“I am,” she replies without hesitation. “Mostly.”
My eyes move over her automatically, cataloguing every detail the way I always do when assessing risk. No visibleinjuries. No tremor she is not controlling. No fear she has not already put to use.
“You look beautiful, and?—”
“Flattery? Really?”
I try to shrug but freeze when agony tears through me. Machines whine in protest, the fucking little snitches.
Lucia glares at me, even as her face twists with concern. “For God’s sake, Gio, please don’t move. Use your mouth or hell, just blink your way through whatever you want to say.”
I cough back laughter. Stare harder at her. Breathe through the pain as I catalogue every inch of her face.Sí, she’s a sight for sore eyes. But there’s something else.
“How long have I been out?” My throat is thick and scratchy.
Her chin wobbles for a fraction of a second before she catches and kills the weakness. “Too damn long. But if we’re counting, you’ve been flirting with consciousness for six days.”
Fuck. Six days.
When thatvecchio puttanacould’ve made serious moves.
But for the first time, as my eyes drift past my beautiful wife to the capos dotted around the room, I don’t sense the twitchiness that comes with imminent danger or the frantic intent signalling the need for action.
Hell, they seem… satisfied, even smug, and not at all like the vicious, bloodthirsty men I know them to be. The same men who would raze the city to the ground to avenge their downed Don.
Something else settles in my chest when I shift my attention back to my wife. When I note the peculiar light burning in her eyes. It takes a moment to recognise it. To register that everything I expected to see in my men I see in her.
That they’re staring at her with… pride.
Unfiltered. Abiding.
And even before I open my mouth to ask, I feel it too. No… not true. This feeling has been there all this time. Insistent and confusing as fuck. But present.
Growing.
In full bloom now as her eyes meet mine.
“What did you do?” I ask quietly, because I already know the answer will matter.
She meets my gaze without flinching.
“We had a few problems. I handled it.”
A single beat passes, and then understanding hits me squarely between the ribs.
My wife.
My Donna.
No longer hiding or waiting or running.
Acting.
The line I’ve spent my entire life walking, between protection and annihilation, vanishes in that moment, replaced by something far more volatile and stupidly exhilarating.
Partnership.
She adjusts my pillow without asking, issues an order for the doctor to return that is obeyed instantly, makes decisions about my care with a certainty that tells me no one questioned her authority while I was unconscious.
