Our hearts pounding against each other’s…creating a melody only we could dance to.
The words coming from our mouths…a private language between the two of us.
Our bodies joining and becoming one…
My husband’s head tilted back in pure ecstasy. My breaths were hard to catch, my lungs burning, but the pleasure…it surpassed the pain. The pressure that was coming from how big he was and how much love was being held in my chest for this man.
He moved inside of me, parting my thighs as far as they could go, going as deep as he’d ever gone. And then he would slide out, I’d whimper at the loss, and our eyes would meet, before mine turned down, watching what he did to me…
We made love.
A reminder that what we had was steady and unbreakable, even if the world around us felt shaky and made of glass.
Our love was the lead around the mosaic, keeping us together, the scene that would live on forevermore, us, together, this way, for then and for always…
The morning light shined through the windows, our bodies still clinging, holding on, still one…and the warmth chased away any trace of the chilled shadows of doubt.
Chapter 31
A Temper so Hot, it Could Melt All the Ice
Aria Amora
There was something extraordinarily ethereal about a ballet dancer in winter. Zermatt was all white-capped mountains, black and white sheep grazing on the frozen hillsides, silver dinging bells around their necks, and snow constantly twirling, not even as gracefully as the ballerina dancing in it. It constantly fell and stuck to the ground around her.
Just for a moment, as I watched my sister-in-law dance, I was lost to the world and all its problems. I set a hand over my stomach, realizing it was the three of us in this warm moment.
My husband was watching me.
He rarely let me out of his sight. It had been over a week since the meeting with the Novak family, and the only thing that had happened since then was another pregnancy test.
Ita was pregnant.
My husband watched my face carefully as he delivered the news, and even though it could potentially be devastating, something deep inside of me screamed the truth: my husband hadn’t been unfaithful to me.
As the days had progressed, my mind began to work out the details. We spoke to Dr. Silvestri again. He said there was a drug on the market that was invisible in bloodwork. It was the sisterto the drug the Russians had been distributing that was so bad. Daze was the name.
The same drug that had taken over and was turning people into zombies at an alarming rate—and that was a mercy. Most people didn’t make it. It was a psychoactive drug with an addiction rate like no one had ever seen before. It was potent with hallucinatory properties and, from what I’d been told, called dark things forward to dance in nightmares.
Before I came along, the Russians had tried to take my husband and had drugged him with Daze. He said he sometimes dreamed about being stuck in a nightmare, in his own head.
The new drug was called Haze.
Dr. Silvestri compared Haze to vodka—like it didn’t linger on the breath, it didn’t leave a trace in the blood—but he said he wanted to run another test on my husband. He said this test would confirm if that drug had been used—it lingered in another part of the body, the liver, which would make his liver enzymes rise. It also caused a blackout sensation. It was powerful enough to erase memories.
Dr. Silvestri said if no damage had been done immediately after the drug had been taken, Rocco was in the clear except for the high levels of enzymes, which the liver would take care of, since he was a healthy man, and the liver could repair itself.
But even if his enzymes were high, it wasn’t complete proof. High liver enzymes could be caused for a few reasons, and without the drug present in the blood, it could be hard to prove, even if we knew the truth. A paternity test was also going to be done as well—that could be done as early as seven weeks.
Dr. Silvestri personally came to Zermatt to take the test for the liver enzymes. He was killed in a car crash on the way back to Italy.
A car crash.
I didn’t believe it.
Neither did my husband.
He refused to take another test before we were back in Italy, since the enzymes would prove to us that the drug had been given, but it wasn’t enough proof to call a meeting about it. I didn’t need the meeting.
