the Faustifamiglia. The python might have released Rosaria, perhaps, but it replaced her with my role in the family.
I refused to pull my Amora into its suffocating embrace only because I could not live without her. She deserved to live a life that offered her the freedom to live without bars and cages. She deserved to be a roll of water in the sea, carefree and going in whichever direction she decided to take.
A freedom that would lead her away from me and into another male’s arms.
The glass in my hand shattered when I thought of her skin being touched by another man. The noises she made that were all mine. The smile she wore that was all mine. The perfume she wore that was all mine after it had caressed her skin and created a scent that was all hers, therefore, all mine to take pleasure from.
She was all mine.
Yet.
The roaring lion in my heart was at war with the hissing snake inside of my mind.
