Every time I close my eyes, all I see is her son’s face and those gray-green eyes looking up at me during the wedding with fear and something disturbingly close to recognition reflecting back at me. And Elena…alwaysElena… haunts me all the same.
I replay the moment she struck me, the sound of it echoing in my ears even now, days later. I replay the way she flinched when I threatened what mattered most to her and tried desperately to beg for me to take it back and how the sound of the door slamming behind me felt cruel even to my own ears.
I tell myself she forced my hand. That she made me do it by running, and lying, and hiding our child from me. But the truth is much uglier than that. I didn’t just punish her to assert control. I punished her because I was hurt.
Deeply.
Some part of me still remembers what it was like to touch her without anger in my chest. To want her without guilt and resentment coiled around my heart. To imagine a future that didn’t end in graves and vendettas.
But that man has long been dead. I killed him the night Matteo died and I found my father hanging from our family estate’s banister. Yet no matter what I do, their ghosts refuse to stay buried. Living in that house afterward had driven me near insane, ending in my coming to our summer villa for reprieve and staying at the residence permanently.
With each failed report about Giovanni Vitale, it feels like another insult added to injury. Another reminder that I am losing ground with the war inside my own head. I need answers. Some kind of resolution, something concrete to justify everything I’ve done.
Because if I don’t find her father soon, then all I’ve done is trap a woman I once loved and her child…ourchild… here for nothing.
That is a failure I don’t know how to reconcile.
Even with this hatred still burning in my heart.
That night when yet another lead collapses, I finally break.
My feet carry me through the villa without conscious thought, down familiar corridors I’ve walked a thousand times, until warm light spills from the library entryway.
When I push the doors open further and peek inside, I see her there.
Elena sits curled into one of the leather chairs by the window, bent over a book in her lap. Luca sleeps curled against her chest, his small body limp, his head tucked beneath her chin. One of her arms cradles him automatically while the other rests along the spine of the book as she reads quietly to him.
Her hair has slipped loose from the clip holding it back, spilling over her shoulder and catching the lamplight until it looks almost golden brown.
For a moment, I can’t breathe.
This image, thisexactone, has haunted my dreams for years. Not in fragments or vague impressions but in aching, precise detail. Elena bathed in warm lamplight with a child asleep in her lap, both of them curled up next to a fireplace as they read together.
It’s a fantasy I always knew I could never have, pieces of a life too soft for my world, too gentle for someone like me to want. A domestic stillness that doesn’t belong to men raised on violence. Yet the deepest parts of me have always wanted it anyway—a family not built from obligation or fear but from something much more tender.
I stand there longer than I mean to, unmoving in the doorway.
She hasn’t noticed me yet. Her fingers brush absently through Luca’s hair the way only a mother does. Her mouth curvesfaintly at something on the page, softening her features in a way I haven’t seen in years.
Then she looks up and the moment instantly shatters.
The words come out before I can stop them, flat and cold. “It’s late. You should be in bed.”
I don’t even mean it, let alone want to say it.
Her expression falters immediately, the softness draining from her face. Her hand curls protectively around Luca’s head, instinctively tucking him closer to her body as if I might snatch him from her arms and steal him away.
“I wanted to finish reading him this bedtime story,” she says quietly.
Something in my chest tightens at that. My hand closes around the doorframe, fingers digging into the wood. “You couldn’t do that upstairs?”
The question sounds more like an accusation, even to my own ears. Anger flashes in her eyes then, hurt sharpened by resentment. This has become a familiar pattern we’ve fallen into over the last few days.
“Not when you’re always demanding I sleep inyourbed while my son sleeps in another room,” she snaps back, her voice low so she won’t wake him.
Ourson, I nearly say.
The words surge up fast, pressing hard against the back of my teeth. It takes more effort to force them back down and swallow them before they fracture what little control I have left than to actually respond to her properly. Forcing her to own up to thedeception would change everything between us. It would turn suspicion into implication, and that’s not something she can get away with pushing off if I continue to press her for the truth.
