The words are a promise as rare and precious as dragon’s gold.
And somewhere deep inside me, beneath the boxing gloves and the cheap trainers and the old fear, something shifts.
Possibility.
And that is more terrifying than any war outside these walls.
25
GIOVANNI
It’s been two months since the boxing gloves.
Since the cheap trainers sitting on polished floors like an accusation neither of us could quite step around.
I stand at the edge of the terrace with a glass of water I haven’t touched, watching my wife swim.
Lucia cuts through the pool with the same stubborn grace she brings to everything, her strokes clean and sure, her body moving with a beauty and strength that still catches me off guard even after everything.
The afternoon sun turns her skin into something warm and alive, and for a moment I feel the kind of quiet that used to seem impossible. I know and accept that it’s not because my world has become safer.
It’s because she’s here. She stayed, despite everything. And because lately, staying has started to feel like the most violent choice of all.
I’ve found myself doing something unfamiliar these past weeks.
Thinking. The kind that starts and ends in emotional investments. And yes, the kind that used to be anathema to mebecause no amount of strategizing or calculating or watching for knives could stop the scathing terror it arrived with.
Soul-searching, some hippie-dippy would call it, as if I’m some sentimental bastard who belongs in the rusty pages of poetry instead of raging blood.
And within that…inwardsearching, I recognise that it’s been easier to call Lucia reckless than to admit the truth.
That I chased her away long before she ever ran.
I told myself I protected her by withholding parts of my life, by curating what she knew until she was settled enough, married enough, bound enough that she would not bolt.
I told myself that was kindness. That was caution and care, in the only language I had ever been taught.
But caution and care and… this terrifying emotion I’m beginning to recognise as…Diu miu…love, doesn’t survive on omissions.
And I’m finally forced to face that my silence did not soften the truth.
It sharpened it. Because when she discovered what I was, it didn’t arrive as something we could confront together.
It arrived like a trapdoor opening beneath her feet. And she did what any woman with fire in her spine would do.
She fled, went far away, not to punish me, but to find air. To find peace.
I brought her back. And God help me, I would do it again. Because that’s the kind of man I am. The exact man she married.
But should heaven forbid this happen again, what would I be bringing her back to, if I never truly change the foundation beneath us?
More carnage? More control dressed up as devotion? More of her surviving me instead of living with me.
All these months later, we talk. We laugh. We touch. We fuck. We’ve found our way back into one another’s arms in theslow hours of the night, as if desire can stitch up what honesty avoided.
But there’s still something sitting between us, unspoken and heavy.
I’ve never apologised. Not properly. Not as a husband. Only as a Don who believes regret is weakness.
