I was detached from the entire world, resorting to my default setting, which was the body of a Fausti solider and the mind of a calculating king.
My passionate heart was shriveling. Suffering as the grape on the vine does for the result. But I was not turning into a fine wine. I was a bitter one, as bitter as the fruit Nonno had grown in his garden all those years ago, when he sat me down and struck me with a sword of truth. It still echoed inside of the recesses of my memories, the bleeding a trickle running with time. It was not meant to kill but to remind.
I had always been the son born to sacrifice. I was created out of obligation. An offering to the family to mold.I was the son of Luca Leone Fausti, and I would take this family into the next phase of our monarchy after my father could no longer rule or wouldno longer rule. Even my father had found something greater than the family to sacrifice it all for.
MargheritaGranchio.
The woman in America who I had met at my brother and his wife’s farmhouse in Tuscany. She had not known about us, even if we had known of her.
My father had gotten his first marriage annulled and married Margherita. Due to health issues, my father decided to get the wheels turning for the switching of power. My crowning.
My nephew became my shadow, as my son would have if he would have desired the position after me. He had not, not after meeting Chloe. My nephew was as close as a son to me. He had the power of his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father inside of him. He would be a great leader of this family.
That was not good enough for my wife.
And, suddenly, all that I had sacrificed for swirled inside of my head like an everlasting eddy, pulling me further and further away from the shore of my life.
Of my heart.
Perhaps even my soul.
They say no man is an island. I did not know if there was truth in this. Teach a man to fish, and he will survive. I had learned how to survive on instinct alone, able to ignore the starving roars inside of me. Or the one thing I had always desired as much as dependable shelter, clean lifeblood, and enough sustenance to keep me strong.
Love.
I had always craved to love and to know love in return.
Perhaps for most men, the assignment was simple.
It was never simple to me.
It was never close.
Love and I were strangers.
The closest I had ever come to knowing it was the love that my brother and his wife shared. And it was not mine to have, but to gaze at from this reality, almost as unreal as stars floating above my head.
The thought used to bring me warmth.
Hope that a love as legendary as my brother and his wifeshared still existed, and not for only them, as if their love was the last of a dying breed.
The warmth I had felt in my chest with Nonno that day seemed to have gotten stuck there. Over the years, that ice in my veins had started to move toward it, and slowly but surely, it started to win the war over romance.
They say no man is an island.
This is not true.
I have become one.
Detached from anything, anyone, except for the instincts that keep me breathing, but not feeling.
And this is where the middle of my story begins—with something I have never told before.
A lie.
No man is an island.
That is the truth.
