It’s like seeing someone I loved flayed alive. And even worse, everyone walking by on Fifth slows down to stare in mingled horror and interest, that creeping joy that comes with seeing misfortune hit others and not oneself.
I turn sharply from the view, thankful for the dark windows that hide my grief from the gawkers, and Luca pulls me into his shoulder. “We’ll rebuild, baby bird,” he murmurs into my hair. “It’ll be just the same as before.Better.”
I don’t believe him. I don’t believe him because there’s a small, horrible part of me that blameshimfor this.
If he hadn’t been so arrogant…
If he hadn’t been soparanoid…
It’s not fair on Luca, and I know the only people to blame are the ones who actually attacked us, but…
Luca senses the stiffness in my back and pushes me away a little to see my face again. “We should have gone straight to the brownstone instead of stopping here on the way,” he says. “This was a bad idea.”
“No,” I say, sniffing and wiping my eyes. “No, I want to see. I want to see exactly what those assholes did. And we have to try, Luca. Maybe…maybe by some miracle, the diary survived.”
But when I get to the sidewalk right in front of the townhouse, it’s even worse up close. Half the facade is completely gone, covered up with tarpaulins and scaffolding. There are public safety warnings posted on every available space, and the remains of crime scene tape flutter from the front door. I walk straight past the guards, who have been posted around the clock and are now all standing at attention, their eyes wide and worried since no one told them we were coming. They’re all Morelli men, of course; Gio sends one to wait by the car in case anyone tries to plant something on it while we’re inside, and he follows us in.
The interior of the townhouse is almost unrecognizable to me. It’s as though all the vital organs have been removed from the body. All our furniture is already gone, either removed and put in storage, or burned up in the fire, or too water or smoke-damaged to be salvaged, and therefore dumped. The staircase is now a few stumpy steps leading up to nowhere, the yawning holes of the floors above completely burned out.
“There’s no way…” I murmur. Gio is waiting at the door, and I’m glad, because I can’t stop the tears that come to my eyes again. Luca puts his arms around me, and I let myself cry, not just for the lost journal, or the lost townhouse, or nearly losing him, but for every bad fucking thing that keeps kicking us down.
Without the diary, we have no leverage at all.
But we have to findsomeway to deal with the IFF, before they destroy us completely.
* * *
Luca whisksme away very quickly after that, back to the Upper West Side brownstone where Hudson has prepared the main bedroom for us again. I’d feel bad about continuously taking his and Gio’s bed if it weren’t for my still-touchy emotional state. Luca and I retire up there quickly, and I shower to take off the grime and the stench and the snot.
Luca, when I come out, has stripped naked apart from his bandages, which I’m so used to seeing on him these days that I barely even notice them. I concentrate instead on the movement of the muscles in his ass and thighs as he prowls the bedroom.
Luca has been thinking, based on his bunched-up brows and tight lips. “Everything okay?” I ask casually, dropping my towel.
He glances up, then does a double take at the sight of my ass as I look over my shoulder at him. Good to know I’m still a distraction for him. There was a time when I worried he might tire of this particular ass, glorious though it is. Luca had quite the reputation in his younger years. Brother Frank doesn’t call him Georgie for nothing—kissing boys and making them cry, that was Luciano D’Amato in his early twenties, running around town, taking tail for a night and then disappearing in the morning.
He did the same tome, after all, that first night.
But during our marriage, even in the rockiest parts of it, our desire for each other has only grown. Developed. Never waned. Our sexual interludes might not occur two or three times a night like in the early days, but they’ve only become more intense. Every time we make love, we become more connected. Moreone. Maybe that’s why I’m so determined to revisit my place in the Family.
“What are you thinking about?” Luca asks.
“Us.” He raises an eyebrow. “Where we’ve come from,” I add. “And…where we’re going.”
With a smile, Luca holds out his hand and I cross the room to take it. “Where do you want to go?”
I stretch up to kiss his cheek. “Wherever you are, that’s where I am, too.”
He hugs me carefully, a faint ashy fug still caught in his hair as it falls across my face. It’s longer than he normally wears it, and I kind of like the look it gives him. “I’m glad to hear that,” he says. “So once we get Tino’s mansion into shape, you’ll be happy to stay there?”
“I don’t mind, but that’s not exactly what I meant.”
He cocks his head. “No?”
I take a breath, think about how best to explain, and then realize it’s not only my words that I need to choose carefully. “Let me take your bandages off and wash you. Please?”
Before we left Boston, Darla confirmed it was safe now for Luca to take off the bandages, to get the wounds wet, as long as we dried them gently and covered them up again after. “In fact, it’ll help,” she said with a bright smile. She left us with a huge stash of hydrocolloidal bandages and strict instructions. And we, having agreed privately that New York would be too dangerous to have Darla so close to us, paid her out her private contract, with a sizable bonus, and said our goodbyes. I really think she was sad to leave us.
But Luca refused to let me remove the bandages this morning. We stuck to our normal routine in the shower and I didn’t push him.
