He blinks at me, and for a moment some of the hollowness leaves his eyes.
“I had to bite a guard who wanted to,” he says matter-of-factly. “I bit him hard. There was so much blood and his screams were so high-pitched.”
The casual way he delivers this information, like he’s discussing the weather, tells me everything I need to know about what he’s been through. My beautiful, artistic boy, forced to violence just to protect himself from predators who saw his vulnerability as an invitation.
I lean forward and press a soft kiss to his forehead, breathing in the familiar scent of him underneath the institutional soap and fear-sweat.
“That’s my little Menace,” I murmur against his skin.
Ginni goes very still. When I pull back to look at him, he’s staring at me with an expression I can’t identify. Something between wonder and disbelief and terrible fragility.
He reaches out slowly, hesitantly, and pokes me gently on the nose.
“You can’t be real,” he whispers. “You can’t really have come for me. You don’t love me. I abducted you. I did terrible things to you.”
The broken way he says it, like he’s confessing to the worst sin imaginable, makes my heart crack in half. This is what he’s been telling himself. This is the story he’s been living with. That he’s a monster who deserves to be abandoned and forgotten.
“I am real,” I tell him, catching his hand and pressing it flat against my chest so he can feel my heartbeat. “I did come for you. And I do love you. More than anything in this world.”
He stares at me for a long, long time, searching my face for signs of deception or pity or obligation. Finding only the truth I should have told him years ago.
“Have I gone crazy again?” he asks in a small voice.
Instead of answering with words, I lean forward and kiss him. Soft and careful, mindful of his split lip, but real and warm and absolutely present.
When I pull back, his visible eye is wide with something that might be hope.
“No, my love,” I whisper. “This is very real.”
The sob that escapes him is heartbreaking in its intensity. All the fear and pain and abandonment of not only the last few days but an entire lifetime, pouring out of him in a single broken sound.
He climbs onto my lap like a child seeking comfort, curling himself against my chest with desperate need. His whole body is trembling like a leaf in a storm, and the quiet sounds he’s making are tearing my heart into smaller and smaller pieces.
I wrap my arms around him and hold on tight, my own tears falling silently onto his dark hair. Because this is my fault. All of it. His desperation, his imprisonment, his suffering. If I’d been brave enough to admit my feelings sooner, if I’d said yes to that hot chocolate invitation all those years ago instead of running scared from what I was beginning to feel...
“I’m so sorry I was so stupid for so long,” I whisper against his ear. “I should have said yes to that hot chocolate that day you were back from uni. I should have said yes and I should have stopped anything bad from ever happening to you.”
Futile words. Useless ones. Sentences that don’t even make sense, not least because the moment I’ve picked for my fantasy is still too late. That day with him smiling at me, sweater slipping off his shoulder, is not soon enough. That day was years after Ginni had been sent to conversion therapy. Bad things had already happened to him. Terrible things. Awful things done to him because he told his big brother he loved me.
And he still smiled at me with all the sunshine in the world.
Ginni doesn’t respond with words, just cries harder, his tears soaking through my shirt to the skin beneath and his grip on me tightens, like he’s afraid I might disappear if he lets go.
I think about how happy he was in the basement. So exuberant, so capable of finding joy in simple things like a perfectly prepared meal or dancing alone to music only he could hear. The way his whole face would light up when I smiled at him, like my approval was the only thing in the world that mattered.
Beneath his intensity and fondness for knives and abduction plots, Ginni is someone bright and joyful and precious.
And I’m never going to let anyone hurt him again.
As Pietro navigates us through London towards home, I hold my broken wife and make silent promises. Ginni is never going to have to cry like this again. Never going to doubt that he’s loved and wanted and perfect just the way he is.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure he knows exactly how much he means to me.
Starting right now.
Chapter forty
Ginni
