I don’t want him to keep it on. I want to see his face, to feel like he’s really here with me. Because we’re in this fucked-up thing together now. And having him put up barriers, or hide behind masks, even when only alone in a room with me, makes me want to die from loneliness.
Curse blinks. Like maybe he’s forgotten he even had it on. Without hesitation or ceremony, he reaches up and slips it off.
And then, I kind of wish he hadn’t. Because having the entirety of his face before me is almost too much. He’s so gorgeous, all sweepingly flawless bone structure – high cheekbones, chiselled jaw, a wickedly beautiful mouth. Thick black hair that’s not too short and not too long perfectly frames everything, curling ever so slightly around his temples and the back of his neck. I sometimes wondered, over the years, if I’d misremembered how beautiful he was, both as a young boy and an eighteen-year-old. I wondered if, by missing him, my brain had exaggerated the perfection of his image.
It didn’t.
If anything, he’s even more gut-wrenchingly good-looking than my memory made him out to be. And his body is a work of art as well, but in a different way. Tattoos crawl up his neck all the way to the underside of his chin. His jacket is off, and he’s wearing a black T-shirt, revealing sleeves of tattoos that go all the way up to his knuckles. He doesn’t have any tattoos on that glorious face though.
Just the eyes. The eyes that don’t seem to match at all. They’re too flat, too cold.
The eyes of someone who’s seen too much and killed too many.
An image of Curse smiling down at me on that beach more than twenty years ago comes at me with vicious vividness. What’s happened to him? What’s happened to us both?
Maybe we were always both meant for ruin.
Maybe in some alternate universe, twenty-eight-year-old Aurora and thirty-year-old Curse are living completely different lives. Maybe he’s a baker or a plumber or a lawyer. Maybe I’m a writer. Maybe we’re on a beach somewhere, smiling like we once did, because everything’s wonderful and we’re together.
Together? Like, married?
That is what I once desperately daydreamed about, after all. I loved Curse with everything I had in Sicily. And even after we left, even after Carlo and the fire and everything going to shit, I still had this mute and painful longing inside me whenever I thought of him. This childlike certainty that, one day, we’d find our way back to each other.
After that night in Montreal, I realized just how stupid that hope had been.
But now, here, with the man who crossed a border before I ever called him, and who had cars and plans and fake documents prepared, I can’t help but wonder…
Did he feel the same?
Unless…
“Did someone send you?” I ask, my heart contracting at the thought. But what else could it be? Curse always followed the orders of his famiglia. First his uncle, now his brother. As far as I know, he’s not some lone agent that strikes out and makes decisions on his own. He’s not a boss. He’s the monster that the boss leashes in the shadows.
His gaze is so still on my face. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s zoning out and barely seeing me, or if he’s completely absorbed by my features. Self-consciousness comes to the forefront. Does he look at me and silently ask the same question I just did about him? What’s happened to you?
Probably. I doubt he’s looking at me and thinking that I’m beautiful. I doubt anyone could look at me right now and make such a statement.
He hasn’t answered me. I’m sensing a bit of a pattern here. A quietness that seems to cling to him. I swear, he said more words to me when we didn’t even speak the same language than he does now.
“Did someone send you tonight, Curse?”
“Yes,” he says.
I nod, processing that.
“So…So Marco was always going to die tonight.”
He tilts his head. A single nod.
“He was always going to die tonight. Whether you’d pushed him or not,” Curse says. “Whether you’d called me or not.”
I’m not sure if that makes me feel any better. If anything, it just makes me feel…inconsequential. Like I could almost kill a man, and it somehow doesn’t even matter. Because other people, stronger people, have already made all these choices for me. It’s the story of my life, I acknowledge bitterly. With a papà like mine, and a husband like the one I would have had.
Something in me suddenly feels reckless with rage.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I pushed him?” I demand. I need to know that I matter. That my actions meant something tonight, even if that something is terrible. That I have a will, a voice, an ability to effect things outside of myself. “Don’t you even want to know why?”
“Do you want to tell me?”
